A New Constellation

life after life after

Time is still lagging behind. Like an X-ray lags behind your actual illness, showing the destruction of the few days prior to the examination. My prognosis is improving though. I can see that someday, sometime, I will regain a view that isn’t full of strange and terrible twisting of trees, giant stone-filled trenches, and mudded highways. Someday. That day is not today. Today, I am finding ground in another state, both literally and figuratively. I’m taking refuge at the other end of the Appalachians, the green hills of Vermont. It is stick season here. There is green on the ground and otherwise the trees are bare and brown. It is warmer than usual. And it is beautifully dark at 4:30 p.m.

I am conscious of the precious dark, the deepening of the inward season, wishing as I do often this time of year to practice cat naps and sipping tea. But it is still an outward time. Everything on the outside remains fraught, unsettling, confusing. Everywhere I look and everyone I know is suffering. We are anxious. We feel unsafe. We feel afraid to put it mildly. We don’t know what to do or where to turn for comfort or clarity.

This is the result of having been through a hurricane. A hurricane that swept away the buildings full of artwork, bulldozed trees up and down the mountain, flooded homes and businesses in a swath of destruction previously unimaginable. And this is the result of having been through an election, an election destined to change the face of America one way or another. No matter who you might have voted for the tension was palpable, the anxiety unmissable, the heightened portent of the future hanging over us.

For the first several days after the hurricane hit, I had no idea what it looked like everywhere else. I couldn’t leave my home. I couldn’t contact anyone in town or even down the road. Something that is most likely beyond comprehension for most of us in this age of internet, no communication was possible for a long long time. Traveling on the roads was impossible to hazardous, and rewards were few for the risk. There wasn’t gas or power available much of anywhere.

It is hard to say now, 6 weeks out from the event, which was worse, the event itself or the protracted risk brought on by lack of communication, lack of power, lack of water. Any one of these things could wreak havoc, but all three at the same time was beyond our concept. And it was protracted. At my house even a month in there was no reliable cell or internet though there was power and water. In town, even today there is still no potable water for anyone on the municipal water system. Prolonged living without water is not something we could even conceive of before this event.

So this is Part II. The long weeks after. The long weeks long after. The long weeks where it seems nothing is changing and everything is changing, has changed, will be changed. The long weeks where no one knows if they are coming or going, quite literally. The long weeks where it isn’t clear if anyone will be able to work for a living again. The long weeks of disorientation, displacement as each of us struggles to find a foothold in the new landscape. This is life after the Hurricane. Life after life after.

The daily quest for simple necessities. The hourly quest for meaning in it all. The minute by minute changing constellation of internal and external symptoms of having lived through a catastrophic event.

We make offerings. We share stories. We are alive and not alive, like the trees in stick season, part poignant, part dormant, green and worn a not completely unfamiliar cohabitation, a necessary rendering of the ongoing cycle of season, of life, of death.