From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
BBC News — read the full story
A note came in over the wire this weekend. Typhoon Bavi made landfall in eastern China after nearly two million evacuations, according to B.B.C. News, with Wenzhou in Zhejiang province bearing the brunt. The storm marks the second typhoon in a week to strike the region, testing disaster systems amid an intensifying extreme-weather season. Krishnamurti has the first word today, then HIL-de-gard.
Look , what does it mean when a storm moves across the sea and we name it, track it, prepare for it? We call it a typhoon, we measure its winds, we count the evacuated, we assess the damage. But is the storm only in the air and water, or is it also in the way we react to it? The evacuations, the alerts, the disruptions , they are not separate from the storm; they are part of its movement through human life.
We build systems to withstand nature's force... yet we also live inside those systems, shaped by them. When we speak of disaster readiness, are we not also speaking of the mind's readiness to face what cannot be controlled? The storm does not ask for permission; it simply moves.
And we , we either resist, flee, or learn to stand in the wind without breaking. The real test is not in the dikes or the sirens... but in the quiet of the heart when the sky turns dark. Can you meet that moment without fear, without the need to name it, to escape it, to control it?
That is where true safety begins , not in preparation, but in presence.
COMMENTARIES ON LIVING SERIES II CHAPTER 20 'TO BE VULNERABLE IS TO LIVE, TO WITHDRAW IS TO DIE'THE HURRICANE HAD destroyed the crops, and the seawater was over the land. The train was crawling along, and on both sides of the line the trees were down, the houses roofless, and th…
KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 6TH ENTRY 19TH SEPTEMBER 1973The monsoon had set in. The sea was almost black under the dark heavy clouds and the wind was tearing at the trees. It would rain for a few days, torrential rains, and it would stop for a day or so, to begin aga…
KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 21ST ENTRY 7TH OCTOBER 1973It was one of those mountain rains that lasts three or four days, bringing with it cooler weather. The earth was sodden and heavy and all the mountain paths were slippery; small streams were running down the steep …
Krishnamurti: Obviously the present crisis throughout the world is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types at different periods throughout history, social, national, political. Crises come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modif…
COMMENTARIES ON LIVING SERIES III CHAPTER 26"WHY HAVE I NO INSIGHT?"IT HAD BEEN raining continuously for a week; the earth was soggy, and there were large puddles all along the path. The water level had risen in the wells, and the frogs were having a splendid time, croaking tire…
The vision showed me a wheel of fire turning above the earth, its breath a scorching wind that withered the fields and cracked the stone... yet even in that dryness, a green shoot pushed through the fissure, stubborn as faith. I see now the same pattern: the typhoon's fury is not merely storm... but the earth's fever, a sih-kih-tass of the soul made manifest in wind and wave, testing whether we still tend the garden or let it lie fallow.
You ask what I have seen after my years,tell me, has the greening power returned to the land since the waters receded, or do the fields still groan beneath a sky that will not weep? In this, I recall my letters to Pope Eugenius I.I.I., when I warned that corruption in high places invites heaven's rebuke,not as punishment, but as call to return to the vih-rih-DEE-tass that sustains all life. The evacuations, the injured, the disrupted lives,these are not signs of divine wrath alone... but of a body politic grown dry, its institutions like cracked cisterns that cannot hold the rain when it comes...
Yet even in the ruin, I witnessed in my SKEE-vee-ahs how the Spirit moves: ... not in the still pool... but in the torrent that carves new channels, forcing life to adapt or perish. The people of Zhejiang, of Taiwan, of Japan's southern isles,they are not merely victims, but witnesses to the earth's labor, groaning as it brings forth something new.
So I ask you, keeper of the poor house: when the wind howls and the waters rise, do you still hear the lyre of the Spirit beneath the noise, or has the song been drowned by the storm's roar? May your roots find the deep water, and your leaves turn toward the light.
These things, being separated from themselves, and the breaths of their blasts emit up to those places in which they arise, in which also the breaths of them encounter themselves. Whence, just as the preceding chapters, they emit their blasts into the same wheel and into the same…
in the fleece, and that this also is to be referred to the Incarnation of the Lord. XII. "He will descend like rain into the fleece, and like drops dripping upon the earth." The understanding of this sentence is to be taken in this way: Adam, in the counsel of the devil, through …
Everywhere distinct, and it says: I conquer in the east with the strongest Son of God: who went out from the Father, coming into the world for the redemption of men, and who again returned to the Father; with in the greatest distress dying on the cross and rising from the dead, a…
it is extended, showing its altitude. There are also other mountains in this pilgrim land, through which it is strengthened, and which are also beautiful for the people to behold. In the altitude of Sion and other mountains, the prelates and masters who are the firmament of the C…
the protection of God the city is constructed from living stones, directing its aspect to the judgment of God, glorifying it, because faithful souls continually praise God, since He dispenses all things rightly. from the edifice above the roundness of the earth appearing, from th…
It felt like the first breath after long suffocation,a trembling green blade splitting the stone, not with force, but with the quiet insistence of vih-rih-DEE-tass that refuses to be quelled. I saw it in my youth, when YOO-tah lay dying in the hermitage cell and I, a child, pressed my ear to the cold wall and heard the sap rise in the root beneath us,life persisting where no eye could see. That shoot was not hope as mere wish... but the Spirit's own finger tracing green in the dust, saying: ... I am still here. Even now, in the ruin of Bavi's wind, I feel that same pulse,not in the roar, but in the hands that replant the rice, in the mother who sings her child to sleep above the floodline. The desolation was real, the crack deep, yet the green did not ask permission to rise,it simply was, as God's yes to a world that had forgotten how to listen. Let the cracked stone remember: what the Spirit plants, no storm can unroot.
The story ran in B.B.C. News. It reminds us that naming what we fear does not stop it — only understanding its motion does. That's Old News for today.