Dreaming the World

Today dawned soft and warm, sunlight shafting through the trees and across the field. The landscape is a spectrum of intense greens, punctuated by brilliant blooms. Wildlife abounds.

We’ve been following the news from Vermont closely, as we have friends and family living there still. We’ve had abundant rain but western Massachusetts, parts of new York state, and Vermont have been repeatedly inundated. After almost two weeks of rain, much of Vermont is under water, with more rain forecast beginning Thursday.

We lived through Irene, abet high and dry, well above the floodplain. Many of our clients and friends were not so lucky, and things were very intense and chaotic for a few days. This latest round of flooding is even more devastating than Irene. While this time the reinforced infrastructure largely held, the flooding of towns and farmland was truly catastrophic.

Sadly, as the climate warms, once in a hundred, or thousand, year events become ever more likely. In mountainous regions like Vermont, intense flooding occurs rapidly and the water’s mad dash for the lowlands makes flooding ever more destructive. Mountain communities now face the prospect of much more frequent devastating floods, with few options for remediation. Like many people around the world, more and more Vermonters are asking whether rebuilding makes sense, or whether they should move away.

Of course, these mountain focused storms are not limited to Vermont, and in the past year we have witnessed catastrophic flooding in mountainous regions all around the globe.

I remember speaking with a colleague in the supermarket the night before Irene. We were stocking up on supplies, just in case, as were many others, when we bumped into her. She ha recently moved to Vermont from Florida and was perplexed at Vermonters anxiety at the approach of a mere tropical storm. We tried to explain that seven inches of rain in Florida, where the land is essentially flat, just flows into the rivers and out to sea, while mountains both force more rainfall from clouds and provide many times the surface area to catch that water, which is then funneled rapidly downhill with disastrous results. She left perplexed, having no lived experience with which to make sense of our collective predicament.

Of course, there are serious floods in Florida, and they bring much personal and collective loss. It’s just that in the mountains everything is amplified. And yes, we in New England are long overdue for a major hurricane and the destruction it will bring. Even then, mountain communities will likely face disproportionate harm.

As we watch our landscapes alternate between flood and drought, water and fire, we are witnessing the fulfilment of the prophesies of many Indigenous peoples. We find ourselves in an almost Biblical moment, one in which we are called to return to balance. In Biblical terms we are urged to recognize our sins and repent. What else is sin save behaviors that take us out of connection and joy?

The vocabularies may be different yet the message is the same: We are collectively out of balance, out of sync with ALL That Is, and if we are to avert greater disaster we must quickly change our ways. Maybe it is no coincidence that last week I found myself remembering Bill Cosby’s “Noah” routine, and wondering how long we can tread water.

We find ourselves in a surreal moment in which the ever increasing loss of so much we love in both the human and natural worlds is ignored, or worse, denied, by many of our neighbors and politicians. In this painful time it is important to have a community with whom to grieve and work towards a future in which we walk together in balance.

May it be so.