While the rest of the world seemingly goes on, we are still regrouping here in Nashville, post flood. While not everyone agrees with me, I maintain we need levity amid our heartache here. Our beloved Frist
Center for the
Visual Arts understood that and graciously opened it's doors to our
city for free from Tuesday until Sunday during the aftermath of our
city's 1000-year flood. I managed to breeze in this week to see U-Ram
Choe, below, before it closes on Sunday, May 16. For a big heart, soul and
eyeball WOW, take a look:
On Sunday, Chihuly premiered at the Frist Center, launching a spring through fall city-wide celebration of innovative glass artist Dale Chihuly's work. In addition to the Frist Center exhibition, Chihuly will bloom indoors at Cheekwood Art & Botanical Gardens and sprout and sprawl across the lush gardens, including a giant, dramatically colored garden of glass. (I'll be writing a future Arts Friday posts about this temporary local treasure. Given my impending move and marriage, it may be September before I feature Chihuly at Cheekwood, but I've scheduled a photography date then with another blogger for this purpose. I'll still be blogging here, just many posts will be pre-published.) And, in the meantime, on May 20-22, the Nashville Symphony will perform Bartok's Bluebeard Castle backdropped by a spectacular set of 14-foot sculptures designed by Chihuly. I also did a quick tour of the Frist show. Amazing. The film of the artist's creations is a must. I will return.
The Nashville Symphony is currently beleaguered by damage sustained to its downtown architectural jewel of a home. The flooded basement damaged some
instruments, including the grand pipe organ. Performances are being
relocated for the next four to six weeks.Yet, like the graceful Phoenix that Nashville instantly began to prove it is, the symphony offered a free outdoor performance in front of the Metro Courthouse public square last weekend. We were there. And, WE ARE NASHVILLE!
Week Two. Peeling back the layers. Still. Painfully. Oh. So. Layers of flooring, walls, possessions, lives. And, Grief. I'm turning the wordsmithing and photo artistry over to some other blogger and photographer friends for my second #NashvilleFlood post:
"There is something really big emerging here and those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear have the capacities to see/hear [the emergence]. This is one of the gifts of the artists, writers, poets, singers, dancers." -- Licensed Clinical Social Worker Dawn Kirk, who blogs at http://dawnkirkimaginetheshift.blogspot.com.
"'What if they threw a disaster and nobody came?'
Part of it is the bomb scare and the oil, but
part of it oddly, seems to be the loss of newspapers.
One of my friends called last night from Ann Arbor,
Mich. The Ann Arbor paper is now a twice weekly
blog, so she only just found out.[...]Our beautiful city
amazes me with its resilience." -- Christine Mather, who blogs at AutismReads.
Dawn published these two short posts, for which I've been granted permission to share here:
The rivers and streams overflowed their banks, giving our hearts opportunity to overflow with love, giving our hands opportunity to work acts of kindness, giving our spirits opportunity to send prayers and meditations throughout Tennessee.
Now that the waters are subsiding may love and all its many tributaries, compassion, kindness and generosity, never subside from the shores of new connections, from the banks of the Universal heart.
At lunch, I glimpsed news coverage titled "Flood Emergency Update." The word 'Emergency' caught my eye because I immediately saw tucked within another word - "emerge." Then I heard myself saying, "Emerge N C" followed by "Emerge and see."
I love words. They hold simple yet powerful keys available for us to see the possibilities in times like these.
Imagine what is being held here in what's called a crisis in Middle Tennessee if we can hold and use this an opportunity to Emerge, to come out, to bring forth new ways of being, living and relating to one another and to Mother Earth.
Emerge and See with Me ! --Dawn! The Good News Muse 5/7/10
About the photographer: Aerial Innovations of Tennessee, Inc., is a woman-owned aerial and architectural photography company headquartered in Nashville. Wendy Whittemore is a photographer and president. Here's a cool YouTube on her company. Here are more aerial flood images by her company.
Every time I get clear and clear the way, I am amazed at what I accomplish. I am remarrying this summer (another manifestation,) and we finally found a home two weekends back. I was so blown away when I walked in and found so many details just as I'd envisioned: the knocked out wall that created a spacious open floor plan within an old ranch-style home, the clear shower and separate bath, the spacious closets, the porches. For a year, in my daily affirmations, I had visualized a cul-de-sac within which my daughter could ride her bike. But, first, I had to get clear, remind myself what I wanted. In the last month of looking at houses, I'd blocked my energy by shutting down in the negativity of my thoughts. I'd begun to believe and state my fear that we weren't going to find anything because we hadn't up until that point--after many, many months--our moving date and wedding and honeymoon looming. I realized what I was doing with my negative energy and I snapped out of it. And told myself to begin again to visualize what I wanted. Literally, within days:
These photos of our new home picture the realtor's staged furnishings. Enticing, huh? Lucky us--or another manifestation come true--we bid on and won, at the Autism Society of Middle Tennessee's Pieces of Hope silent auction, several hundred dollars worth of home staging from Prix De Solde.
This piece was written before the Nashville's tragic 1000-year flood. While I believe that we can create our realities of what we want in our lives, I also believe that there are factors that we cannot control, such as autism, floods, etc. But, I also firmly believe that we do have the power to choose how we view what can be seen as the more unfortunate circumstances of Life. Likewise, Nashville is proving she is a Phoenix rising from her ashes. As we all can when Life seems to deliver us an unanticipated gut punch.
Part of my heart twinges and questions the sensitivity of publishing this piece about my new future home just now. (I'm publishing it in part because of ease of pre-scheduling and time issues in light of my catching up from the book and moving, plus what I have pre-written that fits my Monday "All The Rest of Life" theme here.) There is so much unimaginable devastation in our beautiful city presently. So many people have lost so much. The ravages are incomprehensible and my mind is sorting through words and phrases about how to write about it more than I have in my initial thoughts here. So, for now, I will end with these images. The Nashville Scene published moving images by a number of photographers in a slide show here. But the ones that truly entranced my eye were by Warne Riker, a photographer who is new to me and about whom I can find little information. But here's his website.
And lastly, we've started a campaign, locally, called "We Are Nashville." (I have a flood "Twibbon" on my Twitter and Facebook profiles.) I think part of the campaign is about our city's pride and knowing that, dammit, we will get through this and rise! But, it also occurs to me, that we are boldly proclaiming, "We Are Nashville," because we feel slighted and largely ignored by the national media. Exceptions: Thank you, Anderson Cooper. You yummy thang you. And, thank you Boston Globe, also for these images.
Outside and overhead, we could hear the circling clop-clop of television news station helicopters and the occasional zoom of Vanderbilt Medical University LifeFlights. Inside we were trapped in a surreal universe, disconnected from all forms of media but our cell phones--if our particular service provider's tower was not one of the ones just submerged by Nashville's historic 1000-year flood. We were powerless. Of electricity. And of feeling--in our sense of being able to change the state of things. Powerless to change the circumstances that had literally deluged us with
14-plus inches of constant flash flooding rains for two, weekend days.
As the rains continued for the second day, it was cool. When they stopped the next day, temperatures rose higher, climbing into the upper 80s. The contents of our warm, refrigerators--shut tight--began to spoil. At first we could not exit toward town. Then, we could only go so far. The rains had flooded the parking lot of our grocer, our mutual island of civilization. The waters rose within four feet of the nearby traffic lights. Rumors were all we had. And rumors were rampant. Our area's substation was submerged. Our power would be off possibly two weeks, some said. We could head, oddly, west then east out of our water-locked community. But, Highway 96 was said to be a parking lot, taking one neighbor two hours to inch a mere five miles to the Natchez Trace Bridge.
We were among the lucky ones. Our neighborhood and maybe one other were said to be the only two not affected in our particular western burb.
Publix was our savior, powered by emergency generators. Our only source of food. Employees worked with speed, diligence and the cheerful spirit for which they are known. Many of them were likely to also be affected by the storm. We sought refuge inside the cool store, stocked by 18 wheelers that managed to negotiate the maze created by three flooded interstates. Neighbors, former teachers and strangers whose faces we knew from the Y, former churches and elsewhere, sat in the store's for-sale lawn chairs while charging cell phones with store outlets. Often I asked: "Where do I know you from?" "Oh, yeah." "Well, we're all one now, aren't we?" I said to one of the familiar faces. The chorus of stranded and shell-shocked-- a captive audience--standing in the store lobby half-chuckled then nodded in solemn agreement with my overheard comment.
Just inside: Fresh food! Sparse but there. I bent and reached into the cooler for the strawberries--two for five dollars. And then I paused, deciding to leave one for another family. Alongside me, another mother--a stranger--also bent and reached, and then suddenly stopped to look me in the eyes and ask how I was doing. She'd be the first of a number of strangers who seemed sincere in the question we all faced.
While tensions were palpable and running high, it was overridden by the spirit of generosity and concern for others that were in the same predicament or worse. And for many it was/is much, much worse. My daughter, who has autism, and I suffered mere inconveniences of heat, no power, a threatened water supply and little sense of connection to what was really happening in this mess in which we were living.
The frenetic energy of the grocery-bazaar atmosphere and the broken routines were cranking her anxiety levels and the heat was rising. She seemed incapable of understanding it all. When we could finally escape another route other than 96 and when the nearest interstate was finally clear--according to my outside cellular phone sources--we claimed the last room in a suburban hotel closer to town. There, again, the faces checking in alongside me were familiar in this good-sized city that boasts a small-town feel. Other tired faces were unfamiliar and I'd learn they were among the 2000 displaced guests of the flooded Opryland Hotel, in addition to the displaced downtown Hilton guests.
For dinner, unapologeticaly, I declared a menu of red meat, a potato and a large green salad. Comfort food. Normally semi-vegetarian, my freezer failed to offer the grilled feasts of my neighbors' who communed in our cul-de-sacs. And news. I wanted to watch the news.
Back home, the power is on. Showers are rationed. But the fridge is stocked with fresh produce. My meals are hot. We are safe. Dry. Tired. Grateful. And sad for what our beautiful city has lost in its tourism livelihood downtown and the extensive damage that literally ravaged our city. Saddened for families who lost loved ones, their homes. So many so nearby. The haul back will be long. May we be steadfast in spirit.
