Maybe it comes from my particular family background, or being a woman in a society largely created by men, or my unusual life experiences, or perhaps I am just a little too contrarian. As some of you may have noticed (!), I seem to need to turn everything upside down.
Over the years, I have been to Yellowstone National Park once or twice, and it is certainly shocking to see the video footage of the flooding and destruction of the human infrastructure there. Is there a "however..." coming? Yes, of course. In news reports, there has been a lot of talk about nature "leaving a path of destruction".
Could this not be turned completely on its head? That nature is only doing what it has done for millions of years? These are the very forces that created the natural wonders of the landscape we see today, carving, eroding, spewing out from the center of the earth, pressurizing sediment into stone and sending materials downstream...in a sense, so what else is new? The current severity of these events is almost certainly due to humanity's thoughtless actions, but nature has never stood still. That we expect it to stand still is our hubris. Perhaps, when humans come along and build roads and bridges and dams and homes and developments and cities, expecting permanence, Nature (be that force "he", "she", "they", or well beyond gender) says to itself, "Darn it, here come humans again, paving a path of destruction..."
If the last few years have been about anything, I suspect that they have been "about" weaning us away from that mind frame I mentioned the other day, that human ingenuity can solve any problem. It's just astonishing that we think we are smarter than the forces that created stars, universes, millions of other planets, and, heck, the human body and the energies at the center of our own earth that we barely know about. I feel for the people whose homes and lives are disrupted around the world, for any reason. I've almost never had a "normal" life, and I know how terrifying and upsetting it is to live with no certainties. It can be heartbreaking, every minute of every day. But personally, I'm now heartbroken enough and upside down enough to be rooting, in essence, for Nature as She (my perspective) tries to set things back in balance. If I die or am set even more adrift at this amazingly tumultuous moment in earth's history, I'll be honored.
