in the eye of the storm

The wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it. They just let go into the wind and let it blow them away. They play on it, they float on it. It's a game. Once I saw them in an incredible hurricane-velocity wind, grabbing each other's feet and dropping and then letting go and flying out. It was like a circus act. -- Pema Chödrön

An “epic,” "extremely life-threatening," "100-year-storm” is currently battering the western coast of Alaska. It’s equivalent to a category three hurricane, which is what Katrina was. And like New Orleans, the villages out there--tiny isolated enclaves of a few hundred Native Alaskans living in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet--have known this kind of storm would come, one day, one year. Almost ninety percent of communities throughout the state are faced with ongoing erosion thanks to melting permafrost, warmer oceans, and retreating sea ice, and this kind of storm is exactly what they most fear. The people who live there have known a storm like this could level their communities completely. Some of them have been developing relocation plans for decades now. But they are still there, and the storm has come at last, and we won’t know how bad it is until it clears. For now there is just silence. Profound Arctic darkness. A special kind of terror for those of us who grew up there and have deep connections there, and who can’t do anything about the reality of the situation.

I spent all day yesterday glued to twitter and various live feeds of the storm, gathering as much information as I could. I obsessively looked at weather charts and sent worried emails back and forth to friends and family members all over the state. I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming about evacuations gone wrong and the sheer horror I was so effortlessly manufacturing and projecting on the situation from several thousand miles away. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach, heart racing fast, mind racing even faster through all of the environmental, social, and political consequences this kind of event could have on Alaskans and well beyond.

I looked around my beautiful, quiet little apartment, filling with early morning eastern light. I glanced at my utterly untroubled, snoring dog. I put coffee on. I wrapped myself in a blanket, went outside, and took a much-needed reality check on the cushion.

Fear is just a habit--a very, very stubborn habit--that is grounded in our very deep, core beliefs of personal worthlessness and powerlessness and constantly affirmed by our performance of it. It begins in the politics of our families and we carry it on to the way we behave in relationships, see the world, the way we build our communities, what we believe is possible or impossible. My reactivity to something playing out thousands of miles away has nothing to do with the actual danger of the event. It certainly has nothing to do with what I can contribute to those communities, whatever physical or energetic assistance I could possibly offer them. It would be the same if I were there. I would do what I could to protect myself and help my neighbors, and let go of the rest. There is never anything else we can possibly do. It is the only choice we ever actually have, no matter what is happening around us.

And so this storm, like anything else, is an invitation, and a choice. It is an invitation to examine our reaction to see what it can tell us, and it is a choice to believe our habitual, fear-based thinking--to interpret events beyond our control as confirmation of our own powerlessness--or to question those beliefs, and allow ourselves a bit of the peace we were so often trained from childhood to believe we do not deserve. It is an invitation to play, even when we are so much more comfortable with locking up in fear. It is a choice to see the beauty and potential of change: to let go into the wind and see where it wants to take us next. 

An Alaska where we can all be ravens in the hurricane is an Alaska that is no longer ruled by fear and constrained by deeply-held stories of our vulnerability, and that is the only choice that can finally liberate the state from the patterns of the past. It makes this storm an incredibly powerful and important moment, because it can mean radically accepting the state we are in (in every sense of the word) and stepping fully into our power and presence. We have a choice to redirect anxiety into optimism, and fear into action. Like ravens, we can transform the garbage dumps and ice hurricanes of our lives into vast, limitless playgrounds.