Water, water everywhere
Some be salty; some be fair.
Some be oily, foul and black
Cries to us of what we lack.
We moved past the hour of Summer Solstice early Monday. One of the pagan holy days, the day when we move into the Cardinal Water sign Cancer, and the beginning of shorter days, this particular Solstice holds the prayers and intentions of millions for healing this splendid planet we share with so many beings. An especial focus is the water; all bodies swim through the miraculous elixir one way or another.
Five years ago, I wrote an in-depth article about water for the website PlanetWaves.net and discovered information that made me repeatedly gasp. Remember a bit of the story that was happening then. Five days before the first day of 2005, the Asian Tsunami killed nearly 300,000 people. Horrendous water events continued through the year, with major floods devastating every continent and many islands. Britain was inundated with two C-3 events*, while China was overwhelmed with two C-3 and two C-2 floods. Fresh water was unavailable to 1.5 billion humans.
Virtually every state in the United States wrestled with astonishing floods that year. A preposterous number, some ten trillion (give or take) gallons, of untreated storm waters entered US surface waters: reservoirs, lakes, ponds, streams, riparian areas, rivers. At that time, the Environmental Protection Agency believed as many as 850 million of those gallons were raw sewage. Ole Man Mississippi drains nearly 40% of the continental US; as much as 90% of all freshwater dumping into the Gulf of Mexico is from this huge river system. Runoff from the Mississippi was then so toxic that a “dead zone” existed far into the Gulf of Mexico.
Then came Katrina.
Separated by a short eight months, the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina served as a sort of horrific bookends to 2005. These two catastrophes were the only two C-3 saltwater inundations during the twelve-month period and they account for nearly 98% of the destruction created by all C-3 floods that year.
Since 2005, weird flooding continues to confound us. What happened this year in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, North Dakota is almost unbelievable and the onslaught continues. One of my most treasured places in the world, an island to which I believe I belong, sight unseen, is the Ile de Sein, a tiny scrap of rocks off the westernmost tip of Brittany. The islanders grapple with the reality that their home island may soon be lost in the continued rising of its nesting water, the Atlantic. In a few years, the place the Roman geographer Mela identified as the home of nine Sena priestesses in 47 AD may no longer exist. Gone.
Now the magnificent, the staggeringly beautiful, lush, bounteous, and utterly unique Gulf of Mexico swirls in the iridescent poison of crude oil. A plethora of news, public relations, and governmental sources estimate between 100,000 and 1,000,000 gallons of oil a day escape from British Petroleum's offshore well. And, still no real sign that the required expertise and technology to stop this ghastly pollution truly exists.
All of this is essentially incomprehensible to us humans; the massive proportion of this reality chokes us. We're walking around in some sort of stupor, shutting down our brains and our emotions because of the overwhelming information. What the hell can we do about it? Take tiny steps in our own slice of the world.
A simple request: Join us in asking the Great Holiness, even if you prefer to call it Darwin or Reason, to spark the brilliance which will turn all of this toxic flow into something life-preserving for this splendid globe. And, take a moment to be grateful for the miraculous gift of fresh water.
Water, water everywhere
Clearly tells us we must dare
Heal our Mother's holy sea.
As we will, so mote it be.
* Class Three (C-3) events, as designated by the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, are those which are extreme, with an estimated recurrence interval greater than 100 years; Class Two (C-2) are very large floods, with a recurrence likelihood of more than 20 years but less than 100 years.