- Up all night with a storm: ample time for long thoughts
to accompany the incessant drumbeat of a downpour. Sitting in the dark,
looking out the window into the greater dark: the metaphor of darkness
escapes abstraction and bites down hard. Our fragility is in the hands
of the very world we so thoroughly scorn.
- Tame electricity disappears and we say that the power
is out. But far greater powers than our domesticated trickles are very
much in evidence. The powers of nature are never out. Vast electrical phenomena
stalk up and down the land, speaking in tongues of rolling thunder, inscribing
fiery scrolls in strokes of lightning. There is meaning in all of this,
for those who can read the writing on the Wailing Wall of the weather of
the world.
- Between the earth and the heavens, the natural energies
of air and water and fire are delivering purification by violence: because,
as primary agents of healing, they must. A poisoned body becomes feverish,
and a feverish body tosses and turns restlessly, seeking relief and a condition
of equilibrium. That modern man does not believe in the unified livingness
of all things has no effect whatsoever on the underlying reality. The weather
will increasingly toss and turn in high fevers of pollution, and take us
along for a worldwide ride.
- Scattered across the continents, we murmur our litanies
of fervent prayers to the weather angels. But the wolf winds will howl,
methodically scouring the heights and depths of our poor poisoned sea of
air. Any sage will say what any innocent child instinctively knows: the
basic elements react to human activities. Indeed, all things are intimately
connected, and woven together in indissoluble unity. But modern man is
much too self-important to comprehend the wonder, the imperative, and the
penalties of ignoring subtle reality. He has peremptorily decided that
mythologies are lies, though they represent truths simply too big to tell
small. The Old Ones knew: nothing and no one is separate; nothing and no
one is apart from the whole. The New Ones know this too. The ones in between
have made a civilization of Hungry Ghosts: a No Mans Land of the half-alive,
half-awake, and half-human.
- The harmony of weather and seasons is broken because
we have poisoned the springs of existence. Too many of us strut and preen
and casually devour, as if exempt from the effects of all natural and spiritual
law. To understand that how we live intimately interacts with elemental
forces sheds revelatory light on the effects of mindless consumption, systemic
degeneracy, and the horrifying cruelties of relentless war. However passionately
some may cling to dire ignorance, nature and spirit care nothing for the
twisted human constructs of failing civilizations. It is acute madness
for human beings to persist in living as if separate and apart from the
intricate balancing acts of the natural and spiritual worlds. The patterns
of weather are broken because, to a dangerous extent, we are.
Yet we are not abandoned here to helplessness, cast adrift in elemental
chaos and bereft of guidance. We have been given many effective recipes
for solving our problems. In one notable example, we were offered a definitive
demonstration of the power of spiritual love and truth in our relation
to the elements of nature. Christ bid the turbulent waves to be still,
and they were still, and He walked on the water.
- He also said: "Greater things than I have done,
ye will do."
- And He meant what He said.
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