To say it’s hot as I write really does not do the climate justice.  The dog days do their indeterminable thing, people drag their heels in sheer exhaustion.  Drought is declared to no particular surprise even if dismay hangs heavy like the muggy air.  Even at any remove from our screens, news of the fires filters through, like messengers out of the smoke and do we believe and can we bare to remind ourselves what is happening upon this continent when the scale and sheer intensity bewilders like a pyrocumulonimbus of the mind? 

There’s a kind of easy conspiracy here.  Do not look down.  Do not look up.  Don’t look back and never second guess or try to gage the road ahead.  Live for the moment.  Live for the hour.  ‘Til days cascade and we are listless with inertia, the knowledge of the things we ought to do, the knowledge, almost visceral, that we are on a train to who knows where, where alighting isn’t an option and we are all aboard and in it together only half the passengers are so inured with on board entertainment you’d think they never knew or cared about the destination.

Of course, for many, it’s not so much escapism as staunching a wound of awareness.  And so the easy peace prevails, the neverminds and never noticing till it feels that we are in a play of paradise, only the props are igniting and the show is held fast by goodwill and wishful thinking and we can drink this nectar for another day, shore the sides as long as they last, put one last shot of desperate assurance into the cocktail of our positivity, where positive thinking holds the only key never mind the hard realities.  This much we know.

But what if we remember that it needn’t necessarily be like this?  What if we remember that our future is not hostage to collective fortune, some sad but quite inevitable decline?  What if it is not written in the stars that we have had our day and eaten it?  What if it can still be another way?  Not rose-tinted or requisite of burying heads in the sand but redolent with the knowledge our future is not being so much lost as stolen.  Stolen by men with machines, more money than morals, drip feeding poison into the newsfeeds, deliberate as any given conspiracy, muddying the waters of collective consciousness to suit their ends where endings are a billionaire’s wet dream of profit lines and whatever it takes to preserve them?

What if then we could all awake to see it as such: that if such men have agency, where does our own lie?  What psychological embers can we breathe to life from the literal Aquitanian ashes and those of the Castilian Plains?  What if collectively we found our voice?  Not driven by assurances or even distant dreams of happy ever afters but from the knowledge we can make a tangible difference, primed by bloody-mindedness if nothing else; the will to act and speak out?  What if every amplified utterance, every feed and post and itemised nugget of data could be harnessed to this means?  What if we were united by intent, by some renewed awareness of our duty, to our own selves as much as to anyone else; to live as life demands it, if our own morality rings true?

It still persists but can’t remain unsaid that there are no guarantees here, that time was never on our side, that hope was never anything other than dependent on collective will.  For all the angst, great efforts are still being made; granular and gradual but also on a truly epic scale.  But if the fires of Spain and France can show us anything at all it must be that there is no time for anything at all but standing true.  Where that may bring us out as we navigate these times is not ours to say or grant.  But the only thing that guarantees the end is not being prepared to believe in beginnings; that fierceness, rage, can temper us, forge our intent as we face the new day.

Perhaps what we need above all else is remembrance.  Remembrance of inheritance, of that which we stand to bequeath.  Will we allow this precious earth to continue to be taken by lust for acquisition of wealth?  And wealth, as we know, for the few.  Perhaps we simply need our public discourse to run true, to enact our own capacity for vigilance, call out the lies, stand strong against the headwinds of autocracy, in the given hope its hollowness will be its own demise if we collectively can only see it?  That some kind of faith in human nature can win out, that decent discourse can provide its own brand of validation, that we can still see it born?

There is no promise of a better day other than the knowledge that we do not know what lies ahead, what fortunes, fates and given events may lie on the road before us.  But we can set fair reckonings upon an unknown course, take our bearings as we go, look for given opportunities.  There may still be silver linings in the scale of the monstrosities we face – if we were to pull at them, perhaps we could bring the whole covering down; undermined by its own top-heavy magnitude, an edifice built in the sand.

We can take some comfort then that this day is not done and that the very earth can lend us a hand as we help her.  Meanwhile, at the time of writing this, the fires continue to burn.  Sometimes it is simply enough to endure.  But we can remember there are men and agencies who seek to stoke this status quo even at the gates of the inferno.  Responses should be as intense.