What about Global Warming then?

If you’ve read Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers you probably wonder if we can do anything about global warming. If you’ve read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion you may or may not agree with him that praying about it won’t help. John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, has twice in the last three months urged Australians to pray for rain. About a decade ago I wrote a fairly large piece of work that addresses the issue of what kind of disposition (prayer is a disposition more than it is a form of words) might make a difference, not only to the weather, but to a great deal more that threatens the sustainability of the planet. What follows if the prose poem from that larger piece of work that sums up the theme of that work.

The Celebration of Cyclone Dreaming
Like Wandjina dreaming, cyclones erupt in space-time, wander erratically, wreaking havoc, and vanish, as unpredictably as they appear, leaving a legacy of abundance: the rain that nurtures our prosperity.

In eras long gone we sought refuge in the hope of divine intervention from the uncertainty and fear of cyclones and the slow pitiful tragedy of drought. In these less poetic times we face the fury and the pity alone, stripped, by a storm of our own making, of any sense of relationship with, or responsibility for, the Earth and the Cosmos beyond.

Like the paradoxical legacy of cyclones, however, the aftermath of the meteoric turbulence of scientific discovery, that shattered and scattered the sacral habits of tens of thousands of years, is a new era of sustainable prosperity, reflecting the recovery of our sense of relationship within the Cosmos, and a new sense of Mystery – the latter mediated by mathematics, but possessing the qualities of poetry.

We are not, it seems, mere objects in the Universe, but unique personal manifestations of the One, undivided yet infinitely diverse, Whole. The dancing Brolga and the flowering Kapoc are indeed our relatives, and our consciousness is intimately implicated, not only in their destiny and that of the Earth, but also in the very way that the planet – indeed, the Universe itself – exists.

What, then, are we to make of the efforts of those who danced the rain in dry season? Did they know, by the power of poetry, how to live in a mutually co-operative relationship with the elements? Is that relationship still accessible by the same means? What might be swept away, should we discover, by the fusion of poetry and mathematics, that the relationship between cyclones and the El Nino (the bringer of drought) is not a one way street, and that we have the power to influence it?

Dare we hope for Cyclone Dreaming to keep our relatives prosperous?