Hurricane Helene: A Revelation (Part 2)

How Helene lifted the veil to reveal a Cosmic Video Game...

This post is a continuation of my personal account of surviving the devastation of Hurricane Helene. You can read Part 1 here:

---

Day 2: Saturday, September 28th

Will woke up early and got to work. He was a nonstop flurry of action: checking on neighbors, chainsawing the tree that had fallen, and shoveling trenches to divert the massive river of water that had been flowing through our land since yesterday morning.

Valentina, ever the empath, came in and asked me to make a smoothie for Will. I was happy to do so. Using a rechargeable blender that I’d (“coincidentally”) received just a few weeks prior, I blended up some bananas, blueberries, almond butter, honey, and oats — and when that was done, I energetically charged the smoothie with the feeling of deep gratitude from my heart-space. 

I’d been ambiguous about Will before this ordeal, because he wasn’t always present on the land, seemed perpetually busy, and didn’t make much time to get to know all of us (not that I did, either). But now, he was fully present and “on.”

Seeing him step into his heroism — making sure neighbors got fed, ensuring we weren’t at risk of a landslide, and so on — was beautiful to watch, and I found myself feeling deep, warm thankfulness for him and his distinctly masculine provisions.

Jude, too. He was Will’s right-hand man, showing up to serve however he was needed. If Will was shoveling, so was he. If Will was checking on neighbors, so was he. There was a beautiful ease in how they both filled the heroic roles they’d been presented with — and I admit, I loved to see it. 

The part of me that has yearned to see men step into their uniquely masculine power, was finally relieved. Though the existential suffering around us could not be fully understood, this was one small way in which the ladies of the land did not have to suffer. Men may have made me feel unsafe and abandoned in the past, but not now. Not even a little bit.

When Will came back, sweating from all the work, he drank deeply of the smoothie and said he felt nourished, which made my heart glow.

Funny enough, one of the original reasons I’d come to live at Clarity, was specifically to be a cook. Will’s idea was that, as Clarity developed, there would be more events on the land, and I could make pure, pranic food for the attendees as a work-trade agreement to lower my rent.

That never ended up happening, unfortunately, and there were times when I felt resentful about this. I wanted to cook for people, but there were no opportunities — at least, not opportunities I’d be paid for.

But now that we were stranded on this mountaintop, sharing all our food with each other, I could see how petty it was to withhold my gift of cooking from my landmates over money.

Why not just cook for them because I love to? Because I enjoy the creative process of weaving flavors textures together? Because food can be a vehicle for deep soul medicine — and cooking, a healing art, a spiritual practice?

I hadn’t just been withholding my cooking from them — I’d also been withholding the joy of showing-love-through-cooking from myself.

All because of money…

…which suddenly didn’t matter anymore.

Aside from the cooking resentment, a lot of other things “suddenly didn’t matter anymore.” All those creative projects that I could no longer access on my laptop, due to the power outage, teased me from the digital ether.

When I did get about 5 minutes of internet access, I saw that I’d received an email from the freelance graphic designer I’d hired to create the logo for my immortalist church, which I had been planning to officially launch on October 1st.

“Please let me know if you’d like any changes,” said the email preview — but I couldn’t log into the gig website to actually see the logo. 

Fancy that: my church, which centers around the message of physical immortality, had been put on hold because we were too busy not-dying.

I couldn’t see the logo, nor could I see the social media world I’d become so emotionally invested in. 

All I could see was what was right in front of me.

I could see my beautiful landmates:
Will, the strong and gentle leader;
Valentina, the wise, empathic, intellectual sweetheart;
Jude, the soothing, spiritually sensitive, and low-key hilarious peacemaker;
and Sally, the kind, generous, profoundly insightful psychonaut.

I could see our bounty of health-conscious food, clean water, and propane for our camping stove.

I could see our central house, a cozy safe haven surrounded by a now-treacherous world of unstable mud.

How had I not seen these people, and these riches, before this?
What the hell had I been focusing on?

---

In the afternoon, Valentina took charge and decided we needed to go down to the street level. “Sally and I already saw the damage yesterday when we were looking for help for Jacob,” she said. “But you and Jude haven’t seen the destruction yet. You need to.”

While Will decided to stay on the land and keep working, Valentina, Sally, Jude and I put on our mud-fucked shoes, grabbed our backpacks and tote bags, and headed out — and those among us who had guns, brought their guns. Just in case.

Together, the 4 of us made our way down the mountain.

This is when the “video game” feeling started.

The Cosmic Video Game

On our way down the mountain, it seemed that every few yards, we’d encounter another person who appeared out of nowhere to say something so dramatic and insightful, with the most bizarrely perfect timing, that honestly, it felt scripted. Like this shit was a movie written by a higher intelligence for its own sick entertainment — or a cosmic video game, complete with NPCs and side-quests, designed by God. By Helene, even.

I couldn’t shake the eery feeling that this storm wasn’t a random, mindless force of chaos — but was actually a highly intelligent, organized force of consciousness. There was a purpose behind all this. An intention. I just couldn’t put my finger on it yet…

The first person we encountered was a neighbor lady with a hat that said I can’t think straight: “We’ve got generators and propane and lots of food if y’all need any,” she said. “Love y’all.”

Further down the road, another woman: “Did you hear they found Jolene? They brought her to be with Jacob at the detention center.”

Further down the road, an elderly lady in a rocking chair on her porch: “The monarch butterflies normally migrate in at this time of year. If you go to the bridge this weekend, you can see them passing overhead.”

A few minutes later, a car pulled up beside us with suspiciously perfect timing.

“Monkey!” Sally delightedly shouted.

It was their friend Monkey (obviously that’s not his real name, LOL), a young man with a contagiously sincere smile, adorned in mala beads and hippie-style clothing. He didn’t live around here, but just-so-happened to be driving down this road, at this exact moment, just in time to meet us.

Sally would later muse, “Monkey is like an angel who always appears exactly when I need him.” As soon as she said it, I knew it was true. I mean, he had just blatantly demonstrated that by appearing out of nowhere! 

How strange, the timing!
How curious, the synchronicity!

Could it be, that reality was really this schematic and orchestrated? Between yesterday and today, it seemed we just kept finding more evidence that the universe had a mind and agenda of its own. It just seemed so obvious now.

Will’s words returned to me: The veil is thin.
Indeed.

We explained to Monkey that we were going to walk to the main street, Tunnel Road.

“I’ll meet you here,” he said, and drove off. We continued our descent down the mountain.

I wasn’t prepared for what we saw when we reached street-level, where the flood had been. It was like walking right onto the set of a high-budget disaster movie… except this was real life, and there was no “leaving the set.”

Everywhere we turned was unfathomable, senseless destruction.

Cars, overturned, crushed.

Power lines, downed, tangled.

Homes, shattered, collapsed.

Mud, heavy and devouring.

Roads, crumbled to reveal broken water and gas pipes under the ground.

A couple walking in the opposite direction stopped to talk to us, delivering yet another movie-like moment: “We watched a woman hanging on for dear life as the river rose,” the wife said with a thousand-yard stare. “Eventually she let go, and she went under.” 

After exchanging some more words with the couple, we went on our separate ways. But the mental image of a woman being swept away by a raging flood stayed in my mind, churning my stomach.

When we reached the bridge that leads to Tunnel Road, we were stunned. Much of the bridge had crumbled into the river below, and somehow, an entire shipping container had been carried by the current and was now lodged in the cracks of what remained.

Sally’s eyes went wide. “We’re in another dimension!” she exclaimed, and I knew she was being literal.

This hurricane thing,
this spiral-shaped storm named Huracán
with her churning arms, vicious strength
and undeniably precise and willful intentionality
had picked us up and thrown us into a new dimension
that had not been apparent before.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us at that moment, there were pockets of Asheville and neighboring cities that were practically untouched. They, were in different dimensions from ours — immediately parallel to us, and yet, blissfully unaware of the liminal dimension we now found ourselves in —

a dimension we could not leave, until we faced our karma.

In Taino mythology, Huracán (or Guabancex) is a zemi, or deity, of chaos. She manifests in the form of cataclysmic earthly destruction, such as that caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, and most of all, hurricanes. Temperamental and irrational, it was said that nothing could appease her enough to stop her from destroying everything in her path. Huracán was believed to be the violent aspect of their beloved primary goddess, Atabey, the mother of all beings.

Do The Right Thing: Loot Ingles

There was only one thin strip of cement along the bridge’s edge that could be tightrope-walked on to reach Tunnel Road, so that’s what we did, one by one in a single-file line.

Walking on Tunnel Road, soon enough we came upon a small produce store. By now, Monkey had parked his car on the other side of the bridge and walked here to join us. Together we stood in front of the store, deciding whether to loot it or not.

“We could save this produce and find a place where they’re giving away food,” said Sally.

“But this isn’t some big corporate store,” Valentina said. “It’s a small business, and we know this guy.”

“The produce will go bad, though,” said Monkey. “We might as well take it.”

“But we’d have to break open the door, and I don’t want to cause damages that they might have to pay for later,” Valentina countered, wanting to be as morally sound as possible.

“Are we sure about that?” Monkey pulled up on the garage door to the left of the store, and it opened easily. Perfect!

We filed in, carefully navigating the deep mud in almost complete darkness, save for a few of my landmates’ phone flashlights. We crossed the garage and made our way in through the inner side door to the actual shop, where a bounty of tomatoes and a few other wares had just survived above the surface level of the floodwater.

Once inside, I immediately unlocked the front door so we could get out more easily than we came in. With that, we all began to forage.

“Let’s only take exposed produce that didn’t get touched by flood water,” Valentina strategized. “Anything in a package that they can save and sell later, do not touch. We don’t want to hurt this guy.”

I only managed to grab one lone potato before we heard a banging on the garage door. A man’s voice roared at us: “Y’all get out of there! It’s not your stuff!”

I had a split-second thought: This man might have a gun.

So we all immediately dropped what we were holding, and filed out the front door without a fight.

When we stepped into daylight, we could see the source of the voice: A rotund middle-aged man. He was holding a stick, but didn’t seem armed otherwise.

“Are you the store owner?” somebody asked.

“No, he’s my friend. He’s lost enough in this flood! Y’all don’t need to be takin’ his stuff!”

“We’re only taking things that would go bad,” Valentina explained, “and we’re going to bring it to somewhere where they’re feeding people.” (This was genuinely our plan, dear reader, as you will later learn.)

Somehow this turned into a petty argument. The man insisted that we were bad people for taking the doomed produce to feed people with, and we defended our honor in turn. Our voices escalated when we realized the absurdity of this man playing ethics-police over a few fucking tomatoes.

“Why don’t you guys go loot Ingles instead?” the man shouted, referring to the big grocery chain.

Now I was angry at his drooling stupidity. Unafraid, I shouted at him, “How does that make any sense in your brain?! Looting this place is wrong, but looting Ingles is okay?!”

“He’s lost enough!”

“He’s not losing anything more!” Sally snapped back. “He can’t sell this stuff anyway!”

“Just go take it from Ingles!” the man doubled down.

“IT’S THE SAME FUCKING THING!” I shouted, ready to fight.

Jude touched my shoulder, sending a wave of peace through me. “Don’t feed him,” he said gently. He was right. So I turned my back to the man, ignoring him. Sally and Monkey did, too.

But Valentina, ever the lover, put her hands over her heart, and faced the man fully. “Sir, look at me,” she said, her face sincere, her voice trembling with sadness. “Look at me. We thought about this. We are trying to do the right thing. This store owner is our friend, too. But there are people to feed, and it doesn’t make sense to leave this food here if people need it. This is a crisis. There are no perfect solutions.”

The man kept going, like he just had to have the last stupid word, and a passerby even got involved by tattling on us to a National Guard tank as it drove by (the driver of which smirked at us with a wink, as if to say, Loot the fucking store, I don’t care.)

But now it felt like more trouble than it was worth. So when the man finally walked away, so did we.

“Survival-mode makes people think in very interesting ways,” Valentina said, with more compassion for that man than I could find within myself.

Sally whispered with a mischievous smile: “I got a bag of apples.”

And I darkly joked that I should make apocalypse merch that says: Do the right thing: Loot Ingles.

•••

It later occurred to us that I’d left the front door unlocked. So we hoped that whoever arrived after us, if they were in need, took what they needed.

•••

We would also later catch a rumor that the cops had already barricaded Ingles, walked in, and helped themselves to all the inventory before anyone else could.

So now there was nothing left to loot there anyway.

Those fuckers.

---

The Side Quest

As we passed by the Subway attached to the gas station, a teddy-bear-like Middle Eastern man discreetly leaned out the door and waved us over. Let’s call him Ahmed.

Ahmed was the owner of this Subway branch, and he was clearing out the industrial freezer at the back of the store. Without power, this huge inventory of meat was going to go bad unless we could get it to people who could cook it quickly.

Yet another video game moment! Like,

SIDEQUEST: Help this Subway owner clear out his fridge. Acquire huge bags of food to give away. Do you accept?

Heck yes, we accept!

“Take some to feed yourselves,” said Ahmed. “The rest, we’ll deliver to somewhere they can distribute it.” 

We got to work, emptying tubs of chopped vegetables into plastic baggies, packing copious amounts of thawing cookie dough and pizzas, and organizing the meats: salami, chicken, ham, turkey… 

While we worked, Ahmed confided that he’d already lost a business during COVID.

“This is my second loss,” he said. “I lost 15 animals in the flood. I was up to my neck in water but I saved a few of them. And this?” He motioned to the freezer. “This is $20,000 in food.”

And yet here he was, in the midst of his grief, making sure everyone in the community was taken care of.

Soon we had filled a few bags for ourselves, as well as the back of Ahmed’s pickup truck. The rest, we organized along the wall of the Subway.

People pulled up to see what was going on, and we delightedly pointed them to the food we’d arranged along the wall. “It’s free! Take all you need!”

People loaded their arms with cheeses, meats and breads. Many of them had kids to feed.

A man with a burly beard walked up. “I lost everything,” he said. “My house, my camper. I literally just have the shirt on my back.”

“Well then, here,” Ahmed said. “Take anything you want.”

The bearded man only took a log of turkey and some cheese, as if he felt too ashamed to take more. So Valentina teased, “I think you want some guacamole,” and handed him a package of that. The bearded man, though despondent, looked genuinely touched at this gesture before turning and walking away — to where, I’m not sure. I hope he’s safe.

When no one else could hear us, Ahmed cast a subtle glance at Jude, who is an Israeli Jew, and said to me: “I am from Palestine. So he and I, we not supposed to get along. But I don’t care. At time like this, no matter if you Jew, or Muslim, or Buddhist, whatever. We all need to help each other.”

“Amen,” I said, acknowledging my own faith.

With divine timing, we caught word of a bakery a few blocks away that was using a generator to power their equipment and cook warm meals for people. We parted ways: Ahmed took all the food to that bakery in his pickup truck, while we carried our own huge bags back down the street towards our mountain.

Some for us, and way more for our neighbors.

To Bear Witness

On the way back, a woman seemed to spawn in our path like yet another video game character. She looked absolutely shell-shocked. Her body was tense and her gaze was sharp… and she was angry.

Turns out she was a medic, and she’d personally rescued a woman from the flood yesterday.

“She was in the water for 14 hours when I found her, just hanging on for dear life. Everyone was just fucking watching, so I jumped in and pulled her out. She had hypothermia so bad that she was ripping her clothes off, because she was so cold she was hot. We put her skin-to-skin with somebody so she could warm up again. I called river rescue and asked them why the fuck they weren’t out here, and they were like, ‘We didn’t get a call.’ Why the fuck are you waiting for a call? You know there’s a flood. You know people are drowning. And you’re waiting for a fucking call? Get your asses out here!”

Every time we heard a story like this, I felt another surge of tears coming on. I had seen enough with Jacob’s death yesterday. But now I felt like I was secondhand-seeing even more trauma. How much could I hold?

After chatting some more, the woman went her separate way, and we continued on towards our mountain, at the base of which was the gas station Monkey had parked his car outside of. 

It was being actively looted. 
We simply couldn’t resist.

Keeping our balance on piles of unidentifiable cans rolling around in the mud, we joined the crowd of people foraging in the dark for anything not destroyed by floodwater.

When I saw that almost every drink had been cleared from the glass refrigerators except for an entire row of V8 juice, I reached for it and joked, “Well somebody’s gotta take the nasty vegan vegetable juice!”

A hipster dude overheard me and unironically said, “You’re vegan? There’s organic IPA over here!”

It might’ve been the most polite looting ever.

Pulled Back to the Landslide

When we were done, Monkey took us back up the mountain in his car. But through some stroke of fate, we ended up at the landslide site… and when he tried going around some back roads to get us closer to our land, we ended up at the landslide site again. Unsure of how else to proceed, he dropped us off.

After Monkey drove away, Valentina said, “I don’t think this is an accident. I think we should pray.”

So we stood together and surveyed the landslide where 4 houses had been standing just yesterday — the landslide that had killed Jacob and Jolene.

“Where are the houses that were here?” Valentina wondered. “I don’t see, like, house parts…?”

“They’re under the mud,” said Jude solemnly.

Oh.

There was something truly horrific about that realization. That 4 entire houses not only went down, but were swallowed by the earth.

Jude knelt down, put his hand on the ground, and listened deeply. Then: "I feel the land screaming," he said. "I hear a woman screaming for her child."

Moments later, I spotted a piece of debris: a kid's electronic keyboard. Indeed, a child had lived here.

Together, we chanted “Om,” and toned, and prayed. Trying, somehow, someway, to bring peace to this devastated land.

Admittedly, I pulled away sooner than they did and prompted us all to leave. I felt tired all of a sudden and just wanted to go “home.” Maybe I’d reached my limit of what I could witness in one day.

The rest of them lingered silently at the landslide site before following me up the mountain — up the same slope I’d navigated just yesterday, trying to find someone who could contact 911 to save Jacob.

Upon returning to the house, we strategically sorted out which Subway foods we’d keep (not much, as our freezer was already full) and what we’d give to neighbors in the morning when it was light again.

For dinner, Valentina and Sally made 3-cheese mac, stir fried veggies, and ground beef. It was absolutely decadent. Then I tried to bake the cookie dough by making an aluminum foil “oven” in a saucepan on the propane stove, but we ended up with a gooey cookie pudding-cake instead. All the same, it was delicious — and triggered major nostalgia. We marveled at how blessed we were, to be eating like this in a crisis.

“I am so glad we’re going through this together,” said Jude, emphasizing that he was grateful for us specifically — not just any other apocalypse team.

I felt exactly the same. Who would’ve thought, that following a synchronicity to the Clarity commune, would one day turn out to be the best survival decision I’d ever made? My landmates were smart, kind and resourceful — not to mention spiritually attuned and emotionally intelligent.

I tried to imagine going through this ordeal with literally anyone else, including my closest friends, and I realized it would’ve sucked.

Somehow, we’d been brought together to one place, as if specifically to share this dramatic experience.

Like a movie.
Like a video game.

Maybe everything did happen for a reason, I thought to myself.

---

It still wasn’t certain that our structures were safe to sleep in, so Jude and I chose to stay in Sally’s house for one more night. (My cat, Jupiter, was not a fan of this decision, and was growing increasingly anxious. But we had to make it work.)

Hanging out with them in the kitchen, we darkly joked about what would happen if we ran out of food.

“You’d probably get eaten first,” Jude said to me, plainly. “Think about it. You eat super healthy, so you probably taste the best.”

“She’s organic,” Sally joked.

“She’s grass-fed,” Jude added.

We laughed so hard that our stomachs hurt. From there, we launched into yet another luminous spiritual conversation, perhaps even more mind-blowing than the one from yesterday’s smoke session.

At some point there was a pause, whereupon Jude looked at each of us, and simply said — as if confirming what we could all still see — "Gods."

"Gods," I said, acknowledging the gods before me.

"Gods," said Sally, seeing through our eyes, as only a fellow god could.

•••

Gods, and yet,
we were seemingly at the mercy of even bigger, more powerful gods than us.

I thought about Huracán again. Huracán had sorted us, in her chaotically mechanistic way, into the precise pockets of reality we karmically deserved.

We were all going through the experience of being stranded in this wasteland together, so this was a collective experience. But it was also deeply personal for each of us, dredging up our personal karmas to be dealt with immediately, like a kaleidoscope taking a single central point and fractally reflecting it in an outer mandala around the point. The Collective was the individual, and the individual was the Collective.

If Huracán was intelligent, and had a purpose, it was to reveal.
Huracán is a goddess of revelation.

She reveals people’s true character.
She reveals what was really important.
She reveals unresolved issues, spiritual blind spots, and so much more.

And her revelatory storm that had raged around us yesterday, was about to be amplified by an emotional storm developing in my inner world, swiftly approaching on the horizon, to reveal a karmic debt I’d been shadow-blind to all this time…

---

Read Part 3 here:

---