Life While you Wait
A story from inside the storm
The Storm Hits
When the raw, gale force winds of Hurricane Helene tore through the Blue Ridge mountains, ripping and washing away so much of what we have loved and known, I was thousands of miles away, in sunshine, trying to do a spiritual retreat, and unable to get a flight home. On the news we learned that both our town and my daughter’s were amongst the hardest hit. Two phrases you never want in the same sentence is “children” and “hardest hit.” I sit in the nearly unbearable sunshine while my entire brood is there, in the now silent mountains. In the wake of such ceaseless internet and cell reception reach, this new silence is terrifying in its completeness. I take to counting breaths.
Time slows here. In these moments when you’re receiving news you never expected, like, a class 4 hurricane with tornados in a “climate safe” mountain village??? The mind skips its groove, like a record that keeps jumping. It has no groove for this so it diverts to safer grooves. In a fury my partner and I spend the days organizing donations and relief for the hard to reach places, getting a monster truck, back up helicopter etc. My mind, like all minds, has a very fragile relationship with uncertainty, and to avoid the yawping fear tearing at my cells every second of those two days, I let my mind revert to other, more familiar grooves, organize! Help! Do!
Those two days of radio silence stretched me thin, dehydrated me via tears, wore down my mental fight, tore holes in known places, left me porous. I think of all the mothers around the world whose children are kidnapped, lost in hopeless wars or just gone, and my heart shudders, trying to break out of its cage of unawareness. While my children were silent, the radio and news were not. And the terror stories and growing death count pressed on the exact fault line of fear I was desperately trying to keep at bay. Eventually, a woman at the conference told me something that helped me breathe, “your children are powerful and connected like you. They will find their way to the higher ground, they always will.”
So, when my oldest daughter hiked miles with her kids to use someone’s satellite phone to let me know they were alive the flood of primal relief tears was nearly catastrophic. Like in a movie, I fell to my knees. The sun hit my face, and the grass caught my body as I fell. And fell and fell and fell. To be among the rare mothers who get to hear their childrens’ voices again after tragedy…
And in the space the relief made, I suddenly realized: the world isn’t ready for what’s coming.
Charlotte, NC, midnight, 2 days after the storm
We fly in, truck up, and drive to where Davidson, NC locals have been organizing and gathering an army of supplies. I’m overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by how good people can be, overwhelmed by the massive garage overflowing. But mostly overwhelmed because I can feel the love inside these donations. I can feel the raw conversion of love units into the giving of goods. This is a convoy for love to be carried to people suffering. Exhausted, jet lagged and now armed for bear with thousands and thousands of dollars of help, we head to get as much gas as we can hold. The night is clear and we’re about to drive into the storm, curfews be damned
.
The closer we get the more it feels like a dystopian reality. You don’t realize how dependent our psyche is on things like street lights, stop lights, guard railings, signs, in tact bridges. Thousands and thousands of jaggedly cut and barely pushed off the road trees line the highways and byways like haunting totems. It feels like a mad max world, chaos barely held at bay.
But it’s as we near the rivers and lakes areas that full-on cognitive dissonance takes over. The mind tries to rectify what’s its looking at, with what’s it has known, but the gap between is too catastrophically large and the record skips, but, but, but... We only catch glimpses of what we can see in headlights so the moment has an eerie indie film quality to it, almost Blair Witch, shaking camera angles and all. A sudden image of a car, entirely curved around a tree with its nose touching its taillights about 20 feet in the air sends my mind reeling. The river went that high? Were people in it? We drive on in the silent, ravaged dark.
A Week Later
Our relief mission, up into the unreachable places, was so full of tears and gratitude, yes, but also something surprising, shocking even - joy. How is it I didn’t expect this, didn’t dare to expect this? This joyful fullness, this unity harmony, this hummy hive feeling. The (weary, dirty, hungry) people were joyful - eyes clear and shining. Yes, physically exhausted, hungry, some trapped, all wildly inconvenienced and in some cases very hurt, with their lands and homes absolutely gone, but there was an air of jubilance I had never experienced in that community. Their spirits had been refilled by the challenge, not diminished. Their feeling of connection strengthened.
Which of course, triggered a different flavor of cognitive dissonance. My mind (conditioned by Hollywood disaster movies) had expected desperation and despair and was (deliciously, life-givingly) blown away by the hive of joyous and organized activity it encountered. At that time, there were still no government agencies there, just people helping people. Locals giving local energy to the challenge uniting them all. Because their human hearts had been activated by challenge, and the cracked open heart wishes above all to help however it can. The mutual aid organisms, emerging, are nothing short of glorious. I say organism instead of organization because they are blooming up naturally, from seeds already planted long ago. Natural leaders walking forward, many women, the powerful and able bodied being sent off on missions on ATV’s with chainsaws, oxygen and insulin for the elderly trapped over the pass. The mamas organizing childcare so that they could work to rebuild and clear the debris. As we made rounds distributing relief, cash, gas, hugs, so many hugs, the tears came again, this time from a different flavor of relief: this is the world I want to live in.
Finally, home
Almost two weeks in we still have no power, water or cell service. For my partner it’s the cold fizzy waters that he misses. For me, it’s hot baths. But we find ourselves held in a web of both community resilience, and presence to people and not screens or outer distractions that renders the missing of those fancy conveniences utterly irrelevant. At night we read together with headlamps or candles. During the day we clear the land or go out and help others. There’s a unity my soul has longed for for a thousand lifetimes - I don’t say this carelessly or even with a fantasy that it’ll last, it’s just here, now, and I must praise where praise can live truly. The sheriff drives by not looking for people to catch in wrong doing, but with water and food, asking if we need help with our property. The mutual aid hub here in Barnardsville is serving on so many levels it’s dizzying. A woman is taking sign ups to go pick up and wash people’s laundry and drop it back off. Free food everywhere, hot and take home ready. Doctors are set up with full gear, teams are organized around search and rescue, clearing tons of debris so people can start rebuilding, running supplies etc. After my partner and son spent a day clearing a neighbor’s land they went and sat with an old woman who was lonely and wanted company. This is the world I want to live in.
Pre-storm, like all of us, these people were in their little, take care of me and my own, grooves. But that groove is no longer an option and it honestly hasn’t really been for years. The joy of service returns our life force. The feedback we get from direct connection with others is natural accountability and holds us to our higher natures. The chance to serve from a place of love, and to experience meaning and purpose is restoring people’s hope and faith for a better future, particularly for their own agency in that better future. The truth of being hit, together, is laying bare the truth of our innate interconnectedness in a way we’ve been needing. Unity isn’t a distant high faluting ideal, it’s a necessary awareness for proper functioning. The feeling of being in it together is a healing draught for the epoch of violence we are currently in. We haveto unite because we all have different pieces of the puzzle.
In the last week I have seen and experienced more incidences of selfless giving than I have in the last two decades of my life, maybe ever. From everyone I encounter. It’s not just the dogooders or the activists (them too!) it’s everyone. A seed of an idea blooms up in my mind: what if we’ve been coming at this all wrong? What if we’ve been erroneously villainizing climate change and the challenges that are coming as systems collapse, but instead these are the very things that will actually heal our fractured psyches and allow us to step back into wholeness, into interconnectedness so that as one thrives, all thrive. There’s an air of openness and willingness to engage that wasn’t present before. Without power or distracting internet, people are on their porches at night, talking, reading, waving to passerby’s. People are organizing gatherings, meals, shindigs, bonfires because they want to nurture this interconnectedness and because they have space to do so. Without the constant isolation factory that our unexamined, technology-hijacked lives has been, a crack emerges, full of new possibilities.
What if it’s a practice run y’all?
What if we can see these up ahead challenges as possible gifts from the gods sent to unite, and spur the building of resilient local systems that are based in love and care? I had a pastor in my childhood who said when we pray for strength, god doesn’t give us bigger muscles but the situations we need to develop that strength. What if one of the gifts is the radical reappropriation of resources, that we’ve all been longing for? My partner and I have been collecting donations from resourced folks, far away, and converting their love into cash and putting that money directly in the hands of the people most affected. A feeling of Robin Hood glee accompanies each share. A woman without shoes, gets shoes with a hundred stuffed in the toe. We stock up a small family that’s got high ground with a ton of supplies because this area is still cut off and they become another hub for resilience. These hubs are emerging, like glowing orbs, slowly, slowly, forming a net of light.
We are playing a game, we humans. A game should be beautiful, and go on as long as possible, bringing joy to all players. In an infinite game, the players adjust to keep the game going for all. Someone on a winning streak backs off to make room for a young player to find their momentum. In this current epoch of our human game, players have forgotten how to play a beautiful game. The commodification of everything has made brains rotten with unchecked greed. So while some players are starving and suffering, others hoard obscenely. Elon Musk will be a trillionaire by 2027, for example. Enough money to feed to most of the hungry in the world, hoarded up by one disconnected, spinning, little exhausted, mind-addicted human. Blessings on you dear man, may tragedy crack open your heart, may you learn to carry water and chop wood, may you learn to stop shouting for battles and find the old woman in your community who is lonely, cut off from family, and needs her stories to be heard, and to have that thing on the top shelf reached for her. May you bring the wisdom of her stories back with you to feed the whole. As I watch resources and love and money flow in massive quantities, by hearts suddenly softened by tragedy, I feel the possibility of the human game returning to its innate beauty.
I know electricity will eventually return, and some normalcy will come back in, whatever that word means, but I want to place a stake here, in this moment, in this crack, in this sudden glimpse into a world motivated by love for all, instead of paralyzed by fear of everything. I want to record this. This is happening, this is possible. The challenges of our lives can drive us towards and not away from love. If we are to survive as a species, I believe this is one viable love-way, one beautiful pathless path to walk, together, through the eye of the coming storm.
And thank you for being a pilgrim with me on this path.
Love, Natalie
If you want some practical suggestions for having a strategy and staying grounded you can listen to his brief podcast here.
If you want some poetry, here is Wislawa Szymborska
Life While-You-Wait
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.
I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.
I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.
Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.
Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run —
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.
If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).
You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.