Apocalypse

Helene is showing us who we are

I live in Western North Carolina, just outside Asheville. I am living through what may be the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. Helene may be not just a one thousand-year weather event but a thirty thousand-year one. This is the most horrific and the most beautiful time I have ever experienced. It is uncovering who we really are.

For humanity to survive calamities like this one, we have to do something we haven’t done as a species in over ten thousand years. We have to be ourselves. 

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got

I live in Riceville, in the Swannanoa Valley. The morning of the storm, a friend and I bailed over five hundred gallons of water out of my home. At least I still had one.

For days afterward, I heard the highway was blocked because a house was sitting on the bridge. I pictured The Wizard of Oz. A neighbor finally showed me a photo.

“Where is the house?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said. It was a pile of matchsticks.

In Grovemont, five miles away, a friend pulled three people out of the wreckage. At least one didn’t make it. A neighbor had to relieve a coworker who lost his sister. Another texted, “how am I going to tell my daughter that her teacher is dead?”

An hour north, in Mitchell County, helicopters were landing with food and people didn’t even have bags to put it in. I thought of the line from “In This Land” by Sweet Honey in the Rock, “I don’t even own a plastic bag.”

There are rescue crews from New Jersey, Nebraska, even Canada. There are police traveling in caravans. My next-door neighbors have an AR-15 and an AK-47 laid out on the kitchen table.

I have never felt more at home.

Human Nature

I spent most of the first weekend drying out forty years of my best friend’s family photos. Many had already dissolved. We texted later on.

“My dad is having a hard day today.”

“He’s upset about the damage?”

“I think a lot is hitting him. Yesterday a man and his young family pulled up in a pick up truck. They barely spoke English, but they got out with a chainsaw and got the tree off my parents shed. The family has been driving up from Greensboro every day to help anyone they find that needs it. My dad tried to offer him money, and the man just beat his hand over his heart and said no.”

“Oh my God! It’s just heart-aching how much of that is happening.”

“The man’s teenage son was helping him. The son said the first house they got to in Saluda had a body in it. Since then, they have been driving back-and-forth every day, putting their own business on hold to help people.”

“It makes me want to cry. I’m trying to write an essay and I think I will add this.”

“Have you been to any of the supply stations? You just walk or drive there and tell them what you need and they give it to you. It’s very well organized and no one takes more than what they need. If we can do this now, why can’t we always have supply stations set up where people can go and get what they need?”

“Yes, I had the exact same thought.”

“It’s so weird to think that all the unhoused people that survived are probably living their best lives these days. 😢”

This outpouring of generosity seems incredible, but this is how people really are. Read A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Read Humankind: A Hopeful History. Read Mutual Aid.

Human beings are arguably the most social animal on Earth. Our brief time in civilization only seems to make us selfish. It doesn’t take much to wash that away.

All American

My neighbors with the assault rifles are Ronny and Joey. They’ve been together over thirty years. This is Joey’s grandma in 2010.

Ronny and Joey flew a Trump flag in 2016. They have it hanging in the garage. They flew an American flag upside down on January 6th. They have a bumper sticker that says “JO AND THE HO GOT TO GO” with JO crossed out.

Until the storm, I was afraid of my neighbors. Now I feel safer because of them.

All my neighbors have guns. But we’re just a handful of people with little training and no coordination. There’s always someone with bigger guns.

What makes me feel safer is not my neighbors’ guns but their love. Ronny and Joey, with their generator, charged everybody’s phones, along with the computer I wrote this on. They have a little stand to give out free tomatoes. They started that a year before the storm.

My neighbor across the road is taking care of the elderly widow next door. He’s looking after an old man up the road. He has always done this.

Ronny is, by his own admission, very fearful. He has AIDS. He and Joey are gay. He asked me to include all this.

Ronny would do anything to protect Joey. He loves him. When we act out of fear, we are acting out of love. Fear is just love focused on someone or something in particular.

Fear separates us because we love different things. My friend is a nurse at Mission Hospital. She tried to volunteer with a humanitarian aid organization. Their form requires you to check a box saying you agree that marriage is between one man and a woman, that life begins at conception, etc. You have to state the name of the church you attend. She went elsewhere.

The people running supply stands aren’t ID-ing people. Neither is the man with the chainsaw who can barely speak English. How can we love all people, not just some?

Tearing out the Walls

For days, our long-time handyperson, Layna Spahr, who is happy for you to know is transexual, has been working late with a helper tearing out the walls to keep the house from molding. One night I made them dinner. After all, if the house becomes unlivable, I will have to move. Plus I was lonely.

The next morning, I got a text thanking me and checking in. It ended with, “BTW, I forgot to mention that S.B. is my wife.”

I had hired S.B. two weeks before to figure out why my business was in the red. Helene struck the day before we had planned to meet. I wrote back, “That’s hilarious. You are saving my home and she is saving my business!”

We all, whether we know it or not, are part of a web of close relationships. We depend on each other.

The Tiv of Nigeria consider it offensive to pay someone the exact price for something. You have to give them either a little more or a little less. Why? To continue the relationship.

Whether it’s on the books or not, we are all indebted to each other. We are part of one system.

United State

In 2003, several months into the Iraq War, Thich Nhat Hanh spoke before Congress. He said that if you are hammering a nail and you hit your hand, that hand does not grab the hammer and hit back.

Modern humans tend to see the world as a bunch of parts: me and you, us and them, here and there, now and then. What if it’s more useful to see it as a single whole, as one integrated system?

This is called holism, systems thinking, or ecology. Eco, from oikos, means “house.” A house divided cannot stand. A house united can.

There is a white oak in front of my house. It is older than the United States. Here it is in 2001, when I first moved in. At chest height, it is sixteen feet in circumference. If it had fallen, I could have easily been killed. What keeps a massive tree upright?

Most of us know the story of the blind men and the elephant. The elephant, like the tree, is a living being. Yet most of us are like ants on it, thinking only we are alive. Are the leaves the only living part of a tree?

We are not just on the elephant, we are the elephant. We are not just leaves, we’re the tree. We are not just in the same boat, we are the boat.

We all, not so deep down, already know this. Humans naturally love all our relations. We love everything because we are everything. There isn’t just life in the universe; life is the universe.

Some say the word religion comes from religare, “to bind back.” We are bound to each other because there are no others. There is nothing esoteric about this; it’s just a matter of seeing the big picture.

Thinking you are just a human being is like thinking you are just your nose. It’s why we are careening into catastrophe. It’s why there is so much fighting in the world.

When you wake up from a dream, you realize that you were not in the dream; the dream was in you. When you wake up in life, you realize that there are no other people, things, places, or even times. It’s all one, one reality that some call God.

Life not only can be a dream, it is one. Finding this unity in diversity is the very meaning of life.

When the Healing Has Begun

My grandparents and their siblings left Eastern Europe in the late twenties. The rest of my family were killed. The word holocaust means “everything burnt.”

Helene was a natural disaster. So was The Holocaust. The word natural means “by birth.” We are born loving. We end up fearing, and fear leads to hate. This is entirely natural.

What causes fear is trauma. “Hurt people hurt people.” When we are hurting, we focus on our loved ones; we focus on ourselves. This is our survival instinct. We are wired to be this way.

How can we expand our love despite our hurt? We have to heal the hurt first. The fear that covers it is like a scab, a suit of armor, a layer of protection. We are like turtles: we can’t just rip off our shells.

What hurts? The answer, in a word, is civilization. Civilization is a house divided.

Civilization is not just cities or big systems. It’s a process, one that goes back twelve if not twenty thousand years. It started with conceptual thinking.

Conceptual thinking is what separates me from you, us from them. Simply put, the mind separates; the heart joins.

Like I said, separation is an illusion. This illusion leads to fear and conflict. After all, different people want different things.

Division is nothing new. It goes back to the Big Bang. The entire universe is built on two processes: division (or differentiation) and union (or integration). Together, these two processes create what is known as complexity. This is how systems are built, including the solar system, the digestive system and the justice system.

A more complex system is a more organized one, like an organism. What this means politically is both liberty and equality. When everyone works together, we can have both freedom and community, even world peace. That’s not idealistic when you understand how the world works — the real world: how it has always worked, how it’s working right now, and how any system needs to work in order to function.

The only reason you can read this right now is that your body is a massively cooperative organism. No part is forced to do anything, yet all parts work together for the whole. This is entirely natural. It’s how we are here.

All war is civil war. In our bodies, we call it cancer. Nothing that goes against nature lives long.

Fortunately, if you are alive, you already have not only a brain but a heart. It might be a little rusty. But it doesn’t take a deluge to learn to go with the flow.

Revelation

The word apocalypse means “uncovering.” We are living in a nightmare, but every nightmare is a dream. This is our chance to wake up: not out of the dream, but within it. We have everything we need because that is what we are.