Glaciers in Retreat

Dear Friends,

In the early afternoon I was standing aft on our small ship traveling east up a wide fjord in Prince William Sound, Alaska. This moment of stunning beauty and spiritual stillness was worth the price of a trip to Alaska, I thought to myself. We had been cutting through the beautiful water dotted by jumping salmon for nearly an hour. Per the usual, we were told nothing by the staff of our destination. This voyage was all about surprises.

I saw our guide approaching on my right but continued to watch striking beauty pass by and enjoy my diet coke, cooled by glacial ice that we had harvested the previous afternoon near a glacier on the other side ofthe sound. Hugh began to speak quietly but passionately. "A decade ago when I first came to the sound, this fjord, from quite a few miles back, was filled with glacial ice. From the tops of the mountains on your right and on your left, nothing but ice. (The empty space he was describing was almost beyond imagination.) Now the glacier is in retreat and some people believe what I tell them about that retreat means and some people do not."

How often in our lives, and in how many situations, do we hear phrases like:

I don't believe that.
I can't believe that.
That is beyond belief.
That could never happen.
I refuse to believe that.

The truth is too painful to believe or too difficult to do anything about.
We chose to stay in a comfort zone of denial rather than enter the danger zone of awareness that requires passionate action.

Every moment of my travel up that fjord towards a glacier was through what only ten years ago was solid ice. Now there is only air. Multiplied by thousands of times, what does the melting of that much ice mean for the planet and its people? Does anyone have any interest in knowing such a truth?