Category: Nature

I haven’t slept well for days. The weather radio, a necessity when living on the edge of Tornado Alley, goes off every night in advance of severe thunderstorms that have rolled through nearly every night for the past week.

The Steven Hawking voice of the National Weather Service Austin-San Antonio explains that there are dangerous storms in Travis, Williamson, Hays, Blanco and Burnet counties. There is also always flash flooding in Burnet County. Always. Every time it rains.

Some nights it wakes me up to tell me to stay away from windows because of storms that produce golf ball sized hail. I usually stay in bed and listen to the thunder boom closer and closer. I watch the lightning flicker across the ceiling, illuminating the fan as it increases in frequency and violence before drifting off to eastern counties.

I think tonight will bring more of the same.

As I was working at the computer, I noticed the room filled with the strangest orange glow. I went outside and saw the skies to the south were dark, purple and forbidding. To the north and west the setting sun had cast the whole sky in an unnatural dirty orangish glow, not the orange of Longhorn victories and summer nights, but a sickly smoky orange. Overhead the orange and the purple met in an eerie and twisted swirl of clouds.

I suspect the weather radio will be keeping me up again tonight.

It’s a curious fact of the human species that we demand answers even when the evidence seems to say: Don’t bother. Our species has such faith in the idea of a higher purpose or power that throughout history every culture has looked up to the sun and stars and believed they saw some reason behind their mysterious paths through the heavens. Ancient cultures, and some modern ones, knew beyond doubt why they existed and could articulate it in their stories, but we are not so lucky. The universe unfolds regardless of our existence.

Our 21st century creation story (not a myth, mind you), our Big Bang, with its eternally expanding and cooling universe completely cuts us out of the deal. In the overall cosmic scheme of things, it appears that our existence is purposeless.

And yet, here we are with our deep need to see purpose in everything. We resist imagining that we’re nothing more than animals like the squirrels eating at the feeder in the backyard, and so we continue to probe the mysteries, searching for meaning and reason.

Billions of years from now our sun will expand, consuming our planet, and then die, leaving no trace that we were here with all our scientists and philosophers, artists and writers and, okay, bloggers. If their works and wisdom freeze out of existence along with all artifact and memory of our planet’s life, human and otherwise, one comes to a disturbing question: What was the point?

Granted, these are things that are not scheduled to occur for billions of years, and even one billion years is beyond the capability of most of us to truly comprehend, but when the entire universe becomes nothing more than an invisible wasteland of frozen rock and gas clouds, it’s hard to accept that anything will have mattered. Without some measure of immortality whether it be our children, our deeds, or our works, how can we convince ourselves that our lives are worth the atoms and molecules with which we are born?

I suppose that what prevents us from giving in to a purely short-term outlook is the fact that our creation story, which as with any good creation story, hints towards a destruction story, effectively pushes our collective demise into the recesses of a future so distant that we cannot perceive it as real.

We have plenty of time to continue that timeless debate between Huck and Jim about whether the stars were “made or just happened,” and I can’t help but wonder if that debate – that journey – is somehow the point.