'The Big One'

The hurricane hit in 1969, no matter that it came from inside me. It was the Big One, a raging fury that uprooted all pilings, divested me of moorings and infrastructure, left me reaching up from a broken roof of desperation on a dark night without shelter, left nothing to start again with but a seed, very deep within. I wrote a poem years later that began, “none can imagine the ocean of suffering some minds are drowning in, as none can imagine the sea of joy some other minds have found.” Today I watch the people in New Orleans bereft, clinging to their rooftops, huddling in a flooding stadium. I can’t feel how hot it is there, or what it's like when the toilets and water taps don’t work, there’s no food, a stinking river is rising, and you don’t know where your wife is. TV offers a hint of the devastation, imagination refuses to flesh out the rest. The seed of my own new life, after Shiva* finished off the old, has flourished. I’m a man with a profession, a wife and a house— thirty-five years spent to attain some balance and try to keep the flame of inner life alive. I don’t understand the ways of God. It could all be gone again tomorrow. If that happened—and I were fully aware— I should prostrate on the ground and thank Him. ____ *Shiva—the Hindu god of Destruction, part of the trinity that also includes Brahma (Creation) and Vishnu (Preservation) . Destruction= the beginning of a new cycle of creation.