Fall 2022

The Russian front in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine collapses. Putin mobilizes conscripts and declares he will use “all the means at our disposal.” The U.S. pledges to “act decisively” should Russia deploy a tactical nuclear weapon.

The U.S. sells arms to Taiwan, escalating U.S.-China tensions.

Europe suspects sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline by Russia in the continuing energy war.

22-year-old Mahsa Amini dies in custody in Iran following her arrest by the nation’s Guidance Patrol for allegedly not wearing her hijab correctly. Thousands of Iranian citizens mobilize in anti-regime protests, with women burning their headscarves and cutting their hair in solidarity.

The UK’s new prime minister plunges the country into recession within a month of becoming leader. Pension funds risk insolvency and mortgage products are withdrawn from the market as a result of her budget plans. She is very quickly ousted.

Italy elects a far-right prime minister.

A rain-forest activist and Forest Guardian is killed in Brazil, weeks after attending an Amazon summit organized by a murdered Indigenous specialist who had predicted his own death.

One third of Pakistan is under water this monsoon season. Record-high temperatures in China reduce the Yangtze River to a trickle; factories halt production to ease the burden on the power grid. Last year in Zhengzhou people were drowning in subway cars flooded by summer rains.

Hundreds of thousands of people are facing hunger and the threat of starvation in Somalia, due to drought, crop failure and decades of conflict, with young children most at risk in this worst drought in 40 years.

The COP27 climate conference is dubbed Egypt’s greenwash of its political realities. The cost of climate change dominates the conference.

The world’s billionaires worry how to protect their underground survival bunkers in the event of global catastrophe.

Will we wake up, each of us, to our role in this hardening of divisions—divisions that fundamentally do not exist but are rehearsed endlessly in our minds and in our habits of mind and so affect our actions in the world?

This is part of the upcoming book, Digging in the Earth to Find the Blue Sky.

Sheila Ross is an artist, writer, graphic designer, and Zen student of Roshi Kennedy. She was senior designer at Fordham University, New York, where she founded the Fordham Interfaith Zen sitting group. Ross trained as a sculptor at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, participating in the Locked Room project, which led to the book The Locked Room: Four years that shook art education, 1969-73 (MIT Press, 2020). (sheilaross.co.uk)