NASA Sees Hurricane Sandy as the “Bride of Frankenstorm” Threaten U.S. East Coast (Photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video)
An Irish proverb tells us, “It is in the shelter of each other that people live.”
As I write this the rain is heavy, the wind is picking up, and Hurricane Sandy is on its way to and round us. I don’t know if it was destiny but a few weeks ago, I was looking up something else when I tripped across this quote. As is my habit when something connects for me I started a “draft post” with the quote so I wouldn’t forget it.
It was October 4th. The proverb provoked an electric storm of disconnected thoughts: remembrances of Mary Pipher‘s The Shelter of Each Other, her work on the need for family and connections, the refrain from a poetic Bob Dylan song from which I titled the post, “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm,” then a line from John Denver “perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm, it exists to give you comfort, it is there to keep you warm.”
It is not always easy to write something with depth, but this Irish proverb seemed to hold the possibility of a variety of posts. Ah, multiple meanings to play with, I thought putting it into draft status, saving it for a ‘rainy day,’ a good writing prompt, grist for the mill.
Over the last weeks I have opened this draft a couple of times, savoring its flavor, considering possibilities. It made me think of a two block cartoon I once saw. One cell was labeled Hell and the second, Heaven. Both showed almost the same picture: people sitting at a table where a feast had been spread. In each drawing every person held a spoon with an enormous handle. The Hell picture showed frustration on every face because the spoons were so long no one could bring the food to his mouth. The length of the spoons was exactly the same in the second picture, but every face held joy. In Heaven all were fed as those at the table reached over to the person beside them and fed their neighbor. “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”
I love this cartoon. It tells us our circumstances are not what determine our feelings, but rather our attitude and response to them can make a heaven from a hell. But each time I opened the draft I closed it. I wasn’t ready. The ideas, like a savory soup, still needed to simmer. I had a carrot here and a bean there but no unified whole. So I set it aside and wrote something else.
And now ‘Frankenstorm’ has begun and it is late. I try to post on Saturday or early Sunday morning. This week our granddaughter visited and we played and had a grand time. Then preparing for the hurricane delayed me…but finally when I went into my blog there was my draft: Shelter from the Storm. Yes! What a fit with events. Perfect? I leave that to you. But often timing is everything…and yet, timing also changes everything. As you can see above my thoughts were not about a literal storm. And I still had to somehow put things into a cohesive whole.
So as always research was next. Now hours after investigating all my initial random thoughts and adding a couple of new ones, I decided not to just give you the completed post, but rather to also describe my process.
So…First interesting tidbit I found rereading the lyrics to Shelter From the Storm and researching peoples’ thoughts about their meaning: Dylan’s idea for the song was triggered by a line in the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, ironically or perhaps appropriately named, “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” This seemed like resonance with this hurricane moment. We all ask that question during the storm. But delving into it added a twist or two: a hint of global warming, a bit pointing to the current political campaigns. Interesting, even thought provoking, but not where I wanted to focus in the midst of what could be weather related crises for many people I care about.
Cover of The Hiding Place
Next I followed a new thought connected to a biblical reference Corey Ten Boom took as the title of her book, The Hiding Place. It is Isaiah’s description of Zion, the promised land, as “…a shelter and shade from the heat of day, and a refuge, a hiding place, from the storm and rain.” This concept has layers because the Ten Boom’s home became a hiding place for Jews during the Holocaust…and ultimately its provision came at a cost. Both Corey’s father and sister died in a concentration camp because they provided that shelter. Corey lived to testify to her experience of refuge in Ravensbrook, of caring for and being cared about. Even in the horror of the camps, most prisoners shared from their humanity with one another when they had nothing else left. “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”
Yet how could I tie together these powerful but eclectic thoughts into a coherent post? And where did the hurricane fit? Ah when in doubt edit and go back to your research. So more hours have passed, as I reread and cut and tightened. Where did that leave me? I guess my answer is found in what I connected to in these various thoughts.
Doug and I have spent our lives helping others, and we’ve learned there are many kinds of storms, some metaphorical, internal, and horribly painful, others concrete, but no less hurtful. Losing your home or your health, having no power or food, brings an immediacy that crystallizes the issue, bringing into sharp relief the most basic necessities. But concrete and touchable or internal and symbolic, when people are hurting, for whatever reason, help may be desperately needed.
So does it really matter if Dylan is writing about seeking refuge from a lost love or from the hail, from exhaustion or regret, from real hardship or unhappiness, from life itself or from death? Battered and beaten by storms within and without, those in need surround us. To me the only true question to ask is not what is the storm that sent you to me, but how should I respond? “Come in,” she said, “I will give you shelter from the storm?”
To draw this to an end, I would argue we humans need both to be cared for and to help in turn. We grow up because we are sheltered and all our lives through we need a connection to others. We need resting places, refuges of warmth and comfort. These next days of Sandy may offer lots of opportunities to provide them, or perhaps create a need for us to use them. Surely this will happen many times as our lives unfold. What seems clear is that to truly live vibrantly, to richly and fully experience heaven in our day to day we need to embrace these moments. We need to provide refuge and seek it. “It is in the shelter of each other that people live.”
Related articles
- A Shelter from the Storm (theteentheme.wordpress.com)
- Finding Rest in a Storm (wordservewatercooler.com)
- A Shelter From The Storm (godspeaking.wordpress.com)
In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an 
Today I was out watering my garden when I saw a humongous caterpillar. Emerald green, smooth and plump as a baby’s bottom, as big around as my little finger and three inches long, it lay hidden under a leaf on the stem of a seedling 
I stared back in only slightly less wonder than my granddaughter would. Ella thinks my garden is magical. As soon as she arrives for a visit her shoes come off and out she goes to explore. Bugs and slugs are her friends and she can spend hours making a bird play yard or setting up a trap for fairies.
That took me to images and I quickly identified my new ‘friend’ as the larval form of the Yellow 
Armed with all my knowledge back out I went to move the hose, intending to watch my friend while I worked…..but he was gone. I looked all over my poor tulip tree 
I didn’t. Perhaps moving his leaf and the shade and protection it provided was a risk to him, maybe it was an insult he couldn’t allow, or perhaps it was because knowledge had replaced magic and he had gone to find Alice or the 
As I reflect on it I think this morning I let my interest in knowing overcome my joy in living. I was in full-blown grown-up ‘get the job done’ mode. If I had let myself see him as Ella would, as a real friend, I would have stayed to get acquainted. I would have introduced myself. Chatted a bit. I might have learned who he was. Instead I researched what he was.
The adult in me wants you to know that paper became the first A I received in the class. The writer in me, the child in me, simply rejoiced in discovering the magic of telling a story. I have probably written thousands of memos and hundreds of grants since that magic moment so many years ago. I can recall a few. But none are as vivid to me as writing that one page story, sitting at the white enamel table in my grandmother’s kitchen, leaning on my elbow, writing longhand on a pad, my soul soaring free.
Living in the adult world isn’t easy. It is filled with ‘got to do’ busyness, with work and chores, requirements and responsibilities. But at the same time, those are concrete. They are items on a list that can be ticked off. For an adult what is harder is to give ourselves permission to leave all of that behind and enter the world of the child. To live healthy lives, to live joyfully, all of us need to dream, to be able to fly above the day to day. To write we need to ‘hear’ the voices of the characters who aren’t really there, to envision the shape of the apple tree living in the seed.
When I was growing up every child in school counted down the days to summer vacation. At summer’s end, we took up our busy lives once more, starting a new school year, a new chance at learning and relationships. Even today, it sometimes seems like September is the “start” of the year in a weird way.
Of course, it didn’t. The 
Best of all were family vacations to 
And the end of each day there was blessed by the descent of the sun on the water. It felt inevitable and simultaneously impossible that the red fiery ball poised on the horizon would leave us. As we watched, almost holding our breath, every second a lifetime, we touched eternity as the colors, yellow to orange and scarlet, flared as the sun set. Then, more poignant, the light softened and blue became lavender and transmuted to indigo, slowly spreading across the sky, glistening on the sheen of the water on the shore, light caught on the receding edge of each wave.
While we lived in Syracuse, my husband would pick me up from work on sunny autumn days. Lunch in hand, we would drive out to ‘see the leaves.’ Sometimes we talked or pointed out the particularly brilliant tree. Other times, we rode in silence as the light broke through the slanted shadows and flickered on the windshield. Always, we were awestruck by nature’s magnificence shown in trees which glowed as if lit from inside, even on cloudy days.
That sense of the newness of light, the renewal of a season that starts with the same red and orange glory of the sunset, is a metaphor for me of the change in perspective that comes in the autumn of our lives. They are part and parcel of the harvest of our summers. The children born to us, and raised through our summer, have entered adulthood and their own 
Marianne Williamson said, “We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
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