For many people lives go on trajectories with a few collisions altering course now and then. Often collisions the result of events impacting others change many peoples' arcs at once:
Megahurricane Sandy was one of those events, certainly. Like an earthquake, events of consequence have aftershocks; appearing 'randomly' in the days and weeks after. For folks in NJ and NY time, measured between now and now+1, is in deep freeze, waiting for it's Spring, for the return of light, heat, and consumer social structure. Even while the days shorten and the nights grow colder, they wait with forced patience.
Following the initial shock of awareness that something
big has taken place, people outside the event locus pass through the experience in the third person. Some will be moved to help, be it for families, people they haven't met, animals separated from their owners. Others will ensure their ten fingers and ten toes are all still attached and move on, keeping a watchful eye on the weather glass for a time until the memory fades.
I fell into a rabbit hole for a
while during the storm. We lost power in NH twice, each time for
only a few hours (though many in the state were down for days). We
traveled to outside NYC to be with family. Although my mother in-law
was hospitalized with exposure (her home in White Plains had power
resumed early Thursday the 8
th)
all were of good cheer to be past the storm with no further family
injuries. Returning home I became a radio of sorts, receiving all
kinds of messages from everywhere and occasionally spitting out bits
of static. Could have been from
SETI
@ Home. I don't know.
Today I went through
my favorite RSS Reader program to catch up on the zillions of music, economic, and GooGly pages I follow, for the first time in a while. And there's a ripple, a little aftershock from Sandy: a posting from fellow music lover and former NJ resident
Mitch Lopate on his
TGStars web page. Adapting with less? Surviving and sharing? Whether it be in the form of changing weather patterns or the .0001%, these are
good things to be thinking about daily, and working towards, little by slow if necessary. Because we're not going to have a choice at some point.
But anyway,
the point of this blit was not to be all doom and gloom but to
celebrate the fact
Mitch
called me within minutes of my post.
And we talked, for nearly a half hour, about sustaining, family, NJ,
WA, the Canary Islands, earthen homes, Mitch's music writings, the
Zapatistas
and their form of self-government, Economic Hit men, astrology,
and What The Future Will Hold.
There
are very few humans I can enjoy speaking with like this (though I
have conversations like this with my dog Willow on occasion) and it
was an absolute gift for me that Mitch decided to call. After
thinking about this some I realized, the internets is frickin'
awesome.
