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.

We are in deep shit. And that’s where the best corn grows.

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.

“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?”

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 transgender, 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? It’s not just the roots, it’s that the roots and the trunk are one. It’s that the leaves and branches are one, otherwise the tree could not have grown. What makes a tree is unity.

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

It’s been said that “no disaster is truly natural.” Take The Holocaust. It means “everything burnt.”

Holocausts come from hate. Hate comes from fear. Fear comes from trauma. “Hurt people hurt people.”

What causes trauma? Civilization. Civilization is a house divided. Civilization is civil war.

Civilization teaches us that we’re separate. It treats us that way. This is traumatic because it’s simply not true.

When we are hurting, we focus on our loved ones; we focus on ourselves. That’s just our survival instinct. We are wired to be that way.

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

Revelation

The word apocalypse means “uncovering.” For our humanity to remain uncovered, it takes more than a disaster. It takes the careful dismantling of civilization, not around us but within. We must remember that we’re One.

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. All we need is what we are.