Okay, technically, it’s a new month and “Winds of Change” is so last month. But with a possible hurricane bearing down on the Northeast this weekend, the same weekend as daughter Allison’s outdoor, on the Cape wedding, who could resist?

Instead of obsessively consulting weather websites a thousand times a day, this MOB arranged for a “Hurricane Earl” Google alert. The kind that gives you one report/day. Pretty smart, huh?

Not really. And yet brilliant.

The “not really” is because a Google search, I now realize, is about hits. So the sites that have come up  track this mighty storm’s process as people living in the middle-Atlantic states consult their computers.

What I really wanted to know was: Will this hurricane hit Cape Cod and if so, when, and how bad will it be? But what I’m really learning is: We’re connected. All of us. (And, oh, yeah, as precious and wonderful as Allison and Dustin and this wedding are, there’s all that other stuff happening, too.)

In case you didn’t pick up on it—that’s the “brilliant” part.

* Allison will be wearing pearls once belonging to my Aunt Katherine and borrowed from her Aunt Deborah.

From the Boston Sunday Globe, August 22, 2010:

[Re boycotts against Israel] “We used to lobby the US government, the Israeli government, and the Palestinians to do something,” said Sydney Levy, of Jewish Voices for Peace, a California-based group that collected 17,00 signatures since June asking investment firm TIAA-CREF to divest from companies involved in the occupation. But now we realize that we can take action on our own. We are only waiting for ourselves.” [Emphasis added.]

Last night I went to the Somerville Public Library to hear Boston College professor Charlie Derber, author of From Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy, talk. The place was packed.

Among the many thoughtful, thought-provoking the slight, soft-spoken prof had to say was about time (maybe that should be capitalized?) and how we’re running out of Time and need to “trick it” by addressing the most immediate, compelling problems NOW.

Walking home under a two-thirds moon, waiting to cross the street and pondering his talk, an SUV gunned through a red light. Just as I was about to step off the curb.

“So what?” you say? Massachusetts drivers do that. True. I didn’t get hit obviously. So what’s the big deal?

Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety. But I think this kind of blatant disregard for civility is getting worse. (Steven Slater’s recent lionization reinforces my point.)

Here’s what I’m wondering just might be blowin’ in the wind: As this recession continues (Derber believes it’s really more like 25% unemployment), this hottest summer in history continues, and drought and Russian fires and Pakistani floods impact millions of people and scare the bejesus out of the rest of us, I think the day-to-day interactions between us are getting worse. People are highly stressed, pissed, confused. So why NOT drive through red lights, push and shove, be rude and greedy?

Seems to me that one of those immediate crises Derber suggested we need to address is exactly this. (And I’ve harped on this before.) On some level, people know what’s happening. That we’re not acknowledging that This Climate Change Thing is another Great Depression, another Pearl Harbor and, c’mon everybody, let’s roll up our sleeves and deal just makes them MORE pissed.

Who can blame them.

Back from Baltimore Yearly Meeting—with a brief visit to New England Yearly Meeting—and eager to “unpack.” To spend so much concentrated time with so many Quakers and make meaning of all I saw and heard will require lots of time, lots of discernment.

Meanwhile—a wind story from BYM: BYM was held at Frostburg State College, in the mountains of western Maryland, so far west that one day, when I’d walked to the very top of its hilly campus, I watched another hill, maybe a couple of miles away, being strip-mined.

Besides hills and classroom buildings and dormitories, Frostburg State also boasts playing fields. Many, many playing fields. A perfect setting for a sports summer camp for kids. So while Quakers from MD, VA and DC were at their yearly gathering, K—12 football players and soccer players were also on campus (noticing what food—and how much—these kids selected at the college’s cafeteria was an eye-opening experience).

But we Quakes and those athletes shared that hilly, breezy campus with another summer camp: a high school marching band from Raleigh, NC. My first meal at the gathering and not knowing anyone, I noticed these kids, clearly not jocks, racially mixed, some a little, well, geeky, and sat with them. They were delightful. So the next morning after breakfast, as the brass section rehearsed under a tent near the cafeteria, I lingered.

Their director (whose much-used voice got more and more gravelly as the week progressed), his bearing and sports garb possibly leading you to believe he was football coach, was measure-by-measure taking these kids through a rough passage.

He instructed the trumpet section to stop playing. “This piece has some unusual chords,” he noted to the others. “How many of you are playing weird, discordant notes?” Several kids raised their hands. “Play loud,” he told them. “Emphasizing those notes are what will make this piece special.”

Now, maybe it was the coffee talking, but his instructions seemed to be a metaphor of how a group, a gathering, a community, a “body” (as BYM and NEYM referred to the people attending their sessions) might function. If the center holds, if the trumpet section carries the tune, if there’s trust and safety and respect and civility, the weird and discordant voices of that group or body make that community special.

From time to time during my stay at Frostburg, the wind would blow in the right direction and I’d hear those same labored-over, difficult, beautiful measures being played. And I’d again ponder that potential metaphor.

Now you can, too.

["The wind of change is blowing all over the world today. it is sweeping away the old order and bringing into being a new order." Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963]

Tomorrow I leave for Baltimore Yearly Meeting to give a workshop, “Winds of Change.” To spend time with Quakers from Maryland, Virginia and DC and to listen to what winds of change blow through their meetings will be exciting and enlarging.

Daunting/exhausting, too. Kind of like those earliest visits with Reverend Owen Cardwell and Dr. Lynda Woodruff when, moment by moment, I’d ask myself: “Is this significant? Is this? What about that?”

I’m remembering, for example, that very first trip to Virginia when I was to first meet Lynda and Owen. Deacon Sharon Boswell from Owen’s  church picked me up from the airport. When I got in her car, I noticed her radio was set on the gospel music station. “Is this significant?” I wondered. Yes, it was.

I live in a densely populated, 79% paved-over city that, in the past, had been sneeringly referred to as “Scummerville” or “Slummerville.” (These days, that Somerville is so hip has pretty much quashed those taunts—but not entirely.) Whenever my husband and I venture outside our fair city and see some lovely countryside or acres of trees destroyed by McMansions or a strip mall or another highway, we sigh. But then we tell ourselves,” You know, sometimes it’s less painful to live in Somerville where the rape and destruction of the land and its rivers happened three-hundred years ago!”

As I’ve noted in many of these blogs, I have been drawn to the Transition Town movement and its fundamental, resilient message that, given climate change and the eventual end of the Cheap Oil Era, the ONLY way we’ll survive these huge and scary changes is collectively. So from time to time I hang out with Somervillians who are into weatherization or the Buy Local movement or community gardens or extending the bike path. Wonderful initiatives. Wonderful people.

Marla Marcum of “Climate Summer”* said something recently that really shook me.  A climate change activist and deeply spiritual person, Marla noted that there’s something deeply shameful about what our species has done to this planet.

More and more I am feeling that, perhaps, my role in Somerville’s ongoing initiatives re the huge upheavals we’re facing ** is to somehow engage in community-wide conversations about that shame. And, oh yeah, about our overwhelming feelings of helplessness and terror.

Maybe?

* “Climate Summer”  has been about a group of college students biking throughout New England to talk about climate change. Marla was one of the chief organizers.

** I use the present tense because Somerville, like so many communities around the world, has already suffered 3 times this year from dramatic, destructive weather—in Somerville’s case, 3 devastating rain storms.