Hurricane Hunker

bySunflower01

119 followers

Updated 12 years ago

Sunflower is in Hunkerville, Louisiana. Actually, it’s Madisonville, Louisiana but "hunker" is a state of mind I've been sharing with so many surrounding parishes and other towns before, during and after Hurricane Isaac that we’ve melded into a consciousness of community awareness and concerned mutuality. We’ve become known to ourselves as “Hunkerville.” If we were not given a mandatory evacuation or voluntarily evacuated, we were told to “hunker down.”

What does that mean “to hunker down?” Is it an especially contortive yoga position similar to the downward dog but with a twist, a family acrobatic act where we fold into our homes under stairwells or basements or inside bath tubs in a uniform pattern? Regardless, everyone seemed to respond in a collective consciousness of knowing what the universe meant and we indeed “hunkered” with great variety and diversity. We gathered sandbags and girded our homes against the rivers, horded gasoline for generators, fled to shelters, pulled others into our homes, bought non perishable foods and lugged out all our learned Katrina toolbox, including prayers. We charged up cell phones and laptops. We filled up the trunks of our cars with blankets and survival items in case, at the last minute, the rivers showed they were not to be thwarted by our best sandbagging efforts. You name it, and “hunker” included anything that meant we would protect and fight Isaac against destroying all we held dear. It’s a hunker hunker burning love kind of thing.

After all, a lot of us grew up with hurricanes as part of our family heritage stories like Betsy and Camille as well as Katrina and those experiences worked their epi-genetics in us before we were born. Hurricane Hunkering has been going on for a long time down here in the South.

Some of us hunker better than others. Some of us were disobedient hunkerers this last go round. We snuck out to feel the 60-80 mile an hour winds. We watched the water rise and felt the galvanized current with our bare feet. We slept in barns with our horses to keep them calm. Despite a healthy respect for Mother Nature, we were dying to feel the power of another of her children’s birth, life and death. You don’t survive the southern coast of the U.S. if your love and awe of her-Mother Nature- does not overwhelm your fear of her.

Today, Governor Jindal was accompanied by Mitt Romney to tour the devastation here. We joked that Romney might show up drowned for not choosing Jindal as his running mate. It was our one moment of being distracted to acknowledge the RNC had occurred simultaneously with Hurricane Isaac. Otherwise, back to hunkering.

Old Town Madisonville flooded badly. Sitting at the mouth of the Tchefuncte River spilling into Lake Ponchartrain, it’s a very quaint old fishing village New Orleans’ elite have recently discovered. When the Lake surge from Hurricane Isaac caused Mademoiselle Tchefuncte (pronounced Che-funktay) to swallow back in what she had just regurgitated from the north and to also swallow this new surge, she had not the grace nor the will to accommodate. We are all aware of the fickle manners of our rivers and appreciate their troubled relationship as distant cousins of hurricanes. We are usually the collateral damage of their colliding energies unless we evacuate or hunker.

The thing is Mother Nature is our mother too, we humans. All of us. She likes to bring us to our knees to test our mettle. Most importantly, we get too far apart from one another at times and the communal hunkering and concern seems to reawaken a consciousness of our connectedness. And down here in Hunkerville, I have seen people reaching out with so much brotherhood it kicks up the heart to a new vibration. Of course, like anywhere else in the world some people get thicker and more selfish too. But the latter is normalcy and the former is a brighter light above normalcy. You feel its power at these times. It’s amazing how a little threatening by Mother to pull our ears off if we get too insular in our daily thinking and behaving opens up the heart.

I was taking care of an 85 year old pistol in his home, his hunker, during Hurricane Isaac. I’d spent the day before helping him sandbag and hoard up. Yet, when it comes down to the actual hunkering, we all do it our own personal way. He had the battery operated radio up at decimal levels that caused my ears to ring, which I’m sure was a perfect volume for his sweet Doddridge. “Huh!? Did you say something? Ehh?”

The unusual pinch of being cut off of any social media had me plugging my laptop into the generator and sitting at his baby grand piano two rooms away as I heard the wind lacing its frenetic fingers through branches of live oak and loblolly pines, bending the latter like wet spaghetti. The wind was starting to sound mean, like he was pulling their hair. What to do to hunker with enthusiasm and something to distract me from the outside energy building? Hmmm.

For me, hunkering squoze out of me things I don’t normally do, like sing. At the same time, it engaged my sense of community with my fellow hunkerers in Hunkerville, Louisiana and I was lifted to a transcendent hunker. Okay, maybe that’s taking it too far, but I did just make my first homemade video all in the name of trying to discover my best hunker zen. Dare to watch a video made in a state of "hunker?"

And don’t forget to pray for those still not out of danger of buckling dams and flood waters. Afterall, when you join in consciousness to hope for the best ending for all in zones of Mother Nature’s dramas, you are all part of Hunkerville no matter how far north, east or west you are of us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3r5UYOXd6Y&feature=youtu.be