Rainbows, Wildfires, and the Reincarnation Rollercoaster

I put in hay today, got it in just before the showers started, so it's all nice and dry, stacked up and tarped against any rain or drifting snow that might make it into my barn. That hay represents past and future. It's a past of sun, irrigation water, sweat, and yes, diesel, alas, because alfalfa grows in eastern Oregon. It is stored summer. It represents a future of lambs, more breeding ewes, dinner for some folk. It is stored food. As I finished with the unloading, the sun set, the showers moved on and a rainbow graced a nearly clear sky just after the sun had set. Ephemeral color caught in a few brief moments between day and night.

I had emailed a student of mine living in one of the burned areas in San Diego. Worrying. Today, I got a reply. She was evacuated and as she unpacks in her thankfully! unburned home, she is finding revelation in what they threw in the car and what they left behind. Global warming? Or just a bad, dry year? My son emailed me a NY Times article about the dry future: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?em&ex=1193284800&en=adc25155e153a757&ei=5087%0A

I find a lot of comfort in the small cycles of life: alfalfa growing, storing up sunlight and water and summer heat in green leaves, the growth of lambs in the pregnant ewes, nourished by that stored summer, the nourishment of human lives by those as yet unborn lambs. I look at the climate shift and the international waffling that is going to allow it to continue and I see another, larger cycle. Maybe we, humans, Homo sapiens, are only going to evolve through a very long process of civilization growth and the crash that comes when you don't work together to suit your environment and technology. Maybe this is just the first rise and fall of a very great roller coaster, eh? And where will it end?

Cycles.

It's a theme I've been looking at in my SF lately. Where will we go, as a species, and what is our ultimate evolutionary goal? I wonder.