Past, present and future-- sometimes they all intersect. This has been one of those times for me. Many memories can flood up in me sometimes related to old injuries; but more recently I have gained more fondness for the pleasant times in my life, counting up adventures and friendships like blessings in my personal history.
At the same time, I know things from experience and that gives me a different perspective from younger people who are just starting up with their adult lives and fortunes. I used to say as a young woman beginning to find myself that what I value the most are experience and friendship. That had something to do with my writing in some way; how can you enjoy writing without some substance?
Over time I learned how to sit with the moment through meditating, healing practices, and poetry. Those disciplines have not all been readily maintained in my daily life because I tend to be a scatterbrained slob. But they help me to understand what is valuable. Generally it isn't the big wins but the singular moments.
Here we are now, living in middle America, with another flood upon us and thinking back to 1993, when we were stunned with a hundred year flood. Huh. Somewhere either I or my daughter has a book that the Post-Dispatch published afterwards, filled with the photographs of the drama that emerged out of the clouds. Now we're back there again in Missouri and places further south, while my brain is hung up on current needs, past scenarios in a grattitudinal analysis of where i have been since kidhood. Seems that I had some premonition about this flood of memories over all sorts of history-- when I heard the weather forecast before the disasters hit us with tornadoes, floods and horror.
Yesterday, May 2, 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers began their intervention on the flood wall front to protect the little town of Cairo, Illinois, leaving some people in southern Missouri bewildered over it all. Think back to the flood of 1927 for a moment. I lived in Paducah, Kentucky for a couple of years, a solitary confinement of a memory for me in some ways. It was not the happiest time of my life, finishing up with my high school education under duress. But I remember those stories from people about how one might find underneath the wall paper on many an old house interior the flood line still visible. Pianos floated in that water, among other dearly loved possessions. Can you imagine that? There were elders in the community who remembered those incidentals and chuckled about it by then, mid 60s.
Later I traversed an assortment of highways on an occasional visit back to the Paducah area, and some of those towns are familiar sights in my mind yet-- Metropolis, Cairo, Cape Girardeau. They have changed, no doubt; but I crossed over into Kentucky over more than one bridge. People who aren't familiar with the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi don't really recognize that the Ohio is a much larger river, and it is a stunning place on the planet where the two rivers meet. That's why I started to follow the story so closely. I can visualize some of those areas as they usually have been, and the photos of the flooding, along with the flood levels at Metropolis have stirred me with concern and with reverence for what we are looking forward to on this planet in terms of climate change.
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/il/nwis/uv/?site_no=03611500&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060
We need each other on this Earth to use our collective inquiry into ourselves and the powers that be in order to change the future. Imagine that. Determining our future instead of denying it a chance as a hopening, a quiet interior place where hope happens by our opening up to the stirring of our collective spirit.
http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2011/05/03/historic-flooding-possible/
http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Area-river-level-information-from-National-Weather-Service-120579274.html
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