Preserving the Wild Soul

Julia & Dylan, August 2006

We’re sitting on a red and blue quilt on a wide green lawn overhung with cedars, at an Ani diFranco concert. It is my daughter’s last night before she leaves us to go back to school for her junior college year, maybe the last summer she will come to spend with us before she travels to Europe to study opera. Because she is going, because we are already feeling her loss, she sits between my husband and I, rather than having to choose sides. When he goes off to find us dessert, she leans into me and asks, “Any last words of wisdom?” I laugh and tell her she has almost surpassed me in wisdom, and that the best I can tell her is to trust herself, to trust what she wants. She knows what I mean by this.

We have spent most of the summer deciphering what it means to live by one’s instinctive nature. I have experimented with sitting in one place doing nothing for hours until it occurs to me what I really want. I have gotten up, made a sandwich, taken a walk, written an essay, sat in stillness with those words. She has tried a few experiments with casual relationships, and then determined it isn’t for her. Through a health challenge, I have begun to look at my own history of pushing through adversarial circumstances, managing details, caring for others, because I was strong and I could – but not necessarily because I was acting out of my own sense of order or horror or beauty or understanding. My daughter also has allowed herself to stop; to rest her voice for six weeks, to cease requiring a busy social life, to sit in her own boredom until she could locate her essence.

I think if I could pass along one bit of knowing to her it would be this: One cannot preserve the wild soul on piecemeal terms. I have tried. I have tried taking a karate class, and redecorating the living room and cleansing my liver and buying the cutest freakin boots to ever walk down Pike Street. Beautiful alterations that lasted a few moments, and still never delivered the intended, lasting joie de vivre.

What sustains my wild soul is living less out of perceived obligation, finding the place where desire and responsibility have merged into one soulful union. It can emerge in writing what has depth, rather than what I think someone is going to buy. It can come in finding creative people to be in relationship with, and then setting a structure to that interaction that allows each of us to thrive. It can come in noticing anger when it arises, and not making anyone else but myself responsible for that anger; it can come through taking action to alter the circumstances that cause my resentment. It can come through consistently making choices not to alter my consciousness with substances, to live in truth as it arises. It can come through giving myself enough time to follow a spontaneous choice – to turn to my daughter in the middle of making dinner, and laugh and sing and turn off the peas to have a long embrace. Or, in saying to the family – I need quiet to write, and I’m going in here and shutting the door, and unless there’s catastrophe – don’t disturb me.

And I know she’s learned this, because I watch my daughter making choices to halt the red shoes’ incessant dance. On a summer trip to see her childhood friend Julia, after a luscious Indian dinner, and a drive through Vancouver, and consulting the paper for nightlife, she decides she wants to craft a full moon ritual instead of either going to party or descending into abstract conversation. “What makes you most a woman? What does it mean for you to be female?” she asks us. And after we answer, in between nibbling a bowl of cherries and lighting candles and finding bed linens for makeshift beds, I lay my head on a pillow and close my eyes, safe in an apartment full of women who know who are they, and if not, who can sense who they are becoming. An hour later I wake up to giggles and splashes. She and Julia have submerged themselves in a bubble bath, where I will learn later, they have set themselves right on all matters of uncommunicative men, and disaffected roommates and ineffective teachers.

Joseph Campbell called for a ‘creative mythology’ that could become the structuring force of civilization – one whose core is not theological, but instead personal. In this creative story, we allow our experience to suffuse our being, to wait for its depth and import to arise through our understanding of events, to know out of what one has been in, not what one has been told. Through true revelation, an uncoerced discovery of our deep soul, Campbell says we become a living myth. In a world gone mad with killing over God, this secular yet inspiring philosophy might indeed preserve not only humans, but also the earth, which is being destroyed through our unconsciousness.

And so, dearest daughter, I would say spend all your learning becoming your self, and spend it too in the practice of courage and steadfastness it will take to hold your wild soul when others have ideas for you. Become the spiritual guide of knowing your own nature, and devote yourself to the unflinching task of serving it. For, whatever its name, or hue, or form, this soul will create the events of your life, and with it, you will be carried as a river is carried by its shore.

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Thoughts influenced by Clarissa Pinkola Estes "The Red Shoes," and Joseph Campbell’s “Creative Mythology."

Beulah & Babeland

I’m dreaming of Sean Penn these days. He’s in his crazy mode, wearing wigs of outrageous colors – a long, red, shaggy one and then a short waxy mane of a more calculated man. In the dream, he’s taking time for himself, pulling back from the public, and he must go to elaborate measures to be private. I see how it costs him the natural, spontaneous interaction, how one falls into observer and protector at the same time.

Sean is the William Blake of my internal landscape. He negotiates his own creative territory, showing inside my nightly story how withdrawal is a discreet stage of artistic work. I think we have become a culture so defined by the product, by the power of the market, that we tell more of what the woodcuts went for at Sotheby’s and less of the tale of how Blake worked from his Beulah, the realm of the subconscious, the source of inspiration. And it doesn’t matter what the culture does, because I’m here in my mind, forming a world from my thoughts and beliefs and interactions, and this is becoming the reality that can trigger events.

Like yesterday when I took my daughter to Babeland. (www.babeland.com) “You’re education isn’t finished until your mother buys your first sex toy,” I’d told her, but honestly I would have settled on her getting a book, a film (do they call them films?) or a jar of massage oil. It was the experience I wanted for her, the openness of the free-loving women who created the place, the exploration of multiple genders and sexual styles, the light informational touch that makes everything acceptable.

“There’s a new polyamory workshop coming up in a week,” the round-bodied shop girl says to another customer. We were there at midday on a Friday, and there were couples, gay and straight, purchasing vibrators and butt plugs. There was an old Japanese man admiring the glass dildos in the window – they were like snakes of wild colors, and there was a middle-aged man, being helped by a beautiful lesbian attendant as he sought to find the right kind of whip.

“Did you see how the people watched us?” my daughter asked. We are so obviously mother and daughter, with our bright green eyes, and soft smiles. “Maybe we’re in the beginning of an inter-generational dialogue that openly encourages sexuality in all its forms,” I’d said then, rather hopefully. But we both knew the government in power has been trying to shut down sexual expression with the vigor of a zealot on a crusade: votes against gay marriage, redressing Roe vs. Wade, giving pharmacists the right to deny birth control. “What do they really want?” we’d asked ourselves later: “Man on top dominion? Women back in the kitchen?”

I’d told my daughter about the first time I’d seen a sex shop. It had been while I was getting a lift with a trucker, hauling whiskey from Ontario to Kentucky, a route I often took to visit relatives down south (with permission from my distiller father, who managed the shipments.) I’d walked into a truck stop, turned the wrong way, and found myself in the middle of a porn field, my fifteen year old body in jeans and a t-shirt suddenly feeling as if it had a dozen hands on it, the greasy covers of videos and magazines blazing blonde and tits as the erotic coda.

“I want something different for you,” I told my daughter. I want her to know that she owns her sexuality, that it is of her definition, not theirs. And since both my toddlers received Joani Blank coloring books, and since we didn’t hide the books on tantra, and since we lived in a house where I’d promised to answer truthfully every question they asked, this wasn’t the first time she’d heard that wish for her sexual sovereignty.

“If you help raise a child you can tell them that we did this one day,” I’d said to her, silently forming my own prayer that it wouldn’t be in a world of puritanical regulation, of political or social dogmatism. I want my daughter’s eroticism to be able to be expressed in art, movement, ideas, lovemaking and creative choices, and not limited by the censure of a people inhibited by their desires. I want her source of inspiration, what Blake would call her Beulah, to be both private and transparent – and only she gets the choice about what may be revealed. I want for her a world as wild and free as she can dream, one where she gets to wear any outrageous color.

(Craft above courtesy of Babeland blog site)

What I Am To Do

Today I find myself in constant inquiry: what am I to do, what’s necessary? My life has become more like the blank page than ever – no responsibility demanded from an externalized authority, no children to take care of, a partner who prefers silence, few links with groups and organizations, less financial constraint than any other decade of my life. Still, there is the page of the day, the long hours upon which to place a desire, the wait to see if the desire holds. And because I was raised to exert willpower to succeed, and didn’t really question the consequences of self-discipline until my forties, I awake at dawn with a list of creative projects that could be undertaken. And then I make coffee, draw an angel card, clean the kitchen, read my email, check the calendar -- a date book that is filled with honest labor and hope for real contact with others. From the days I have written activities, it is obvious I care about designing the garden, walking with friends at Green Lake, time with my beloved, making a healthy dinner, writing the novel.

This season, I find myself less inclined to draw upon will to craft my time. Instead, I’m asking the heart. Listening for what the moment requires. There’s a line from A Course in Miracles: “Once you have accepted Its plan as the one function you will fulfill, there will be nothing else the Holy Spirit will not arrange for you.“ I suppose I’m trying to accept ‘Its plan,’ and the source for this information is often in what’s showing up in my day. God as reality. With this spontaneous way of living, there’s less of a need to make a choice, and more of a moment of reflecting upon the decision as it moves toward me.

Ah, a rejection letter – will it cause me to quit? Not likely. Instead it’s a redirect, a chance to rethink the structure, to change the book’s title. Then a call from a friend whose having an aha! moment and wants to share. It leads me right into gratitude for where I’ve come from, an acknowledgement of how our family has moved through its suffering to our center. There’s an art project needing completion for the show on Friday, and I’ll do it late in the afternoon after I’ve written a few pages. There’s the novel, the writing that I’ve turned away from this last year because I couldn’t wrench my voice from a teacher’s influence. And since I’ve done the work to reclaim my sovereignty, it’s time to place it in the forefront again.

In coming back to this work of fiction, I realize I’m writing from the point of view of a child, and so there is a fresh burst -- an idealism, an optimism, a sense that I can be enthusiastic again. And because the novel is in the form of magic realism, it can speak of the extraordinary, it can find answers in which the supernatural may resolve the unspeakable. I’m also aware that magic must also support the human condition; that the novel can’t resort to enchanting but tidy solutions because someone needs one. I can’t forget the Holy Spirit is arranging this story and its unfolding, and it’s one I don’t have to push, that I can intuit toward it.

When Beltane fires are reduced to ashes, I’ll start committing to even less, ask for more silence, find solace in the little library I’ve created in our home, determine to set aside enough time to write a chapter each week. And in my calendar, I’ll keep looking for the signs of the summer, signs the ‘one function’ is becoming clearer all the time.

A Time for Great Doubt

"Heart Menhir" photo by Carole Harmon,www.harmonphotography.com
Sonya on the Cote Savage, France, 2005

I used to be able to say I was immune because I was outside the country, an American living in Canada, Canadian by education and mind-set and belief system. And then I moved back, or rather my husband convinced me to try this country I’d left when I was eight, told me there was more opportunity here, more to earn and more to do and more to share. And then when I’d lived here for a few years, I realized the sharing was becoming increasingly scarce, that folks mostly were looking to find ways to hole up with their paycheck and their tax cuts, and their three car garages, and that if I was smart, I would be too.

And I like to think that I am sharing the wealth, that I give to groups that spread goats and chickens and bees to families without the means, and I give my used clothing and books to local relief agencies, and I give my time to people who are hurting, and I give cash to the homeless people, and I give food to anyone who wants it. And what I notice is --after years in this war I’m increasingly not sharing my outrage. I’m looking at new photographs from Guantanamo and I’m getting up from the couch and I’m making a bowl of ice cream. I’m reading the New York Times piece about the new Patriot Act being passed, and I’m making plans on where to take my husband for our twenty-fifth anniversary. I’m listening to them talk about taking away our right to be spied upon, and I’m shutting it out, going for a walk, trying to connect with my god.

I go to hospitals to put my hands on babies. I leave love messages for my children. I send books to young people without anything to read. And I don’t talk about my secret despair – that we could be in these children’s generation or their children’s generation, leaving nothing for them, humans going the way of the dinosaurs…Mama, remember when the rivers had running streams?

There’s a room in my home I call the maitri room, maitri, for the practice of loving-kindness. Three times a week I go into that room and I scream, I kick the air, I hit pillows. And under the anger I’m terrified, and desperate, and unruly. I’m fucking tired of sending letters. This sitting in a room with twenty or so other people who think just like me is wearing me down. I used to be able to say, “but I don’t know what to do,” but I’m 46, and that’s not cutting it anymore. There is something to do.

“If you’re working within your community, then you are doing the right thing,” my friends say. But I think that change is not getting to the others fast enough. The others, them, the ones-in power, the leaders, the government.

Each day I pray: Let me be of use. Show me how to bring peace to these warring times. Is it useful that I’m writing the words in a novel? Is it useful that I’m trying to bring the otherworld into popular culture? Is this the use – making a dinner for my friends?

I cried into the telephone to my friend Wendy after Hurricane Katrina hit: “What the hell am I doing being an artist?” I shouted, and then I signed up for the Red Cross with my husband and we went on assignment, trying to give out money, and ended up mostly expending energy preventing the people who didn’t deserve the money from getting it.

“What if your voice was exactly what was required by the world?” my friend asks, and for a moment I imagine it like the butterfly that dashes the spread of violence. The artist’s voice exists within the imagination, where we aim for consciousness, but art is without strategy. Iris Murdoch said, “Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. We are presented with a truthful image of the human condition in a form which can be steadily contemplated; and indeed this is the only context in which many of us are capable of contemplating it at all.”

For me, responsible objectivity to this point has been committing to get clear, to sort through cloudy thinking, to give up substances that alter me, to meditate my way out of passing emotional states, to raise responsible children, to learn to live with a smaller ecological footprint. Still, there is something else to do.

I think of Starhawk and the Rant Collective doing bioremediation in New Orleans, using beneficial bacteria and mushrooms to clean up the toxins in that hurricane-ravaged city. I think of my friend Pamela Grace helping people debunk the money myths that have held them hostage, offering folks a way out of debt. I think of the shaman Valerie Wolf who taught me how to journey and dream on behalf of those in need.

I’ve been writing since I was twelve, and pretty much by the end of the story I could sum things up. I could say this is what it is, this is what I know. And now I know that I don’t know all sides. The greatest truth, the biggest place of freedom is that I really do not know. I know pieces of things, I know the way my mind wraps around them. I know that I can listen, that I can hear, and often, I know the consequences of an action before it is felt. Yet, I don’t know how an action is being held, how it is floated, what it will mean in the long run. Up until now, I’ve mostly felt impatient with the not knowing, so impatient that I used it as proof that nothing was really happening anyway, so why try? In this new I-don’t-know there is liberation, optimism, a breath coming in.

Daniel Dennett, of the recent “Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” has said that people will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea "that has lodged in their brains." Maybe this is the way we prevent our own extinction – by tracing our personal ideological iconography, by breathing some hesitation into our convictions.

This is true for me -- good writing has enlarged my sensibilities, and mostly in its portrayal of the ambiguity and complexity of the human condition. Letters have spaces between them; sentences have pauses. There is something to do, and it requires proper reflection -- action as a vessel that can contain the truth. We can take a moment before action is necessary while we consider. It is a moment that can save lives, one that can alter the direction toward cruelty, or toward virtue.

On the last day of our spiritual retreat, my friend Anne shows me the mudra for fearlessness. It’s the third finger held to the thumb, the others pointing straight to the sky. I try to fall asleep this way, and when I wake, I re-form my fingers, hope for fearlessness. In this form of fearlessness, I want to act without the conviction of superior knowledge; I want to stop in the doubt of the moment until the way is clear. I want to watch the world shape itself like my fingers, not toward courageousness in its perfect bravery and certainty, but with all fear evident, even while we wait, even as we proceed.

Say I Am Going Home

photo by John Cooper

On the last day in one of our temporary homes a package from my almost twenty-year-old daughter arrives. In it is a paper writ with scroll-embellished calligraphy. It says: “When I say I am going home, I mean I am going to where you are.” I draw in my breath. This has been the child who has had the most difficulty with being uprooted, mirroring my own ambivalence about being a gypsy. It’s been three years of traveling for us – from Seattle to California to France to another town in California, and now back to Seattle. It’s been three years where we’ve been choosing because of the Cancer, making the choices that could protect my husband while he recuperated, making choices that gave our daughter the opportunity to work with gifted voice teachers.

“I don’t know where I’m coming home to,” she said just before this Yule celebration, calling from her college apartment in snowy Indiana. “Sometimes you have to locate home within yourself,” I’d said. But then she knew I hadn’t grown up like that. She knew I’d left my childhood home as soon as I fell in love with a gangly boy-man at 17. I had located myself within his turbulent heart, and I’d stayed there mostly, venturing out for forays into Zen, brief flirtations with other men and women, writing retreats. He was my home so I could almost lose my mind talking with characters while a story formed. He was my home while I learned that I loved women, but not enough to live with them. He was my home while I almost drank to disappearance, and then reshaped my psyche by understanding what’s at stake in being true to oneself.

A therapist asked me once: “Do you think it might be dangerous to locate yourself within a man who has Cancer? I mean, maybe he needs his energy for his own healing.” And I hadn’t thought that I’d be a drain on him, that I’d be tiresome or depleting. I thought that he lived within me as much as I in him, but I’d never considered whether this was wrong. Because of his Cancer, and the inward river he had already set out on as he contemplated his second surgery, I started removing myself from him, piece by piece, a daily practice of energetic withdrawal. I stood by the shore while he drifted, silently floating toward some place I had never known, couldn’t envision.

It wasn’t until the surgery that his spirit had called me back. After the deadly cut that nicked his stomach and caused his insides to fill with blood, after they’d inserted the tube and begun bagging him to fill his lungs, after we’d all ridden down in the elevator to the second surgery of the night, I sat in the dark waiting room, its only sound the blaring of a television I was helpless to quiet, and chattered so loudly my teeth bit my tongue. My sister wrapped her arms around me to keep me warm, and still I shivered, my body inside his cold skin, offering my devotion, my radiance, my love. “I knew he was going to be okay because you suddenly shook me off and stood up, your chill finally resolved. I knew you were in there with him,“ my sister said, and I’d looked at her with such gratitude; my sister, the practical nurse who truly witnessed the unseen.

Three years later we did the unthinkable – we moved back to a place we had already been. We moved back because though we knew we were joined in Spirit, we had missing pieces that had to be completed by others. We had created a safe place to go out from for our daughter and our son, but we needed that for us too. My husband needed his patients, their ills and constraints, their sufferings and stories, so he could give back the healing that had been given him. I needed my writers, my dakini sisters, my adventurers, my soul friends. I say to them, the Seattle ones and the ones nearby, in Banff and Vancouver, “When I say I am going home, I mean I am going to where you are.”

Terminal Numinous

The afternoon I leave Seattle there is a car to return and a shuttle to the airport and before I am called to board the plane, a train to the outlying terminal: Terminal N, like ‘November’ I think, using a military alphabet to remember my destination, until I rename it Terminal Numinous, because I’m looking for an alliteration with hope.

On the train to Terminal Numinous I hold the rail and look down at my jeans, denim that has wicked water out of city puddles, drawn their cold wet straight up to my California knees, knees that once knew how to stay dry when I lived in the northwest, a thousand years ago. I can’t remember how to choose the right hat for the weather, and which lanes lead up the hill to the expressway and what time is good for traveling over slick streets so it’s minutes not hours getting there. And so I seriously miscalculate, arriving too early with the laid-over businessmen, grumpy in their Friday clothes and paper sack repasts. I wedge myself between their iPod’d ears, admire their dry cuffs and take in the aroma of aftershave, the scent of musk and longing, of sweat covered over with flowers.

And when I lean over to pick up my bag, I realize it isn’t them I’m smelling but myself, a perfume I can’t place until I track it back to the parking lot at Madison & 16th, where I’d handed him the packages and he’d placed them on the gravel lot and grabbed me up, transferred his fragrance onto my sweater, my son lifting me into the air like I’d once swung him, my feet flying out in back, arms bigger than his father’s clasping so hard I’d exhaled fast, tried to make myself lighter. He’d laughed and said something then, but I couldn’t recall it because I’d been thinking at that moment how I was coming back to this city, which was his and not yet mine. I’d been thinking of what it is to find yourself a stranger in your own life, to live years and years with satire and biting wit and then to suddenly notice the complete absence of irony. I was thinking of how it might be to be the son of a man who’d gone through a brain injury, watched its resultant personality change and memory loss, including the loss of stories from your own childhood, stories from your father’s past. I was wondering whether the boy-regrets would depart, or whether they’d stay underground, waiting for a sign it was okay to come out. My son was smiling down at me and I was thinking of last night, when he’d had to stop talking a long time while he held his tears, how I’d reached over and asked him to cry. And when he could speak, how I was surprised at the source of his sadness, though I ought not to have been. “It’s like being cut off from your history,” he’d said, “when there’s no way back to your father’s past, his people.”

I told him the story I could recollect then, of discovering I was pregnant with him, our first, the first grandchild on both sides, how we’d found out two weeks after his father’s mother died, how she’d been driven over on the street while giving directions to a stranger. I told him I was awakened one night a year later while he slept in the basinet next to me, startled by a woman’s shimmer at the foot of the bed, how she’d walked over and placed her hand on our baby boy, offering a sign of protection, a signal that she’d be there for this one, how his grandmother had disappeared when my fear grew stronger. “That happened?” he asked, and I couldn’t imagine that I hadn’t told him. Maybe these stories had been told only to the boy-child, the one who used to believe in magic. Maybe I’d forgotten that the man needed the stories too, needed them as much as the food we’d send him when the demands of school and work intensified. Maybe this young man was calling us back to him to recover the mystery, the numinous portal of ancestors and remembrance, the place where what has been lost can be re-imagined.

Asking for clear-seeing

From the Hurricanes Katrina & Rita Call Center, Bakersfield, California

1.
We don’t receive the call confirming our Red Cross assignment until the day after the Owl is freed. It is almost Mabon, the autumnal equinox, and the vineyard that borders our home cascades plastic netting, strung to protect the grape harvest from the peck of the birds. A young Owl has caught her talons in the web, and then in her struggle, has bound her wings to her frame in a synthetic stranglehold so that every movement squeezes the life from her chest. The ranch manager Hector holds her while I slice across the net’s rigid lines with a knife, Owl’s enormous eyes boring into me, her beak screaming silently, the choke at her throat severe until we loosen the wings that must expand. The last of the net is loosened and she flies high into the eucalyptus grove, the vast light of her gaze a clutch in the mind I cannot dispel.

2.
The trip is cancelled. There are no ready assignments in the time we have asked for vacations from work. And then there is a telephone call, at mid afternoon, the day before we are asked to depart, an invitation to DR303, the Hurricane Katrina Call Center in Bakersfield, California. I’m miffed at both the sudden urgency and the administrative task-minding the assignment appears to be. We had wanted to be in the action, to be called to my native South, to work with the people face to face, like our friends who were hiring pilots and renting trucks and zooming in with supplies, heroically rescuing families from rooftops and whisking the ill and elderly from the Convention Center. Instead we learn that our job will be helping people get access to emergency money from a phone bank in a town in the middle of nowhere. The next day, as we drive through the mountain desert’s oil fields I remember that it is the second anniversary of my husband’s surgery and chemotherapy for cancer, a treatment that nearly ended his life and completely altered his personality. “We said we would do whatever assignment came,” I say to him, mostly to reassure myself, “We said we would do it as an offering for the new life we have been given, right?” He looks at me sideways, oil pumps tipping behind him as far as I can see, nodding his head, clearly along for the ride.

3.
At four o’clock we walk into a room of such cacophony that it automatically causes my heart to pulse faster, my skin to flush with heat. We’ve been escorted through two security checks, been given visitor’s badges and ushered into a room pounded by rows of florescent lights that shine onto long tables covered with white plastic, over which lean sleek laptop computers and slate telephones that pulse with the luciferous light of the technological. Four hundred operators hired by the Red Cross mock-speak from scripts designed to appear friendly and professional: “How were you affected by Hurricane Katrina?” We join a group of employees and volunteers training in the use of the Red Cross’ database system, which we learn was developed to track victims of mass disasters, their household members, and residence histories as well as the assistance that is given. In a couple of hours we’re considered system savvy, and we’re taken to meet the director of our shift, Bill, a military man who prizes organization and hierarchy, and our team leader, Ken, a straight-laced Iowan who has worked similar set-ups in Guam and Florida. This call center operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and we’re assigned the graveyard shift and sent to a nearby motel at midnight to check-in and hopefully rest a bit until we report for the next night’s duty. We try to stay awake all night watching CNN from our soft bed, thinking of the volunteers sleeping on cots, the shelters without cool air and hot showers, and the food that when it does come, is cold and tinny.

4.
The Red Cross volunteers are middle-aged and finally child-free, like ourselves, or they are young, twenty-something, the age of our children, taking leave from school and jobs to help the one-million people who have so far, been affected by this disaster. We’re introduced to Jay from Seattle, Brynda from Wisconsin, John and Matt from Minnesota, and a handful of Californians who have driven in, like us, though they really wanted to be flying to Louisiana. This Call Center was set up in a matter of days, and is an experiment in providing massive and speedy cash assistance to Red Cross ‘clients’ the usual method being sending teams out in the field to do assessments of property, injury, illness and the means to afford recovery. It is three weeks into Katrina’s first strike and the first wave of volunteers is a well-trained, disaster-proven team while we, the second wave, are a rag-tag band of newcomers, mostly having been propelled into action by the pictures from the Superdome and the Convention Center. We’re to do client case work, though we barely know what that is; we’re to troubleshoot and provide support to the operators, who when they need assistance, raise red flags for case managers, and blue cards for mental health professionals and makeshift cards with duct tape on them for the nurses. We run from operator to operator, every five to ten minutes, assisting in verifying the identity of a client, talking to distraught victims, unthreading problems in sending the funds to Western Union. For nine hours each day we will stop running from operator to operator only once, when our supervisor insists on a fifteen minute break in the cubicle in the back office, where we scarf nuts or cookies or early Halloween candy before we return to the warehouse of raucous screech.

In this town of 35% unemployment, the operators are mostly African-American, Latino or Asian, and many of them work two jobs, leave the graveyard shift to take children to school and then go on to a day job in order to make ends meet. Many of them are the same working poor who are only geographically separated from the folks who were hardest hit by the disaster. They can answer up to 12,000 calls a day. There are 1.4 million who try to reach us every twenty-four hours, often waiting all night for six hours to get through. I hear the operators whisper ‘honey’ and ‘baby’ over the telephone, commiserating when they detect the truth, and frowning when they suspect a fraud. Every so often an operator yells “Red Cross!” over and over into the microphone, trying to wake up a person sleeping on the other end of the line. When the client requests a supervisor we’re put on the line to provide a place for venting emotion, and to discuss solutions. “Is she a sister?” asks J. when I plug the headset into the phone; she wonders if we will be sending the needed cash. Another time K. slips me a note in girlish script: “You are a wonderful person and great speaker” which makes me cry because I’m not expecting the young ones to see the threads we are making from our voices, strands from volunteer to client that make me feel as if I am singing solace. Each night, though we barely know each other’s names, the operators and volunteers watch over each other, making a practice of listening, of noticing the cues and impulses and inflections that can inform a choice, perhaps save a life. C. has tears in her eyes when I ask if she’s having a good night. No, she’s not, she says, her boyfriend went into a coma just before the shift began. I pat her back, guide her to meet with one of the mental health counselors, keep an eye on her until the morning. Later, B., a young man working his way through college eyes me when I approach his red flag, and sternly advises as he hands me the headset: “Listen to her. She’s in trouble.” Meaning, break the policy – I have found an exception to the rule.

5.
One of the rules is that we will not give out client information. At midnight the first woman I speak with is looking for her sister and she is not showing up on any of the missing persons lists. As I gather the details of the places the family has been, the operator locates the missing sister in our database. When I tell her we have a phone number, the woman screams on the other end of the phone, and I hear the people near her rouse from their sleep and shout back. In my mind, I can see the dimly lit shelter where a long line of people stand behind the woman; I feel them resting and waiting as they will be asked to do every time they want something. This phone will be handed from person to person, finally to twenty families before it is cradled at daybreak.

6.
Midweek I talk with L. who is in her late twenties, living in a shelter in Texas with her two children. Her landlord has called to tell her the apartment building in New Orleans is being razed, and she has a few days to move her things, which she hasn’t seen since the flood, so she doesn’t know if she still has things, or a sodden mess of clothing and furniture she’d have to haul to the corner to go to the dump. L has no money for gas, much less a U-Haul, and she had no savings to help her with the evacuation, which has already cost her a hundred dollars just to get to a shelter. “You don’t understand m’am,” a phrase I’ll hear dozens of times each day, as they press their stories toward me, ‘Look, look, this is what it is to be poor, to be without options.’

In the shelter in which she has lived for three weeks she sleeps with her children ‘wrapped around her legs,’ she tells me, because she’d heard a story of a woman whose eleven-month-old baby had been taken from her in the night and sodomized. Only she doesn’t say those words, but instead, “They killed that baby, m’am, they took him out back by the dumpster and they poked his bottom with knives and whatever else they could get their hands on. I’ve got to get out of here. My babies can’t sleep in here…”

I can’t hold this possibility; can’t imagine it; it cracks my world to believe that it is true. I ask if I can place her on hold for a moment and I breathe, trying to force that story from my body but it won’t leave. I try to imagine that it is a stretch of the truth, that it is one of the rumors that made the rounds, like the rapes in the Convention Center, the murders in the streets that were reported on, then discounted for lack of police record. I try to remember the caution from the supervisors to avoid personalizing the client’s pain. I try to think of what the counselor told me about people being off their medications, and the hallucinations that swirled in these places they gathered – maybe this was someone’s vision and it was passed from person to person, as if it were a memory. It’s too late – it’s her truth and it has already sunk into my belly, where it will live.

Every story is going into me, and I am feeling connected to each of the voices -- the woman who can't find formula for her baby and who has no work and is living out of her car; the soldier who flew home from Iraq so his wife could go to war, and had to walk his three young children out of the Superdome and through the floodwaters out of the city in order to keep them safe; the old man who waited for days to get through and is sleeping, snoring softly on the other end of the line; the grandmother who is living amongst raw sewage and whose grandchildren have high fevers; the student whose daddy took off with the FEMA money to smoke it, abandoning her with only the clothes on her back; the estranged father who calls to claim his four children whom he hasn’t seen in a year, then snaps up the emergency funds and leaves the children and their mother without a lifeline; the woman who had a stroke and was dragged through the infested waters by her daughter, only to miraculously recover and walk out of the city herself.

The people are sad and angry and heartbroken and insanely poor, and a hundred stories each night pour into each of us in that harshly pulsing room, and it is as if we are not separated by physical distance, the survivors and ourselves. They sit at their kitchen tables, and they walk their dark streets and they stand at pay phones in the church halls, and they cry and tell us that they haven’t told anyone this yet; they’re asking us to witness what can’t be said in the daylight, what hasn’t been told in the news. We’ve become the Owl, circling in the night, watching, encoding.

7.
One of the counselors calls us the ‘second disaster,’ a term coined by mental health professionals to define the myriad red tape debacles that await every disaster survivor. There’s FEMA and the insurance companies and the unemployment agency and even the Red Cross, who as a large organization, survives on policies and criteria that don’t always benefit the person whose life doesn’t fit neatly into the box. ‘Use your good sense,’ we’re told when one of these people comes our way, and I take the team leaders at their word, offering to help many who do not meet the agency’s condition for most-in-need – severe home damage.

One night it is the fisherman who calls needing cash to pay for his wife’s funeral. On the eve of the hurricane he’d gone out to protect his investment – the shrimp boat that provided for the family’s income – and left his wife in a nursing home where he thought she’d be safe. He returned to find her drowned inside the building, and he with no funds to offer her a ‘respectful burial’ he said. The operator and I share a long gaze, write notes back and forth while he talks, figuring a way to help with his wake.

8.
Now Hurricane Rita has come and gone, and we’re already receiving the frantic calls from Texas and Mississippi and Alabama. The Red Cross has not yet made a damage assessment, and we’re awaiting the announcement of the zip codes in the newly affected areas, which will legitimize the need for funding. Their homes are under water they are telling us; their towns without power and food they are telling us; they have lost everything they are telling us, and they’ve used the last of their funds on expensive gas that burned in long waits on stalled freeways. They don’t have money for food or hotels or more gas, they’re telling us, and they’re out there, running out of cell phone minutes while they wait for someone to realize they are just as needy as the first wave of hurricane victims. We wait all night long but the new zip code list never arrives. Most of us are one disaster away from ruin, I think, pretending we live lives safe from interruption, pretending we are insulated from catastrophe.

9.
We have passed the early phases of the disaster, the stages that according to the book, “Disaster Mental Health Services” are oriented to exhilaration, to heroism, to acts of bravery and compassion beyond the ordinary. We are now ensconced in the disillusionment phase, the one where people are angry and tired, and fed up with how the system works or doesn’t, and who just want things to be back the way they were, or at least defined, clear. The Call Center has served almost a million households in a few weeks, offering cash assistance or scheduling visits from volunteers in the field, who will meet with each family to help set up a plan. Still, the people want more. They can’t understand why their neighbor with such little damage has been given so much while they’ve had to wait, to suffer through endless busy signals while the promised assistance vaporized into future appointments they will have to wait for once more. Each night we volunteer to listen to people who yell at us, who threaten us, who promise they will take our names to the radio stations, to CNN, to the President, and even to God. We are told we are going to rot in hell because the cash is not provided immediately, we are told our souls are without mercy because we ask them to wait for what we hope will be a few more days for a Red Cross volunteer to show up and assess the damage in person. We do not tell them that the Red Cross is out of money, that we are borrowing cash based on pledges from the American people, as this disaster rockets past a billion dollars in emergency funds given. We learn to soften our voices, and to avoid taking it personally, and to hear them out with compassion; we ask ourselves to meet the screaming and swearing and desperation with clear seeing, with clear listening. We try to remember that we would be in the same despair too, if this were us. We know that they are fighting for the survival of their families, their communities, the place they used to call home. We observe without expectation, ask ourselves if this is someone who requires an intervention, whose hope might be restored through one small act we can make in this moment. We recall that their stories are saving us, that we are being restored through seeking to understand their truth.

We breathe and we remember that when we have finished our shift, we can walk out into the breaking sunlight. In our mostly dependable and comfortable lives, we can lean into each other for a moment and realize that our true needs have been met, that weeks before what we thought were needs were only desires masquerading as requirements.