Remembering Helene
One Year On
Dear Friends,
This weekend marks one year since Helene changed the face of the Southern Appalachian Range. It was the most devastating storm in recorded history. To mark the moment, I’ve been sifting through the archives of my letters to you last year.
There is something remarkable in the human spirit and the intrinsic hope and resilience to carry on. But calamity leaves a mark on the soul, and I have found myself at times fairly fiercely hoping for collective mourning, recalling in almost daily echo words I heard years ago from the Very Reverend Todd Donatelli, Dean of the Cathedral of All Soul’s, who wrote in 2011, Can it be the community who knows how to lament [. . .] is the one who finds barren places to be springs of life?1And so, too, the words of German biophilosopher, Andreas Weber, which you will read below, have been a constant. Weber urges mourning pain rather than repairing it, being content with feeling, not with fixing, and wait[ing] 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.2 These sentiments permeate not only our experience here in the wake of Helene. They interpenetrate the far reaches of human existence.
1st Letter in the Immediate Wake of Helene
October 3, 2024
Dear Friends, My family, loved ones, and I are safe in the aftermath of Helene. I am at home in Asheville with a close friend, with two of my sons and their father and stepmother nearby. The van, Sweet Petunia, weathered the torrent.
Thank you for your outpouring of love, concern, care, and prayers. Temporary cell towers have gone up in numerous locations over the past few days. While service remains spotty and is slow, I can now see your incoming messages and emails. I am inadequate to express the magnitude of my gratitude for your outpouring. Thank you.
In this still crisis stage of recovery, existence is what is right in front of us: it is biological, it is a neighbor in need, it is going to where the next need presents. Search and rescue efforts are ongoing, as is the recovery of bodies.
Being on the receiving end of the help that continues to arrive from near and very far is almost more than the heart can bear. In every pocket of this suddenly changed place that last week bustled with city hum, on every tree-shredded mountain ridge, and in the water-swallowed hollows where not trucks, not helicopters or ATVs, but only mules and horses can make it to pull people out or carry water and food in, the goodness of humanity spills over. We are good to each other when together we come to the bare nakedness of being alive or dead and all else that seemed to matter washes away.
Meaning-making the enormity of this devastation will come, I tell myself. . . .
Five Days in the Wake of Helene
Published October 13, 2024 – Notes from My Journal
As I write, helicopters chart course overhead on continued rescue efforts as bodies continue to be found and supplies continue to be shuttled to difficult-to-access communities in need. The impulse is strong to say something meaningful in the wake of Helene. Stronger still is the recognition to resist making meaning where meaning is not yet made.
I did begin recording notes on Day #1. Perhaps these jots from my journal from Days 1 through 5 lend a glimpse of moments lived by those of us privileged enough to have escaped the worst of the battering. Survivor’s remorse nearly keeps me from sharing.
I cannot write firsthand about losing a loved one3 or watching my home wash away in a bloated river or down the side of a mountain in a mudslide. I have nothing to say about my living room being bisected by an ancient oak tree, nor of the experience of that very tree leaving life, lying prostrate, hollow in the middle, taking however long it takes a tree to die when it is snapped in half in gale-force winds. I have not lived these calamities. I somehow seem always to be steps away. Until I am not and death takes me, too, when it comes. But death by drowning in a river furor seems an especially merciless horror. . . .
All of this is to say that perhaps putting words to the page of seeing, hearing, doing, not doing, of wondering and feeling, serves some purpose. I do not know. But I am quite certain that meaning-making is not any of ours to do alone.
You may wonder why no images. I assume you have seen more on the news than I can show you, much of which, were I to try, is cordoned off here and we cannot get to. On Day #1, it did seem natural to take photographs, but everywhere my eye landed was on a dying tree. It felt heartless to the beingness of the tree to take an image, not unlike it would feel to photograph a human body thrown by the current downstream, and so, I stopped.
Perhaps the missing images symbolize the felt absence of countless human and other-than-human lives here and everywhere there is devastation today.
Please note that some of these notes are disturbing.
22 September
Final passage in my journal before the arrival of Helene
“If, then, there is any one generalization to be made for any and every soul, the soul will be the primary act of a physical bodily organism.”4
28 September
Saturday, post-Helene, Day #1
This climate event is life-changing in as yet untold ways.
On Wednesday morning, 25 September, I woke with the sense, unexplainable, that I should move to higher ground. [I was twenty feet from the bank of the French Broad River.]
[I text T (long-time friend) and ask to locate the van and me to her driveway late afternoon.]
[A little after 4 pm, Wednesday] The sky opens. It rains as I have never seen/heard/experienced rain.
A sense of foreboding.
I begin to understand that the first storm system is setting the stage for the next. I begin to understand the hurricane [in the Gulf] is the next system.
Thursday evening, steady stream of texts with family, loved ones . . . K writes, This is INSANE.
Helene is still out in the Gulf, hundreds of miles from here; hasn’t reached Tampa. The rain is unrelenting.
Thursday Night into Friday, Helene.
Thursday ~11 pm, D [son] calls, wondering if I should get out of the van. Don’t wait too long, Mom. T texts. If shit gets scary, please leave her. We will find a way to get you a new home. I don’t want to be without you. The world needs you in it. T and I relocate the van to a hotel parking lot. I ride out the storm from the sofa in her living room, watching trees fold, bend, break.
The sound of a tree when it breaks.
Friday morning, early, texts with Mary. Images of trees draped over her car. It’s like a tree graveyard up here. I’m so glad you didn’t come up here and glad you are at T’s.5
M [son] telephones. Says he is OK. He has spoken with D [son]. We are cut off mid-sentence when water, power, cell service go down.
Late afternoon Friday, [T and I] walk a block; passage in every direction forbidden by downed trees.
7:30 am – 7:30 pm curfew
Saturday morning, T and I learn that some roads have been cleared. Neither of us has cash, little food between us, seven gallons of water in the van’s freshwater tank, and forty available miles of diesel fuel in the van; a tree limb smashed through the windshield of T’s car. We decide to drive the van the three miles downtown, stopping by the home of [sons’ father and stepmother] to check in on them. They happen to have cash; she hands me $100.
Where the roads are cleared of trees, there are countless snapped and low-hanging power lines, too low for the van to pass under in most places.
We reach Biltmore Avenue, see a crowd outside the Moxy Hotel on high ground, glass shattered from the windows above, awnings downed on sidewalks, iron poles bowing, debris scattered beyond every line of sight. We learn there is weak wifi at Moxy. I manage to get texts out to D, C, M [two sons in Asheville, one in Portugal] and one to K with my whereabouts.
I put the phone down. M [son] taps on the window. I swallow hard, get out of the van. You ok, Mom? A hug. A long hug. Yes. I am. Are you? He had not seen my text.
Shows me videos he took of the early stages of the French Broad rising, already flooding. I will forever wonder how we happened to be at the very same place at that very particular same time.
The co-op is open. T and I buy food to feed.
29 September
Sunday, post-Helene Day #2
A friend arrives with buckets of water in the back of her truck from a spring on her property.
A friend arrives with gasoline and diesel fuel.
T lines a bucket in the backyard to use as a temporary toilet. I have a compost toilet in the van. What do downtown residents do?
I walk an hour and a half to Montford [former neighborhood], crawling over and under downed trees. Check on neighbors and loved ones. Manage to send three texts standing outside the Visitor’s Center.
The sky is filled with helicopters.
K arrives.
T’s place becomes a hub for meals, water, news. E, who brought the spring water, makes soup.
Begin to triage food based on what will go bad first.
I-40 from the east [where there was a landslide] is passable in one lane for the National Guard. I-40 from the west [where there was a landslide] will not be open for an untold time.
Friends and neighbors begin to leave by the only open artery, southbound on 1-26.
30 September
Monday, post-Helene Day #3
[no notes]
1 October
Tuesday, post-Helene Day #4
We empty T’s freezer and fridge, place what will fit into the van fridge [solar powered]. Make soup.
Generators sound at some neighbors’ homes.
Word of people believing they are smelling gas leaks. Sheriff’s Patrol says it is the smell of bodies.
Word that they’re running out of body bags.
Word of >1000 more still unaccounted for. [There will be more.]
Word of Mission Hospital setting up a temporary morgue.
Word of someone shot and killed over food in grocery-store parking lot.
Word of truckloads of drinkable water and food coming in from the south; locations not clear; take your own container.
Word of a 43-year-old woman hospitalized due to cardiac arrest. [There will be more.]
Word of a couple rescued on horseback; helicopters & ATVs cannot reach.
Word of help from as far as Ireland; from all over N. America.
We begin to fall out of the news cycle.
Death of people, death of place; no funeral yet.
Temporary cell towers go up. More messages come in. Still not enough bandwidth to send messages reliably.
The sky is filled with helicopters.
I must stop now. The weight.
2 October
Wednesday, post-Helene Day #5
It is beyond time this time we exist in. I am losing track of days.
D [son] arrives with drinking water and $200 cash he hands to me in an embrace before leaving town [following word that if you do not need to be here, leave—to reduce impact on resources. D and business partners had five locations on the river, including the Outpost. Only one stands post-Helene.]
We have become a meal hub here at T’s home.
I tell T that I am going to stay to help. Memories of returning home last December after pilgrimage. Place of belonging.
Soup dinner with M [son], friends, and neighbors.
Text messages send more easily.
Parades of power trucks driving by.
The sky is filled with helicopters.
In the city, most of the roads are cleared of trees. M [son, helping with search and rescue efforts] says this is not so outside of city limits. He packed water and supplies 12 miles on foot with crew today to reach stranded community. [He and his team will do this for many days.]
Word from M that those who refused search and rescue evacuation before the storm were left with a Sharpie and asked to write SS# on the skin.
When the wind is slaughtering trees and the river is a torrent still rising, life is changing, but you don’t know what in life is changing. When the wind stands still and the waters retreat, life is changing, but you don’t know what in life is changing. When in the days that follow one foot in front of the other, and chainsaws are the chorus in the air, and helicopters are in a hurry, life is changing, but you don’t know what in life is changing. What did we have on Thursday that we do not have today . . . those of us who still have life and limb and family?6
Vignettes, Week #2
Dreams, Children, and Sorrow in the Wake of Helene
I write now 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.7
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.8 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”9 fails the need to metabolize our personal and collective wild edge of sorrow.10 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 touchpoints 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.
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 hot meals and forks and spoons and bottled water. This group in the side lot, cooking, was a group of Ukrainian refugees. They drove up from South Carolina. We drove the food they made to a community downtown. Children ran from the playground to greet us and run meals door to door.
One young child, waiting his turn, did not cheer with eagerness to help as 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, eyes on me, 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 eyes, 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.
Helicopters crisscross the sky. Fewer today. Chinook to and from, to and from.
K says 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 welling up.
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. Annie was her name. She said it’s strange to be here. She said it’s normal and it’s not. I bought Asian pears that fell to the ground at 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 [son] 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.
A Short Row of Sugar Maples
October 27, 2024 – One-Month Mark
A month has passed since Helene’s catastrophic sweep across Southern Appalachia. To mark the day, I took a long walk late afternoon. The sun shone slant through a short row of sugar maples strangely spared the twists of wind, leaves hanging low like fruit heavy before the fall. Beneath my feet, the every autumn rustle of drying leaves, fragrant.
I have shared in weeks past that the very real human impulse is to give word to what has no words or words not yet. The phenomenologist in me keeps refusing the impulse, refuses today even journal entries and description, and for today stays as close as can be to the flesh of that walk, believing the lived world of one is, on a primordial level, the lived world of us all.
Today, what comes are a few pictures and two words, be still.
Then, November
November 24, 2025 – Look at What Sorrow Has Done
There was word midweek that we might get a touch of snow come sunrise on Thursday. I went to bed on Wednesday hopeful in the way a schoolgirl is hopeful that the waking day will be made magical by the magic of snow. Wittgenstein’s quote went to bed with me. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.11 In these still early days post-Helene, words walk around me, never quite landing in the hands, that I might grab them and put them on paper. But in this inner hush, I have wondered, especially now in November, about the human proclivity to so quickly opine about matters that worry our need for certainty. Was it Meister Eckhart who bade silence so that words might form in the heart?
Some days ago, I wrote this in my journal.
Words unformed sit in wait at the bottom pause between two breaths in a deep-sleep dream you may not wake from. The birds stopped singing for days. Why interrupt their silence? The raw pulp trees twisted and broken over, if you paused before them, you would hear their last sigh across the air we’re still breathing. And the root webs, upside down on the top of the ground, if you were to lie down beside them, you would feel life’s pulse punctuated by the murmuring beneath them, their veins seeing the light of day as their life goes dark.
Millions died that day across these ancient ranges. By one estimate, the number of trees that fell during Helen was over 41,000,000. That’s in the forests alone, not the cities swept into ruin.
As trees lay dying across the mountainsides and riverbanks, on roads and in parking lots, in back and front yards and parks, along street walks with rusted iron gates upended, persons were searching night and day for persons, and persons were rushing to persons on rooftops just inches above rushing water, and persons were grabbing dogs off car tops and cats off tree tips, and children, pray God, went clutched in the crook of the elbow. And when the storm passed and the clouds, too, then came persons asking persons are you ok? And what do you need? It was only natural it didn’t matter what color or creed or whether those in search or those searched for would vote red or blue. What mattered was life and death and nothing else.
The pen stopped.
Then came Wednesday, November 6 and the results of the 2024 election and oh, the outrage and oh, the vainglory, and no sooner the newsy opining about who was to blame and who was to be cheered and friends unfriending friends because they heard how they voted and how could you?! It didn’t matter if you voted red or blue. The response was the same, either side.
But then came concentric circles of humanity right here amongst all of you and others, too, opining not at all, rather conversing about the impenetrable silence of haunting loss; unfolding details about how last week’s poem, “Kindness,” penned itself while a bride sat frozen at a plaza; searching through pain and sorrow to be greeted by otters and the setting sun; wondering about faith and doubt in the prayer of St Francis. You wrote about war-era survivor’s guilt and bodies burning in a thatched-roof hut. You reflected on love unfolding over poetry at the bedside, by the aroma of coffee and the sleepy, waking eyes in the early dawn light and you, shattered when she died.12
Dear friends, look at what sorrow has done.
It has brought us together and bound us in “a potent alchemy, confirming the heart’s intimacy with all things” and one another and life itself.13
We are not only witnessing horrific news from afar. We are together experiencing “tears in the fabric of culture, crises of ecological breakdowns,” even the “loss of our certainty in the continuation of life itself.”14 No longer can we not see, not touch, not feel these tears. No longer can we keep sorrow at a distance.15 And why would we when the day-to-day of being human gives every occasion to let our hearts be made tender.
If we can bear “rapt intimacy with feeling,”16 as in your letters and conversations and comments, “we surrender the desire to know things so that we might . . . at least for a moment, be with them,” perhaps even be inwardly hushed by them.17 Paradoxically, we become living bearers of reverie, ever more open to imaginative and receptive engagement with the world and one another18 as sacred beings unfolding with and as the unfolding of the universe itself.
One Year On
September 27, 2025
The air is thick with foreboding—Imelda forming out at sea. The tree canopy is as still as the silence the day after Helene, before the helicopters came as crisscrosses in air. Leaves and limbs of the trees still standing greet and cradle the leap of squirrels scurrying. Winter is coming. Every now and again, the sun burns a crack in the clouds, and the belly softens just a little, the shoulders drop. We’ll have a family gathering at the Outpost tonight, reopened, along the cleaned-up banks of this stretch of the French Broad, if the weather holds. I have not been back since I packed up on a perception.
Time in the soul moves not in a line but ripples out from the center of now, and it takes me a minute to register the clouds in my chest when I see D in the driveway on Friday, inspecting the branches of the hemlock trees hanging over the van. I fill the freshwater tank, check the fuel level, make sure there’s cash on hand. I text T, will you pick up a few things at the co-op, just in case? I moved into a studio in her house soon after Helene.
M calls at half past ten Saturday morning. There’s a new hurricane coming, Imelda. Have you heard, Mom? I’m still getting calls from people who still have trees in the middle of their houses from Helene, waiting in line for help.
A neighbor raking leaves sees a neighbor hesitate before picking up the Citizen Times, tossed on the sidewalk before the wake of day. He pauses, folds his hands over the top of the rake, head cocked her way, You doing ok? I can barely make out what comes out as little more than a whisper from her. They say another storm’s coming.
Gatherings in Silence
In keeping with the premise that “Silence is the essential condition for intimate [and inner] work,” in these twice-monthly gatherings, we come together to meet one another in Silence without the need to speak to fill a void. We meditate for half an hour with Silence as a companion presence. On the 1st Sunday of each month, we have a reflective conversation, our words surfacing from open and spacious pauses, not unlike a Quaker meeting, revealing what is alive in the present moment.
These gatherings are an online sanctuary from the noise of the world and a homecoming to presence.
All are welcome.
If you would like to join and have questions, please email me: reneeeliphd[AT]gmail[DOT]com.
To keep the sanctuary an intimate experience, ‘seats’ are limited. Please email me for the Zoom link.
Inner-Life Work in the Spirit of Anam Cara
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References & Notes
Todd Donatelli, “The Landscape of Fall into Winter: Ending as the Advent of a New Year. The Cathedral Connection (Newsletter), November 2014. http://www.allsoulscathedral.org/Cathedral_Connection/nov-2014.pdf.
Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), p. 174.
I did not know yet that a loved one would die in the days that followed.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s de Anima, trans. Kenelm Foster, O.P. and Silvester Humpries, O.P. (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1951), p. 73, emphasis added.
Chris, an artist, who dropped by T’s place, having dinner in the van, asked this question.
Weber, Matter & Desire, 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).
Twentieth-century Austrian-British philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. by D. F. Pears (Routledge, 1981)
This letter is inspired by letters, conversations, and comments from and with
,, , , , , , , , , , , , amongst others.Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief(Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2015), p. xvi.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. xvi–vxvii. I mean by this that we are a grief-phobic society. The accumulation of losses presses at the soul, the deepest dimensions of our being, and can no longer be denied by the willfulness of the conditioned mind.
from a paper I wrote in 2017, “Becoming Intimate with What We Cannot Bear,” The Ecozoic Review.
Robert Romanyshyn, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation (St. Antonio, Fl: Frog, 2015).
“Time in the soul moves not in a line but ripples out from the center of now” — what a gorgeous phrase, Renee. Time stood still as I read this, the past present and the future unknowable. The kindness, compassion, and care is real. The trees are real. Thank you. 💚
"Unmetabolized sorrow is sorrow thrown into the dark corners of the unconscious, and it does not sit still, and it does not stay quiet."
This collection of your felt experiences across the span of time during which Helene was active in your immediate life and your world is nothing short of incredible, honoring all you witnessed, holding equally hopelessness and hope. Your writing opens the space for metabolizing sorrow.
A year doesn't seem nearly long enough to process the depth of such long-term and wide-spread destruction that follows an epochal event.
Such courage, such solidity as yours--these are rare and precious. Thank you, dear Renée.