A meditation on survival, synchronicity, and staying alive
✎ May 17th, 2025
The morning after the tornado, I made coffee and toast and sat on the back porch. The sky was beginning to brighten again, but the stillness felt off.
I opened social media for the first time since yesterday’s storm. Photos were everywhere now. Maps. Warnings. Updates. Topographical renderings of the tornado’s path. It had a name now. A designation. Yesterday, it was still just a big storm in my mind. Today it was something else entirely. A confirmed tornado. A fucking tornado had moved through my neighborhood, not even a half block from my home.
And people died.
That truth hadn’t landed yesterday, but it began to register now. The body count. The wreckage. Entire neighborhoods just gone. No power. No water. No gas. Families homeless overnight. These were the same streets I walked with the girls. Rode bikes. Laughed. Lived. The contrast felt much more visceral now.
I hadn’t fully registered it until this morning. Yesterday I was on autopilot, keeping the girls safe, doing what needed to be done. But now it was landing in my body. The weight of it. The grief of proximity. And the strange, disorienting truth:
We were spared.
We were close—but not in it.
Then a slow realization crept in:
We all just take turns holding the pain.
Somewhere else, someone’s holding the joy.
That’s the divine balance. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful.
I’ve been holding that pain for over three years now. But yesterday? Yesterday, it shifted slightly. I wasn’t in the eye of the storm. I was on the fringe. Close enough to witness—but not consumed.
All the work I’ve done—the quiet kind, the desperate kind, the fathering kind—it wasn’t for nothing. It was to move me from the dead center of collapse back into a position that felt a little more steady. Maybe for the first time, I’m starting to taste what it feels like to live just outside the hurricane.
I’ve lived in the eye of it for so long. I didn’t even realize I’d started stepping out.
I posted a quick update to let people know we were okay. First time I’ve posted anything in over a year. Then I went out for a walk. I left the walkie-talkie on the kitchen table like I always do, so the girls can find me if they wake up. I just loop our block—east to west—half a block in each direction so I’m never far.
On my first lap, I saw a pink ball caught in a sewer grate. Big. Familiar. Then it registered. Juliet’s. We’d just played with it last night in the backyard. I retrieved it, tossed it in the front yard, and kept walking. Laura, our neighbor, waved from her car. I nodded back. They’d been so grateful last night—we ran extension cords from our house to theirs so they could power their fridge. Little lifelines. Trying to help where we could.
The air was still strange. Excessively pollinated. My throat was scratchy. Chainsaws already buzzing in the distance. That’s when it happened.
A ladybug slammed into my left hand.
It landed and held on, its wings exposed and delicate. I slowed my steps. Brought it closer to my face and watched it settle, folding its little wings back into place. Something skipped in my heart. Lindsay.
“I’m really glad you’re still here,” I whispered.
And then, without thinking, these words followed behind: “I’m glad I’m still here too.”
That cracked something open.
I cried. Just walking. Crying. Talking to a ladybug. Letting it leak out.
I want to stay.
I’ve had one foot out of this life for a long time now. A part of me always wondered if I was on the wrong planet, like I got dropped off in the wrong timeline by mistake. But today—something shifted.
I do want to be here.
I want to stay.
I want to keep going.
I want to keep loving and building and healing and helping.
I feel like I landed here for a reason.
Not just for my daughters, but for me, too.
The intensity of that realization hadn’t even settled before the next rupture. A scream. Blood-curdling. Real. I froze. Listened. Then sprinted. Cut through a backyard. Opened a gate into an alley behind a multi-family building.
It wasn’t what I thought. Not a murder. Not a tree accident.
It was a sanitation worker—trapped. A city dump truck slamming a dumpster repeatedly against the top of its opening. The man was inside. Screaming. The driver couldn’t hear him over the machine.
Another crew member was trying to wave him down.
I yelled, “Do you need help?”
One of them shouted back, “Yes!”
I didn’t have my phone. I turned to run home and call—just as I saw Roger, my neighbor, come through the same gate I had. He had seen me take off and followed. I asked if he had his phone. He did. I told him to call 911.
The man inside was still alive—but had been crushed. Shouting. Furious. Still fighting.
The driver—Jerome—was now standing outside and looked like he was in shock. His coworker was angry and screaming at him from inside the container. I walked up slowly, talked to him calmly. Told him we were okay. That help was coming. I asked him to breathe with me. Just one breath at a time. He softened. A little. I told him that the injured man being angry was a good sign. “He’s got fight in him,” I said. “You’re going to be ok too.”
Another neighbor came out in her robe. Roger passed off the phone so the other worker could give details to the emergency responders. Everyone was shaken, but stabilizing.
Help was coming now.
And I needed to go.
I jogged back to the house. The sirens were coming in the distance. My girls were still asleep. I sat back down on the porch, a little in shock myself as I reflected on what all just played out. I took a few deep breaths for me now.
And then this thought came through:
Tornadoes have aftershocks too.
So does everything else.
The sky may be calm, but nervous systems are still shaking.
This whole place is still in a trauma response. The wound is fresh. The air still feels sharp. The trees are cracked. The systems are fried. The people are scared.
We want to move on. To return to normal.
But the body doesn’t work that way. Grief doesn’t work that way.
Energy doesn’t disappear—it echoes.
We’re still bleeding. We’re still unhinged.
We want to reboot and get back to our creature comforts.
But healing asks for slowness. Attention. Stillness.
Today I’m just trying to move slow.
To honor the aftershocks.
To show up with care.
And keep choosing to stay.
From my fire to yours.