By Gerald Hausman
Bokeelia, FL, USA
I, for one, have never questioned whether human beings make their own weather. We call it, conversationally, inner weather but, really, it's micro-macro, inside-outside. Some say all weather comes from natural causes. My insurance policy mentions "acts of God." I once heard a man who lived through the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s say that the bad weather he experienced was none other than "a hangover from the Roaring Twenties." Well, then, do we make our own weather?
Gerald Hausman
|
If we peer into mythology, or perhaps our early history, we find the same old plagues, the same rampant diseases that are with us today. We also find the same weather - floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, ice, and drought.
Is there a psychic condition of mass consciousness that brings on weather conditions? When Lot's wife looked back and saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, was she seeing, as some have suggested, an atomic blast, a nuclear explosion? Was this an act of God? Or, perhaps, an act of Man? Is there a condition of the human mind that anticipates an act of God? And are we as human beings co-creators of this act?
These seem to be unanswerable questions. Yet, curiously, native people have been answering them for thousands of years. American Indians have always had thunder-makers who brought rain during a drought. In Navajo myths, there is the story of the wood rat who brings a terrible sickness upon one of the Hero Twins. In recent times, the Hanta Virus infected many Navajos with a fatal disease carried by a flea in the fur of a wood rat. Prophecy and science often sit side-by-side.
Hopi elders have long spoken of koyanisquatsi - life out of balance - tribal shorthand for the crazed human condition and its effect on everything from reduction of money to reduction of rain. Dust from the Sahara driven by preternatural winds now penetrates the reefs of the Caribbean killing animal life that took millions of years to thrive. Oil seepage goes deeper and deeper into the ocean bottom affecting, so oceanographers say, the very weight of water. And the weight of water implausibly, but truly, influences tectonic shifts that in turn precipitate tsunamis.
Coyote, so the old stories say, created the first Great Flood by stealing Water Monster's babies. When he returned them, by order of First Man, things went back to normal. If only for a little while.
Maybe the oil companies are doing the same thing when they return oil to the ocean floor. Only, afterwards, things don't go back to normal. Not even for a little while.
Links:
Gerald Hausman - Author & Storyteller
Gerald Hausman's profile at Stay Thirsty Publishing
Gerald Hausman, author and storyteller, calls himself a native of the world. He is the author of 70 books, some of which have been made into films, many of which have been translated into foreign languages. His latest book, The American Storybag, was released by Stay Thirsty Press in October, 2010.
