Going to the Gulf?

The invisible ocean has given you such abundance,
but still you call it "death",
that which provides you sustenance and work.  
from Rumi

I talked with a colleague yesterday who has been working down in the Gulf of Mexico with scientific sampling related to the oil gusher crisis. She said that people like me were needed down there and urged me to send my resume to her so that she could pass it along to the research coordinators. She said that the work was hellish due to the heat and the unfathomable difficulties of such an ecological disaster.

I think that it is something that I could help with, from editing and reviewing proposals to doing field work on water quality and benthic ecology. If my expertise is needed it would require month long hitches working in Louisiana. I haven't discussed this with my wife yet. And I will clearly need to do that before sending in my resume. I have a sense that it will be important to see with my own eyes what is going on. And as I have learned in Al-Anon, I strive to work to effect a solution instead of obsessing about the problem.

After being on a pristine beach and surrounded by unspoiled estuaries over the past few days, I am indeed grateful to have been in the most beautiful "temple" that I know.  But I am ever mindful that the situation could be very different. The shrimper towing his nets could instead be towing an oil boom. The pelicans riding the thermals could be flopping in a sea of oil unable to fly. The dolphins following the sailboat could be gasping for breath and dying.

It could all change in the blink of an eye. I am not taking anything for granted. These ecosystems and indeed life itself is ephemeral and fragile. Guard it well.

We ourselves have created the ecological conditions that are strangling us. Think of that: no one has done it to us--we humans have done it to ourselves. Ram Dass