The river, "strong, brown god," always wins

I am not alone. CNN reporter Ron Powers uses the same T. S. Eliot description of the Mississippi that I have used so often, to express the same concern:
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-12/opinion/powers.mississippi.river_1_mississippi-valley-mississippi-river-porch-swing?_s=PM:OPINION

Quote :

So it is with all of us. Some elemental instinct in us, some
vestigial instinct for ceremonial worship of what T.S. Eliot called "the
strong brown god," turns human beings into riverine hypocrites. We
worship and venerate the river with words, even as we defile the river
with our actions: using it as a sewer for our chemicals and industrial
waste; ruin its natural beauty by cramming its shores with grain
elevators and railroad tracks, throwing up walls and dams and channeling
systems in the vain effort to cut its awful grandeur down to human
scale.And Katrina laughs. And the strong brown god in 2011 ravages our crops and casinos.Perhaps it was the St. Louis-born Eliot, among all of history's river
bards including dear Mark Twain, who most accurately limned the river
on its own atavistic terms:"Implacable/Keeping his seasons and
rages, destroyer, reminder/Of what men choose to forget./Unhonoured,
unpropitiated/By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and
waiting."

Ann

Ann,

You are in good company.

My friend and I often discuss how nature takes back what man changes, if given half a chance.

It's always amazing to fly over Florida and see the carved out, abandoned subdivisions with all their paved streets breaking apart with weeds and trees.

I trained young men to participate in a piece of the Everglades Restoration where they were removing canals to return land to its natural state. Rapidly, the signs of civilization disappeared.

We've played with the rivers and the lakes to meet our own needs, dug the wells and watered the golf courses to change the underground aquafers - but the water will choose its own path.

I remember the mud huts along the Nile River in Egypt - the people there built temporary houses of mud along the river to farm the rich land from the flooding and knew they would be moving inland during the flood season. That was about 30 years ago - it's certainly different by now - probably condos along the shore....:-)

Many American Indian tribes had beliefs that allowed them to live in harmony with the land and the natural resources. It would have been nice if the land had been left in their care. However, the world is unfolding as it should, a bigger plan than my simple mind can comprehend. In the meantime, rivers flood and natural disasters cause much grief.

Yes, DK, but the grief is not their problem. The rivers are correcting the damage done. The people just happen to be in the way. If, as you said, we had been living in harmony with Nature all along, the need for such correction would not be there.

Ann

It is in the nature of man to try to tame the elements. Nature is the ultimate conquest. It always has been since man planted the first seed for food, enlarged the first cave for shelter, imagined the first tool to help his labor along.

It is only lately that the notion of doing all of that in harmony with the elements has been concieved.

What a monumental break for the earth that mankind has finally recognised that the earth and man and existance and nature are all wound up together.
The earth will go on even if mankind never gets it and destroys itself.

Love,
Betty

Betty Fasig wrote:

It is in the nature of man to try to tame the elements. Nature is the ultimate conquest. It always has been since man planted the first seed for food, enlarged the first cave for shelter, imagined the first tool to help his labor along.

It is only lately that the notion of doing all of that in harmony with the elements has been concieved.

What a monumental break for the earth that mankind has finally recognised that the earth and man and existance and nature are all wound up together.
The earth will go on even if mankind never gets it and destroys itself.

Love,
Betty

Ann