Disaster

by Halcyon

As San Diego was burning, I thought about natural disasters quite a bit.
Fires. Floods. Landslides. Hurricanes. The current presidential administration. Fat Free tapioca pudding. Etc..

With the exception of the president and the pudding, all the disasters on that list are a natural part of the planet’s workings. Yet, so often we are tempted to curse fate when disaster hits.

I don’t mean to downplay the heartache and hardship that the disasters cause.
I just wonder how we can continually be surprised when things like this happen.

It is the way it is.

We are the only species that ignores that truism.

As humans, we broke the cardinal environmental rule of working within the existing cycles of nature. Other animals watch their populations drop when the conditions deem it so. Human’s fight desperately to overcome the world’s natural checks and balances.

We do not bend to our environment, we bend our environment to us.

Too hot? Air condition it.
Too dry? Irrigate it.
Too steep? Bulldoze it.

Then we seem shocked when nature reclaims its power.

We are surprised that a house on the cliff is in danger of falling in the sea? Cliffs erode. We are surprised that the earthquake cracked the home’s foundation? The ground shifts.

These events do cause heartache. But I think the pain is increased because we believe the cultural lie that we *can* control our world.

Our fault is in believing that we can create permanence.
Everything is transitory.
And the world ’s natural order is that of creation and destruction.

Death. Decay. Struggle.

These are the foundations of the natural world.
But long ago we learned that our big brains did not have to be subject to the whims of this violent world.

No more food? We would cultivate it rather than follow it.

But once we started living outside the rules, we forget that we are not in control.
We become shocked when reminded of the natural state of chaos.

We are like ants who have overrun a picnic. And we fail to realize that someone or something could shake out the red and white checkered blanked in an instant. Despite all our preparations, everything we have would be gone.

Sometimes as I read about overpopulation and pollution and our general abuse of the planet, I wonder if the host of the picnic is finally fed up.

I wonder if the fires and floods and famines are the inevitable “shaking of the blanket.”

Then I remember that the blanket gets shaken every so often, regardless of who is eating.

And a tree burns in the forest even if there is no one to hear it.
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True, disasters can be shocking.
But that shock is good if it can remind us of the natural chaos.
Disasters are good for re-calibrating our perspective. The fact that we are *not* fighting fires, hunger, or beasts every day is the shocking part.

The occasional chaos reminds us of how precious every moment of peace truly is.