Oh Nature, you rapscallion! You’re in cahoots with The Great Cahooter aren’t you, the
one with the various fingers in various pies, some feet in doors, the one who is
everywhere and nowhere at the same time and none of the time: The tornado that
ripped through here on May 21, 2022 was oddly placed, perfectly surreal and
nonsensical; shenanigans with Aeolus the god of winds, and I don’t know whom else. I
watched it from my mother’s third floor apartment, so who’s the god of balconies?
Daedelus I suppose. Did the Minotaur have a not-mentioned balcony up above the
Labyrinth where he would go and pick his teeth after a meal of sacrificial young nobles?
Any event is an opportunity to learn. There is potential in a storm–a transformative,
build-up-tear-apart storm, to experience more than wet hair and a call to the insurance
broker. There should be a tinge of mortality, perhaps fear, uncertainty deep down that
makes us all equal and nothing else matters. Sing it sister! Sing it while the wind
obliterates the view, laden as it is with water, dirt, tree bits, deck chairs, shingles,
beagles, bangles, banjo’s, anything with heft. The not-heft items: love, compassion, fear,
hate, arrogance, small-hearted meanness, curiosity, wonder, thoughtfulness, did I
mention love? I think love can be mentioned more than once. Oh and trust should be in
there. Trust, vulnerability, and love again. Sue me.
I feel like I’ve been gutted.
Tell it!
Seems pathetic. I almost don’t know what to say.
Let ‘er rip anyway.
Okay. Okay because maybe I’m not the only one who experienced this: You know that a
few of my friends had different opinions about the vaccine, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Despite this, in each case, I reached out and tried to step over, around the issue and
pick up those glinting threads of the history we had. There were decades of
camaraderie, of support both ways, of showing up, of sharing joys, hardships, wins and
losses. There was faith! We had faith in each other…I thought we had faith in each
other. Was there faith? Am I making this up?
And?
And the tornado rips through here and not one of them checked in to see if I was okay.
Other friends did, and right away too, but not these few. The town sustained damage to
buildings, to trees, and had days without power. I sustained a kind of heart-shock, a
feeling of fractured, rasping loneliness that I had never felt before. There was a flavour
of meanness, a terrible sharpness of separation that made me wonder if I had been a
sucker, a galloping fool all along.
Jung said: “We don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add
capabilities and experiences that make us bigger than the problems.” My self-esteem
has been unstable right from the get-go. This hurt like hell in the sense that here are
people who have made a point of “now I will not care for you.” This is a shame, a
needless loss, but in the spirit of Jung, I will learn the lessons from it. There is still great beauty in humanity, great love, so I will remain open to that.