Cars and buses swirl and bob around in the torrents of blackened water, and it's shockingly surreal. They remind me of Matchbox dinky toys I may have played with as a young boy, when I too created hell-hath-no-fury 'floods' in my backyard with the help of hose water and mulchy earth. My childhood backyard Matchbox floods and the footage I've seen on TV from the Japanese tsunami look more alike than not. Eerily so.
Nature is not always kind. It can be down right mean and ugly, especially when we're in the way. Which seems to be most of the time. Nature pummels through, as if we and all the vestiges of our civilized lives are mere afterthought and pesky minor hindrance to the raw, stupefying power that is Nature.
It's humbling, to say the least. Each and every time I see it.
We scurry around and count the dead and mourn the dead, fret about the hubris of having nuclear reactors at the mercy of the elements, and wonder at the sheer power of this amorphous thing that can kill, maim, destroy and change forever. This thing we take for granted, this thing we think we control. But it controls us - and out of nowhere it, or rather, Nature, reminds us of that.
The Japanese are better prepared than any other country in the world for earthquakes. Not much they can do about those tsunamis, however, something that is no doubt part of their history and their national psyche, as evidenced in their traditional art (as below). How beautiful it looks when etched in a painting, how horrible it looks when captured in minute detail on a television screen.
Nature - however much we try to represent it and somehow conquer it, it always has a way of showing us who's boss.
No comments:
Post a Comment