Cindy's Open House Blog: Earth Wobble, Climate Change, Pole Shift …

Friday, 2 October 2015

Earth Wobble, Climate Change, Pole Shift …

Earth Wobble, Climate Change, Pole Shift … and the Changing Sky above Me Part 2

Hi dear friends and followers. Welcome to my blog, today we continue with part 2 of Earth Wobble, Climate Change, Pole Shift. I hope you enjoy reading this entry, thank you.

But what hit me so hard when I was asked if I had noticed changes in the sky was that I had noticed. It just hadn’t registered. I hadn’t noticed changes in the sun or moon so much as I had noticed changes in constellations. I’ve been an avid sky watcher since I was a little girl, but I moved around a bit in my young adulthood. Now that I’ve been in one place for over 22 years, I know the changing seasons and the weather, right down to which days of March will dip into that last “unexpected” freeze that will destroy any bedding plants I’ve put out in the first beautiful days of warm weather.

When my children were little and needed reassurance, I would take them out in the late fall and early winter and point out the constellation of Orion. I gave each of them stars when they were about four or five years old. Betelgeuse for one and Rigel for the other, both in the constellation of Orion.

“See those three stars?” I told them, pointing at Orion’s belt. “That’s Mommy in the middle with my arms stretched open wide to you both.”

And then I turned with my arms stretched wide from one to the other & then one to the other again and made them laugh. They both grew up thinking that they owned stars in a constellation. In those days, when I pointed out Orion, it was at the end of our driveway, at midnight in September. They understood what the constellation looked like and, if no other, they could point Orion out among all the stars throughout the winter and name the red star and the blue one.

These are special Mother-Daughter moments, forever in my heart, so I am not unsure of the constellation’s location in aspect to my family home in September through December.

On a particular night in September 2008, I stood at the end of that driveway looking up into the eyes of my then-boyfriend. It was after midnight. Not by much, but enough that he was dreading being late getting back to Ranger Camp, finishing a load of laundry, and then getting up for a hard three days’ stint of work before he could see me again. The day had been eventful in many ways and then it was ending with kisses on my driveway, the constellation of Orion rising behind him in the night sky—at the corner of my driveway—and him professing his love for me a moment before he slid into his car and drove away.

Last year, on the same date in September, I had another eventful day. A very hard one, this time. And, somehow, there I was, at midnight, pushing the big garbage can out to the end of the driveway and realizing, suddenly, that it was the anniversary of a night that was very sweet. I paused there–in the same place I had stood with my arms around Army Boy’s neck–no longer thinking either kindly or unkindly toward him, but really not thinking much about him at all. Instead, I was thinking about Orion rising in the eastern sky and wondering where it was. As I turned to go back inside, I found it in the sky…but above my neighbor’s drive, not mine. Still, it was late and I had a lot on my mind about the hard day I’d had.

I had a lot of difficult things on my mind last fall, so I wasn’t paying that much attention to the sky, but I did notice a few other times, when I was out in the evening looking at the night sky, that Orion seemed to be in a different place than it had been in prior years. I wasn’t even sure when it had happened, this difference in where it was placed or at least my perception of it as being different. But, the first time I noticed for certain was in September of 2014.

In the last week, I’ve talked to a number of people who are either farmers, gardeners, amateur astronomers, or people who follow a spiritual path centered around the Earth. Those who have lived in one place for a decade or more and some who have lived there less report that there are changes that they’ve noticed but, like me, had not quite registered what the changes were or what they meant.

While taking a week off to be at home and work on a special project, I’ve had the luxury of watching sunrises and sunsets every day and, just in the last week, I’ve noticed a few things that I would not have noticed before, due to my busy life. In my home office, I can see the sunset—through my northern window—at the height of summer. Twenty years in the same house, ten years with my desk in the same spot, much of it in the same chair, and I’ve never until this summer been able to catch the sunset through this window.

The other thing that was new and different was walking around my house about an hour before sunset during what my photographer daughter calls “the golden hour.” In the narrow side yard, between the southern end of my house and my neighbor’s fence, the light came through as though it were a golden hallway. It reminded me a bit of Stonehenge at summer solstice, with the light coming through the stones. It was a golden tunnel of light and beautiful, something I surely would have noticed at least once before, in all the years of living here. That passageway is at an unusual angle and the sun has to shine between several trees to hit it just right.

The last thing I noticed about the sun’s placement is that, for years, I’ve been able to tell if I was going to be late for work by whether or not a certain design appeared on the tile floor just inside my front door. The sun shines on the glass pane above the door and makes an unusual design on the floor that looks like a dragon. That design, the angle and the depth of it, has changed as well.

I’m not sure why all this has happened, or exactly when. Just that it is different now. The sky is different above me–the constellations, sun, and moon. We have no concept of where we are in the universe except by our connection to our planet and no way of telling where our planet is in connection to the universe without looking outward at the celestial bodies.

Yes, I’m sure we have scientists, astrophysicists, astronomers to tell us these things, but the average person doesn’t know unless they are attuned to the Earth and the sky. Even NASA has said that earthquakes can affect the tilt of the Earth, but I don’t believe anyone ever said exactly how that would look. I think, maybe, I’m beginning to understand that now.

Maybe this is why everything feels a little off in the day and in the seasons. Maybe this is why our world and the people who inhabit the planet with us seem a little out of balance these days. Because we are.