One Disaster After Another...What is Gaia Saying to Us?
For the past several months I have watched as one disaster followed another and another across the face of our world. The news each day brings us updates on all the horrendous displacement of human lives over the past eight months, and it still keeps on...now there is the Earthquake in Asia, and flooding in the heart of New England in the US. I wonder as I watch these events unfold how the humanity involved must feel, to be one day going about your normal every day life and the next day being told to evacuate your city, not just a section of it but the entire city; to sit in your attic clutching your pet close and watch as a wall of water descends on you in a rush...to return to the place where you last saw your child that morning, clutching her book bag and lunch bravely running off to meet her friends never guessing that you might never see her again, and then to stand on the same spot and see the piles of rubble that were her school...it must ripe the heart from a parent to witness such a loss...it ripes my heart as a mother just to think of it sitting here in the safety of my home on the mountain of Tzfat in far off Israel.
So many homeless in the world tonight, not by their own doing but by the actions of nature, of Gaia . this earth of ours,the small blue planet that looks so serene when viewed from space.
Serene...a word that makes us vision pastoral scenes of peace and beauty...not many of those crossing the net pages we visit to get our news...in fact I haven't seen a peaceful scene on the news net now for months. Just the faces of those stricken and not knowing what it is that they may have done to deserve such a tragedy in their lives, the faces of weary reporters who stay on in the devestaed areas and try to feed us whatever bit of news they think we can take today...once in ten or so times there is a story of hope, or of someone being rescued or a pup finding it's owner, or a family being reunited...but underneath it all runs this huge river of human suffering and tragedy for which there seems to be no salve!
It crosses my mind everyday, probably a hundred times or so that if all of us who are not suffering could give just some little part of ourselves to those that are, perhaps we could overcome whatever the imbalance in the world is that is the cause of all of this pain...and I read that in many ways that is happening.
Then I read that the aide agencies are overwhelmed...how could they not be, 22,000 still in shelters from Katrina, 225,000 in temporary homes provided by the government of the United States, thousands in Guatemala that need a place to stay, and now hundreds of thousands more in Asia who have no place to lay their heads at night...it is overwhelming just to read it, so much so that most people I am sure have turned it off, tuned it out and try to go on their way in an ordinary manner not to think about it.
All of this for me, a Jew, the daughter of a survivor, reminds me that we must not turn it off, we must not for a moment forget that there are so many suffering so horrendously in the world...not because of who they are, or where they are, or what they believe or the color of their skin, no they are suffering because we have so upset the balance of the earth, of Gaia, Mother Nature that now she is ill...
Some may say it's the "End Time", others that it surely means "Messiah" is coming, some actually have the audacity to blame the poor people of the countries involved and declare that it is God's rath being poured out on them....
Those of us who are awake spiritually have known for a long time that man could not go on mistreating this living earth of ours forever without some horrendous changes taking place, we knew in the sixties when we first discovered the Green House Effect, we knew when the Nuclear proliferation wouldn't stop, we knew when we kept using the fossil fuels that wreck the air...we knew, but we did nothing...
Doesn't that sound familiar....they came for my neighbor but I did nothing, because I wasn't a Jew, they came for the priest and the nuns but I did nothing because I wasn't a Catholic, they came for....but you remember this story, Right?
Now we must DO SOMETHING, WE MUST TRY TO RESTORE THE PLANET TO HEALTH, we must try to learn to live together in PEACE, we must try to take no more than we need and to share when we have the chance, we must not continue to DO NOTHING!
Life as we know it has changed radically, we must not stand idilly by and do nothing thinking it has nothing to do with us...we must become proactive, we must begin today in our own little corners of this world to do better. If that means, we clean a dirty alley, or we suffle through our clothes and send away things to others, if it means we stop long enough to look in the eyes of the beggar on the street before we give him something...whatever it means we must do it! Our lives and the life of the planet on which we all live depend on US!
For the past several months I have watched as one disaster followed another and another across the face of our world. The news each day brings us updates on all the horrendous displacement of human lives over the past eight months, and it still keeps on...now there is the Earthquake in Asia, and flooding in the heart of New England in the US. I wonder as I watch these events unfold how the humanity involved must feel, to be one day going about your normal every day life and the next day being told to evacuate your city, not just a section of it but the entire city; to sit in your attic clutching your pet close and watch as a wall of water descends on you in a rush...to return to the place where you last saw your child that morning, clutching her book bag and lunch bravely running off to meet her friends never guessing that you might never see her again, and then to stand on the same spot and see the piles of rubble that were her school...it must ripe the heart from a parent to witness such a loss...it ripes my heart as a mother just to think of it sitting here in the safety of my home on the mountain of Tzfat in far off Israel.
So many homeless in the world tonight, not by their own doing but by the actions of nature, of Gaia . this earth of ours,the small blue planet that looks so serene when viewed from space.
Serene...a word that makes us vision pastoral scenes of peace and beauty...not many of those crossing the net pages we visit to get our news...in fact I haven't seen a peaceful scene on the news net now for months. Just the faces of those stricken and not knowing what it is that they may have done to deserve such a tragedy in their lives, the faces of weary reporters who stay on in the devestaed areas and try to feed us whatever bit of news they think we can take today...once in ten or so times there is a story of hope, or of someone being rescued or a pup finding it's owner, or a family being reunited...but underneath it all runs this huge river of human suffering and tragedy for which there seems to be no salve!
It crosses my mind everyday, probably a hundred times or so that if all of us who are not suffering could give just some little part of ourselves to those that are, perhaps we could overcome whatever the imbalance in the world is that is the cause of all of this pain...and I read that in many ways that is happening.
Then I read that the aide agencies are overwhelmed...how could they not be, 22,000 still in shelters from Katrina, 225,000 in temporary homes provided by the government of the United States, thousands in Guatemala that need a place to stay, and now hundreds of thousands more in Asia who have no place to lay their heads at night...it is overwhelming just to read it, so much so that most people I am sure have turned it off, tuned it out and try to go on their way in an ordinary manner not to think about it.
All of this for me, a Jew, the daughter of a survivor, reminds me that we must not turn it off, we must not for a moment forget that there are so many suffering so horrendously in the world...not because of who they are, or where they are, or what they believe or the color of their skin, no they are suffering because we have so upset the balance of the earth, of Gaia, Mother Nature that now she is ill...
Some may say it's the "End Time", others that it surely means "Messiah" is coming, some actually have the audacity to blame the poor people of the countries involved and declare that it is God's rath being poured out on them....
Those of us who are awake spiritually have known for a long time that man could not go on mistreating this living earth of ours forever without some horrendous changes taking place, we knew in the sixties when we first discovered the Green House Effect, we knew when the Nuclear proliferation wouldn't stop, we knew when we kept using the fossil fuels that wreck the air...we knew, but we did nothing...
Doesn't that sound familiar....they came for my neighbor but I did nothing, because I wasn't a Jew, they came for the priest and the nuns but I did nothing because I wasn't a Catholic, they came for....but you remember this story, Right?
Now we must DO SOMETHING, WE MUST TRY TO RESTORE THE PLANET TO HEALTH, we must try to learn to live together in PEACE, we must try to take no more than we need and to share when we have the chance, we must not continue to DO NOTHING!
Life as we know it has changed radically, we must not stand idilly by and do nothing thinking it has nothing to do with us...we must become proactive, we must begin today in our own little corners of this world to do better. If that means, we clean a dirty alley, or we suffle through our clothes and send away things to others, if it means we stop long enough to look in the eyes of the beggar on the street before we give him something...whatever it means we must do it! Our lives and the life of the planet on which we all live depend on US!
posted by Leah PettePiece | 10:01 AM
