“Shock has value,” says wise woman Josephine Spilka upon contemplating the outer and inner wreckage that mighty Hurricane Helene visited upon her life.
After what she thought was a night of heavy rain, Josephine awoke in the early morning of September 27 to what sounded a freight train ripping through her house.
When the stately rooted trees on her property began twirling like parasols through the sky and crashed down into a 10-foot-high barricade of tangled wood blocking her driveway, all she could do was sit on her sofa and cry trembling tears.
No power. No cell phone service. No way to know what was going on elsewhere.
Drawing on her decades of accumulated wisdom as a Classical Chinese Medicine practitioner, Buddhist devotee, and I Ching student, Josephine summoned her presence amidst the chaos and has emerged—is continuing to emerge—with, in her words, “trust in the natural order of Heaven and Earth.”
Listen to Josephine express the privilege she feels by having experienced Helene firsthand and the opportunity it presents her to transmute crisis into blessing.
Here’s a time-stamped summary of what we covered:
0:00 Introduction: “Things will never be the same”
9:52 We had no idea what was going on anywhere else
10:50 The strange exhilaration of a living world heightened by disaster
14:20 Natural elements don’t behave the way we expect them to
16:09 You can’t pretend anything is ok
17:30 “I Ching Hexagram 51: The Arousing”
18:50 Thousands of dollars of wasted food
22:19 Disaster has no opinion
23:24 “What do I really need?”
28:02 Kwan Yin’s blessing
33:10 Astrological coincidence and the massive hand of fate
36:10 Back to WNC: the impact on Josephine and the future of Asheville
42:44 Trust in the natural order of Heaven and Earth
47:58 We each need to become sovereign
49:57 Nature eats chaos for breakfast
To follow Josephine’s insights on her continued journey, subscribe to her Monday Morning Notes here on Substack.
”The shock that comes from the manifestation of God within the depths of the earth makes man afraid, but this fear of God is good, for joy and merriment can follow upon it.” —I Ching Hexigram 51, The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)
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