Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Thinking a lot about water, especially after the last post. Essential for life, potentially great destructive force.

India and Bangladesh.

This is what the NY Times reported yesterday about the unprecedented monsoon rains and floods in South Asia.

Freak rains, which scientists describe as a feature of climate change, seemed to be responsible.

This is part of what we will be dealing with from now on. It is not that more rain is suddenly falling from the skies, it is that the amount that falls in deluges, at rates of inches per hour, is increasing.

A feature of climate change.

It’s not like we can just go back to the climate we had before, even if we stop emitting carbon this minute. No, it is a question of how bad things are going to get. Here are the beginning messages — unprecedented floods in some places, persistent drought in others. Are we listening to the portends, to the signs of the times, communicated to us with ever greater urgency in our changing weather patterns?

Necessary for life. Water as sacred font of life, source, without which life ceases. While we wax eloquent about the sacredness of water, we must remember that not all that is sacred is calm, peaceful, benign. Sometimes what is sacred, indeed, creation itself, has within it seemingly destructive forces — from our point of view — forces greater than us and about which we could use a heavy dose of humility.

We have been messing with Mother Nature, and she is beginning to really mess with us.

Sacred water. We must respect it. And we must think about how we’re living on the planet.

[tags] sacred water, monsoons, india bangladesh floods[/tags]