Late afternoon, Day 6 of 12 Days of Christmas, 2012: strange sky phenomena (color and sound), a hair cut, and the rise and fall of civilizations

Yesterday evening, extraordinary sunset. A color in the sky that I have never, ever seen before. And yet my iphone camera picked up a different color differential! Strange.

What I saw was an intensely brilliant and alive aquamarine blue just below reddish gold cloud cover in the western sky, with a clear demarcation between aquamarine sky and the rim of reddish/gold clouds. And yet here’s what I got on camera. It’s almost as if the colors were reversed from my perception of them outside — but not quite. The pink was “true” to what I saw, but the blue above and the whitish area below were not. Decidedly not! The whitish area had replaced the aquamarine, and there was no “blue” above in reality. I wish I had had another witness to this, as it really was extraordinary, and I don’t think I’m losing my mind!

Then, this morning, walking with puppy Shadow downtown on the B-line trail before a marvelous two-hour lunch with a friend, looking forward to lunch, very much enjoying the warmish weather and cloud-covered sky, when out of the blue, thunder. Rolling thunder that went on and on and on, like for several minutes, emanating from just above. No lightning visible. Then, ten minutes later, a light, drizzly rain. What struck me was the fact of the thunder itself, in December (though that is not too unusual; it happens here once or twice a winter), but that the thunder went on and on and on with no break. Not especially loud, but seemingly directly overhead. I’ve never heard thunder do that. It didn’t seem natural to me.

Otherwise, except for the labor of composing two posts on further ramifications of the Connecticut Massacre, one about connecting dots as to what external agent really “caused” it, and the other reflections on internal causes which, once we face and embrace them, may help us shift from a culture of almost casual violence and destruction to one of conscious creativity and peace — I got my hair cut!

Dear Timantha comes over here once every 5 weeks to cut my hair. During our session she told me that she was in the grocery store yesterday getting food for her family of seven (it’s not easy for them to afford food, by far their biggest expense), when she came upon a man in line that was buying expensive steaks and “a really good brand of beer”— paying for it with his food stamp card! That blew her away. Timantha’s family does not use food stamps.

Her story brings to mind the word “Entitlement” in a short 33-word video Mike Adams created that I think captures really well the cyclical “rise and fall” of societies in which power centralizes and then collapses.