Yesterday my friend Anna and her friends Dana and Michael visiting from Colorado and I went for a nice hike in El Charco del Ingenio, the botanical gardens here in San Miguel de Allende. After days of cloudy skies and intermittent heavy, heavy rains, it was a sunny late-morning, and we four felt enveloped, embraced, by Mexico’s lush, verdant Nature. 

Some of the trails had been cordoned off with yellow police tape for safety reasons, and there were a few muddy puddles on our paths; but for the most part our hike couldn’t have been more beautiful and therapeutic. It was the perfect way, I thought, to get out of my ever-over-active, worry-prone head and allow Mother Nature to speak to me.

This is some of what she whispered in my ear:

Look at that reservoir! See how full-to-over-flowing it’s become due to this rainy season’s super-abundant rains? Hear the distant roar? Get closer… See? The spillway is especially dramatic this year! Yes, I know you’ve never seen it this fierce. The walkway from this side to that is impassible. Stop here by this railing. Look. Listen. See how powerful I am? I am your Mother. Listen to me.

 (The impassible walkway over the reservoir yesterday)

Whenever I’m in Nature, I search for sermons. “Sermons in stones,” Shakespeare called it. In this case I was reminded of the old ’60s slogan, “Go with the flow” — the idea that one should be adaptable, accept things as they happen, and not resist change. Is “go with the flow” the answer for today, I wondered?

Should we, in this time of torrential bad news raining down on us daily — such as the recent devastating flooding in central Texas and elsewhere in the world – just, metaphorically, lie back, make like a log, and let the current take us downstream? Stare up at the puffy, white cumulous clouds dotting the baby-blue sky above us, think positive thoughts, and do deep-breathing exercises to stay afloat? Then, when we reach the spillway, simply follow the rest and fall, crashing, downstream, to our ultimate, winding fate?

In the past several months I’ve been reading thick, meaty, thought-provoking books by the brilliant Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. I’ve read all four of his bestsellers by now, but not in chronological order. I just finished his second book, HOMO DEUS (2017), which left me reeling. Forgive my overly simplistic summation, but what I came away with is this: Humans as we know them are not long for this world. (I should stress that Harari’s books are not science fiction.)

The clever subtitle of HOMO DEUS is “A Brief History of Tomorrow.” In it, Harari says we’ve gone from theism (belief in a supreme being outside of ourselves) to humanism (belief in mankind being supreme) to what we’re approaching now, which is dataism (where digital information/data will reign supreme). In this “tomorrow” (which will be sooner than we can imagine), artificial intelligence (A.I.) will leave us in the dust, so to speak. That is, if climate change or nuclear disaster don’t do us in first.

The seeming inevitability of all this is indeed chilling — especially to someone like me who is still stuck in 19^th century theism. Personally, I find I must believe in God (NOT the big old white guy in the sky as depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but rather the Great Spirit that Native American peoples speak of) because I cannot bring myself to believe in man. As for digital deities? Forgetaboutit.

It seems to me we all need something to believe in, something to stand for. Without that, we’re flailing, aren’t we? “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” I once read somewhere as a kid, and it stuck. So what will it be?

Where do we stand, as we’re buffeted by photos and videos of starving Palestinian children beseeching the world to care? Or of brown-skinned immigrants who’d arrived seeking better lives being placed in cages in the mosquito-infested Everglades? Or of the sociopathic U.S. president who lies through his teeth? We may try on various philosophies for size (there’s no one-size-fits-all), carry various banners, cling to various beliefs: Not my problem…. Everybody gets what’s coming to them…. Keep your head down…. Winner takes all…. Don’t worry; be happy…. Go with the flow.

I for one refuse to be a log floating on my back in that swollen reservoir, mindlessly going with the flow. No, if I have to be anything in this rainy season scene, I choose to stubbornly buck the current. I want to be a small, black duck, madly paddling away from that treacherous spillway and loudly squawking warnings to others to do the same — before taking spiritual flight.