Warming Stripes

Draw a band of colour across your face for every year you have lived. The first are a deep, cold blue; then, without your quite knowing when, they shift, slowly but surely, and the last are a red that can no longer be missed. They bar your forehead, your cheeks, your eyes. They bar all our faces: those who march and those who shrug; the activist and the climate sceptic alike. Whether we like it or not, each of us carries our own warming stripes, and they are larger than any of us. No one escapes them. They run through every one of us; they are now part of what defines us.

There was a time when all you could see was what those stripes stand for. Every headline added a shade of red to your mood; every evening walk became an inventory of what was slipping away; your eyes stayed open and took in nothing else. It rises, it fills your whole being until there is no room left, and then, all at once, it stops, because the weight of it is too much to bear. In the silence that follows, the crickets are still singing in the long grass. Their song, quickening as the heat rises, is a living thermometer measuring the same warmth. They carry their stripes too. No one yet knows how to live with this new normal, nor what other way of being in the world we shall have to find; we know only that at the heart of our questions, something in the grass will always sing, or so I hope. To all of you who feel this warming as if it were your own fever, whose eyes have held nothing but red for too long: I wish you a little more blue.