Take a globe and highlight the areas regularly hit by natural disaster. The patterns are easy to "see." It's only the "do"-ing that seems to leave so much of mankind paralyzed and caught out.
That same night as I listened, my spirit guide See Do went on. He talked about the air, the water, the winds, the geology, and life, within us and outside us.
And he talked about the infinite grains of dust moving over rock, sculpting with timeless patience. The dust is carried on the air and rock is carved away.
We can sit on the steps and feel the breeze. We raise our face into it to smell its offering. The richness of the world. It feels good to be outside in it.
But the air carries something more. In fact this something is its very life engine. It is heat. The dynamics of thermal energy on the air drive everything the air around us does. Everything it does for the world, for us and to us.
This paradise planet blooms with heat from the sun. It is carried through our atmosphere endlessly in a complex dance well beyond the powers of the mightiest computers to simulate. It unfolds and refolds its subtle computations with ease. And without error out to the very last decimal place.
So there is a price to pay for living in such intimate contact with such a dynamic and powerful system. Heat must be rebalanced. As the ocean warms in summer, the heat rises up into the air carrying great energy and great quantities of water. These movements naturally organize from randomly tumbling clouds spilling out their white cargo high in the sky into cooler air, into waves of mass in motion that, once attaining a certain scale, will be drawn toward a center, falling in step with a the natural rotation that further draws the upwelling of energy from the warm ocean surface below.
A hurricane is born. The world must seek balance and the heat is taken up on the air and carried to cooler, emptier latitudes. Along the way as the energy grows and tightens its spin, the wind will move at greater and greater speed.
The energy carried here is colossal. Well beyond man’s atomic bombs and rockets. And utterly invisible. A stunning fact of our world. We can feel the breeze; we can see the moisture, the mist, the rain. We can see the dust and flying debris. But the air will never show its face. Even drained of energy, condensed into liquid. Oxygen, nitrogen, helium, argon, hydrogen and the rest. They all become liquid metal as clear as the purest water.
But here in our world they swirl in motion all around. And that motion is driven by heat.
And inside the hurricane that swirling, turning, driving energy actually has the power to pull the ocean up from its moorings. The surface is sucked up. Pulled up by the low pressure suction of the core drawing more and more energy off the surface and driven on winds spilling out, reaching well over a hundred miles per hour. A new thing is given life: the tidal hurricane swell. During hurricane Katrina, along the coast of Louisiana, this swell exceeded twenty-three feet. It rolled ashore with predictably devastating consequences.
If you take a globe of the Earth into your hands, and with a marker, highlight the areas of shoreline that will regularly be hit by a devastating hurricane or typhoon, you will mark over a few very small stretches. Your marker trail will also express a fair warning. These places should take care. They should be ready. They should prepare. Or they should be empty.
They same will be true of earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and the rest. The patterns of life are written on this planet for everyone to read. The “when” is all we lack. The “where” becomes more precisely prescribed with each passing calamity.
The instruction is See Do. And I do think I’m getting it.
– continued (Part IV: The Earth’s energy within)
- A satellite image of an enormous hurricane about to make landfall. I asked “why do these tragedies happen?” And See Do began to take me into “the big stuff.” Image Credit: unknown, to come.
On Saturday, I went over to the restaurant where Susan bartends. She was busy keeping up with the late afternoon traffic. In between, we grabbed snatches of conversation. At one point, she asked “So what’s new in the world?”
I answered, “Did you see? There was a big earthquake in Pakistan. Just happened this morning.” Susan said “Oh, wow, no. Everybody okay?” and I shook my head no and said “They’re saying there could be thousands dead.” Susan said “Oh my God, that’s horrible.”
After tending to more customers, Susan came back and suggested that there was a question I should ask See Do. “Why do these things happen? Why these tragedies? Like Katrina. Why does that happen?”
That night I went to bed close to midnight and while still finding sleep I began to ask the questions of why there are disasters like hurricane Katrina? Why are there these disasters that can take so many lives?
And the answer came. See Do let me know that we were heading into very serious territory. This is the big stuff. If I felt ready, he would explain it. And it was going to be a long night. Here is the essence of what came through.
As human beings we are moved greatly by these apparently random events that can erase thousands of innocent lives in a single stroke. We are shocked to sadness and drawn to help. And we should do what we can, but we need to understand our place and the place of these events in our world’s greater moving. We need to look deeply into what it is to be a human being living in the temporal reality on this world of ours.
We also need to be aware of our weakness for awe at great numbers. Great numbers are all around us if we look. Events are constantly unfolding with the same difficult consequences all around. And very nearby. And we must remember that it is true that “the sacred is in the ordinary.”
We felt great sadness for the thousands uprooted and left homeless by a huge hurricane or typhoon. Yet, in a large city like we were in, walking home we may pass five “ordinary” homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. And feel little.
He reminded me how not long ago, in August, I was heading out to buy something and rounding the corner of Ontario and Rush I came across a homeless man apparently asleep on the sidewalk. It was mid-afternoon and hot, in the mid-90’s. He was very dirty and disheveled. He was lying face down with his arms at his sides. Unfortunately, sights like this are not uncommon in many large metropolitan areas.
I walked by him and went on my way.
After completing my errand, I headed back through this same intersection. Now there was a police ambulance and a patrol car at the corner. Several police were standing around talking. And a man was photographing the area of sidewalk where the man had been.
And it occurred to me that the man was very likely dead. And that he very likely had been dead when walked past earlier.
Of course I tried to put this terrible idea out of my head quickly and went on with my day.
But here was a tragic death. Squarely in front of me. In the midst of prosper, on a busy corner of a great city, a human being’s life had ended. And I walked by. We experience sadness and call on others to help when we hear stories of great numbers, but cannot see the life around us. For some reason we can not grasp the sadness and pain in the ordinary lives around us. And we are very selective in how we choose the disasters that we will give our emotions to. A thousand here cause outrage, while a thousand there are ignored, maybe even laughed off.
One death, alone in the world, is not enough to move us to act. But isn’t every death one death?
We bemoan that the poor were left behind in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina to suffer. But a single homeless man in Chicago is forgotten. And we give ourselves permission to forget him, because he is, what? Poor? This is a pointless circle of illogic.
Much of this world is about life and death. It is about our ability to learn from what we see. And then to do the things that will lift humanity. This is not a small responsibility.
See Do was building an argument. And seeing it would begin to shape a greater view of my place in the world. An important lesson was unfolding. Remember, there is only one. And now I was learning that one is not a small number.
— continued (Disasters vs. the Ordinary, Pt II)
