We have fallen so far from where the water fell. There a wall stands now to power dishwashers, curling irons, flat screen TVs, and telephone poles. The fish no longer swim freely. Crawling up step ladders like meticulous marmosets.
Flooded the valley floor, to ensure that we can always take more. We have submerged the spirits that lived there before.
Colonialism and capitalism smashed those sacred idols to put extractive reason in their place. To them, those were primordial pagan pleasantries.
Water was to grow more sugar cane, water was to drive industry, water was to starve out those who would not succumb to sedition.
First it was the old gods, then the new god, and then the final god that had no spirit at all. Slowly ground down between the cogs of a wheel, we shunned all semblance of the spirits. All that remained were specters of folklore and faded memories.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité. The rights of man merely required reason to rationalize the world for the colonizer class. To the winner go the spoils, there they may be shared equally.
How we may democratically bulldoze this forest, steal freshwater from a community, or commodify our very crops.
The scientific method has given us many gifts. But it has stolen many in return. Applied in the name of greed, an incomplete knowledge creates a faulty reduction and robs us of our humanity.
Here we have come to the ultimate calamity. The fires will not calm. The waters will not wane. The wind refuses to wallow. We have decimated the oceans and changed the climate.
More committed to faceless ideas than to seeing the people in front of us.
Despite the destruction, it is never too late. She called out a warning. We need to restore the ancestral knowledge that has been so easily discarded. Knowledge and technology must operate in a dynamic, complex, living, interconnected planet. To name a piece under a microscope will never be the same as seeing the life in a grassy meadow.
A bridge has two sides. Our relationships are messy, our emotions complex and raw, our dreams wild, our hearts untamed horses. We cannot be too rigid or too rebellious.
There is middle ground to be found between the past and the present, the rational and the realistic, the natural and the mechanical, free thought and fraternity.
The sages knew that there never really were spirits that guided the rains, blocked out the sun, or made the earth tremble. These sowers were merely creative in their storytelling.
Their senses were keen, their eyes were open, they listened to whispered wisdom, and learned from the land. A thousand different cultures, spread through geography and terrain, grew to become a part of the soil.
Release your flood waters unto these thirsty plains. Recollection is your only remedy.