Dear Readers,
First, thank you. Since Helene tore through my life you have been kind, generous, and patient. Many of you have subscribed, sent messages, bought cards, and coffees, and all of it really, really helped.
The essay that follows is long, and once I started writing it, shortly after Helene, I knew that it would also take a long time to really be in a place where I could finish it. Now that it’s done, the finishing feels like a new beginning, so I’m guessing that the timing is right.
I really wanted to record my reading this essay, to add my voice to it, and I may still do that, but truth be told, there is much of this essay that I cannot get through without my voice breaking, and tears flowing.
I am in the last month of preparation for my art show Dreaming Animals, of which the pastel above is a part. I will be sharing more of the artwork from that show in the coming months.
With appreciation,
Stephanie
1
First Hand Accounts
Thursday evening, September 26, 2024
It’s 8pm. I’m sitting at the kitchen counter, laptop in front of me, scrounging the internet for more information about the Great Flood of 1916, anything that might tell us what to expect. Around here, it’s the flood of ‘77 that everyone remembers. Now, apparently, we’ve skipped over that one for an even older flood. “Worst storm in recorded history,” another forecast warns. Rain, our constant companion for days, has grown to a loud static on our metal roof. More is on the way. A lot more. My husband sits across from me. More than anything, we are afraid for our daughter, with whom I share my studio. I work there, she lives there.
It’s an old Appalachian cottage, six miles down the road from our house, built in 1909, right on the banks of Brown’s creek. When I look out its windows I see the clear and laughing waters of that creek, and I see a great mountain: Celo Knob, the most northern of the seven peaks of the Black Mountains. She looms large on the horizon, an inky blue giantess gathering clouds. Her eastern face is the watershed of Brown’s Creek.
Brown’s Creek is not laughing now. When I left the studio at 7 pm it was roaring. I’d spent the day there, rolling up rugs and trying to imagine what might happen if that creek, doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size. In truth, I couldn’t imagine what the water would do. Nobody can. Scientists makes neat maps, but those maps don’t prepare you for the actual consequences.
As night closes the curtains of the day, and rain threatens to close the roads, I finally discover this first hand account of the Great Flood of 1916:
“The horrors of that night cannot be told. The rain fell in such solid masses that one seemed to be under a waterfall and it not only undermined houses but actually tore them to pieces. The noise of the rain was like continuous thunder, added to the roar of the river and the shock of the mountain sides literally crashing into the valleys. It was in fact a cataclysm, such as these mountains have probably not experienced in recent geological periods. The forces of nature setting themselves to a gigantic movement simply paralyzed anything that man could do and literally stunned imagination. The people who went through that awful night can never forget the shock of it.
— Dr. Lucious Morse at Chimney Rock, 1916
I close my computer and call my daughter. We’d talked about different scenarios, checked in with neighbors, made plans. But the phrase “stunned imagination” sticks . All the dire warnings have not had the same impact as this first-hand account from 108 years ago.
There is little time. Soon Middle Creek will go over the road to our home—this happens with lesser storms, and when that happens we will not be able to get out. My son, who lives next door, leaves in his truck to get my daughter. She puts her cats in pillow cases and they come here, to higher ground.
2
Stunned Imagination
Friday morning, September 27, 2024
From my journal:
It’s 9 am. The power is out and cell service also. So there’s no way to check on anything. It’s raining with untold ferocity. I think oh it can’t get more than this, and then it does. And then again. Thankfully the threats of wind have not played out —if that were the case trees would be down everywhere. I suppose we are in the thick of it. They said to expect the worst from 6 am to noon. It certainly became more pronounced around 6. I’d woken up at 5, and noticed the power was out. I checked my phone for information but there weren’t any posts from this morning.
From my bedroom I can see the little drain-seep that curls around the house. Usually it is just a trickle, but now it is a furious stream of water maybe four feet wide. I’m so glad my daughter came here last night—there’s no phone, no power, no access—we wouldn’t have known what was going on with her and that would have been so scary.
Noon. We all went out very shortly after the peak. Water was rushing over the driveway where our little culvert is, and then churning a massive hole on the other side. The driveway is badly damaged, but as we walked down we were stunned to see that the road was completely covered in water. The water was nearly up to our neighbor’s porch, and a sea stretched before us, the river swollen past anything I could have ever imagined. We walked through the water, which came to our knees, where the road lifts a little bit. From there we could see that Rock creek had swollen so much as to overtake the road. The asphalt, a fresh layer put down just a few weeks ago, was tearing way in chunks under the churning water.
My heart is heavy, for the prospects for my studio are not looking positive at all. When we came to the bottom of the driveway and saw the road, I just started crying. I think I will feel better once I know the extent of it. Not sure why that is.
In actuality, we were in the thick of it. Busick, just two miles up the road from us, had the highest record of rainfall for the whole of the storm—31 inches of rain. There’s a reason for that—it’s just past one of the steepest inclines of the Blue Ridge Escarpment. When Helene hit that mountainous wall, it squeezed moisture from her like a giant squeegee. And all that water went downstream, in all directions, more water and more water, decimating Micaville, Burnsville, Erwin, to the north and Swannanoa, Asheville, and Marshall to the South.
When I think back now, to that moment, of standing in my driveway worried about my studio, I’m almost ashamed, because also at that moment, and for several hours afterwards, members of my community—entire families— were drowning, houses were swept away, communities region-wide were on the brink of such devastation as this area has never seen.
That afternoon, flood waters still raging, my son crosses the swinging bridge over the South Toe River (a testament to older, more nimble engineering) and hikes to my studio. It still stands, but is filled with 6” of mud. He pushes out as much mud as he can, then drives our minivan, (luckily left there), as far up the highway as possible, then walks home the rest of the way. He returns with news. His childhood soccer coach has lost his wife. The road to town is impassable. Of the two large concrete bridges over the South Toe River, one is badly damaged and the other is gone. Ripped into pieces. That night I send a satellite text to my sister using my son’s phone: “We are all OK. Massive catastrophe. House studio OK. No roads etc. Love you.”
3
Myth, Nightmare, Dream
To recognize the symbolic significance which floods have taken in tradition and myth, is not to deny their occurrence as historical events. Of all natural disasters, floods stand out by their lack of finality. They are preeminently the sign of growth and regeneration. A flood destroys simply because the “forms” are old and worn out, but it is always followed by a new humanity and a new history.
— “Dictionary of Symbols”, Jean Chevalier , Alain Gheerbrant, et al.
In myth, the flood is near universal, older than Noah, global in its telling. In the coming days, though, I don’t think about flood as myth. Our reality is only devastation and survival.
There’s no electricity, no communications, and essentially no roads. So for the first week or so we just focus on the work of survival, which is its own kind of blessing. We haul water, clear out the mud from my studio, and later, procure a generator, groceries, help friends do the same. We check on our neighbors, some of whom we hadn’t talked to in years. Our volunteer fire department does remarkable work clearing trees, repairing roads, checking on all of us. Everyone that can finds a way to pitch in. There is so much that must be done, and so much horror region wide, that it is impossible to think, or feel. There is only doing the work that must be done.
But when we walk down the highway to our van, parked just past a sinkhole, and then drive down State Highway 80, weaving past fallen trees and power lines, our community is unrecognizable. Houses are shredded, piled against each other like bumper cars. The entire river and all the land around it looks like a a war zone strewn with enormous piles of trees, remnants of houses and sheds, twisted lumber, trash, mud, sand. The air is rank with the stench of busted propane tanks.
News trickles in, of neighbors whose homes were flooded or swept away. Down the road the little hamlet of Micaville is destroyed—the elementary school will never reopen, the post office is swept clean off its foundations, the Taylor Togs building, a former factory that housed several businesses and a health clinic, is obliterated. Cars are upside down in the creek beds.
Two miles down the road from my studio, an entire family—a husband, wife, child and grandmother who fled the war in Ukraine and established their home here, are all missing, presumed dead. Another family—a mother, her two young boys, and her fiancee—have also perished, swept away by a river risen to unimaginable heights.
Every day, almost continuously, helicopters fly over the course of the river. They are rescuing stranded people. And they are searching for human remains.
_____________________
For the first week I keep a detailed account in my diary. I’m not trying to process it all, just record our experience. But at some point, I turn inward. I remember a dream I had, only days before the storm, so I pull out my dream journal. Twelve days before Helene I had this dream:
15 September 2024
Floodwaters
I’m at my neighbors house [this house sits between my house and the South Toe river]. The neighbors are sitting on their porch watching the water, only it is an entirely different system, more like an ocean. There’s a great bay with a distant shore. It’s storming, though, and the water is fat, fast, and dangerous.
I scan further back and find a dream from last year:
December 2023
Micaville Renovations
Micaville General Store has been flooded, and there’s some kind of moat around it. The owner is running me out, closing her doors to figure out how to save her business from the water that surrounds her building.
And then even further back:
26 July 2021
Rock Creek flow
I’m standing with my neighbor in the field of her farm. There’s a sense of flow – it’s been raining and raining, and mule manure is spread across the field. We are talking, and the soil is part of our discussion and awareness. I’m going to walk back home along rock Creek. Here is the interesting bit – it’s like the road and the creek have merged – the road home is the creek, and it’s high from all the rain and difficult to navigate.
I have a lifelong practice of dreamwork, but I don’t know what to make of this. Each of these dreams, in their full recording, has weird, precise details that clearly connect to my lived experience. Did my dreams tap into some realm beyond time? How is it that even three years ago I was dreaming almost exactly things that would occur?
Rather than some sort of affirmation, this dream resonance feels disorienting, as if even my inner world has also been flooded. Everywhere I turn, even inwardly, I’m stunned, disoriented.
4
An Altered Landscape, an Altered Body
On Sunday we walk down to the river.
I know that it will hurt. That the river, always an agent of change, will have transformed my favorite spot there, where Rock Creek joins the South Toe River. A place that has given me innumerable gifts. I know that trees will be gone, the riverbed reshaped. I know that the familiarity of this place will be changed.
And all these things are true. It is a ravaged landscape, a different river. I stand on the shore confused by the change, disoriented by the altered landscape, struck with the loss of place. Perhaps twenty feet of riverbank has been torn away, and the path I’d walked innumerable times in my twenty-two years of living here no longer exists because there is no earth there now, no maples, no birches, no rhododendrons. Where my path had been there is now more riverbed.
And it does hurt.
_____________________
Twenty-seven days before the storm, in this place that is now gone, where a tree that gave me many gifts once stood, I sat cradled in her roots, journal in hand, and wrote:
I’ve come this morning to write at a place of power. I wasn’t planning that, I was mostly just planning to write outside. But I found myself instead drawn to the river, and more specifically to this place, where Rock Creek joins the South Toe River. And as I walked here, I mused over an idea I’d had earlier this week, about writing my own Catalog of Mystical Experience—a collection of all my experiences that are clearly-from-somewhere-beyond-this-realm. The place I was walking towards, I realized, held such an experience for me. I knew then, exactly, what the land wanted me to write.
More specifically, it was a tree that was communicating with me, and I wept as I wrote, feeling her presence so profoundly. Now, post-Helene, these words seem to foreshadow all that was to come.
Now as I write this I am quite literally cradled in her roots. She leans perilously over the creek, and I do not think her sap runs in this world any longer. I have watched her needles fall to the very last. But she is absolutely here with me, and as I walked to her, before I’d even put this pen to paper, she was telling me things.
The river, here especially, is always changing. The hemlocks have died, and a hundred years before them, the American Chestnuts. There have been floods caused by climate change, that carved deep cuts into the riverbank and grabbed whole trees only to deposit them downstream, scoured of life. To love this place is to know it will change, and to not fight against it.
But in all the disorder and change, as structures that have stood for decades, or ages, are broken, there is an opening to join our consciousness with the land, to build a relationship so deep that it extends into the foundational Otherworld, and we do this not with any great shaman’s skill but with the simplest of things embedded in every human being—imagination and love.
The changes of this time require of us our grief, for all things must change and should rightly be mourned. It might even be that the grief is what opens us, what rouses us from our slumber into a charged state. In mourning we can also begin to incorporate into our waking awareness the truth that our reality is but a segment or aspect of a much greater reality, a reality that is always speaking to us in a language that our bodies can understand, for it is a felt experience. And if we do not give the paradigm of the day authority over our own experience, and allow the Mystery to blossom within us, something wild happens. The world that is now crowning in our collective Imaginal realm, the world that will become in this next age, the Age of Repair, this world can begin to take root in the here and the now. We can begin the work of bringing it forth.
These words, read thirty days later, take on a deeper meaning than I can properly assimilate. I am still in a stunned state. Grief has yet to find a way to move through me. Now, only days after the storm, I’ve just begun to become aware of a great tearing of life energy that is both in the land and in my body. It’s something I can feel on the edges of my consciousness, like the finest roots of energy saturating everything. It’s something that is not yet part of our measurable scientific knowledge, and maybe will never be, but I know it’s there. And that everywhere it’s torn. It’s the source of disorientation that I, and all my friends and neighbors, are feeling. Call it what you will, the fabric of livingness is torn all around us.
5
Anger
November 6, 2024
I want to tear this essay to pieces.
I want to crucify any attempts to make sense of a destruction that was so clearly self-generated.
I want to catalog the highways and the concrete and the bombs and the plastic factories as evidence of our desire to be known as The Great Destroyer.
I want to say, I am one person, I am one woman, I will live my small life, I will not say I know anything because clearly we are sublimely arrogant.
I want to save the world, but now I know, we will make the world as we see fit, with a vision so short-sighted and numb to the living world that sustains us that our world is nothing more than a machine, and we the cogs in it.
_____________________
Once I had a dream that a star was following me through the sky. I was at a fair, and the sight of it in the sky was enthralling and terrifying to me. I dashed home but it followed me throughout the journey, a ball of otherworldly light. I wanted to shoot it out of the sky, so haunted I felt, but then a herd of horses ran after it, and only then did I realize that it was not threatening me, that it held a great consciousness. It landed in my driveway, then and—this is the funny part—opened up like a pod. Out popped a young man.
You live on a planet of LIFE! he exclaimed. How can you live like this?
I know, I know, replied my broken heart.
6
And Then There Was Ice
mid February, 2025
Things aren’t normal, and never will be again, but we are all adapting, as humans do. I’ve started working on my art show, feverishly now, because I’d made a plan and then Helene came in and it’s been so much chaos and disorder and repair that it’s taken me until January to really feel like, yes, I can pick up my pastels, get to work. It feels good to be moving forward, to be making progress that is actual progress and not just cleaning and trying to make my studio functional again.
Then an ice storm hits. It doesn’t hit everywhere, but around my home the ice gathers like a shroud over the forest.
There is so much ice in the forest right now. I’m standing at its edge, holding my breath. The trees strain with the weight of the icicles; branches snap every few minutes–– great booming cracks, followed by a heart-wrenching cascade of ice and limb. The forest is breaking, and I don’t dare step into it, it’s terrifying, but it’s also beautiful. Ice is beautiful, that is, a glaze of light and gray. A breeze runs through my sweatshirt and on into the forest, a seam of crackles, and I step back again, knowing a tree will break from the wind.
The forest did break. The next day my husband and I walked up our path to survey the damage, and it was bad. Helene had felled a swath of trees, perhaps from a microburst of wind. Since then I’ve been scrambling over massive trunks on my daily hikes with my dogs. But the ice storm is worse than Helene. Trees are down everywhere, branches piled high across the entire forest floor.
Everywhere I turn, I feel the assault of climate change and our failed collective response to it. On a warm day I buy vegetables from a farmer-friend. Spring is coming, and in passing I say, “I think when I start to see the wildflowers emerge I will fall down weeping.” As if only then can I let myself let all this grief move in my body. Only then can I find a way forward, into whatever storm awaits us.
7
The Way Forward
We love the world, we destroy it. The pace of destruction grows. And it’s not us. It’s not our fault. It’s this snowball of an economic machine, a true monster driven by blind and greedy men, and it’s what this machine does to us, collectively. How it deadens us to the beauty and song of life, life, life! How it destroys that beauty, that song, bit by bit. It is breaking everything now.
We can’t see a way forward, but we know that much of this human world has been built on the wrong foundation, like a factory that sprawls and smelts our essence into something cheap, something less-than, cog-like, as if we are parts of their machine and not conscious living beings deeply connected to water, air, soil, plants, to all life.
We think maybe AI can save us, but even that vast reservoir of our collective knowledge has been usurped by, and feeds, the same monster.
There is another vast reservoir, though. We slip into its waters every night. When we sleep we swim in the mystery, and the mystery tells us stories. It’s a gift, dreaming is, and one I’ve cultivated my entire life. For so long I thought this gift was only for myself, that my dreams belong only to me, but now I am beginning to believe otherwise.
Dreaming is the living, inviolate collective mystery. The monster can’t touch it, can’t claim it. And the one truth, the one unshakable truth that my dreaming has given me is that this mystery, this Otherworld, is foundational to this world. It is from the Deep that we arise, floating on top of its vast ocean of consciousness. To truly understand the power of the Otherworld, the anima Mundi, the Soul of the world, is impossible. But to have just a glimpse of its numinosity, its power, and—if I am to report truthfully—its ocean of love, is to be forever changed, to be reoriented to the world in a profound and, dare I say, magical way.
There is something deeply felt about the experience of the dream. We don’t even have to interpret them. Really interpretation can be a precarious thing—once interpreted we tend to put the dream into a box on a shelf. Cage it. Lock it away. But a dream is a living thing, it arises from your body, and is embedded in your consciousness, but it is also feral, untamable, with its own purpose. Our dreams want to be honored, they want to be held gently, called forward, they want to hum in your everyday mind, like a note in the song of the world. They are resonant, they call the Otherworld into this world.
Truthfully, most dreams are just like little house-elves, doing their magic housework in the night, if your house is your psyche and the housework is what your deep self needs—a cleaning here, a rearranging of furniture there. But sometimes the doors of your house swing open and wild things come in. Sometimes the doors are blown off, walls disintegrate, and you have to build a new house, a bigger house, to hold what the dream has given you. Like the flood of myth, old forms are worn out, and new ones will arise.
Several years ago I woke from a dream sobbing from its beauty. I wrote it down, and stepped outside, then broke down sobbing again. I was broken open by it. In the dream I was given a vision of a violet-gold light so radiant, so infused with Otherworld energy, that it healed everything it touched. For months I held that gift, knowing that it asked something of me, but uncertain of what that was.
A dream like that unfurls slowly in this world. You have to build a bigger house for it. You have to hold it, let it go, call it back again to you. The energy it held roots into your consciousness, sends tendrils out, begins to transform you. Because the truth of it is that the dream comes from a place that knows, in a way we can’t. It is your greatest teacher, if you are willing to surrender.
The violet-gold light of this most beautiful dream lives inside me. In my sacred imagination,where sight is a felt, inner experience, I weave this light into the Earth, where the trees have split and fallen, where the river has scoured her banks, where my heart aches from the insatiable monster trying to turn the living world, and my body, into a machine. I put this living, healing light into the roots of energy that saturate everything, and I feel again what I felt when that dream broke me open. My fingers twist the threads of light together. Oh world, you are beautiful, and your healing is all I have ever truly wanted.
And in sharing the living image of this dream, in letting it out into the world, and calling it back, over and over, something is happening. I don’t know what will happen, but I know we are meant to weave the mystery together, into our lives, because to experience the mystery is a gift that belongs to the world, not to the individual, which, after all, is naught but an illusion, because there is a light that runs through everything, and we belong to it.