A flare for the traumatic

Sylvia Shawcross

It was too cold. That’s all I’m saying. It has been a long and rather temperate summer and these colder nights and now days, although logically they shouldn’t be, are a bit upsetting.

Especially when it is so very dark at 2:00 in the morning and you are standing out there on the driveway looking for the aurora borealis.

It is there—that heavenly sky. But also there is the street light turning the ribbon of pavement into a violet yellow snake and the string of startling lights the neighbour put up along his fence. So the night sky I squinted to find drifted up there beyond the trees. And then a fire engine went by, no sirens, just the bright red lights pitting the darkness.

I gave up quickly. Because it was cold. Too cold for an old woman. I could always see the display on the internet. I thought about the sun up there doing its flare. A very severe flare apparently but then again any natural phenomenon is now labelled and perhaps might even be worse than we have ever seen in a hundred years or a thousand years or ever.

As if “ever” is measured.

I think about the anger of the sun and how it speaks in light instead of words and we living here under the sheltering space know only the end of its hot breath in a soundless sky. I think about past worlds and how they worshipped the sun.

In the days before they could do things like measure the proton and electron components of solar storms and plot them on graphs with lovely sun colours. Red is very bad. I would rather have lived then than now in some ways. I want the mystique and not the measure. But I am foolish thinking that I know.

Beyond the cosmic display for us to marvel at, I don’t know that the flare had much of an effect on anything. Perhaps it messed up the way that pilots talk to each other up there. They who fly in a metal tube going to important places.

Do they feel free up there? Unchained to the earth? Above the fray? Godlike in their perspective? Or is it the rush of adrenaline as they sail the sky biting through the clouds? If we were meant to fly, surely we would have been given wings? But of course, we’re no angels.

Perhaps the flare messed up all those plans they have for war and bombs and cyberattacks. Perhaps. Although it doesn’t much seem like it now that I look at the headlines. The human condition and its love affair with war continues.

It must be a love affair. What has so much power over all these generations, hundreds and thousands of years, still trapped by human hatred and fear? Only love has that kind of power. Love of life. Love of family. Love of country. Perhaps. It is always perhaps. All of these things have been carefully dismantled in so many cases. How can one wage a war when there is no love? A crazy thing to ask really.

Mostly of course it has little to do with love or hate but greed and its tactics of fear. It is never the people. Never. We are played from one generation to the next. Played like fools, with fear tactics, particularly by governments no doubt held hostage.

Never fear. Never.

But that is not what I’m writing about here. Not again. I’ve written too much about war. It is bad. That is a given. It infuriates me. That is also a given. I will not forgive those who promulgate it. Not for any reason. But it reminds me of a time before this time. As everything does when you grow old.

The marches in the 60s. And the Vietnam war. Yes, they hated the government for their role in Vietnam. Yes, they hated. But the flower-bedecked children of peace chanting and singing urged Love not War. They did not protest from hate. Not ever. It would be only the fringe who did.

It is different now. The protests on the streets of my country right now are full of angry people who are angry at a war and angry at a people. Too much hate. And people in this country are fearful now about these protests for many reasons. This hate. That is not what protests need to be.

If I could change one thing, pacifist that I am, I would ask the protestors out there to fight for Love not War. To fight for peace not punishment. We get no where with hate. The children of the 60s may have gone on and done terrible things (and certainly good things) but in this stance they were right.

But then, I am no one really to say anything. An ordinary person in a big world with a little voice. I do not speak from a pedestal but from my small life. Make love not war and we’ll be fine. Or at least better than this.

In the meantime we can look to the sky dancing at night.

Earworm for the week: