2019-12-20-A Small Twist, Big Changes

Session

Lesson

George: “I’ve been in this country for over 60 years and each year around this time we’d be bombarded by Christmas beetles. Last year I saw just one and it was already dead, this year none at all. It seems everyone noticed the Christmas beetles’ absence. This is most spooky, tho: there are no cicadas in the trees, no spiders under the eaves, no hornet nests all along our fence line or under the giant leaves of the monsterio plants.

“The almost complete absence of insects has brought out some 12 to 15 species of birds, begging us for food each day, all day. Some species that are normally shy, like the tiny blue wrens, present themselves as fearless and some pairs, like the plovers, have simply raised no young this season. To me this is a picture of even worse times to come.”

Teacher Samuel: “You have noted a small twist that is heralding some new big changes. Not only is your planet receiving more light and heat as your sun is doing what it must do, ‘a radiation’ — an aspect of your sun’s output you have long overlooked — is penetrating deeper into the ground and killing many ‘bugs’, as you call them. Hence not much room for hornets and spiders let alone your insect-eating feathered friends. What to do? What to do? That is, beyond feeding your bird friends some soft dog food.

“Consider now what it is you do when you are out on a sun-shiny day. Correct, you wear a cap, a straw hat, even a wide-brimmed Akubra. It’s in this fashion you can consistently float a huge shade over the most sun-exposed parts of your world. You might also begin to whiten the thousands of square miles of road deck that takes in the heat. None of this should surprise you. You basically intuit all this, but you come to me for confirmation only and then you ignore what you’re told, let the heat build up until some big bad compensating volcano announces the next icy winter.

“It’s true, my friend, ages since we recommended ‘you’ purchase a New Guinea river to irrigate all your fertile land, but at this stage ‘you’ have not even acknowledged that you are the keepers of this Urantia farm. Progress is slow down there, but we still love you.

I am Samuel the Panoptian.”