Rocky Mountain Tsunami and the Mother Goddess Chamundra. September 19th 2013
Back at the Benedictine monastery in Three Rivers, Michigan. Perfect fall weather. Yesterday there was a large flock of sleeping Canada Geese perched on the mud flats filling up the edges of Monks Pond. Today they have vanished. The skies have covered over. Only sprinkles of rain here.
A few days ago a tsunami tore through the front range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. A twenty foot wave was the first sign that the five year drought was about to end. Years of drought and forest fires have stripped the mountainous terrain of anchoring and stabilizing vegetation and provided the perfect chute for this violent wave to tear through dirt roads, trailer parks, homes, water treatment facilities, telephone poles, oil fields, dams, sheering away the cement off paved roads. An area the size of Connecticut has been flooded. Rotting carpet, moldy couches pile up on sidewalks. Owners are desperately trying to keep mold at bay by throwing out anything damp from basements. Six have died and over a thousand are unaccounted for. Emergency vehicles can't get to remote areas of the front range of the Eastern Rockies.
A friend lives in Lyon, high enough to have been spared from the violence of the river water below. But the town of a few thousand inhabitants has been decimated. The rescue authorities are attempting to force residents to leave by suspending supplies of water and food. Many are determined to stay. My friend is living off of rainwater collecting in a rain barrel. She is staying in touch with the outside world on her smartphone. As long as she has gas in her car she can charge up her phone and stay in touch.
Every March and October for the last fourteen years I have been driving through Lyons on my way up to the Estes Park YMCA to go on spiritual retreat. Lyons sits on the edge of the steep foothills of the Rockies, ten miles north of Boulder. It's a sleepy town going through a bit of a tourist renewal it seems. Art galleries with western and native art, coffee shops, decent eateries, have sprung over the last few years. Now it is destroyed. Does it have chance at a recovery or will it simply be a rest stop for spiritual seekers and tourists heading up to 8500 ft to Rocky Mountain National Park. Judging by the refusal of many of the towns folk to evacuate, I am betting on recovery.
Last week here in Michigan we went from over 90*F to 40*F in 24 hours. When the weather broke there were tornado funnels over Lake Michigan west of us. The weather is wild.
This is a mad world. And yet I feel the pristine smile of hope. She sparkles in the waves of silence in this woodland beauty. Fall is in the air. Off to see if the geese have returned or moved southward.
The geese are gone. As I walked up to Monk's Pond frogs startled by my approach leapt away squeaking loudly. Earlier this summer there were hundreds of tiny frogs. Now there are only a dozen or so, large, fleshy green frogs. I spent time discovering their hiding places among decaying pond greenery. Suddenly I would catch a pair of eyes and a body hanging below the surface of the water, legs and webbed feet splayed out. They just hung there perfectly still. If only my unbroken concentration at spotting them could arise during meditation!
I picked up “The Deep River” by Shusaku Endo, the contemporary Japanese writer from the Monastery library. He was raised as a Christian in Japan. Christianity in the 16th century Japan suffered a period of intense persecution and now lives as a distinct minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist and secular country. Endo’s Christianity is distinctly Asian, a far cry from the scholastic approach of Western Christianity. Deep River is a tale of four Japanese visiting the sacred ground of the River Ganges in India. Each is drawn on this pilgrimage for different reasons: the grief of man who ignored his wife during her life; the death walk through Burma by the Japanese during World War II, the inner emptiness of modern Japanese secular life, and the life of a failed Christian seminarian. Endo writes beautifully. Each of these characters find surprising and simple healing in the midst of the Hindu funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges.
At one point in the tale, the tourist guide takes his travelers into his favorite Hindu temple. They descend into the underbelly of the temple. It is dark and suffocatingly hot and humid. He shows them the wall painting of Chamunda. She is the goddess of charnel grounds and fig trees. She is a haunting figure, the daughter of Devi, the Mother Goddess. There is no flesh left on her, only bones and bulging eyes. She is suckling the lepers, the dying, the deformed. Even though she appears to have no milk left to give, she keeps feeding. She is quite different from Mary, the western Mother Goddess, who sits serenely on a crescent moon holding her son in her lap. Nothing tidy or detached about Chamundra. It seems that the fig and its taste of sweet sexuality is the fire that kindles the outpouring of Chamundra's nourishment to all in desperate need. She is present in all the killing fields, especially Syria.
The Russians and the Americans have brokered a deal to rid Syria of its chemical weapons. Apparently Obama has lost face. Perhaps losing face to win the peace takes a kind of courage and risk taking that we need much more of. And those cruise missiles are not far off. Maybe he deserves his Nobel after all. We will see. And the self immolation in Washington continues. This time Obama will not negotiate with Republican hostage takers. We are in for a ride.
News from Colorado gets worse. More rain. More digging out.
A week later. My friend now has electricity, but no water and cell phone connectivity is hopeless from her home. I sense the doldrums are settling in. It will take months, years to rebuild the roads, bridges, the sewers. There are reports of oil leaking from ruptured pipelines and storage facilities. The mosquitoes are intense and it is a bad season for West Nike virus.
Here in Ann Arbor fall has arrived. Murray, my dear partner, is stumbling around with a very bad back, friends are getting sick, and my son Ben and his fiancée are stuck in Istanbul waiting for the visa paperwork to make its way through the embassy in Ankara.
And yet beneath all this turmoil and suffering there is a quiet holding. If only we could listen to the call.
