After Beryl

July 12, 2024

Friends,

I’ve been dreaming of the apocalypse since I was a child. When I was younger, it was a horizon-swallowing tornado, or hundreds of them, which later were uncannily reflected back to me in Jeff Nichols’ haunting film Take Shelter. In one dream, maybe a decade ago, the sun went out, extinguished in a blink. Light, and all our certainties, were instantly gone. We knew it was coming, but could do nothing to stop it.

That dream came back to me as I stood at my kitchen sink this morning, washing dishes in a daze while a hurricane, Beryl, shook every living thing outside my window. Beryl wasn’t supposed to come this far east. It’s hard to find new language to write about something so powerful and yet common, repeated on this stretch of the southeast Texas coast every several years. A couple of months ago many of us learned a new word, derecho, for a different kind of invisible god, one that ripped trees out by the roots and flung them across neighborhoods. Right after the derecho hit, unknowing, I took the spookiest drive of my life in the dark, around downed limbs and debris, not encountering a working traffic light on six miles of city streets.

I’m writing this in the parking lot of a grocery store near my house, the last of Beryl’s winds blowing through the open windows of my car. Neighbors’ cars pull in and out — the store is one of the only places nearby with power. Trees are down across the street, and fire trucks and heavily armored police vehicles speed by regularly. On my short drive here, I passed neighbors cleaning up their lawns. A group of millennial dads in cargo shorts and mucking boots stood around a portable table drinking beer, their chainsaws on the driveway. Couples walk past, holding hands, on their way to the store.

A flock of pigeons amble outside my car, too. Some have plopped down on the asphalt; others are pecking and preening. My father’s father raised pigeons. He raced them in southern Pennsylvania — one of my earliest memories is of gently packing them in crates, releasing them an hour from his home, driving back to the house to time their return. I’ve seen them hundreds of times in this parking lot, and also never saw them until today.

That dream I mentioned earlier didn’t end with the sun going out. The expanse of the Milky Way snapped into vivid presence, illuminating us differently, as if by candlelight.

These experiences elude rational concepts. The psychiatrist C.G. Jung borrowed a good word for them, though: numinous. It describes experiences that fill us with awe and terror. For a moment, we can see something else that is also present, something that may shake our foundations. That invites us to see in new ways, to look past our screens (frustratingly unresponsive on my side of town today). To see what is hidden in plain sight. To hear what is humming under our language.

We can choose where we put our attention, even when all else seems out of our control. Now, more than ever in my lifetime, I believe we need to develop that capacity so we can choose wisely, before the invitation to see in new ways becomes an increasingly destructive demand.

With concern for all affected by this storm,

Sean Fitzpatrick

Executive Director, The Jung Center, sfitz@junghouston.org