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| Billie Silvey |
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| An eclectic website about Women, Christianity, History, Culture and the Arts--and anything else that comes to mind. |
| January 2012 |
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| Throughout human history, people have tried to keep chaos at bay by classifying the basic elements of life. As in so many areas, the Greeks were among the first to do it. Aristotle identified four elements--earth, air, fire and water--a list which eventually grew into the periodic table of elements. It was a way to impose order on a chaotic world by stepping back from it and analyzing what it was made of. In the 18th century, the Swedish scientist Linnaeus did it with plants and animals. Biology is based on his classification. Traditional education has been a system of learning these classifications, ignoring the fact that the pioneers of the fields started with nothing but their observations of the world around them and their minds. Writers do it with words. If I can organize experience and put it into words, I have grasped it, tamed it to an extent, made it manageable. Many of us do it with faith. We trust the God who made the world to be able to control the chaos that threatens to overwhelm us. In 2011, however, chaos seemed to break free of our classifications. Earth, air, fire and water exerted themselves in ways that threatened to plunge the universe back into chaos. It began in March, with the earthquake in Japan. The earthquake touched off a tsunami which swept away many of the coastal structures and much of the population of northeast Japan. The tsunami led to a nuclear disaster as water got into the power plant at Fukushima. About that time, my husband Frank and I started watching NHK world news in English from Tokyo. We could see the stunned faces of the newscasters as their individual worlds were plunged into chaos. The first of two continuing features, "Nuclear Watch," concentrated on the facts and figures of the Fukushima disaster, another way to cope with disaster by attempting to quantify it. The second, the "Road Ahead," concentrated on people and searched for hopeful signs of recovery. Gradually, as the year has progressed, we've watched as the newscasters began to relax and smile more, even though the news from Nuclear Watch still too often includes the words "worse than expected." Our favorite weathercaster, Saki Ochi, responded to the threat of disaster and the need for hope in the future in a way that women have responded since time immemorial. She's pregnant, a real sign of hope in an instable world. Frank and I were both war babies, and my first pregnancy began when he was home on leave during the Vietnam War. To classify, organize and quantify is the response of certain more scientifically-inclined minds to dealing with disaster. To tell stories, develop programs to involve others, look ahead with hope and search for personal continuity is a way of coping among the more literary. This issue of the website will concentrate on natural disasters around the world, with emphasis on earth and water, fire and air, and learning from disasters. I hope you find it enjoyable and enlightening and will respond by writing me at b.silvey@sbcglobal.net |
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| Natural Disasters |
| Saki Ochi, weathercaster on NHK World news |
| Relationships among the four elements |
| The Greek philosopher Aristotle and his four elements |