Ancient Is the New Now

Big-shouldered typhoon, flooder, landslider and tornado generator Man-Yi stormed the night through the country, leaving big wet long wide footprints all over filled with trees, cars, roofs, rivers, sheet metal and mountainsides.

At about 4 am on Monday I'd been sleeping to the roar of the heavy rain (up to 8 cm (> 3 inches) an hour!) that had been falling for, oh, the past couple months, seemed like - it was becoming the normal ambient sound - so I didn't really notice unless it stopped, then suddenly in utter dark the first big shoulder hit the side of the house. I lay there wondering if the walls and roof could withstand much more of that, then the wind blew harder and I pictured the outside, what might be flying around out there, sounded like a slow-motion train derailment, metal somewhere in the din doing loud wind-torquing back and forth-- later learned it was the demolished neighbor cabin roof.

In the spitty gusty morning our trees are raggy leaved, what's left of them; large-branch loss from cherry and chestnut, couple of trees fell on a cabin below us, half-rubbling it, a bigger tree fell on the roadside, looked like it had been mauled by a giant tiger. The slavering, growling beast removed roofs, tossed some buildings stopped the trains too, of course. During the daystorm, against the blur out the window I watched our old chestnut tree shimmying and shaking itself apart, out front the high old cedar tree, trunk a meter around, was rockin in the wind like at a Stones concert as the weeping cherry did a whole different rubbery dance, the house rocking and shuddering at the serial impacts of giant windshoulders as the rooftiles rang like fine marimbas up there.

On TV, while we had it, the rampaging Yodo River in central Kyoto was higher than I've ever seen it, lashing at the splendid old bridge in Arashiyama, and I realized that that the famed and lovely stone walk along the river's banks beside Ponto-cho, like the supporting poles of the striking riverside restaurant platforms, aren't there just to be pretty-- they are of ancient necessity, as long ago folks here learned from experience over millennia, and again this week.

Seems the earth is increasingly revisiting its old ways, as though asserting its authority, shrugging off carbon footprints, ramping up earthquakes and beefing up the tsunami department, reviving ancient weather patterns, droughts, floods, wildfires, volcanoes coming back around again for longer, fiercer times, tweaking the DNA spectrum to give us all new challenges, as we begin to relearn (or not) the truth of long-ago solutions, as ancient becomes the new now, testing once more whether and what we can overcome, that we may move on...