July flood thoughts
It’s been over a month since the floods came through Montpelier. While the creeks are no longer raging down hillsides and the river isn’t as high, the flood continues to linger. It lingers in my attunement to this place, relating to rain with a bit more anxiety, biking along the river and taking note of the height of water rather than listening to the sound of it, watching the downtown for how ghostly it feels, for how lively it feels.
In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown poses this question, “Do you understand your quality of life and survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?” This question has been reverberating with me, tumbling together with the experience of watching the earth around me swell with water and the collective wondering of what to do. If I position myself within the essence of this question and as a co-conspirator alongside the flood rather than a resister to the flood, there opens an invitation.
standing on the banks of the creek
raging with flash flood warnings
stones knocking against culverts
river edges expanding and rising
I grieve for what this means for our species mortality
homeostasis
built on the fundamentals
of a single raindrop
oh these sweaty raindrops
pouring down to cool and regulate us
falling on a world out of balance
we, the human species, are off balance
is the flood a call for interdependence?
LET’S CO-EVOLVE TOGETHER!
the rivers roared
PRACTICE ADAPTING!
the creeks sang
RELATE TO YOUR PLACE!
the waves gushed
this is an invitation
to conspire with Earth, to be in relation
“natural disasters” are such a construction
of the language of human supremacy
when this flood was simply mama earth
showing us her needs and capacity
searching for a container with width to hold her tenacity
heaving breaths of wild water
so wild
is our insignificance
so wild
to be a species in the ecosystem of nature
when the earth is earthing
inviting us to earth with her
