Floods: What do they teach us?

I was in Legazpi on February 21, supposedly to prepare for the facilitation work for the Bicol Regional Rural Congress. It would have been a time to listen to the issues of people's organizations in the rural area.It would have been a time to think seriously of the link of the urban and the rural strategies in community organizing work.

In the afternoon of February 21, the radio blared: Albay is in a semi-state of emergency. Because of the continuous heavy rains since the week that passed flooding couldn't be avoided. This inevitable flooding after a week even with heavy rains didn't happen in the past 15 years. This flooding is the first after Typhoon Reming of December 2006.

Remembering the law of nature that says "Everything must go somewhere" I could only strike my breast in contriteness. Yes, by our silence, action or omission, we have allowed plastic garbage to clog the city's drainage system. We have allowed deforestation. We have allowed the unabetted emission of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. All these affirms nature's law: Everything must go somewhere. We have allowed forces to weaken or cut the connectedness of the web of life. Now the floods come to our doorsteps.

More than what we carelessly do to destroy the balance of our ecosystems are the thoughts that we nurture to weaken or destroy our inner person's ecosystem. Quantum Physics teaches us that thoughts are energy. Everything must go somewhere. Where do our thoughts go? Do we let them loose so that they do not return to the home of our human values but to wander in the dimension of human greed and the limitless need to acquire that which would never satisfy the human heart anyway?

Flooding is the universe's way of letting us remember our birthright: We have an individual as well as a universal purpose in life. Our thoughts, contrapuntal, that is, must go somewhere. Unlike the garbage that we throw into the drainage system which brings us floods, our destructive thoughts thrown into the ecosystem of our hearts and minds work inwardly by cutting our connection from the source of all matter, being and intelligence.Everything must go somewhere. If what we do is to turn away from the source we find ourselves somewhere far away from the source. It would take a lot of hard work on our part to go back home to that somewhere, to that place where we will get connected again to everything that is life-giving.