The weather plays a major role in our lives; shifts in the temperature and precipitation have effects on our bodies, minds, and souls. Whereas indigenous peoples have long reinforced their intimate relationships with the spirits of nature through rituals, most modern city people barely take note of the weather except when it is unleashed in storms, floods, hurricanes, and other disasters. We are only beginning to realize how the high levels of environmental pollution, resource depletion, and global warming are adversely affecting the weather.
All these factors are alluded to in this timely and fascinating paperback by Nan Moss and David Corbin, who are faculty members of Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies and also teach courses at the Esalen Institute in California and the New York Open Center. They have been researching and teaching the spiritual aspects of weather since 1997. They espouse a shamanic worldview where everything is alive and personal. Planetary health, they assert, comes with harmonizing our connection with the elements of wind, water, clouds, and earth.
Shamans from tribes around the world regularly engage in spiritual practices and exercises to influence the weather but they are very different from the aggressive weather modification techniques used by scientists. Moss and Corbin observe:
"Weather, as with any alive and creative thing, continually offers up unique and ever-changing moments all over the earth. A frown or smile or gesture or breeze or storm or cloud can give us important information of the moment, yet it is only the outer layer, the presenting façade of the nature of its being — and it always changes. If we are awake, any particular element of weather can usher us in through its portal to the deeper story. All we have to remember is that we aren't looking at the whole story, that the answer both is and isn't there."
In chapters on the sacred nature of storm, honoring the hurricane as a divine tempest, and healing with the weather, Moss and Corbin demonstrate the process they call "weather dancing" which involves opening our hearts to the spirits and energies of the elements and honoring the mysteries of nature. Weather Shamanism makes us want to pay more attention to the weather and our relationship with it. The authors provide many stories and illustrations from indigenous peoples who have done so with rituals, songs, dances, and poetry.
