November/December 2009 Editor's Viewpoint
From Chaos to Growth

Mount St. Helens is one of several lofty volcanic peaks that dominate the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest. In March 1980, this sleeping giant began to awaken with a series of small earthquakes. According to the U.S. Forest Service, over a period of three months, more than 10,000 earthquakes shook the volcano, birthing a large crater in the summit’s ice cap and a noticeable bulge on the north flank of the mountain.

Nature was preparing for a big change.

The new view of Mount St. Helens came on the morning of May 18, 1980. Just 20 seconds after a magnitude 5.1 earthquake rocked the mountain, the volcano's north flank and summit collapsed, forming the largest landslide in recorded history when the debris tumbled 14 miles west down the North Fork Toutle River.

Gas rich magma and super-heated ground water trapped inside the volcano were suddenly released in a powerful lateral blast that accelerated up to speeds of 300 miles per hour, flattening 230 square miles of forest in three minutes. Some people on the western edge were able to escape the advancing cloud of rocks, ash, volcanic gas and steam by driving their cars at speeds of 65 to 100 miles an hour. The blast cloud, which initially produced a towering column more than 15 miles high over the volcano, traveled 17 miles north raining debris across the land.

When the major eruptive activity finally ended, the once richly forested landscape around Mount St. Helens looked like a smoking gray wasteland, littered with millions of fallen trees.

Unbelievably, beneath the utter destruction lay life. Burrowing rodents, frogs, salamanders, and crawfish managed to survive below ground level or water surface when the disaster struck. Surprisingly, elk were seen west of the volcano only weeks after the eruption, their hooves uncovering soil and speeding the return of plants.

The saga of Mount St. Helens demonstrates how order arises spontaneously from chaos through self-organization. The never-ending cycle of nature is based on destruction and reconstruction through self-organization. When a plant dies, it returns to the soil in a chaotic form of decaying nutrients — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen — but these same nutrients provide the basis for life when they self-organize into ordered structures. Nature flows naturally between order and disorder, between life and death, creating order from chaos.

In chaos theory, forms emerge, dissolve and reform through the creative process known as self-organization. Nature is never stagnant, staying the same over time. It is always evolving and adapting with new structures that are ideally suited to the conditions of that moment.

Based on chaos theory, life in human form on Earth often represents disorder, the chaotic primordial soup of potential from which self-organized structures are created to mirror the orderly structures of the divine realm.

A spiritual journey is about breaking down the form of human awareness to a state of semi-chaos, allowing a new form of self-organization to manifest. The act of creation and destruction are one and the same — creating a new form or organization from seemingly disparate elements. Destruction frees the elements and creation organizes the freed elements, but ultimately both creation and destruction are creating a new form.

Like a phoenix consumed by its own self-created fire, a new bird, a new morning star rises anew from the ashes to live another day.

— Vicky Thompson

 

Heart of the Issue
You can recreate yourself in any moment.