Large Fierce Mammal

Shit Storm (Source: Linkedin.com)

“There’s an old saying — ‘Safe as houses’ — usually spoken in reference to situations that were anything but safe, but not always. There have forever been people who lived their lives in a wide eyed and blissful belief there can be some place where pain and death won’t find you.

“Enter the ‘safe space’ which, interestingly, seems to be a phenomenon built by and for people of a vintage unaccustomed to the joys and perils to be found in working without a net.

“The modern societal shift toward ‘safety first’ represents another case wherein the utterance elicits a nodding of heads and stroking of chins as if it stands axiomatic for living a fulfilled life. If risk represents any impingement on safety, then it must be avoided at all costs.” ~ Risk: Nothing of Value Happens Without It

In last night’s Dark Sentiment I set forth the preamble for tonight’s offering so if you haven’t yet set the stage by reading that, go do it now. When ready, get the storm chips handy, pour a flagon of your favourite salt washer downer, and follow me.

I want my daughter to feel safe in her home. That’s why I’m rebuilding with climate change in mind is the title of a First Person (Translation: “It happened to me”) piece by Jason Charette published just yesterday by CBC News in keeping with its long standing tradition of giving me exactly what I can use to prove a point pretty much right when I need it. The link to the entire article is embedded in the title at the start of this paragraph, and I will ask that you read that through before moving on to my own interpretation below.

For background, Mr. Charette’s “about” page says, “In rural Prince Edward Island, Jason Charette lives with his small family in his purpose-built tiny house. He is a former Green Party of P.E.I. candidate and advocate of small houses.”

And now tonight’s story.

The story goes that once there was a man who was raised upon the left coast of a nation where he grew restive with what he observed of the way others around him had of being in the world. Those others issued forth from the cities and built houses upon farmlands and forests, houses that were bigger than their number of occupants should require, made real by indulgent money lenders and the burning of inexpensive fuels to warm them in winter.

His disquiet festered on into adulthood when he took a wife and with her travelled far to the nation’s right where they settled upon a beautiful island well known to all, except evidently them, to be a center of calm when it wasn’t hurricane or blizzard season. And so it came to pass that the couple settled in their right place in the midst of the record breaking snow storm of 2015. This they marked as proof of the changing climate in their new locale of which they knew little, and notwithstanding the record breaking snowstorms of 2004, 1982, and the “Storm of the Century” in 1905 to name but a few of recent memory but seemingly unknown to them.

In time, the couple were blessed with a child as the summers passed in torrents of sweat for lo, the house daemon assigned to the relocation of heat from in to out was inadequate to its task, and winter’s chills cast their assaults undaunted by all but the most generous of burnt offerings.

Then came the summer of the year two thousand and nineteen when Dorian, being the latest name bestowed upon the wind and rain elemental, roared in by dark of night casting all before it into ruin and despair, and they were sore beset. Upon the rising of the sun, the family found it had been spared, or perhaps ignored in that way often mistaken for spared, and in the dawn found it within themselves not to flee but to rebuild with the purpose of atoning for the sins of the world in their own right place in their own small way.

And so they poured their hearts, minds, and treasure into the building of their dream home which would stand in the face of “once a century” storms of the sort that have occurred more than once per century since the dawn of centuries, and stand as an example for all around them, most of whom could not afford to do it themselves, nor ever hope to. The house was stout as that built by the third little pig but fraught with the need to sin mightily in quest of avoiding it, for as is said of what must be done with money in order to make more of it, the couple learned how much sinning must be done to avoid committing it. And so it came to pass that they made plans to build from Nature’s bounty, with wood and and other materials grown in the field or dug from the ground seemingly absent understanding of how many sins lay buried therein, but lo, the unrelenting daemon named Reality, reluctantly so by many, cast those plans asunder and tittered at their ease of redirection into such ever more sinful indulgences as  insulating foam made from petroleum, concrete, and steel, seemingly absent care or even knowledge of how many sins lay in simply getting them to the building place let alone putting them together, and how they justified it all with declarations of improved ruggedness, longevity, and holding in the heat against the dead of Winter. Best of all, the house was small, adhering to the example of cats that seem to enjoy sleeping inside boxes one tenth the size of what you would expect.

Emboldened by the seemingly ineffectual return of the wind and rain elemental, now named Fiona, which visited the part-built house, chuckled wetly and windily at their hubris before leaving it alone — for now –the couple were able to complete their tiny filter against Nature’s wrath. There they now intend to live happily vindicated, blissfully ignorant of how wind and rain elementals feel about those who prepare for their onslaughts by stocking freezers, and how little one can accomplish on the path of righteousness by atoning for the sins of the wider world through committing them yourself with self-absolving explanations and the chanting of mantras such as “net zero”, “climate change” and “warming Atlantic”.

A shining example for others to follow, or metaphor for how many layers it requires to form the full tear inducing root called an onion? Right vs wrong? Sinful vs Righteous? Can I offer any metrics by which this story represents a measurable position relative to the One True Path?

I must ask, what does that even mean? All the politics, all the clutched pearls, all the feels in all the world, the King’s horses, and the King’s men combined have little chance of arresting the fall from a precipice no one can agree to the location, or even existence, of.