Love and Strife in the Eye of Helene

Most of you know we live in Asheville NC. We are still sans power, water or internet. Thus no pithy posts. Some lights have been turned on here and there, but the water infrastructure is severely damaged. In fact it has been springing leaks for years, but the Marxist regime running the city has prioritized reparations and dei programs and being a sanctuary city while shrinking the police force by a quarter to a third, thus only applying special pipe band aids.

We left town to attend an Archaix gathering in Virginia Beach on the day before Helene’s entrance. We are veterans of hurricanes on LI, a couple here, thus not terribly concerned, other than a few things like covering our chest freezer with blankets in case of an outage.

We drove out in three hours of intense rainfall, and joined our friends. We are serious homebodies, not leaving our house for a year. What happened more or less in Asheville, is the first rainfall that Thursday dropped six inches of rainfall, supersaturating the ground, so that Helene’s somewhere around twenty-inch sluice the next day was all flood torrent. The French Broad River flows north and the Swanannoa River west, which means especially for the former that it carries all the water pouring in from the south ahead of Helene’s encroachment. There is a special kind of weird uneasiness to witness the devastation of home from afar on phones, with all roads into town closed.

You have seen the pictures and videos, muddy water and mud slides, harrowing rescues as creeks you can jump over carry homes in their torrent. Our friends said that there wasn’t even that much rain going on, and their little streams ran up so rapidly as to defy imagination. People and animals didn’t, or barely had a second to get out.

Not nature-al.

Our friend and author of the amazing book we publish, Poetic Whispers from the Otherworld, Shonagh Home, beautifully put us up and up with us until I-40 finally opened and we drove home this past weekend.

The irony is that we are consummate ‘preppers’, with two solar and one gas/propane generator, food, water, solar lights and chargers, stored gas, etc. And not there for the event.

Short story all our friends and our home sustained little damage. We are especially grateful to friends and neighbors who dragged about-to-mold carpets out of our sopping basement, and hooked the solar generator to the chest freezer.

Not all little damage, one of our fiends, the artist William Henry Price, had his first floor Studio Arts District building flooded to half way up the second story. Another had severe damage to her home. But a lot of death for people in the hollers. One fireman told a friend to start adding zeros to the count.

Empedocles the preSocratic philosopher wrote of Love and Strife as the pumps of our lived experience. Love is Aphrodite. As far as I know, he never designated a deity as Strife, but maybe Eris is a good choice.

Empedocles also brought out of his Otherworld journeys the arrangement of life into four elements: and certainly Water being prevalent now. Both in its power to obliterate, and then stand obvious in its absence in our homes. Water he equates with Persephone, queen of the afterlife, not only Death, but the Return to Life.

Love binds for Empedocles. Strife separates. Rarely are they so intertwined as here now. Strife that we share has brought us together in a kind of Love only the Greeks could poeticize. The very real connection between us all, grounded in our shared being, seeing ourselves in and through the other, runs a glow through our interactions.

But.

There is another level of Strife. The Strife of the archons, the Strife of Yahweh. The Strife of Allah, and yes, the Strife of Evangelical Jesus. The Strife of the mind virus feeding off human suffering. It is so old, it has no real name. The Strife of the minnows doing the bidding of this parasite: especially embodied in the current administration, neo-con blood and loosh suckers. For our purposes expressed as FEMA.

Everybody knows storm was directed and stalled here. The patents are in the office. Everybody knows Lahaina and Paradise and Santa Rosa were energy weapons. Cars don’t melt next to unburnt trees. Everybody knows the ‘vax’ deposits nanobots. Follow the science.

I feel like there is nothing to say in the face of abject ignorance as to what is going on. The corporation of The United States is at bloody war against the American people. It became hot on 9-11. It is now blatant.

FEMA (and their goombahs) is either, as the fire and policemen attest, as volunteers risking themselves attest, preventing rescues, absconding with and preventing deliveries of good, taking credit for the rescues of first responders, broke because illegal immigrants are vastly more important and deserving of funds than mountain folk here for generations, getting helicopters buzzing a volunteer set up to distribute goods, so that everything flew away; or a benign organization, here to help at all costs, like my brainwashed friends who send insipid NYTimes articles about their wondrous work.

Going to send this now, as I have verbiaged too long, and writing a substack on an iPhone is less than ideal. The best erudite explanation of FEMA came from Robert Barns, which will be in a follow up post.

As always, thanks for your support and attention.