Tag Archives: Hurricanes

The Hana Chronicles: Month 9, Day 1

0
Posted by on in children, Community, Education, Entertainment, Family, Historical, Inspiration, Personal Values, Social, Striving, Travel

September 22, 2026- Hana got a thumbs-up from her pediatrician today, at her 9-month visit. Doc even referred to Hana as “The Boss”, for her outspoken babbling, that had a tome of authority. Most importantly, the little girl is hitting all the markers, which I have described over the past few days. She even took three steps without support, earlier today.

Hana is also showing a sense of humour about herself. When her father mimicked a few sounds she was making, she looked at him and burst into laughter. She does get cranky when she’s tired, but otherwise, my granddaughter is in some ways a mirror of my mother, and she can give it back, albeit in the babbling of a nine-month old.

So, she enters the last quarter of her first year, as our hemisphere begins autumn. The next three months will bring four lateral incisors, a growing sense of individuality and the first meaningful steps.

HANA’S NOTE- I wore a dress to my doctor’s office. It made me look special, Mommy said.

EXPANDING CIRCLES: Louisiana- The Pelican State is said to be floating on borrowed time. A friend from Slidell recently told me that the biggest mistake people have made there was not providing means for irrigation, as the levees, while protecting low-lying areas, were also drying out the soil in those areas.

Louisiana is Texas’s neighbour to the east. The Turf- Most of the state is of fairly low elevation, with the area around the mouths of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers being below sea level. This has been borne out most vividly, and tragically, in extreme weather events like Hurricanes Camille, in 1969, Katrina and Rita, in 2005 and Laura, in 2020.

First Nations- Louisiana is the ancestral home of the Atakapa, Caddo, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Houma, Natchez and Tunica peoples. After European settlement, the Alabama, Biloxi, Coushatta and Ofo people were pushed into the area. Today, the Chitimacha, Coushatta, Houma and Tunica-Biloxi Nations, as well as Jena Band of the Choctaw Nation, have reservations in the state. The Choctaw were largely among the displaced who were forced to go northwest to Oklahoma, in the dead of winter, during Andrew Jackson’s forced relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes. The Jena Band were those who escaped into the piny woods and bayous. Poverty Point, Watson Brake and Campus Mounds are sites of burial mounds of the Caddo and even earlier peoples.

I have been to New Orleans, three times; once was specifically for Mardi Gras (2015). The other visits were briefer, due to transit needs. Baton Rouge and Alexandria were the sites of a longer visit, at the time of Hurricane Laura (2020). On that occasion, I was volunteering with the Red Cross, at a storm shelter. Lake Charles, Vidalia, Monroe and Shreveport are other communities in which I’ve stopped. Each of these would be worth a visit with Hana, especially the Mounds, the area around Lake Pontchartrain and the Garden District of New Orleans. I would also like to spend a few days in Lafayette, absorbing the Zydeco and Cajun sounds. Preservation Hall, in New Orleans would be a destination, as well.

Where I feel most at home: Alexandria, Lake Charles, the Garden District and French Quarter, south side of Baton Rouge, Vidalia.

Where I feel most at peace: Lake Pontchartrain

NEXT: New Mexico

Navigating

6
Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, Education, Family, impediments, Inspiration, Matters of Faith, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving, Travel

October 6,2024, Manila- The day started and ended with rain. Thus, the nice picnic devotional we had planned for late morning became an indoor affair. I brought chicken fillets, topped with dinakdakan sauce. Kathy and her male cousin contributed a rather good pizza. Others brought a regional variation on pancit- a generic Tagalog name for noodles. There was also a seaweed dish, brought by one of the young men. I have been a fan of seaweed since the days we lived in Jeju, Korea. It is a powerhouse of nutrients. I will describe dinakdakan, which I find tasty, upon request. (No, it is not made from insects).

The afternoon was spent in study of aspects of Huquq’u’llah, which I have discussed in earlier posts (see especially Sept. 16, 2024). It was not dry and intense-no Filipino would sit through such boredom for long, but it was done with attention and focus. Kathy knows what she’s doing, especially when it comes to academic presentation of financial matters. I was honoured to sit at her right-hand side and contribute a fair amount to the discussion. Much of it was in Tagalog, but I had everyone’s attention when offering thoughts in English.

Towards the end of the meeting, K’s cousin pressed me to extend my stay- “permanently”. She and I exchanged knowing glances, smiled and I said I would need to go back to the U.S., for six months. There are several things needing attention at Home Base, in Carson City and back East-not excluding the possibility of time in the Southeast, given this year’s sudden explosion of hurricane energy-shades of 2005. Brief visits to San Diego and Jalisco are likely in February, and I will want to get to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, in April.

So, we have pretty much agreed on a May return. How “permanent” will be influenced by things like the birth of one or more grandchildren-still to be determined, BTW. Today, though, I learned that any mixed signals I may have sensed, over the past day or so, were mainly in my mind. This beautiful, compassionate, intelligent woman, whose friendship I am so privileged to secure, is for real.

Equinox Abundant

2
Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, impediments, Inner Struggles, Inspiration, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving

September 22, 2022- Equinox always seems to coincide with heavy physical energy-especially in September. So, we see intense storms affecting an area from the Windward Islands to Newfoundland, the southern Caribbean (and onward, next week, to Florida and beyond), western Alaska to northern California, and Pakistan. Earthquakes hit Mexico (twice), Chile and Indonesia this past week, with minor quakes in several other spots , including California.

Anything that affects Earth also affects its inhabitants, so there appears to be an upswing in aggressive behaviour, as well as its opposite, passivity, with Learned Helplessness accompanying the latter. I saw plenty of both today, in my work assignment. Fortunately, the school where I worked has effective systems in place to address both extremes.

Mostly, though, I see Equinox as a celebrant of both fertility (in the southern hemisphere) and productivity (in the northern hemisphere). Whenever there is an uptick in constructive energy, it is met by converse forces that tear down that which no longer meets the needs of humanity. There is resistance to both, and when that resistance can no longer be justified by logic and the scientific method, conspiracy theories arise. Yet, because the Universe is about the generating of life, and follows several levels of order, those theories and the resistance that generated them, tend to fall by the wayside.

I believe, very strongly, that this is what will happen with the current resistance-all the authoritarianism, denial (of climate change on the Right and of fetal humanity, on the Left) and closed mindedness across the political spectrum. Chaos is not going to be the order of the day.

The Equinox is about abundance.

Most Essential

0
Posted by on in children, collaborating, Education, impediments, Personal Values, Service Activities, Striving

October 22,2020-

This year was supposed to be one in which I spent a goodly amount of time wending my way around the Pacific Northwest, Canada and the northern tier of states, from Maine to Montana.

Instead, COVID, hurricanes and just a general sense of being present here at Home Base came to the fore. I am grateful for all the experiences, from close to home ( in some local schools and as an online host for Baha’i events) and in Hurricane Alley (Red Cross disaster responses in Louisiana and Texas).

Nowhere do I feel more useful, though, than when making sure that little ones are guided to the right, safe place-especially at the end of the day, when it’s bus or parent pick-up time, That has happened twice in three days, just because it’s all new to our five-year-olds. It breaks my heart that they should feel ashamed for needing help with learning this routine.

The most essential thing is for human beings to feel safe, especially in what, for them, are novel experiences.

Jargon and Cross-Purposes

2
Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, distraction issues, impediments, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving

September 24, 2020, Dallas-

I came here, this afternoon, to begin two weeks of deployment with the Red Cross, this time mainly helping clients who were displaced by three storms: Laura, Sally and Beta. They are staying in hotels, so our efforts are in the lobbie sof some of Dallas’s larger chain hotels. The Hilton, Hyatt, Wyndham and Marriott chains are earning their stripes, these past few weeks and for the near future.

I have spent a good part of the afternoon, at Dallas-Fort Worth Inetrnational Airport, bickering back and forth with Uber’s IT department and finance office. When IT finally cleared me, Finance stuck its foot out and, with the use of jargon and God-knows-what payment model, determined that my bank accounts were insufficient to meet a $ 26 tab. (They were not insufficient and aren’t now, either.)

Such are the vagaries of communicating only by smart phone. Tabs that are easy to locate on a PC do not exist on a phone. Looping is also more prevalent on a cell phone than on a PC or I-Pad. This is not the phone maker’s fault, but that of the website designers who choose not to add the same buttons to the phone that are on their PC applications. I know this, because my banks and this Social Medium,as well as others, have the smae buttons on their phone apps as on their computer apps.

It is a challenge, when businesses that depend on the consumer act at cross purposes with themselves, as well as with their prospective customers.

The good news is that a proactive taxi driver benefitted from Uber’s foolishness and I enjoyed a fine meal of Hawaiian Poke at a nice little establishment called Lemon Shark, not far from my abode of the next two weeks.

Self or Others?

10
Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, impediments, Inspiration, Personal goals, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving, Travel

September 23, 2020-.

I was in a group session on Monday evening, in which the question was posed, as to whether it is more crucial to care for oneself or to care for others.

The short answer to the title question is: Both. Actually, anything one does for oneself usually impacts others, and vice versa. This is especially true if one is reflective and maintains a consistent presence, in any given activity.

I have two socially-responsible lines of activity: Substitute teaching, which I did yesterday and Disaster Response, which I will resume tomorrow. A flight to Dallas, via Denver, early tomorrow morning, will begin my second Red Cross deployment, in a month. Two weeks will be spent in “Big D”, purportedly in providing assistance to those still being sheltered after Hurricanes Laura, Sally and Beta. Much of the sheltering happens after the full-on storm has left, and the floods/power outages make life continually unpleasant.

The activities in which I am involved are impacted by my beliefs. ‘Abdu’l-Baha exhorts us: “Be fair to yourselves and to others, that the evidences of justice may be revealed, through your deeds, among Our faithful servants.” It was ingrained in me, long before I became a Baha’i, to consider the needs of others, in lieu of indulging myself. That has remained, by and large, a guidepost in my life. I would have to , of course, acknowledge critics who say “Wait, you weren’t very nice to ME, not so long ago” or “I remember when …….” The goal, however, remains the same-and none of us walks on water.

So, as with my earlier deployment to Louisiana, by way of Beaumont, the needs of others will be far ahead of my own needs-this being the essence of Disaster Response.