A Tale of Two Hurricanes–and You, Part 2

Since finishing my post on Hurricanes Isaac and Katrina this morning,I’ve realized that I hadn’t actually finished. I’d only begun.  (Is your life, like mine, that way more often that not?)  All day I have continued to be haunted by three things.  One is John Nelson’s achingly, lyrically beautifully map and the Deep Truth it depicts:  each event in our lives is part of a much greater Whole, vaster than we have dreamed.  

Another is something that Eric Francis foregrounded in his post in Katrina’ aftermath.  Seven years later, you can still feel the energy in his words. Francis begins his post with something he couldn’t get out of his mind — an image of Karl Rove standing on the roof of the White House in a magician’s hat and cape, with a big staff, conjuring Hurricane Katrina.”   Francis reminds us that Katrina came in the wake of a fury of climate change denial by the Bush White House, and a dramatic, downward spiral in the U.S.’ tragic misadventure in Iraq, the ancient Fertile Crescent of civilization.

Seven years after Katrina’s devastation of the city that is arguably America’s most global in its very DNA , Isaac rolls in. He plowed through a Gulf of Mexico deeply scarred and maimed by a massive oil spill two and a half years ago,down tot he mats of oil on its floor.  The Republican Party was gathering for its national convention on the Gulf, in Tampa, but Isaac skirted Tampa and headed for New Orleans.

It’s profoundly interesting that Isaac veered away from the feverish yet grim hurrah for the old paradigm of empire, conquest, and subjugation. Instead, he headed for New Orleans, one of a handful of U.S. cities that retains its allegiance to diverse points of cultural and spiritual origin.  Like Greece, Egypt, Syria, Russia, China, and India, New Orleans is a charged node of transformational energy, with roots that go deep into the ancient world.  If you’ve ever been in labor, or sat with someone who was dying, or undergone metamorphosis of any kind, you’ll remember that much of it is sheer agony.  You’ll recall that a kind of purging of the dross within you has to take place.

And that takes me back to John Nelson’s masterpiece of a map.  Those luminous arms, spiralling around the dark center of all that we do not yet see, do not yet understand, do not yet even dream of.  What a haunting image of our own mysterious journeys as individuals and also as a species–and perhaps as a solar system, a galaxy, and a universe as well, though we have not yet learned how to think that way. Perhaps, though, it is where we are heading. Perhaps, now that Neptune, the Cosmic Seer, Mystic, and Dreamer, is in his own realm of Pisces, we can see at least that much.