Friday it will be 4 weeks since Hurricane Florence hit here. Today Hurricane Michael will hit Florida, heading right for where my dear friend lives in Tallahassee — she just texted me a picture of how she and her husband have their hallway set up where they will ride out the hurricane and it looks pretty much like mine 4 weeks ago — and it feels like madness! By tomorrow the weather is supposed to come here as a Tropical Storm. Today I am looking around trying to figure out what all I must do here. What all must be taken down and brought in again.

Today I have therapy and a whole host of errands. Mailing a package, medicine for Pugsley, groceries, water, and more. We could lose power again. There could be more impact with the trees here. We are to get a lot of rain. Some trees fall because the ground gets so soft from flooding and so much rain. And then we are not recovered from the hurricane that hit here. I look out my studio windows to the back at all the big dead limbs hanging that no one has been able to come and get down yet. Some are very large and high up and overhang the back of my house. Will they come down? We all thought whatever damage we had was what we had. But they are predicting potential high winds here too. There is no way to know what will happen.

Now there is nothing to do but to do what we can and wait and see. I was to have a lovely couple come tomorrow morning at 8 to spend the day doing work outside here, everything from yard cleanup to trimming bushes and cutting back the roses and everything that were torn asunder with the hurricane here. It’s a mess out there. Now the Tropical storm is supposed to come tomorrow. It’s hard to know what to do.

Today fear is displaced by busyness. My daughter Rachel will be here tonight for dinner and to watch our show. (We watch “This Is Us” every week together on Hulu the day after it airs because I don’t have cable tv.) She can help me take down all of the windchimes on the front porch and back deck that finally got put back up after Hurricane Florence. I have a LOT of windchimes, lovely sounding but worrisome during a storm when they must come down. And my front porch plants, lots of them, will be brought in the front room. I used to have a lot of plants on the back deck too but most of them died having to be in the garage for over a week after Hurricane Florence. All the ones that had been on the front porch were brought in the living room in the front of the house. Most of them fared well. Now my back deck is not usable with huge broken branches overhanging it and the back yard fence broken in several places and unsafe from trees falling on it so the plants that survived are all on the front porch. These weeks have felt like an endless series of carrying things inside and back out and now inside and then back out again. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

My friend Noni may be coming here to ride out the storm tomorrow. We will cook as long as we have power. So much is uncertain. Today I am doing laundry, washing bedding. This morning I was sitting here thinking about the fact that I, like everyone else in this town, had to throw out all of my food in the refrigerator and freezers. I’ve finally just restocked them pretty well last week. Now if we lose power again we could lose our food again. Hopefully that won’t happen.

I’m kind of numb. I am worried about my dear friend and praying for her and her dear husband and my god-daughter that they will be safe, and looking around here and making a list of everything I must do. All we can do is prepare for what may come and hope for the best.

May all beings be safe. May this all be over soon.

Infinite Compassion: A 365 Day Journey~ 
Day 1 – Peeling The Layers Of The Heart…

“We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition.
No one is encouraging us to open and still we must
peel away the layers of the heart.”
Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche