We've Not Even Begun to Grieve

Preparing for The Storm

As I sit here typing on the evening of Friday, August 19th, most of Southern California is under a tropical storm warning due to Hurricane Hilary, while parts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Canada (to name a few) are on fire. We were upgraded from a watch to a warning just a few hours ago. Jon filled the gas tank in the car tonight, we’re stocked up on food, and more prep will happen tomorrow. We are predicted to get about three inches of rain here in the Ojai Valley, but this could change. Any rain in August is unusual, but 3” is unheard of.

However, we are living in the unusual now.

The last time a tropical storm made landfall in California was in 1939. For all of its palm trees and beaches, California is not in the tropics. A very large percentage of the palm trees here are not native to this land but were brought here in the late 1700s by Spanish missionaries due to some biblical association. We are a populated and built-over desertlike terrain and climate that ends at the sea.

I gotta say, my spoons have run out of spoons and the spoon drawer is empty. I’m barely feeling this one as of yet, and I guess this is what living through late-stage capitalism and accelerating climate change is like. The hits come so much faster and are so much bigger that it starts to feel like one massive takedown, and numbness and apathy set in.

I was so close to finishing so many things with big plans upon waking this morning, and today not a one of them got finished. I’m two three naps in as of this point which tells me that somewhere there will most likely be some serious flooding.

I was talking to a friend, and we were wondering aloud about the chasm in our town, the chasm that’s also reflected to us in the world around us and its cause.

I think it’s this, on a larger scale, late-stage capitalism and accelerating climate change, and the pandemic on another.

Collectively, we have not yet even begun to grieve all we have lost since the pandemic overtook us. Each of us individually may have done our best, felt to whatever extent we could the losses, the incalculable and devastating losses - people, experiences, animals, jobs, relationships, activities, loves, so many loves, and the regularity of living our lives - gone for years, while trying to survive a once in one hundred year event.

But there has been no collective grieving, no coming together as One.

And now we find ourselves having been thrust back in, the rat race running once more. So many going at top speed again without having tended to the pain, anger, sorrow, rage, powerlessness, and grief. While another wave of COVID bears down upon us once more like a hurricane but unseen.

The Grief

Inescapable and present within us all.

Untended to, unhealed, festering and manifesting as ugliness in our spaces, spewing out of us at times in unconscious ways, creating more separation, more isolation, more, and more, and more until we choose to stop. And feel it. The monstrosity of it as it weeps from above.

And Grieve.

For all that we have lost.

For all whom we have lost.