Meeting the Great Unraveling

The day Hurricane Helene hit, in late September 2024, my husband, Mark, and I woke up early and settled into morning meditation. At 9:00 a.m., Mark walked the land to ensure that our gardens and tiny trickle of a creek were faring well. The rain and wind had intensified. We had kept an eye on weather reports and had innocently stocked up on extra candles in case the power went out for a few days. With the internet down, we were unaware that the storm had changed course dramatically in the middle of the night and that our region was about to become its bull’s-eye. Everyone, including elders who had inhabited these mountains for eighty years, believed the mountains would always protect us. 

Suddenly, the loudest crash we had ever heard erupted, and a river of debris cascaded down from the mountain above with no warning. We watched it pick up my office at the back of our house and carry it away, then begin pushing mud into our home through the open wall. Time slowed down and sped up simultaneously as the flooding then destroyed my husband’s office. There was a quickening in our hearts as we prepared to escape and entered the micro-moment awareness of mindful witnessing and action, when a huge tree crashed into the living room and punctured the propane tank. 

Just as we were running out, the entire house crashed down upon us. My husband dove out the front sliding glass door while I was swallowed up by the landslide and flooding. As I tumbled into the underworld beneath our home, I suspected I was dying. Yet a few minutes later, a slight opening of light emerged in the muddy dark in which I was tumbling. With that light as a guide, I quickly slid out. In the chaos of the storm, I heard my husband screaming my name as he pulled me out of the mud he thought had killed me.

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None of my old subconscious fears about where danger and harm could come from touched my near-death experience. My home—the place where I believed I had the most safety and control—assaulted me, alongside the trees, earth, and water I had so lovingly stewarded. 

I’ve been a student of climate change since I was a teenager. I’ve helped others metabolize the grief, frustration, and desperation of witnessing society’s resistance to addressing both the clear and the more subtle signs of the climate crisis. I’ve long devoted my dharma teaching to bridging the timelessness of practice with a conscious response to the polycrisis we face today. 

Yet my own experience of natural disaster held myriad surprises. Seeing the walls, roof, and foundation of our home dissemble before our eyes, and all our belongings wash away, both shocked my human orientation and affirmed the truth of impermanence. Through a near-death experience, I met the threshold to death with curiosity, innocence, and beginner’s mind. This has ever-deepened my trust in life and practice. Practice had prepared me for this like nothing else. Practice equips us to meet what my mentor Joanna Macy has long called The Great Unraveling. 

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In the first week following Hurricane Helene, an indescribable sobriety and simultaneous awakening rippled through our mountain community in western North Carolina, an experience I suspect only people who have witnessed an entire region transformed by natural disaster, war, or a climate event can understand. With access roads destroyed by landslides, our community was trapped on the mountain where we lived. We had limited resources, many neighbors in need of help, and no clue if the storm’s ferocity had run its course.

As I nursed my injuries and served in the initial recovery efforts by being emotionally present and making sure people were fed, I was aware that my life and perspective would be forever changed by the unimaginable events I had just experienced. 

I took these notes on the back of an envelope:

What is resiliency? Community resiliency is our willingness to both give and receive support from one another moment by moment. Bodhicitta is the seat of our resiliency. The bodhisattva in today’s world is adaptive, fluid, vulnerable, collaborative, and willing to soften rather than harden in the face of disaster. 

What is preparation? The only true preparation is within oneself. We cannot fathom what direction the creative-destructive force of Earth’s storms might take. Emergence is the organizing principle of life on earth, and presence is the only preparation for emergence. There is no planning. You must flow. So commit to practice. You may not know what the escape route might be. 

Emergence is the organizing principle of life on earth, and presence is the only preparation for emergence. There is no planning. You must flow. So commit to practice.

What is revealed in the wake of a climate event? A climate event takes us beyond the thin veil of separation between oneself and one’s neighbor, and beyond the false divide between oneself and those events that happen “out there.” The social constructs and built environment we often find security in are revealed as just that: constructs. In the wake of a storm, what remains is the naked truth that we are all in this together, at ground zero. 

While love thy neighbor was already a value in western North Carolina, Hurricane Helene seeded a community awakening in our region. It was as if people were starving to embrace one another with a quality of unconditional kinship that appeared only when social constructs were stripped away.

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Throughout the liminality, discomfort, and complexity, I have taken refuge continually in stillness. The still certainty that comes with strong intent and years of practice has given me a foundation throughout my journey of displacement. I’ve continued to teach while living out of a suitcase and not knowing where I will land, and this has been invaluable for my sangha. 

Teaching in full transparency in the aftermath of the hurricane has normalized for many in my sangha that it’s OK to be messy. That’s our collective reality. I’ve been showing up and modeling the reciprocity of holding community while allowing community to hold me. This has offered me an honest teaching about resilience.

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Bodhicitta, referred to in Mahayana Buddhism as “awakening mind,” is our immeasurable magnitude for care and kindness toward all of life. We are sometimes only partially aware of its potential in everyday life. Bodhi means “awake,” or “completely open.” Citta means “mind,” “heart,” and “attitude.” Bodhicitta is about tenderizing and softening rather than hardening. It is the foundation for vulnerability in moments of gratitude, radical generosity, and building bridges in the relational field. It is about protecting what we love rather than defending against what we fear. 

The potential of bodhicitta was exhibited by neighbors, strangers, and sangha who organized with a joy of service. I was reminded of my training as a Zen monastic. Everyone rallied for the common cause of care for all. The specific ways the Buddhist community co-organized affirmed that sila and sangha should be core teachings in these times. 

While my Zen mentor Pam Weiss started a GoFundMe for us before we were even off the mountain, my colleague Kritee Kanko organized help for our escape from the mountain. Ivan Meyerhoff, a Buddhist chaplain from Davidson College, heroically responded and drove hours to rescue us as soon as the roads were partly clear. Another knock on the door of the neighbor’s house in which we were sheltering revealed a sangha member from Tennessee, who drove a long distance on dangerous roads to deliver supplies to the Buddhist sanghas he was connected to. 

Our relationships matter, and our dharma must focus on nourishing them. Systems are unraveling. Any attempt to spiritually bypass by trying to hold on to an individual island of peace is useless. We are all in this together.

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A few weeks after we lost our home, my husband and I flew to Los Angeles from New Jersey, where we had been staying with family after leaving North Carolina. While we were in New Jersey there were ten wildfires and days of 75-degree temperatures. Our last day in California was January 7. As we waited on the tarmac for our plane to take flight, large billows of gray smoke suddenly appeared over the Pacific Palisades, just a few miles away. This was the start of the Palisades fire that would devastate a community, with the Eaton fire destroying another nearby community in Altadena just a few days later. 

This is a time that requires our consciousness to change. Just as we might consider ways that Covid was an ally shaking us out of our slumber and helping us to awaken, these climate events are also our allies. They are helping us to wake up—if we are willing. People have been blind to the impact of our actions and interconnection on this planet for too long. As the earth heats up, the invitation is to open our hearts in a bigger way. 

The polycrisis points us to radical acceptance of reality. These storms are not going to stop anytime soon. As we move more into acceptance, our fragility can be supplanted by the knowledge that we’re part of the natural feedback system and the web of interconnection on planet Earth. Let’s support one another to awaken to the teaching of this time. Let’s show up for one another and those who are most vulnerable through this chaos, welcoming the reality that everything is cracked.