New Strength from
Ancient Wisdom
was wondering what we would eat
when the last jar of peanut butter
was gone when Kathy stuck her head through the door to let me know her stove was working and offered to heat up a can of soup.
“Our stove works, but we don’t have any water,” she said.
It was the morning after. Time had slowed to a breath-by-breath situation. Life as I’d known it was irretrievably broken, smeared with sludge and feces from our town’s sewer system treatment plant, which had broken
during the storm surge and contaminated our water supply. The stench seeped through the walls, nauseating me.
Every tiny movement required a decision. If you drink bottled water, where will you pee? If you move something, how many steps through slime will it take to reach that canister of anti-bacterial wipes? You can’t carry them with you because there is no safe place to put them down.
A few months before the storm, my father and uncle came to me in three separate dreams, warning me that there would be an emergency and I should stock up on fresh, clean water. There were thirteen gallons upstairs and twenty-four bottles of drinking water. Since the house was becoming toxic with bacteria, we were going to leave the next day—if I could find someone nearby who would let Bogart and me stay for a couple of nights until I figured out where to go next.
All that was running through my head as I gave Kathy a gallon of water to take across the street to her own damaged home. She could come back if she needed more.
A bone-chilling cold settled in as the October afternoon light started to fade. Soon, it would be dark and I did not look forward to a second night upstairs in that cramped crawl space.
Ten minutes later, Kathy returned, holding two cups of hot tea. I felt like crying. Her kindness left me feeling cared for and supported. It was the gift of empathy in action. We were in it together. We hugged, and in that moment of having lost everything, we were rich.
The Richest Man in the World
That stays in my mind like a Post-it, reminding me of a photojournalism assignment to shoot pictures of gold panners in the Madre de Dios jungle, a forgotten corner of the Peruvian rainforest. Our government-issued Ford pick-up truck had gotten stuck behind a mudslide, which had buried the one-lane road under ten feet of muck. After an uncomfortable, cold night
trying to sleep in the truck, the driver and our guide joined a crew of volunteers who were shoveling out. Looking at the mountain of mud and the pace at which the crew was working, the driver guesstimated it would take around five hours before the road was drivable.
For some reason that I don’t understand, I had no fear about being alone there and went for a walk in the early morning cloud forest where I got splashed with cloudlets of dew clinging to the trees. Pushing away branches and stepping carefully over slick, wet rocks, I entered a clearing where a skinny, bearded man with one tooth was living in a bamboo lean-to, covered
with a blue tarp. We stared at each other—two creatures from different worlds.
I
Excerpt from the book Five Gifts, by Laurie Nadel, PhD