My instincts cautioned, "Don't get involved. You have plenty of your own woes right now. You don't even know how you'll pay your own rent this month." BLAH, B-L-A-H, BLAH, blah-blah-blah, blah, bla chattered away the story incessantly in my head.
My instincts died down luckily and my intuition won out. And that happened way before the reverend on Sunday asked us to allow our hearts to be broken by Katrina. Then, she said, we will be led to the appropriate action, the right action to take.
I talked a long while back about my heart breaking open after the tsunami. It was not personally the biggest tragedy in my life. I mean that in the personal sense: worse has happened to me. I've lost my job, husband, and a major chunk of my net worth in the course of a single year. It wouldn't be a blues song without the dog dying too. So yes, Taz, our beloved yellow Lab died seven months after the divorce. So, in the grand scheme of things, the tsunami wasn't that hard on me, myself.
However it was the first time my heart reached out to so many others. I literally felt the collective pain and suffering throughout the Indian Ocean. And that bowled me over. I believe what happened to me is known as your heart chakra opening.
Yet this entire year I've felt like a heavy cloud has been weighing me down. I've tried not to show it online too much - and it hasn't always been completely dense, completely opaque. I'll tell you why that's been and why that's lifted this weekend in another post. "Getting involved" with Katrina (i.e. which starts with feeling, rather than ignoring or shutting out) actually has had the opposite effect than I anticipated.
Another thing the reverend said that stood out for me as resonating with my own experience is that somewhere in our life we begin to be guided by an inner light instead of figuring it all out in our head. However, this guidance never seems to shine a beacon miles down the path. Nope, it's just out about six inches.
Six inches of clarity. Just enough for the next step. One step. So often we're waiting to be shown the whole five-year plan. Hmmm, I don't think it works that way. Grace is what happens when we're busy making other plans, anyway.
Six inches is enough for me to know I'll be talking here post-Katrina about resiliency and healing (filed under new category: Resiliency). Which believe it or not relates to creativity, intuition, growth, and fearlessness. (For regular readers, there is a business tie-in, don't worry as everything I truly learned about marketing, I learned by being with people. But it's squarely aimed for those affected by Katrina, too.)
If you are aware of psychological, spiritual, and other emotional healing resources for Katrina victims and their families, please add them to the Katrina Help Wiki. Thanks!!
p.s. With a headline like that, I bet you weren't expecting something maybe in a different vein from the topic of this post.
Technorati tags: Flood Aid, Hurricane Katrina
Credits: Flickr photo by 1000 watt dream
Hi Evelyn....
Very interesting new category, resilience. I buy that a lot. It's a very, very interesting thought area for me... Here are some recs. www.zukav.com just sent an email to his list today about 12 opportunities to be found on his site post katrina... i think this may be like wht you said about the heart chakra opening up post-tsunami... I think you and zukav mean similar things.
And then two wonderful books on resiliency: "Learned Optimism" by Seligman and "The Resilience Factor" by Reivich.
Posted by: Resources | Sep 13, 2005 at 10:18 PM