California is burning, and so perhaps is our precious Joshua Tree.

There are so many reports now, such commotion and frightful imagery, so many words taken up in masses of whirling sentences. And fires burn everywhere. There is preposterous heat at sea level; it scorches even far north inside Arctic boundaries where fires are burning too. Smoke hangs bilious in carbon-laden clouds over Siberia. The flames are offspring of zombie fires — clandestine embers as they describe them to us — over-wintering in peat bogs sluggishly burning in hope of spring re-ignitions, alive again to burn more Russian silver birch, larch and pine trees.

Lightning struck near Cima Dome in California and fires started to burn; magnificent stands of bone-dry Joshua Trees went ablaze in an area I know well. They are on fire all round and very near the vigorous tree whose image I share above, its present condition and future unknown but doubtful. It lives within the Mojave National Preserve, an entity created by law. Considering events of past weeks — the super-heated winds, lightning flashes and the burning — the Preserve must join the list of meaningless human creations, among its vanities.  To quote a most idiomatic translation of Ecclesiastes:

 

“Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That’s what the Quester says.]

There’s nothing to anything — it’s all smoke.

What’s there to show for a lifetime of work,

a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?

One generation goes its way, the next one arrives,

but nothing changes — it’s business as usual for old planet earth.”

 

From Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, Dynamic Equivalence Translation by Eugene H. Peterson