On a hot and humid Sunday afternoon in Chicago two weeks ago, there was a loud explosion behind our apartment building. BOOM! and the electricity went off. My husband and I laughed and joked about the air conditioners in the city – that they had finally done it; maxed out the ComEd power grid. For weeks it’s been in the high 80s and 90s, day after day, but we are environmental types, and refuse to buy an air conditioner. We don’t even have a fan. I work at home, so the first week of this hot summer was rough, but I acclimated well. As July wore on, we watched more and more AC units pop up in our neighbor’s windows, until everyone was running a unit at night, which makes for a noisy atmosphere when you’re sleeping with the windows open. Between the heat, some intense business shifts and self-imposed deadlines, I had been draining myself of energy. When the electricity went out, I thought, “Perfect. Now I’m literally powerless.”
The transformer which kaboomed that Sunday blew itself clear off its pole. It took 36 hours to install new poles, new transformers (2 this time) and new lines to the buildings affected in our block. Meanwhile the contents of our fridge died a slow death, despite the bags of ice we set in there. But the evenings were nice; we slept in the lakefront breezes in the living room, camped out on the floor. And it was quiet – no AC units buzzing away. Tuesday morning about 1am, the power came back on. I got back to work in the morning, but it was like walking in deep mud; everything was a struggle. Something was draining me, sucking my power. I ignored it and kept pushing forward.
Thursday night I opened our electric bill. Typically we average about 120 kwh a month, thanks to an older refrigerator. I gasped; the bill said 577 kwh for July! What the WHAT? I went down to the basement and our electric meter was spinning like crazy. Another 220 kwh had racked up since the actual reading on Monday (and the electric was out until Tuesday!) I went to bed irritated [click to continue…]
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Barbara Marx Hubbard describes evolution as a spiral: an ever-expanding coil of progression. Each level of our cyclical path does not return us to the same point where we began, but loops us into the next phase of development. I like this image, and it mimics the spiral pattern found in living matter. As Nobel Prize-winner Sir Laurence Bragg said, “We are all made of right-handed corkscrews.”
