Furious Rain. Or Glorious.

The last four or five days have been amazing. Crazy. Anxious. Worrying. Beautiful. Cold. Bothersome. But amazing.

Our part of Coorg received extremely heavy rains — almost 50 inches over 4 days — and the fields flooded, power went out, trees fell, everything that could let water in did that, roads got blocked due to floodwaters and there was a major slide higher up in Talacauvery in which the family of the priest of the temple, and over 20 cattle, were lost to the rubble that tore off and slid down.

Our neighbour from next door came over. The old gentleman had come over to recharge his phones since there had been no power for over 4 days and our solar panels plus the genset running for a bit kept the juices flowing from the UPS batteries. Of course, coffee was had, stories exchanged and much learned about rice, the history of the place in terms of the weather and terrain and so on. He told us that before last year when a similar spell of rain occurred, he had seen such a heavy spell only in 1961. Overall, across places, a large part of the season’s rainfall has started happening all at once, within 10 days at most and often just 4–5.

Each time I have a conversation around here — with my neighbours, with the team at the property, with friends who live around here — it blows my mind how much deep knowledge about the land, weather, trees, birds, insects and the interactions amongst all of these exists easily and casually in people’s daily lives and the work they do and the conversations they have.

Tough and flooded it was, but it was also a sight to see! I saw the risen waters, I saw transient springs formed, I saw various trees react variously, I saw water flow across various surfaces. It also afforded a lot of time to think about a lot of these things — those that one learned, saw, heard, discussed.

The water is life giving. The cycle of destruction and the revival is too. It’s only through the lens of the need for predictability and stability, and the risk perceived at the individual level — of survival, of potential loss — that we think of this cycle as a problem.

In the few days the heaviest rain pounded Coorg, almost everyone changed their schedules to adjust to it. People weren’t moving about much, the work around the fields and estates reduced to a minimal, and folks lived without electricity fairly easily. A community phone recharge setup popped up someplace, and many went to see the bridges blocked, and visiting VIPs.

The city is built around the expectation of the predictable to a much much higher degree. We’re trained to live our lives by the watch, not by the season or the weather. It bothers us that the weather interferes with this, and we get frustrated, or depressed, or angry that better infrastructure doesn’t exist that allows us to continue ignoring the changes in the real world around us.

It’s a mirage. Variation exists everywhere on this planet, and our essence, our success and happiness likely lies in the acceptance of these variations — including the extremes, in the adapting to them and living with them, and in a deeper understanding of them. Knowledge which takes us away from this is broken, and will eventually cause us pain and harm as the variations become more commonplace and un-ignorable.

Today we tend to think of our cities as places we can escape to to get away from these variations but they just change form, magnify and eventually, will hit doubly harder. It’s the same planet — the city is just our limited, artificial construct inside of that and cannot pretend to not be part of it. The more we acknowledge, embrace and respond to this change through adaption, the better we will live on this planet, and indeed, survive.

Personally, the past week has moved me to a place of being a lot more at peace with nature. We often claim we are nature lovers, but it is not a thing you consume like you do a well-made NatGeo documentary. It’s something to live with, to learn to accept, and to find your place in — including the harsh bits and the human-pov downsides from those. At least collectively, even when there’s individual loss.