we live our lives with a strong faith in home, that place where we rest our heads and keep our memories. when my roommate, marlo, was clearing the food out of our kitchen cabinets, we took a moment to pause and breathe in the midst of packing up to evacuate new orleans. she looked around the kitchen and said, ” i finally had given up and started calling this home.” four of us have been living together in this shotgun house since october: marlo, william, me, and the baby, cylis. the house has fostered us, the neighborhood has inspired us. we have become a family.

now, six hundred miles from home, i am struck with the unfathomable dread of losing home. i didn’t think i’d get attached; i’ve always been transient. just the moment you let up your guard, nature threatens to take away your man-made security, striking blows against human civilization. we cannot get attached to the material things in life. and we cannot create systems to wall out nature; it will only be our downfall. the saddest thing about our existence is the suffering that we have created for ourselves.

i am not scared. i am not hopeless. i am just worried about losing our human “stuff”–tools, buildings, jobs. some of the minor things that connect us as humans. i am in awe of nature right now. i have no control. i want others to surrender to this fact so as not to suffer from the losses that may come…

there is a lot of hype on the news as we are just a day away from gustav making landfall. i am trying not to succumb to the whirlwind of worry. but this storm has made a serious threat; i fear, through our own destruction of nature & its safeguards, we may lose the roots of the culture of southern louisiana.