The latest climate crisis in my 73 years. In 2022, I was in the Eastern Kentucky flood and watched my car float in Troublesome Creek. I have experienced California earthquakes and numerous fires. In 1990, an avalanche in the Sierra Nevada mountains isolated our little town of June Lake for a week. During the Painted Cave Fire in Santa Barbara, I couldn’t reach my husband and son for six hours. Phone service was out. After we were reunited and returned to our neighborhood through the charred alien land, we turned the last corner to see that our house was spared. All the roses in my garden had forced blooms from the intense heat.

Then Helene: That night in September 2024, the wind howled from the Smoky Mountains and trees crashed on my roof. As lightning flashed, I watched branches wave closer to the bedroom window. At first light, I began. Dress. Find food, flashlights, candles, blankets, and water to flush the toilet. Survey the trees crushing the roof and the back deck. Take pictures of the water flowing through the electrical panel. Three large pines destroyed the generator. My husband, whose newly reconstructed heart pounded irregularly, took his blood pressure. My neighbors met in the street. One had a generator, another had water. Another had a chainsaw. Trees blocked fourteen houses on our dead-end road for three days. No power, water, internet, or cell service. We had no water for the toilet or shower. Food spoiled in the refrigerator.

Burly men from Wisconsin came to North Carolina with machinery. They opened the road and lent us a generator. I found cash, gas, ice, free water, MREs, roofers, tree cutters, and showers. I stood in line at the grocery store to get peanut butter and bread, cash only. I found charging stations and a place with a functioning internet connection to file FEMA and insurance claims. My husband said, “I don’t feel safe.”

I’m a child of crisis; I do the next thing.

The roof was destroyed again. Through the hole over the master bath, I could see the dark sky dawning. The house shook as if an earthquake had us in its grasp, and the rafters broke. I recalled the 1986 earthquake in Ventura, California. At that time, encouraged by downed power lines and wind, the fire roared into the dry treefall. We escaped fallen buildings, taking refuge in the brick school. I made a “Go” bag as I did for the Painted Cave fire. Now, six months after Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, my husband wants to sell the house. “I don’t feel safe,” he repeats. The last time I felt safe was when I was twelve. Safety was never guaranteed in my childhood home. I created a safe space in the closet behind all the clothes. In 1962 I read Silent Spring and discovered the world itself was unsafe. Experience has borne that out. I have survived floods, blizzards, fire, and drought. Nature does what it does, and I adapt. We rebuild, plant the azaleas again, and clear the fallen branches from the garden.

Wisdom and Resilience Go Hand in Hand, from a suite of photographs by Merry Song

When I entered college, our first course was based on the words of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl writes: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” I wonder what the dinosaurs thought when the sky turned dark and the unending winter came.

The concept of liminal space obsesses me. Climate changes amplify my concern beyond my own sphere. As a child, I “ducked and covered,” squatting on the hall floor in my school with my head covered and my face between my knees. The world could end before lunch. The dictionary definition of liminal—barely perceptible, or being in an intermediate state—only begins to open the meanings of this word into so many areas: color theory, psychology, anthropology, spirituality, and myth. As a young adult, the cultural change of the “hippie” movement shook our society. For a time, we could, as John Lennon sang, “Imagine” a better time. The world seems dark as the dinosaur’s sky just now. Once again, the trauma of change shapes my life. Fear pushes me toward despair. My goal is to endure the ambiguity of transition. Remember that self-care is a radical action. Find the light; walk in beauty.

According to “Team Fear,” the researchers who conduct Chapman University’s annual Survey of American Fears,* the nation’s number one fear in 2025 is corrupt government officials—which has topped the survey every year since 2015.  The top three fears this year are:

1. Corrupt Government Officials
2. People I Love Becoming Seriously Ill
3. Economic/Financial Collapse (in 15th place one year ago)

Human fears generally center around other people; we’ve assumed that the physical world is basically stable. Lately, that assumption has been severely shaken in many of us. In this time of environmental convulsions and social unrest, of danger, confusion, and desperation, we may all, occasionally, feel like children of crisis. Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” How many times have I quoted Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”? “Things fall apart;/the center cannot hold;… The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.”  How do I exist in this time? What will be born of this time? In me? In the world?

That word, abide, echoes within me, as in the venerable hymn: “Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.” To abide is to accept or act in accordance with, to tolerate. In the hymn, it means to stay, enduring and stable. Right now, my home and my stability are fractured. My goal is to endure the ambiguity of transition; to abide in the state of liminality until the next change, to continue without the illusion of safety, for change is certain. How I react is up to me.

Outside my bedroom window, I see 80-foot trees lying like pickup sticks where there was once a verdant forest. We saw two deer yesterday. The bluebirds are back. Soon the trees that live on will be green. Nature does the next thing, as will I, throughout this turbulent time. I cannot run as I used to, or carry heavy logs. In my elderhood, I have settled into abiding: neither afraid nor fearless, not belonging but not alone, a shapeshifter traveling in time, place, emotion, the world. And remembering what John F. Kennedy once said: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters—one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

Wisdom and Resilience Go Hand in Hand, from a suite of photographs by Merry Song

On the anniversary of Hurricane Helene, I feel the turn from that liminality, as if the wind has changed direction. There is a new roof, a new generator, a new bathroom, and new paint and flooring. We have moved the furniture, and some pieces are gone. The flow of the house is different. Emotionally, more than just one year has passed. We have moved three times and have finally returned to our own home. After ten years, I rediscovered my neighbors. Medically and psychologically, my husband and I have improved. Pain and depression are vanquished for now. Surgery, medication, contractors, and insurance: we have rebuilt inside and out. Our lives are different. That peak of crisis was not sustainable. My hope must be. If I am a child of crisis, I am also a child of hope and transformation, looking to see what will happen next.

Encounter with the Future

by Anika Pavel

  Encounter with the Future is a political and social drama running parallel with a rapid coming of age. It is a true story of an 18-year-old girl who arrived in London from behind the iron curtain alone. She became an emigrant when her country was invaded by Soviet Union in August of 1968. She went from sleeping in the telephone booth at London’s Victoria railway station, to waitressing, then becoming a model, actress, even a James Bond girl. This engrossing memoir is told in series of essays, some previously published, some wholly new. Encounter with the Future is a mirror of an unforgettable journey filled with fear, pain, veracity, and laughter. “Pavel is a natural storyteller and shrewd observer with a deep understanding of people. She keeps readers engaged across decades, continents, and pages.” — Publishers Weekly “Pavel manages, from her present and sophisticated vantage, to evoke the innocence of youth.” — Nicolas Delbanco, author of Why Writing Matters “A touching tale of a woman who makes it through the tornadoes of life and still comes out centered.” — Goodreads “Beautifully written and captivating…it will make you look differently at your own life.” — Cindy Myers, author of Mile High Mystery Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

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