This post first appeared in August of 2020, just before the presidential election. It was my first post on Substack. There have been 267 posts since then, on everything from nuclear war to wildflowers, from supernovae to the murals that decorate my city and I’m feeling an urge to return to the place of my origin, revisit the garden of intention and the spirit of that very first post. It was called ‘chaos’. It went something like this.
My very first post began as a seed, as most of them do, an interesting idea that appeared like a rain cloud in the sky and grew into a thunderstorm.
I received a couch surfing request from someone in Egypt. When I looked up his town I discovered that he was living in the delta, where the Nile river flows into the Mediterranean. Most people in Egypt live in the delta, as it turns out, or nearby and have since the time of the Pharaohs. I started researching the Nile river and got fascinated with it’s history.
The Nile river, of course, gave rise to the ancient Egyptian civilization but it’s source is deep in the heart of Africa’s tropical zone, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. It flows out of Lake Victoria and travels 4,000 miles through 11 nations before it arrives at the Mediterranean. It was a mysterious and compelling adventure back in the mid 19th century to try to find the source of the Nile. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume” and all that.
Anyways I started thinking about the flooding of the Nile, how every year the monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia would raise the level of the river so precipitously that it would inundate the valley down river, destroying everything in its path; but it would also bring fresh silt and enrich the land where the ancients planted their crops. In their myths they represented that event as a story about the death and rebirth of the god Osiris. I realized, In fact, that all the ancient creation myths have a similar theme - from chaos comes renewal, from the void comes the world.
The word chaos comes from the Greek kháos, meaning chasm or void. It also has a protean quality when used to describe the creation events of the ancient myths like Babylonia’s primeval sea, the chaos of Egypt’s recurring floods, the Iroquois’ water covered world and of course the Hebrew version: “The earth was without form and void; darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Our country is in a time of chaos. Instead of truth and guidance and inspiration from our government leaders we get lies and obfuscation and blame casting. The idea of a unified nation seems to be on no one’s mind, instead we create divisions and cliques and define ourselves by the conspiracy theories we believe in. Social media, instead of being a place to socialize, is inundated with political memes and outrageous, attention grabbing posts that have little to do with verifiable facts.
Extreme opinions have become trendy. It’s a form of acting out, a kind of self expression for the frustrated. The uncertainty of our times has created anxiety and the anxiety has created all kinds of strange behaviors. It’s a fear reaction to changes that we sense are happening but can’t control.
But the creation myths also tell the story of renewal and rebirth from the chaos. “Then God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.” That was a positive development. The Iroquoian Sky Woman fell from her island in the sky, but landed on the back of Big Turtle floating in the primordial waters that covered the world. Osiris, the Egyptian god, was killed but then was resurrected from the dead with perfumes and magic spells performed by his devoted queen. The Babylonian's battle with the watery chaos that was all around them was won by their hero Marduk.
All the stories of our ancestors proclaim not only rebirth but renewal. Our chances of coming out of this chaos are 100% if myth is a reliable guide.
And how bad is the chaos going to be? It could be much worse than this, we could look back at this time as the halcyon days when things were relatively normal. It depends on how much fear and anxiety we choose to carry around with us. As can be seen from Donald Trump’s spectacular rise to power, people’s fears and anxieties are easily aroused and manipulated. The same technologies that were supposed to make our lives easier, more productive and more fun, have enabled massive brain washing. That’s not a nice word but appropriate. People don’t know the difference between opinion, preference and what they actually know to be true. There are facts and there are ‘alternative facts’. There is news and there is ‘fake news’.
I would call that some pretty rich chaos. We should be able to make something out of that, like the Iroquois story of the primordial ocean and the toad who dove down to the bottom and brought back a mouthful of mud and with that tiny bit of earth the world was created on the back of Big Turtle by Sky Woman and her friends.
Maybe that’s what we need, story time around the old campfire, telling each other the stories of who we are and how we do it. I know we have TV and movies and they kind of do that, and the evening news tells us all about all the bad things going on in an entertaining sort of way, but maybe we could have some discourse amongst ourselves. Maybe, when the fog lifts and we stumble out of the chaos into the light of a mid-day sun, we’ll be able to do it again - remind each other of who we are and how we do it.
We are the human beings (spoiler alert) and we do it with a wide range of amazing behaviors but our most celebrated, our most sublime is when we do it with kindness and compassion. That’s also when we are the most content. That’s also when we are at our most powerful and creative. And that’s when a nation or an individual can become great again.
Right from the first chord I knew this was the soundtrack for the podcast. Classic down tempo. Dreamy. Powerful. Thank you Kruder & Dorfmeister.
If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, you can become a paid subscriber by upgrading here. Upgrade If you’d like to make a one time donation, click the button below.
Share this post