Dreams, Children, and Sorrow in the Wake of Helene
Notes from My Journal
Dear Friends,
This week’s letter offers another week in the wake of Helene in phenomenological vignettes, these from week #2. I write in the spirit of what biophilosopher, Andreas Weber, refers to as a “metaphysics in the mood of loss.” Weber writes:
A metaphysics in the mood of loss limits itself to mourning pain rather than to repairing it.
He continues:
It contents itself with feeling, not with fixing, and waits for what is felt to be real and for needing to be really done, open to every solution, confident in life’s desire to heal.1
And so, as with last week, these notes are the moments that struck enough of a chord of feeling in me to write them in my journal. I want to caution that I do not write these letters as personal therapy. This is not to say that sharing is not healing. I write these post-Helene letters as a gathering place of moments on behalf of the collective pain and sorrow, and the tender beauty in recovery from this disaster, understanding that the personal is planetary and that we here in Southern Appalachia are not the only beings on this, our Earth, stepping brokenhearted through a haze of calamity today.
And we are brokenhearted in an unanswerable way. And it won’t go away, this heartbreak, when the water is back on and drinkable. I hope not anyway. It is in brokenheartedness that we come to the bare naked receptivity out of which is born hope and reverie and a way forward.
There is a tendency to grotesquely glorify the crisis of a moment and quickly move on.2 Neither the glorification nor the moving on allows for embodied feeling and inner collective recovery, healing, and when called for(th), change. Glorifying sensationalizes sentimentality and hovers over the surface of feeling. Moving on without “what is felt to be real and . . . really done”3 fails the need to metabolize our personal and collective “wild edge of sorrow.”4 Unmetabolized sorrow is sorrow thrown into the dark corners of the unconscious, and it does not sit still and it does not stay quiet.
I offer these vignettes, then, as touch points to share. If I have not managed to evoke a moment as more than my own, it is purely a reflection of my lack of skillful means as a writer.
Forthcoming:
Today, 12–12:15 pm ET: Vigil in Silence
Please join me and a growing group from the last two Sundays of ~25 of you across North America and Europe in a vigil in Silence on behalf of all beings who, today, are suffering or in sorrow and on behalf of Earth and our collective healing.
(This is not a Zoom gathering but silent vigil wherever you are.)
I will light a candle before the hour and invite the sound of the singing bowl at noon to open our circle and again at 12:15 to close our circle.
If you join in Silence today, please do let me know by email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com or DM me here on Substack.
Sunday, November 3, 12 – 1:30 pm ET: Zoom Gathering in Silence with Reflective Conversation to Follow
All are welcome. Email me (reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com) with questions, to register, and receive the Zoom link.
December 4–8, In-Person Retreat
Valle Crucis Retreat Center, Banner Elk, NC
The retreat, Entering Unknowing: Inner Pilgrimage for a Time between Worlds, is on!
Valle Crucis Retreat Center tells us they are eager to host our group post-Helene. There are a few remaining spots. Email me or Doreen, Retreat Coordinator, for more information and to register. tanenbaumd [AT] gmail [DOT] com
I close for today by offering my gratitude to you all for your countless kindnesses, your tender expressions of care and love, and your patience in my slow responses.
With love,
Renée
Friday, post-Helene Day #7
4 October
A dream. Mountains leveled to plains. Trees felled, every last one. Not one tree standing. Water washed, fallowed ground, dust in the sun. Rows of people. Making their way from here to there, there being the other side of the barrenness, there being now a great distance from here, they are bent over. The people bent over are picking up the pieces, every last piece of debris and remnant between finger and thumb. They are weeping. They are singing.
Yesterday, an assembly-line crew at a distribution hub piled 100+ cases of water into the van, stacked them three feet high, then piled to the ceiling paper towels, toilet paper, diapers for young and old, and wipes. This hub at a church north of town sent us to another church that flooded but even so opened its parking lot to be a drive-thru distribution center. T and I asked for a list of what to ask for back at the hub. In the side lot, another group of thirty or forty people cooked sausage and rice and beans in huge vats over fire cookers. They loaded the van with the hot meals and forks and spoons and bottled water. This group was Ukrainian refugees. They drove up from South Carolina. We drove the meals to a community downtown. Children ran from the playground to greet us and run meals from door to door.
One young child, waiting his turn, did not cheer with eagerness to help the way the other children did. T asked him how many meals. He said three. Then he said four. Three meals stacked one on top of the other spanned his waist to nose. I took the top meal off the stack and offered to follow him. His eyes were on me in a walk-run as we turned the corner of the front of the van, and at the end of the parking lot, and at the far side of the playground, and before we came to a breezeway, “It’s not far. Past this red door. Down this way. It’s the next red door.” We came to a second red door. He paused, looked up at me again, then opened the door, the floor a place for things left when order is not yet an aftershock—an empty bottle of water, an open box of cereal, a pair of shorts, a single sock. “My mom is in the back. My dad will be home soon.” Mom came out to greet us as the boy turned and ran back to the van. He waited his turn again. “I need one more for my dad.”
Helicopters crisscross the sky. Chinook copters to and from, to and from.
Saturday, post-Helene Day #8
5 October
A waking image. Water up to my eyeballs, pooled mid-iris. Seeing half through water. Breathing from the crown of my head.
Word that Search & Rescue found an eight-year-old girl wandering the woods, alone.
Today, the children recognize the van and come running. “I’ve got big muscles!” They line up to carry one by one, one-gallon jugs of water, 100 one-gallon jugs of water plus the emptied crates that hold four. The children call the crates baskets and jockey to be the one to get to carry the baskets. A toddler makes four trips to the distribution room, each time with a gallon of water half as long as she is tall.
God bless you says the man to everyone who backs in for loading.
Blessings of God says the Ukrainian woman when the van is ready to go.
I ask Toni at the flooded church drive-thru when we return for another round if there will be anyone making hot meals tomorrow. “No,” she says, “How many do you need?” “I don’t know. We had about fifty this run and ran out in ten minutes.” She does not pause. “We’ll make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Can you be here at noon to help?”
Helicopters crisscross the sky. Chinook to and from, to and from.
At the distribution hub, security guards direct traffic, pistols on their belts. A convoy of National Guard vehicles with armed soldiers rounds the corner from Merrimon Ave to Beaverdam Road.
Word that a person pulled a gun on firefighters when the firefighters pulled up to a fuel pump.
Sunday, post-Helene Day #9
6 October
Morning sun begs light through lingering fog, droplets of everywhere water disperse the sun, a million tiny suns drift in the breeze. Word of another hurricane brewing in the Gulf. It’s on a similar path.
Beyond the Comfort Zone participants across North America and Europe join in fifteen-minute vigil in Silence.
Fewer helicopters today. Chinook to and from, to and from.
K says a certain quality of gossip has a role to play in crisis. You tell me what you hear. I tell you what I hear. Collectively, we begin to make sense, fill in the gaps, see holographically.
Fatigue is setting in. Tears knocking.
Wednesday, post-Helene Day #12
9 October
An oak leaf brown too soon, broken limb.
Early voting has begun. M says entire communities in the rural north are living in tents. Nighttime temperatures will drop close to freezing next week. Asheville Dream Center and Water Mission are giving away battery packs and generators. M and I get on the list to give two generators to communities north.
West Asheville Farmers’ Market opened yesterday. I met a woman named Annie. She said it’s strange to be here. She said it’s normal and it’s not. I bought Asian pears from Lee’s Farm, a bag of arugula and a bunch of kale from Flying Cloud. Full Sun had tomatoes. Urban Peasants had power to bake bread.
A car collision westbound on I-240, the rear passenger door pried open by first responders. A lifetime of belongings and a sleeping bag spilled out onto the freeway.
A thirty-foot-long tree trunk raised by a crane from a fifteen-foot distance between two homes. Neighbors gather around and watch without a word as if the body raised is a human body.
Caw of a crow, a distant chainsaw, a strange comforting melody, up and down go the tones.
The woman in her 80s who walks by T’s house at the same time every day, wearing the same dress, carrying the same bag, her hair pulled tight and just so and always the same, stops and blows kisses. She looks into the eyes of the one she greets, hers as clear blue as Arctic waters.
Chinook copter to and from. Stops at 5 pm. Not a cloud in the sky.
I stitch a patch over a hole in a pillowcase.
Saturday, post-Helene Day #15
12 October
A dream. Running ahead of buildings falling one by one like dominoes. The sun shining too brightly to see what is out in front of us.
Word from Mayor Manheimer, “We are a strong community.”
Climbing the steep hill on Starnes on foot, I see a young man with his dog. They have stopped and stepped aside from the sidewalk. I pause. “Everything ok?” “Yea,” he points to the dog lying on the road. “He just doesn’t want to climb anymore.” We smile the unspoken. “You doing ok?” I ask. His eyes soften again. “I am. And you?”
I walk all day. Walk and meet the eyes of others.
R on Short sees a Duke Power lineman and runs to ask if she’ll have power soon.
Milo, the doodle on Cumberland, lands two paws on the top of the board fence as I approach. I give his beard a good scratch. He drops his head into my hands.
M meets with city leaders. Says at dinner to prepare for the long haul.
“I’ve lost everything. Everything. My home. Everything.” A woman about my age drives up to the church drive-thru. She asks for water, paper towels, toilet paper. She also needs pet food, kitty litter, some crackers and peanut butter. She begins to weep. Toni, telling me what to pick up at the hub, grabs my hands and pulls me over to the woman in her car. A man standing to my right begins to pray for her comfort. The woman leans over, arms folded across the steering wheel of her car. I bow my head. I begin to weep.
Chinook to and from the north, flying low.
Sunday, post-Helene Day #16
13 October
2nd Sunday vigil in Silence, 12 – 12:15 pm ET.
The Silence through which the helicopter flies The Silence at the center of the fire at the center of Earth The Silence inside a tear
It dawns on me in the Silence with others that I won’t be going back to the place I called home by the river.
To donate to and support post-Helene recovery efforts, visit Beloved Asheville.
To make a one-time donation to Beyond the Comfort Zone, you can “Buy Me A Coffee.”
Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), p. 174.
Weber, Matter & Desire, p. 174.
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015).
Thank you for time-traveling us to your landscape and heartache. We need the intimacy of your notes to keep the stories alive and real and close.
“It is in brokenheartedness that we come to the bare naked receptivity out of which is born hope and reverie and a way forward.”
Thank you for letting us mourn with you and slow down to your human pace (or van pace, as the case may be). I'll be with you in spirit at noon.