subject: Fie Years After Hurricane Katrina: A Changed Life [print this page] Ongoing Daily Spiritual Insight from the Story ofThe Little Prince
The airman's crash in the Sahara Desert is symbolic of what has to happen in all our lives: the death of the socially-constructed person we have imagined we are, and the rebirth of our original true being.
It's not often something that happens overnight, though it can as it did with Eckhart Tolle as he relates inThe Power of Now.
For me it was a journey that took years, as little by little I learned that the person I thought of myself as was a false self. Inch by inch my authentic being emerged, intermittently and tentatively for several years.
But then there came the crash in the desert, with the ending of the old and the emergence of the new, the person I had always been born to be.
The timing of this part of The Little Prince's story, focusing on the crash in the desert, is quite synchronistic in terms of my own life.
That's because we have serendipitously arrived at this part of the story on the weekend of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. For twenty years I lived in Louisiana, most of it in the New Orleans area.
We were not in the main city where the flooding happened even though the hurricane didn't hit the city with a bull's eye, but in a suburb right in the path of the hurricane. Seven of us huddled in a very solid house on six acres of land surrounded by trees so dense they formed a solid wall on all sides.
As the blow began, the power went out in the early hours of the morning. It was the hottest time of the year, stifling heat and humidity. Since we were on a well, our water supply went too except for what we had put in plastic bottles.
I watched 100-year-old giant pecan trees uprooted and tossed on their side as easily as pushing a birthday candle flat on the surface of a cake. By the time it was over late that afternoon, the skyline had been totally transformed. There was no longer a wall of trees, but one pine here and one there stilt-like against an open horizon of fields on all sides.
It was as if an atom bomb had gone off, akin to the photos you see of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At such a time, you realize that what we consider normality in modern society can end in a flash. One day you have all the comforts and the next everything is swept away.
A friend at the time had a parallel event going on: a divorce that came as a total surprise, blowing her world apart.
Another friend, older in life, tripped while staying with his daughter after the hurricane, hit his head, and died the next day in hospital.
All around me people's lives were in upheaval, in some cases their homes flattened and in other cases badly damaged.
I imagined that if we just spent enough hours on the end of a chainsaw, we could eventually put life back together. What I didn't take into account was the emotional impact of the whole disaster on everyone concerned.
At a time like this you can be shell-shocked and not know it. You behave in ways that aren't necessarily rational.
In the months that followed, my life changed irrevocably. Some put their lives back together in a fairly normal way, but for me this was akin to the "crash in the desert" that the airman experienced in the story of The Little Prince.
Where are you in this journey? Have you too crashed in the desert?
