The Porch began in Asheville, and while we have community members in many places (folks in every state and over 60 countries read this newsletter), Asheville is a very important place for the Porch community.
This past week has seen devastation come to our city and surrounding area, in the form of Hurricane Helene and the flood that ensued. The loss of life and impact on our community cannot be adequately described. And along with many others, Porch people are doing what we must: we are bringing what we have, and asking for what we need, expanding the circle of family to include everyone we meet, one step at a time. If you’re not in the areas directly affected by the storm, here are two primary ways you can help, right now:
1: Consider donating to one of the organizations listed here - they know how best to serve the growing needs of the community.
2: Don’t wait for a crisis to call forth the best in you. Check in on your neighbors, let go of a grudge, apologize for something you’ve done, show hospitality, breathe deeply, look at the most beautiful nearby thing and re-commit to treasuring it more than money or power, ask someone what it’s like to be them today, ask someone for help, tell a better story in which everyone can live in peace and unafraid. Share more.
Below are reflections from three of us who help steward the vision of The Porch, and who care deeply about Asheville. We’re safe and well (some of us have been out of town since before the storm) as is everyone we’ve heard from in the Porch community. Of course, please share this post if you feel it will help. We welcome your words of support, and the spirit of transformative storytelling married to practical action for the common good.
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FROM GARETH HIGGINS
Asheville is full of porches.
If you grew up in the South, you know that a porch is a gathering place, for conversation, connection, and sometimes simply sitting a while. Around Asheville there are entire towns that feel like porches - I think of Hot Springs, Weaverville, Montreat and Black Mountain (where we host part of the annual Porch Gathering). Asheville itself, though growing quickly larger in the past few years, still has a porch-like sensibility; or at least you can find the “porch-ness” of Asheville if you ask a local.
I grew up in the North - of Ireland, that is - but I was adopted into Asheville over a decade ago, partly by marrying into Western North Carolina (Brian’s family have been there for three centuries), and partly by landing there when he got a job in the city. I cannot imagine my life without the gifts of Asheville: a small city on a hill, with exponential creative impulse, feet on the ground and mind in the spirit, earthy folks who work with their hands, a natural landscape that could make you weep with both gratitude for the awe of it and lament for how we humans often don’t share what we have with each other.
It’s been one of the great gifts of my life to know and be known by Asheville, and this week my heart is aching in a way I have not known before. Hurricane Helene has taken the lives of over 200 people, at least 61 of them in Asheville’s Buncombe County; the injuries and damage to community, buildings, roads and livelihoods more than we can imagine. So much taken by the flood.
And as always, catastrophe calls forth love:
Hospital staff not going home for over a week now. People emptying their fridges and cooking it all for the neighborhood, or just giving away what they have. A friend posting on Facebook that he has a fueled car and can give rides to those who need them.
The communities of Circle of Mercy and Land of the Sky, BeLoved Asheville and Haywood Street, and many more becoming hubs of sustenance and safety.
The multifaceted brilliance of the White Horse Black Mountain, an arts venue on whose board I serve, transforming into the town meeting place, giving away warm beer and offering a place to sit.
There are many porches that I love, and where I feel loved. It might be un-Porchlike to identify a favorite, but I’ll risk naming just one: the back porch at Karen’s (and if the Porch community has an elder wisdom figure, it’s Karen) where birdsong has mingled with a hundred conversations about our community.
Karen always quotes the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. But Karen has carried enough unexpected burdens, and experienced enough of the world’s shadows to recalibrate her Juliana. She recently revised her favorite contemplative teaching as follows:
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, kinda sorta maybe fuck it.
That fuck it is not intended to disparage. It’s just one way of expressing the mix of emotions that attend the hardest parts of life, and must be walked with if we’re not robots: anger, sadness, fear, desire for change, and laughter at the sometimes seeming absurdity of the suffering that comes our way.
Wisdom teaches that beneath all anger is fear, and beneath all fear is love; simply put, we feel anger because we’re afraid that something we love is (or seems to be) at risk. Such anger and fear can become violence to self or others, or can be - with tender and skillful assistance - transformed into fiercely protective, wildly creative, deeper love.
The suffering underway in and Asheville is real, and we should not make less of it than it deserves.
Nor should we downplay the outpouring of people simply doing the right thing that seems to be present throughout our city and region: loving their neighbors as themselves.
When we suffer, we can unite our suffering with others, and find ways to support each other. And when we witness the suffering of others, we can help directly; or if we’re not near enough to do so, we can still remake the world by embodying a better story.
Without Asheville, The Porch would not exist. Asheville has loved us, and we’re going to love Asheville through its suffering; through our pain; and we’re going to deepen our commitment to the truth that you never know when a story’s over, especially when you’re in it.
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FROM BRIAN AMMONS
Unrelated to the coming storm, Gareth and I both left our home on the Asheville/Swannanoa line for planned travel a week ago today. Within less than a day of our departure, our friends and neighbors there were thrust into a reality that I’m still barely comprehending.
I can’t quite express how surreal it is hearing news of the storm’s impact on Swannanoa from the BBC while sitting in a cafe in Belfast. I felt grateful this morning that I’d grabbed my Warren Wilson College sweatshirt on the way out the door — its literal warmth superseded by its tangible representation of the part of me that doesn’t know what to make of not being stranded without power or water on the hill I just left a few days ago.
We’ve heard from most of our friends by now. They are rattled, tired, fierce, resilient, and actively figuring how to meet basic needs and look out for people around them. It is strange not being there with them, and also humbling knowing how little I’d have to practically offer if I were.
People from all over the world who have visited that region because of work we’ve done there (from the Wild Goose days in Hot Springs through to the Porch Gathering just a few months ago) have been reaching out. Friends from Northern Ireland who through us have come to know friends from Asheville who participate in retreats here are reaching out to check on our people back there (yes, Karen Moore is safe…and you’ve know idea how much it means to me that so many folks have asked about our dear Karen by name).
I’ve been reluctant to post much other than sharing info about resources, because that’s what folk there need now — but I realize that because of the nature of what we do for a living we are part of lots of people’s connection to that region — a region my family has been tied to for 300 years, having arrived there from a place I’m currently located.
Mary Oliver wrote, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention…” and so I’m doing that. Paying attention to news from one home while I trying to show up in another. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say, other than acknowledging there’s a little network of folk I love that are connected to Western NC through us, and from Western NC to other people I love.
However you pray — whatever paying attention looks like for you — I do believe it matters.
All the other caveats that go along with the above apply (send money not stuff, don’t add more burden to limited resources by showing up in person yet, listen to local folk for lists of orgs to support — BeLoved Asheville is a good place to start, but I’m sure friends will add to the thread).
There are always multiple stories happening simultaneously, and lots of ways to tell each one. How to neither gloss over tragedy in search of a silver lining, nor have our hearts broken by tragedy without noticing the beautiful alchemy of community, isn’t always clear. Somedays, I just light a candle and write a rambling post.
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FROM JASMIN PITTMAN
I don’t have many words yet after Hurricane Helene. I am, along with so many, grieving the devastation in our beloved region. Southern Appalachia became my home a little over seven years ago, and discovering a sense of place and belonging was surprisingly swift and softly fierce.
My family and I have evacuated to Charlotte, North Carolina, and I’m grateful we are safe. But we are tethered to our community back home, and my heart is stretched achingly thin. I’m worrying. I’m witnessing the relief efforts from afar. I’m asking myself how I can help.
A poem feels like a very small thing to offer, but this is what I have at the moment. It is, as Brian mentioned, a way of paying attention, and maybe that is something like a prayer.
Transitions
In my path,
two dead birds, small
bodies curled like commas,
a pause before the winds
begin.
We blanket them with dirt,
burying wings
and a lightness
of being.
An ex-lover wonders
if our mountains remain
a haven amid the
fever of climate
catastrophe.
After the floods, I wonder
if love can go
extinct when we turn
a blind eye, a slow
unseeing.
I barely recognize
this place,
blanketed in mud,
but still feel
her pulse,
the way a baby
curled in darkness
lives by the steady
drum of a mother’s heart.
A long labor
on the horizon.