For Shelter, the World

*BAM*

That noise you just heard was the door to the past swinging shut and locking.

As you may know, since 2004 I had been planning on making a geographic move out of the U.S. South, with my eye on the Portland, Oregon area. However, chances are good that if it weren't for Hurricane Katrina, I'd probably still be living in Mississippi or New Orleans. There were too many things that would have kept me there ... taking care of my aging parents, my job, and primarily fear and doubt.

Katrina took care of all that. Not only did it impel me out of where I was, but it left me with no possibility of going back. There is no "back" to return to, since the town I was living in on the Gulf Coast was virtually destroyed, and New Orleans (my place of birth) may as well have been. So making the cross-country move in the final months of 2005 was at the same time the most difficult and the easiest thing I've ever done. It was as if a doorway had opened and a big arrow was pointing to it: "Go This Way". Having made that commitment to myself three years before, to either find another way of doing this human existence or cease living, I went that way.

President-elect Barack Obama.

I'm smiling, because getting to this point, individually and as part of the human race, has been such a long journey. The road goes on, however. I am not dancing and shouting with joy. The happiness I am feeling is more subdued ... more a contentment, that all is as it needs to be right now, that a major hurdle has been leaped, and with a knowing that much is ahead of us that will require courage and strength. I know that what is to come will also have its rewards as well, especially if we have the intention of doing it with as much ease and integrity as possible. (Laughter and a sense of curiosity won't hurt, either.)

As for that doorway we all just walked through, once we take the first step beyond it, the door itself will cease to exist. There is no going back. By raising our collective voices in this election, we have made a commitment and signified our intention.

Getting grounded

I'm taking a couple of days to get back into my own energy and get re-grounded. I've been feeling off-kilter physically the last couple of days, and I suspect it's because I spent too much energy this past weekend on U.S. politics and specifically the presidential race, and got caught up in other people's dramas.

One of the big lessons of this summer has had to do with relationships ... whom do I interact with, and when, and how. That's in intimate relationships as well as more casual interactions, online as well as in my daily life. I'm experiencing a sea change in this, and I know others are as well.

In deciding what to do, and with whom, and what to give my attention to, the guiding factor has to be "how does it feel to me?"

I'm learning, and listening.

Back soon. :)

Weddings, past and present

Today is my parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary. On December 1, 1946, my father, then a 24-year-old who had served in the Army Air Corps in India and China during WWII, married my mother, who was 19 years old, in front of a justice of the peace in rural Arkansas. Two children and many twists and turns of the road later, my parents are still married, although not living together. My mother now resides permanently in the locked unit of an assisted care facility in Houston, TX, and my father has relocated to Dallas after hitchhiking out of New Orleans four days after Hurricane Katrina flooded their home.

My father's father, born in rural Texas in 1886, never learned to drive a car. His natural wanderlust, which seems to be the family inheritance, spent itself traveling from place to place, all within a range of 300 miles from his place of birth, in order to keep his family of nine children alive during the Great Depression. He was intelligent but uneducated, and seemed to have no use for -- and even looked with contempt on -- modern technology and advanced education. A farmer, he mostly sharecropped, never owning land until his later years, and only used traditional manual farm implements.

My father, a member of the generation who created the American middle class by taking advantage of the post-war GI Bill to obtain a college education and pursue a professional career, is living in a vastly different world from that of his parents. We never know what we set in motion when we act. Despite limits to the adaptability of certain individuals (my mother comes to mind here), and despite our societal failure to attend to the consequences of sudden and/or drastic change, the human spirit and psyche are very resilient things.

A veteran of WWII, my father has lived to see one of his daughters marry a second generation Japanese-American, whose parents lived in internment camps during the war. Forty years ago, my sister and her husband would not have been able to get married; in the US, marriages between a white person and a person of any other race were illegal -- being a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment, as well as being considered unnatural and obviously against "the laws of God". It took the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, in 1967, to hold such anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional and contrary to fundamental human rights.

Today, December 1, 2006, eight hours away from me in the U.K., two young friends of mine are getting married. One year ago, they would not have been able to do so, since they are both men. Although the legal and moral implications of "civil partnership" versus "marriage" have yet to be resolved -- and in my opinion the impetus to do so will not come from legislation or court decision, but by a quickened process of evolution, having to do with a re-orientation of our views on relationships, gender and sexuality, and what constitutes human integrity and freedom -- there is a seed that has germinated, taken root, and whose shoots have breached the earth's surface, reaching toward the sky.

Here's to a long and happy life together, guys. You are the future, and yours is the future of the human race.

Seek not to be understood

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . . hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . . joy.
Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled . . . as to console
To be understood . . . as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love.
For it is in giving, that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying, that we are born to eternal life.

When I was in Dallas last week, I spent some time with a friend of mine from the Gulf Coast, who, with her daughter, ended up in Dallas after Hurricane Katrina. It is such a wonderful thing to be with people who understand. You don't have to explain where you're coming from, because that's where they're coming from, too.

My friend mentioned that she had attended a support group for Katrina survivors (there are a lot of them in Dallas). The one thing all of them said they found the hardest was that no one understands. That's a difficult place to be, compounding the effects of post-trauma that tend to cause one to feel alone and isolated to begin with. It goes beyond just a lack of understanding, though ... that's understandable. After all, how could anybody understand, who hasn't been through something like this?

What's hard to bear at times is what people do because of the lack of understanding ... at the very least, the thoughtless, offhand remarks, "it's been six months, why aren't they back to normal yet? Why don't they just get over it?"

It has been very interesting, as someone who was intimately involved in living through the Katrina experience, to see what other people have done with it ... using it for political purposes; making assumptions and judgments based on a very limited and often erroneous view of the facts; getting riled up and ranting about things that have little basis in reality and, actually, that have little to do with them personally; and, unfortunately, saying hateful and mean-spirited things about their fellow human beings.

Now for my own rant: I swear, if I hear one more person make an ignorant remark about "it's their fault for not having insurance" .... That statement has little to do with the reality of the situation. Most homeowners on the Gulf Coast had hurricane insurance -- their mortgage lenders required it. However, most people did not have flood insurance because the insurance companies would not sell it to them. The Mississippi Gulf Coast was not located in a flood plain, and therefore insurers were not required by federal law to make flood insurance available. Even those who did have insurance have found getting paid difficult.

Beyond that, though ... to think that having flood insurance would have made it all better? Your house, your town, your job are wiped out overnight, your social network destroyed and friends scattered across the country, and a check will somehow magically eliminate the effects of trauma? Money can be very helpful in starting over, but I think this illustrates the warped attitude about money that we've got in this culture.

I have my own speculations about peoples' motivation, some of which I've already expressed in this blog. I think it has a lot to do with denial. Either it couldn't have been that bad or it had to have been the survivors' fault. To think otherwise would lead a person inescapably to know that something similar could happen to them, too, and that they don't have control over everything in life. And that can be a hard thing to acknowledge.

Sometimes I will hear someone here in Portland say, "why did they keep living there when they knew it was likely to get hit by a bad hurricane? They knew it was just a matter of time."

My response is, "you live forty miles from an active volcano (Mt. St. Helens), and the experts are saying it's just a matter of time until it has another major eruption. You're also living in an area on active earthquake fault lines, and the Oregon coast is at risk for a devastating tsunami. So why are you still here?"

Life, Death, and the Internet

Interacting with people online is a very different experience from being with them in "real life". In real life, you know they exist because you can see them and touch them and hear their voices. When I'm online, reading what other people have to say and posting my own words, sometimes I feel as if we're just a bunch of disembodied minds, communicating with each other. Except that I know there are real human beings behind the words that appear on the screen.

The Internet is so fascinating. The possibilities for connection, learning, and creativity that have opened up because of it are endless, and expanding all the time. At the same time, as Michael at One foot in front of the other said recently about the Internet,

[I]nterconnectedness can have its frightening moments, or at least moments that give one pause. Never before in human history has such interconnectedness been possible.

The 'Net can be a tricky, even dangerous place. It seems to magnify the usual issues inherent in human existence and relationship.The question "what is real and what is illusion?" (and that question exists all of the time, even in real life, whether we admit it or not) becomes crystal clear on the Web. This may be the Internet's greatest danger and its greatest gift. The Internet is like a shape-shifter, constantly changing form, twisting and turning and moving beyond one's grasp. If you can learn to navigate that, to refine your intuition so you're not just relying on external cues, learning when to trust and when not, weighing the possible consequences, all the while maintaining your integrity as a human being ... well, you'll have tapped into something very powerful.

One of my big decisions whenever I begin an online presence is whether or not to use my real identity (or often, which of my online "identities" I'm going to use.) On many sites, there is a real need to be able to protect one's identity, in order to protect oneself, while still reaching out for support and community with other people. One of the downsides is that it limits our ability to help each other offline. That can be frustrating and even heart-breaking. Sometimes, humans just need a physical hug, and it's hard to do that in cyberspace.

Everyday I read what people post on their blogs, the things they are having to deal with, the serious decisions they're having to make, the ordinary and extraordinary crises they're going through. Sometimes I read about some challenging situation that someone is facing, and all I can do is write of my support and trust that they know what they're doing. I've been told that people online had the same feeling about me back during the hurricane. I learned first-hand about the power of the Internet during that time. In fact, the support of online friends whom I've never met in person kept me going, in some instances more so than the people in my "real life."

Recently, people I know online have experienced death of loved ones, death of online community members, life-threatening illness and accidents, and suicide threats. In "real life", the usual response to those would be, "what can I do?", and you can make a firsthand assessment of the situation. Online, the possibilities for direct assistance are limited. In addition, in two separate instances I have personally observed within the last three weeks, the question has been raised, "are these people who they say they are? Did this really happen? Maybe this is all a hoax." Sometimes I can see people holding back in their uncertainty or suspicion, not wanting to be made a fool of or feed something that ought not be fed.

With the Internet and human nature being what they are, those are not necessarily outlandish questions or concerns. On the other hand, if the situation is what it is presented as being, what violence are we doing to our fellow human beings (and ourselves) through our lack of trust and our accusations that what they are experiencing is a lie?

If I've only met you online, does that mean our support of each other is any less real than if we'd met in person? Are our hearts any less real? Are the things I'm learning here about myself and life any less real?

Ultimately, I have no control over what other people online do. I do have control over how I choose to meet what happens here. I think what it comes down to is that I am me, a living human being, and in order to maintain my integrity as a human, I have to reconcile my online life with my "regular" life. Because it's all "my life".

"I Don't Know"

One of my favorite sayings is "the three best words in the English language just might be 'I don't know' ."

"I don't know" is the most teachable place to be in the whole world, and also the most honest. It's at the point where we are willing to give up the idea that we've got it all figured out that we begin to open to true understanding. This requires that we give up the illusion that we're in control. The biggie in this is that by saying "I don't know", we're then going to have to look at things about ourselves and our world that we have been trying for eons to avoid seeing.

We're also going to have to give up on the idea that we've got the answers, and that if we can force everybody to see it our way and do what we think they should do, we'll be safe and everyone will be happy. Point of fact, that's total BS, and it's an incredibly brutal way to interact with our fellow human beings.

Earlier tonight, I was reading an Amazon customer review of Elie Wiesel's book Night, a fictional narrative based on his experience as a childhood survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. The reviewer in question emphatically stated that the author had to be lying, because he wasn't "emotional" enough in the way he described what happened. The implication was that she knew what an appropriate response to such an experience would be, and Mr. Wiesel did not meet her criteria.

Pardon my French, but how the hell would she know?

If you haven't been through it, you have no idea how it feels, how it affects you physically or mentally, or how you would respond in similar circumstances. If you're sitting there on your comfy sofa, beverage in hand, and saying "Well, I know I'd do such-and-such", you're fooling yourself. You do not know. You have no way of knowing.

Now, I didn't go through something of the magnitude of the Holocaust, but having gone through Hurricane Katrina and the events afterward has confirmed for me the truth of that old saying, "don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in his shoes."

The amount of sheer ignorance and arrogance on the part of people who ought to have known better is still mind-boggling to me, and now that my mind is getting "unboggled" from the PTSD, I'm seeing it even more clearly. This includes people in my immediate experience after the hurricane -- family and friends -- as well as people posting on the Internet and writing op-eds and letters to the editor, sitting in the comfort of their homes and spewing their judgmentally self-righteous puke onto people who had just had their entire world wiped out.

"I don't know. I am willing to learn."

Then listen.

Then we can begin to communicate with each other, and maybe, just maybe, we can start working together to save this world of ours.

Family Business

These are my paternal great-grandparents and their children, one of whom was my father's mother. This photo was taken around the year 1910; all of these people are deceased now. The only one I ever actually met was my paternal grandmother, and due to my family situation, I did not know her well. She's in the back row, third from the right.

(For the full effect, click on the picture, and when the new page loads, click on the lower right corner of the photo to enlarge it again.)

Back then, when you had your picture taken indoors, you had to hold still for a length of time in order to allow for full exposure of the film. Also, getting one's photograph was not commonplace as it is today; people hadn't yet learned how to "pose" and look either cute or natural for the camera the way we do now.

However, I've seen photos of other families contemporaneous with this photo, and while the people in those other photos may not look comfortable, they at least look pleasant.

Two years ago, totally out of the blue, I got intensely involved with researching my family's genealogy, on both my mother's and father's sides. I met a lot of my relatives, most of whom I'd never met before, and talked with my elderly father about his childhood and his recollections of what had been told to him about his ancestors, as well as my mother's. Among my mother's papers I found three handwritten sheets of paper, listing a handful of ancestors' names and approximate birth and death dates that her mother had given her back in the 1970s when the genealogy craze first started in the U.S.

A couple of my cousins had a treasure trove of old family photographs and allowed me to make copies. I took copious handwritten notes and also downloaded and printed out a large quantity of documentation from online research. Most of it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, so I will have to reconstruct it -- fortunately, I have a really good memory.

The Internet has been an incredible development in genealogical research. Instead of traveling to courthouses all over the country, I was able to sit in front of computer at 3 o'clock in the morning and view images of U.S. census records from the mid-1800s. There are a lot of genealogists out there who have done an immense amount of work and are sharing it via the Internet. As with anything on the 'Net, you have to take things with a grain of salt, and you learn to approach things with a good intuition and critical research skills.

What I've been able to determine is that on both sides of my family, branching back through the maternal and paternal lineages -- and that's a lot of people, a lot of surnames -- no one immigrated to the U.S. later than 1800. I had not been aware of it until now, but I am pretty much a 100% daughter of the Confederacy, and before that, a daughter of the American Revolution many times over. Which fact would have absolutely thrilled my mother had she known it, bless her heart.

At least one branch of my mother's family (surname Warren) has been traced back to Jamestown. As far as I can tell, most of my ancestors came over from England, Ireland, and Scotland, but there are also Swedes, French Huguenots, and German Palatines.

My father's father was descended on his mother's side from Andrew Job, a confidante of William Penn, who led the Quaker "refugee" settlement from England to the New World. Another Job descendant named DeWitt Jobe, my grandfather's mother's first cousin, became a Confederate martyr at the age of 19. A spy for the South, he was captured by Union forces, beaten, strangled, his eyes gouged out and his tongue cut out, after which he was dragged behind a horse until dead. (Or so the story goes; it may have been embellished over the years; then again, maybe not. War is hell.) He was posthumously awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor in 1977.

I like to say that I am distantly related to half the people in the United States, and I don't think that's much of an exaggeration. Indeed, related to a lot of the people in Europe, as well.

This means that my story is the story of America. The way my ancestors evolved in the past 350 years on U.S. soil is the way the American consciousness has developed and how we got to the state we're in now, in the year 2006.

Look again at the picture of my father's "Granny Williams" and think about that some more.

Thinking, talking, and doing

One of my new blog categories is "the personal is political." I recently heard that concept explained as "the intersection of personal responsibility and collective movement; of individuality and of influencing many people. "

For the past several years, most of my information-gathering has been via the Internet. In my opinion, the mainstream mass media, notably TV but also most newspapers, is currently less than worthless for that purpose. All of the major media outlets are owned by a handful of giant multinational corporations -- GE, for example -- and their bottom line is making money: marketing and entertaining, rather than challenging their viewers and possibly upsetting them with real, hard facts that might not match what they want to see.

The reason I said "less than worthless" is because we've got a marketers' world of illusion that's being presented to us as reality, and that illusory view of the world is what most folks are using to make their decisions. That's dangerous and scary.

I've spent a lot of time online the past few years, reading, thinking, seeing what other people are saying, and sometimes adding my own voice to the mix. Talking is very important. It helps us sort out what we think, refine our ideas, and create community with others. However, thinking and talking can be a really good way for us to pretend that we're addressing a problem when we're actually avoiding it. There are times for philosophizing (and believe me, I love to do that) and there are times for doing.

I can tell you exactly when this became crystal clear to me.

On Day 5 after Hurricane Katrina, I was aware that my entire town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast had been destroyed, and I'd spent several terrifying days trying to get my elderly father out of New Orleans. I was intimately involved with what was happening in New Orleans. I also was worried about the friends who I knew had stayed in Bay St. Louis during the storm. Through Internet message boards -- the magnificent Katrina version of the signs posted in lower Manhattan in the days after 9/11, by people looking for their loved ones -- I'd been able to find out that some of them were still alive but had no food, water, shelter, or medical care; and some of them had been injured or gotten sick because of the toxic conditions.

After my father made his escape from New Orleans  -- he literally hitch-hiked out, after a Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputy refused to help him and left the 83-year-old man standing by the side of the road; the authorities in this upscale, conservative suburb of New Orleans were too busy trying to keep the people from Orleans Parish from using Jefferson Parish roads as an escape route out of town to help their own residents get to safety -- we went to visit some relatives in north Louisiana.

On Friday night, Day 5, we were watching TV at their house, viewing the scenes out of New Orleans, still flooded, with the misery at the Superdome ongoing. At the time we were watching this, the people in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast were suffering horribly. I knew what was happening; I was afraid for my friends, exhausted and in shock about what was happening to the place I'd lived in for my entire life. I could do absolutely nothing for them, and was trying to hold on to the hope that the people who could do something were doing so.

After showing scenes from New Orleans, the news switched to Washington, D.C. They showed U. S. Senators and Representatives, standing on the floor of the U.S. Congress, carrying on about how horrible this was, something's wrong with our government, blah blah blah. Now, I don't disagree with a lot of what they said, and if I hadn't been from Katrina land, I might have joined in the discussion about it on the Internet. But something clicked for me.

Human beings were suffering, beyond endurance, and in imminent danger of dying. They didn't need people pontificating and philosophizing. They needed actual, live, specific physical help from their fellow human beings.

Blog jazz

A long time ago I discovered the value in putting my feelings and thoughts on paper. You could call it journalling, except it's more than that: it takes different forms, depending on what I need at the moment. Always, though, it has been as uncensored and authentic as possible. It's been me, writing to myself, for myself; essentially a kind of self-therapy, a way of coming into intimate contact with the various aspects of myself.

The reason I started blogging was so I wouldn't just be talking to myself; although I am definitely talking to myself as well, as I guess any writer or artist is. I'm potentially communicating with the entire world; anyone who surfs or Googles can end up reading what I write, and it's been amusing to see what some of the searches are that lead people to this blog.

Someone I know who writes a syndicated newspaper column was asked whether she received emails from readers and whether she answers them. Her answer was that she does little beyond acknowledging receipt, because "it's a column, not a conversation." I'm coming from a different direction with this blog. I want it to be a conversation. A mutual give-and-take of ideas and experiences and energy. The analogy I have in mind is jazz ... one person says something, another person riffs off of that, and so on.

Contrast this with an orchestra, where the musicians play music composed by another person and follow the direction of the conductor. In jazz, no one person is in control of the process and there is no absolute "road map" to follow. Each person contributes their individual unique expression, following their own creative process, trusting each other, playing off each other (and I think the concept of "play" is important here); and what they are doing is creating a greater whole. This is a new way of group creation. Both the individual and the group are of primary importance.

I'm not sure if I'm getting across what this looks like to me, but I think what I'm describing is the way the world is heading -- if it is to survive -- in terms of evolving new ways of relating and connecting. It goes way beyond people learning to "get along with each other", into actively enjoying each other's existence and co-creating in mutually beneficial ways.

Here's the dilemma I find myself in: there are certain things I want to explore here, some things that I think go to core issues facing humankind now, and particularly in the United States. I would like to put these ideas out there and see what happens. However, to discuss these things, I am going to have to talk about other people. I don't need to use names, and my intention is to do it non-judgmentally and for the purpose of discussion. To readers who know me, though, it may be apparent who I am talking about. An intrinsic part of what I want to say is derived from observing my family, and that could get a bit tricky.

My experiences this past fall after Hurricane Katrina are fundamental to what I've been seeing and realizing. Major doors are opening in my understanding and awareness. The thing is, in order to fully discuss what I need to, I may have to say things that could hurt people's feelings or make them angry and that might not show me in the best light. I lived in other people's homes for several months; things happened that led to insights for me; how do I talk about it without sounding ungrateful to the people (fallible human beings) who gave me shelter?

La Catrina and Dia de los Muertos

In Mexico and the southwestern U. S., the day after All Saints' Day is Dia de los Muertos.

La Catrina is the reigning queen of Dias de los Muertos, the Mexican fiesta honoring the dead. Finely dressed in an upper-class Victorian style, an oversized, feathered and flowered hat perched primly on her skull, elegant but skeletal, La Catrina was popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada in his political lampoons of the corrupt regime of Porfirio Díaz. Her role, then and now, is simple: She reminds us that rich or poor, famed or unknown, we all eventually become skeletons.

Until August 29, 2005, Beach Boulevard in Hancock County, Mississippi, was populated with mansions and upscale camps from its western end, past Waveland, to its northeastern end in Bay St. Louis, where the Yacht Club was located.  Those are all gone now, smashed to rubble and swept out to sea. As one of the owners said recently with a sense of irony, "the 'haves' are now the 'have nots'."

I read somewhere that Hurricane Katrina was the great leveler, metaphorically as well as physically. Money did not spare anyone from Katrina's wrath. Those with financial means may have been able to fend off some of the worst effects of the hurricane, but that may end up being merely a postponement. Many evacuees immediately bought new residences in new towns in an attempt to hurry up and get "back to normal". However, they still own their houses that were destroyed or seriously damaged but for which they continue to owe mortgage payments. In addition, they are still going to have to deal with the lingering physical and emotional impact, which may not show up until later. This may include health problems, marital difficulties, PTSD, job instability, and the effects of trauma experienced by their children.

If there is any constant in life, it is change. Nothing is permanent, nothing stays the same, nothing lasts. Ever. Not our bodies, nor our jobs, our relationships, the communities we live in, our religious institutions, or our nations.

I wonder how having money has enabled us to avoid facing our ultimate lack of control over the impermanence of all things, as well as the implications of the fact that we are here together on this planet. Our fates, our lives are inescapably connected and getting more so by the minute. What other people do affects us, and we cannot control what they do.

We have been using money to substitute for being truly present to each other and to our own lives. This is true on both the personal as well as the sociopolitical level. If I have the financial means, I can insulate myself from having to engage in the "give-and-take" of being in the world in conjunction with other imperfect humans. I can isolate within my own home and my own mind and limit myself to what is presented to me as "real life' in the media, as filtered through my own belief system. I can pretend that I am in control. Because Americans in particular live far beyond their actual means, we have gone seriously into debt (I mean that economically, but I think it applies spiritually as well) in an avoidance of the realities of life.

I think time just ran out on that one.

Autumn in the South, post-Katrina

Autumn has arrived here in the Deep South. Today, I went shopping for sweaters, since none of mine survived the hurricane. I kept thinking about all of the people on the Gulf Coast whose homes were destroyed and whose FEMA trailers have not arrived yet.

From the GulfCoastNews.com Recovery News Report, updated 10/24/05 at 5:43 PM:

Much cooler overnight temperatures have arrived on the Coast with temps in the low to mid 40's expected. The low temperatures will be a hardship for many Katrina victims currently living in tents. More than 3,200 FEMA trailers have been set up in Hancock County, more than any other county since Katrina, but nearly 2,000 more will be needed in Hancock County.

The thing you have to understand is, these are just people. Whatever your preconceptions are about hurricane "victims" or "homeless people", let them go. We are all just human beings, of all socioeconomic groups, all races, all walks of life. It's not "you" and "us", or "us" and "them".

We are you.

This is what it's about:

Katrina has shown me some things. She's shown me that the American government is unable to protect anything we hold dear. She's shown me that the American people are an amazing, giving, tough, resourceful, huge people, and that they're not being represented fairly by the current class of small-hearted politicians and lazy bureaucrats. She's shown me that people around the world care about us after all, despite our government. She's shown me that it's not about FEMA, it's not about the Red Cross, that it's about amazing families like Elizabeth and Kenny's family in North Carolina. Like I've said before, it's just about people like you and me, on our own, together.

First trip back to the Gulf Coast

My first order of business when we got to Bay St. Louis this past Saturday was to check on mail delivery to my P. O. Box. After the 2-hour drive, we were very pleased to see a row of "port-a-potties" lined up in the Post Office parking lot. The people whose homes have been destroyed and who are living in tents on their property don't have indoor plumbing. Those of us who come in for the day to work on our houses don't dare use the bathroom facilities in our homes, for sanitary reasons.

(Not to mention, the idea is just gross. There is an inch-deep layer of wet, slippery sludge covering the floor of my house; things are rotting, or starting to mold and mildew; it smells horrible. We had to wear dust masks/respirators and rubber gloves to work. I have been told that when the storm surge hit, the water didn't just come in through the walls and floors, it came up with great force through the plumbing fixtures -- the sewer lines backed up, in other words. People who were there say it was like fountains spraying out of the toilet and bathtub.)

On the Mississippi Coast, a great many people are still living in primitive conditions. Tent cities have sprung up in shopping center parking lots -- the stores themselves are closed, having been severely damaged by the storm -- where meals are prepared and served to the public, medical services rendered, drinking water and supplies handed out, and relief business transacted. Free Internet access is now being offered, since most people still don't have power and telephone service (kind of like a "tent city Internet cafe.") Most of this is being done by private individuals and groups, not by governmental agencies.

On the return trip after checking on my house, we made another pit stop at a rest area on I-10 just east of Slidell, LA. We parked next to two guys from the Kentucky Dept. of Public Health. I thanked them for being here, and they apologized for being able to do so little.

I have heard that so many times in the past few weeks. Everywhere I go in Baton Rouge and on the Coast, there are people and vehicles from all over the U.S., volunteering in many different ways. They see the enormity of what has happened, the overwhelming nature of what we are dealing with, and question whether what they do has any significance. I tell them, even if you are able to help only one person, to that person it means everything.

If I had to give one piece of advice to people who want to help, it would be: ASK. Ask us what we need. Let us lead. Right now it is so crystal clear to me what the difference is between true helping and selfish or self-centered helping. Acting on the basis of what you think someone needs or what you think you would need -- or worse, what you think someone ought to be doing -- is likely to be both a waste of your energy and frustrating to people who are functioning in incredibly difficult circumstances. The best helping comes from being present to the people you are there to assist, without judging or assuming anything, and, to the extent possible, without projecting your own issues into the situation.

The fact is that someone who has not gone through something like this cannot understand what the Katrina survivors are experiencing. Honestly, I am going through it as a survivor, and I barely understand. We don't have the luxury of trying to figure it out. I don't know that it can be figured out. The truth of this experience, whatever it may be, is not going to be comprehended by the mind thinking about it. And I have certainly tried to do it that way. It didn't work and just made me feel bad.

I am finding that going through this is bringing me to a new level of self-care. I don't have the energy to waste on people or situations that are not contributing constructively to my life; and that includes my stewing about things in my head. I am getting to be a lot less shy about removing myself from detrimental or otherwise inappropriate people or circumstances, when previously I would have put up with it or gone into denial about it. It takes a hell of a lot more energy to be in denial than to face reality, though, however unpleasant the latter may be.

Having your home and possessions destroyed in a particularly awful way, your entire community wiped out, friends missing or scattered around the country and in great distress themselves, disruption of income, being homeless, and having to make major life decisions about what to do and where to go from here ... all of this at the same time ... that's damned challenging. It is also real. It did happen.

May I become at all times, both now and forever
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those who have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need.

-- His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, from Ethics for the New Millennium

For the people who are offering me sanctuary, and those serving as my bridges and lamps, I am grateful.

A Teachable Moment

In my clearer moments, I feel grateful for being at Katrina "ground zero" and for being a part of what is happening at this significant moment for humanity.

I just received an email message from Rita Nakashima Brock, co-director of Faith Voices for the Common Good, describing the Sept. 26 peace march and rally in Washington, D.C., at which Cindy Sheehan and 369 others, including many members of the clergy, were arrested. Here is an excerpt:

Katrina has created a "teachable moment," a time when it becomes clear that our nation is off course. Though awareness is spreading, we people of conscience must continue to press for justice. Faith Voices, together with members of the Beloved Community, are planning an online town hall meeting to create a Declaration of Interdependence. Similar to the Peace Not Poverty event, unlimited numbers of us will join together to create a vision for the common good. Look for details soon!

[...]

A record 370 people of conscience had been arrested and were being held at the Anacostia jail. The Park Police had to borrow vans from the Metro Police because there were three times more people than they expected. The arrest took more than four hours.

What a journey!

From its humble beginnings at Camp Casey -- a handful of grieving mothers and veterans in a soggy, fire ant-infested ditch in Crawford, Texas -- to a march and rally of some 300,000 people, Cindy Sheehan has sparked a nationwide movement. What happens next is up to us.

I know we will rise to this call! I saw religious and non-religious people alike united by our mutual commitment to progressive values at Camp Casey and again on the grounds of the Washington Monument. The night before the arrests, at an gathering organized by Rev. Sekou, over 700 people celebrated what can only be described as a progressive tent revival for peace!

Dr. Cornell West, Mairead Corrigan -- Nobel Laureate from Belfast -- Rabbi Arthur Waskow, and more. Speakers from the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian traditions delivered fiery calls to serve justice, to have courage to make visible the losses of war, and to work to end oppression. A Jewish choir roused the crowd like gospel singers. I spoke for policies of love (text and photos). To close, a Buddhist monk from Japan stepped forward, in a flowing saffron robe, and sang "Go Down Moses," in tribute to his hero Harriet Tubman. He brought down the house, moving many of us to tears that reflected our heartfelt, united commitment to justice and peace. The service was one of the most moving interfaith experiences of my life.

The flame sparked by Cindy Sheehan is now a bonfire. Fanned by the winds of Katrina, it burns in the hearts of all people of conscience. We must make our nationwide commitment to progressive values unstoppable.

Interestingly, Rita Brock entitled her message "Declaring Our Interdependence." This is exactly what I've been feeling is one of the biggest lessons Katrina has to teach, both myself personally as well as all of us. We cannot continue to isolate ourselves within our homes, our minds, and our particular nations. We are here together, and we cannot do everything all by ourselves. We have to stop pretending that we can, and start learning how to rely on each other and be reliable for others.