One of my favorite writers on wilderness and the true spirit of it is Stephen Harrod Buhner. This commentary on water knowledge and 'the focused power of human consciousness' comes from 'The Loss of Biophilia and Biognosis', Ch. 4, p. 61 in The Lost Language of Plants (2002) by Stephen Harrod Buhner.
This gives me new respect (and greater tolerance) for the little creatures who burrow under the forest floor where I live (and sometimes leave my plants with their poor roots hanging in mid air).
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If you kill off the prairie dogs there will be no one to cry for rain.
- Navajo warningAmused scientists, knowing that there was no conceivable relationship between prairie dogs and rain, recommended the extermination of all burrowing animals in some desert areas planted to rangelands in the 1950s "in order to protect the sparse desert grasses. Today the area (not far from Chilchinbito, Arizona) has become a virtual wasteland."
- Bill Mollison, PERMACULTURE
Water under the ground has much to do with rain clouds. If you take the water from under the ground, the land will dry up.
- Hopi elder
Burrowing creatures, such as prairie dogs, open millions upon millions of tubes in the soil of Earth. As Mollison notes, these "burrows of spiders, gophers, and worms are to the soil what the alveoli of our lungs are to our body." As the moon passes overhead the underground aquifers rise and fall and Earth breathes out moisture-laden air. This exhalation of negative-ion-charged air through the many fissures and tubes opened by the burrowing creatures helps create rain.
How could indigenous peoples have known this? By all our standards of scientific knowledge they could not. We have neglected to realize that indigenous peoples have always had access to the finest probe ever conceived, one that makes scientific instruments coarse in comparison, one that all human beings in all places and times have had access to: the focused power of human consciousness.
- Stephen Harrod Buhner
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Much of the Great Plains has been converted to farming or pastureland, and prairie dogs are not often welcome in such places. Because of their destructive landscaping, they are often killed as pests. During the 20th century, about 98 percent of all prairie dogs were exterminated, and their range has shrunk to perhaps five percent of its historic spread. National Geographic
For another kind of 'cry for rain' in the recognition of the therapeutic potential of subjective healing experiences (and how these do depend on the 'filter of human consciousness', J.L) such as those possible sometimes with aquatic bodywork, see this latest post on my other blog Aquapoetics.
