Sacred Waters

"To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible." Starhawk

We have had some torrential rainstorms and hail over the past few days that have created waterfalls cascading off the house and challenged the drainage capacity of the front stone courtyard. Watching the rain make water sheets across the windows of the house is a vivid lesson in human frailty.

The long awaited attempt to seal off and cap the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leak failed last night. Watching the rain and thinking of the powerful force of the oil gushing out of the earth under a mile of water, I thought of the many people racing and struggling to stop this terrible event, the thousands of families along the coast impacted by the blowout, as well as the rest of our country. We are having to accept the fallibility of what we and the world have depended on for generations: American know how. Here is something we don't know how to fix much less control. It is a heart wrenching feeling.

When disasters befall us there is a tendency to want to place blame somewhere and on someone even if it is something human error has not caused. Our confidence in our ability to control everything, to know everything about our world has blown our belief in our power well beyond the range of its limits. Knowing how errors occur or where oversights have failed that are meant to limit those errors is helpful, but raging against each other turns our attention from a more important insight that surfaces each time our ability to control or manipulate the natural world slips from our grasp. We are being asked by the events at hand not just to discover where we failed mechanically, but also to examine the underlying relationship we have to the great world we live in that brought us to this endeavor to begin with. We are being reminded we do live in this world, not on it, and not alone but together. Our interactions with the natural world have long been complicated. In our desire to create better living conditions we have built dams and bridges and canals and lakes for thousands of years. The confidence and wealth our successes brought eventually led to our endeavors to travel to the moon and drill on the ocean floor. Many of those achievements have enabled a better way of life for millions of people. But these achievements cannot succeed as a one way relationship. In our dominance we often overlook the necessity for us to balance our needs with the health of the world in which we live. It is a terribly complex equation, which becomes more fraught with the growing populations of the world. There is no single right answer and times such as these underscore the perils we face unless we continue to dedicate ourselves to understanding and implementing a healthy synthesis between the needs of both.

The rains have passed for now. More is expected all week. In my heart I believe we will eventually cap the oil rig. We speak often of praying for peace among ourselves. Perhaps it is time to broaden our prayers for peace to include not only each other, but our beautiful world as well.

"The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application." Miquel De Cervantes