The Tao of Hurricanes: In Search of a Consciousness of Storms
My time in Florida has been marked by storms. I am as if tattooed in spirals. Dark Polynesian royal blue bands etched around my heart. I go cautiously, but without hesitation, to touch the source of consciousness in wind and rain, thunder and lightning, to peer into the counterclockwise helix, the macro DNA spiral of a storm.
On Friday, August 13, 2004, I drove away from my home of thirty-eight years in Southern California to South Florida, more than 2,500 miles away, the same day Hurricane Charley screamed into Charlotte Harbor near Fort Myers, Florida. I hoped for a simpler lifestyle and a greener garden. I had no intention of becoming drenched in the baptism of storms.
From my garden in Encinitas, I had ceremonially cut, then carefully wrapped and gently stored three, four-foot lengths of San Pedro cactus in the back of my black Toyota Highlander. I planned to transplant each piece to the new soil of Sarasota as a reminder of my entheogenic garden. San Pedro is a powerful shamanic entheogen of Andean cultures, a psychoactive plant native to Peru.
Thirteen years later, in early September 2017 Irma, a Category 5 hurricane steamrolled over one tiny Caribbean island after the other. It leveled Barbuda. Catastrophic winds tore apart the Virgin Islands. With an eye on Cuba, it devastated the island’s north coast and left more than 50,000 people homeless in Havana.
Meteorologists tagged Irma as the strongest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. With 185 mile per hour winds, was there a Category 6? Whatever the statistics, Irma was huge and very bad news spinning my way. I braced for the worst.
At first, Miami was in the crosshairs as Irma aimed at the Florida peninsula. With memories of the devastation of CAT 5 Hurricane Andrew, nearly one million cars fled Florida ahead of the storm. Highways gridlocked from mass evacuation.
After plowing through a string of small Caribbean islands between 9/6 and 9/8, it continued west towards Florida. On Saturday 9/9, Irma scoured the north coast of Cuba as a CAT 5 with winds of 130 mph. Irma was the first hurricane of this magnitude to make landfall in Cuba since 1932.
My San Pedro cactus barely survived the humidity of Florida. Gradually, they adapted and multiplied, but hadn’t bloomed in twelve years. Then, two days before Hurricane Irma swooped towards us, a single giant white flower burst open on one vertical stem of soft, blue-green cactus. Overwhelmed by its beauty, I stood by the eight-foot-high single spike harboring one huge white flower.
A San Pedro flower is seductive. At first, there is nothing but a tuff of gray-brown fur, a thimble of fibers on the bluish gray stalk. Sometimes, it sits there unchanged for weeks, and then overnight it becomes luxurious. Feathers are about temptation. Perhaps this is true for bodily pleasures between lovers, but San Pedro flowers are about inward seduction. They symbolize transition — a radical but smooth change from one state of mind to another.
Irma’s path was broad enough to cover Florida: south to north, east to west. The transition towards us was imminent, but where it would make landfall, if at all, was still uncertain. Then, abruptly, it rotated east and crashed into Marco Island. Nearby Naples was awash in storm surge and battered by wind. Irma stayed inland and headed due north.
In Sarasota, I prepared for the worst. I duct-taped outdoor furniture together, covered cars, anchored our orchid houses to the ground, and sealed doors with hurricane covering made of space-age plastic. Having learned from previous storms, I had stockpiled water and kept a propane camp stove ready for cooking. I had plenty of staple foods like rice and quinoa, canned black beans and tomatoes, dried pasta and spices, Tuscan olive oil and canned tuna. I would not go hungry, even if power were out for weeks.
A hurricane is a war of unprecedented scale of Nature against humans. There is but one predictable outcome. People always lose. It’s a matter of cost and how many lives are lost and disrupted.
On Sunday, 9/10 in the predawn indigo, the moon hovered just past full over the Gulf of Mexico, as Irma tore through the Keys, I sat still as stone on the sand at Turtle Beach on Siesta Key, about eight minutes from my home.
“Come to center,” I reminded myself. “Find the seed within the kernel, go to the place where the life force dwells, the same force of nature that all sentient beings possess.”
A hurricane is a force of Nature. Shamanic traditions inform us that storms respond not only to weather and currents, but also to the human mind. A Hawaiian Kahuna knows this as he knows that bones support his body.
Is a hurricane alive? Not in the same way as a person or a fish, or an otter that eats the fish, or the kingfisher that sits on the branch above the stream are living beings with a brain, a heart, two kidneys, and other organs. A hurricane has no organs, no connective tissue, and no cerebral matter. Neither does a jellyfish, but it is alive.
Does a hurricane have intelligence? I wanted to believe that it did. My life’s work rested on the principle that the Earth possesses intelligence, the same way a crystal forming within the dark of the earth exists within structural limits and manifests itself within mathematical boundaries of what it is to be a crystal, or a star, or a hurricane.
If non-sentient beings exhibit intelligence, a Taoist, a Shinto priest, medicine man, shaman or Kahuna could, theoretically, influence the dynamic of the storm.
In the seas between ancient China, Korea, and Japan typhoons, as hurricanes are termed in the Pacific, are common. In ancient Japan, typhoons were called Kamikaze, “Divine Wind.” Twice Kublai Khan, in 1274 and 128, invaded Japan with overwhelming forces, and twice his ships were sunk by massive typhoons. The Japanese people bowed to the Emperor, one who personified the mandate of heaven, who embodied the natural order of things, and who had the power to influence history and storms.
In 1870, Father Benito Viñes, a Catalan who moved to Cuban to become the director of the Meteorological Observatory at the Royal College of Belen. Viñes was the first to attribute trigonometric functions to storms, a kind of mathematical intelligence of hurricanes.
“Shamanic traditions inform us that storms respond not only to weather and currents, but also to the human mind.”
A hurricane has a spiral pattern. And, so does your ear canal, a seashell, ferns, and sunflowers. A simple spiral that repeats itself is termed a fractal, a non-linear, a dynamic self-similar set as found in Mayan architecture.
Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are impossible to predict or control, like air turbulence, the weather, the stock market, and our emotional states. These phenomena as portrayed by fractal mathematics, capture the infinite complexity of nature. Complex, but not random.
The intelligence of a cyclone or hurricane is not in signs and symbols like writing and language, but in bars and notes like music, or the physicist’s blackboard calculations of mathematical proofs. Few can fathom the intelligence hidden in numbers. The study of patterns comes close. Researchers use fractal mathematics to find order within chaos to reach a deeper understanding of the size, speed, and path of a storm. Does a hidden pattern within a complex system, like a storm, mean it has consciousness?
The ancient Chinese found that which has no origin but is never-ending and termed it Tao, the way of nature, endless flow.
Does consciousness have fractal geometry? The shape used to describe the self-reflective nature of consciousness is the torus. A torus is a dynamic, constant flow process around a central axis with a vortex at each end surrounded by a coherent field. Energy flows continuously through the center wrapping around itself and endlessly repeating. The torus is the fundamental form of balanced energy. It enables fractal embedding of energy and is consistent from the sub-atomic to the galactic.
David Bohm referred to it as “undivided wholeness in flowing movement.”
The Chinese termed it yin yang, balanced mutually opposing energies that made up the Tao.
The pattern of a hurricane is similar to a fractal spiral. In the spiral core of a hurricane, the Fibonacci Sequence gives ways to the torus, the mathematical manifestation of both form and flow. Magnetic fields, plants, galaxies, tornados, and hurricanes are toroidal energy systems.
In the worldview of the evolutionary biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, the universe is consciously creating living systems within itself. According to Sahtouris, all dynamic systems are alive, and therefore conscious.
A living system, like the Earth, doesn’t have to think like a human does, or need organs like a heart or a brain to exhibit consciousness. Nor does a galaxy, or a hurricane, or a crystal.
What qualifies a hurricane as conscious?
· It has the mathematical fingerprint of the cosmos.
· It has undivided wholeness for the time of its life cycle.
· It has flow.
· It responds to external influences like the temperature of the oceans it travels across.
· It is self-generative.
· It has a lifespan.
At sunset, I was back on the sand, but this time on the south end of Siesta Beach. Almost everyone who lived on Siesta Key already evacuated, so only a few others came to watch the sunset. The ocean was calm, reflective as a dark mirror. Was this the ideal moment before the storm?
I sat still on the white sand. The sky and sea blended. A dark gray fin broke the surface. A school of dolphins was slow swimming northward, not far offshore, staying ahead of the storm.
All life is conscious. Synchronicities permeate time and place. Events in life are ephemeral, even if catastrophic.
By Monday 9/11, the storm plowed through the Florida Straights, pummeling the Keys before shifting northwest. Suddenly, Tampa became the target. The week before, the west coast of Florida appeared a safe haven; unexpectedly it became the bull’s eye. Most evacuees from Miami had fled north, but many drove west only to find that the storm was chasing them.
Time to purify. Back at home I lit Palo Santo, a fragrant holy wood, in an abalone shell. I brushed my body with Agua Florida, a floral scented water. As night approached, the winds increased in ferocity. I began ceremonies in the Andean tradition, one after the other, each offering placed on white paper wrapped in sky blue tissue.
The wind turned intense. There were lulls, at moments near quiet; then a surge erupted. Trees twisted shimmied. Green foliage went dark. The tone of branches and leaves lulled in the wind then roared. Variations in sound and pitch were measured in seconds.
Past and future became irrelevant. The present was the only now, and it was terrifying. A monster was out there. A dread came heavy but beautiful. The cloudless sky was uniform, opaque, almost iridescent silver, aluminum.
“The present was the only now, and it was terrifying. A monster was out there. A dread came heavy but beautiful.”
The bronze Japanese temple garden bells hung stable, the wind irrelevant against the weight of metal, tolled deep and steady. The tall pines swayed like kelp in a surging tide.
The rain came in dashes of overlapping circles, spinning droplets in horizontal bands. Palm fronds whipped, banana leaves tore. Thin, vulnerable branches from every tree dropped heavy onto rain-sodden ground. I prepared one offering after the other until I lost count. The fire whipped, snapped in the wind, and devoured each offering within moments.
I stayed up until the wind became strong enough to double trees in half. The power went out. The worst passed in the night.
In the morning, I was back on Siesta Beach. The wind was offshore pushing steady, powerful enough that it was hard to stand. Gulls streamlined beak and body, facing into the wind.
The predicted storm surge never reached the condos and private homes of the wealthy. It never flooded the street or reached beneath doors. The experts admit that there’s a lot of uncertainty with storms; more so if they run south to north like Irma.
Cell phone coverage held. I checked the news. After Cuba, Irma headed north and blasted the Keys. Unpredictably, it passed on Miami. Instead, it turned east, made landfall at Marco Island, drenched the coast, and flooded Naples; then screwed north and stayed over land, growing lighter on the heavier populated cities along the West Coast of South Florida, including Tampa and Sarasota.
Irma dropped intensity from CAT 5 in Cuba to CAT 4 when it mashed into Marco Island and Naples. Trees snapped and splintered. Roofs ripped. In between, it pounded the Florida Keys. As Irma moved across land, running south to north, it became a CAT 3. By the time it left Florida, it was CAT 2, with gusts up to 100 mph.
That 50-mile shift from west to the east made a huge difference. The predicted storm surge in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t happen. Though it didn’t make direct impact on Miami, the Atlantic surged overland, flooding streets and inundating towns from Fort Lauderdale to Jacksonville. Because hurricanes turn counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, the ocean swelled into the streets, leaving mountains of sand behind when it receded. Much of Florida’s Atlantic coastal towns were flooded.
Major hurricanes change history, alter landscapes, and influence geopolitics. It disrupts and devastates individual lives. We’ve yet to see how Irma will change us, or affect the future.
After a hurricane passes, everything is different. For days, I drifted in and out of psychic disorientation marked by strange dreams, unexplained emotional calms, and stolen glances of sky reassured when blue holds above.
Eventually, acceptance comes. There will be calm days and those stirred by wind. One looks for explanations in the patterns that few see, that nearly no one cares about, that may be universal, already discovered by ancient civilizations, but forgotten.
In the ceaseless flow of energy creating matter, regenerating itself endlessly, there is still so much we do not know, including the Tao of hurricanes.
