When What Heals Hurts

A spell for embracing gratitude and grief

I have spent many a blissful day floating down the Guadalupe River in Texas. Cool green-blue water shaded by cypress trees. She’s a lazy river, a lap for resting into on an inner tube, head thrown back and feet in the water, cradled, slowly spinning and sliding downriver under the sky.

Guadalupe river by kayak, May 2015

Those of us who have lived or live in the Texas Hill Country learn about the quick shift the waterways; the danger that can come on even the most peaceful, quiet day.

When I lived in the Hill Country in the early 2000’s my friend T designated themselves as my alarm system. I was often off-line and didn’t pay attention to the weather or news. So T would call me with warnings: It is going to flood. If there is water on the road DO NOT GO THROUGH IT. She would make me pinky swear and promise that if I was driving and came a place where water was going over the road I would stop and turn around.

It is truly hard to imagine how quickly tame rivers can turn into quick killers. What appears to be a shallow pool of water in a dip in the road can easy be five feet, flat on the surface but moving so fast cars disappear downriver in a blink.

My friends Shiila and Dan lived in a two-story cabin next to a slow running creek which flowed into the Blanco River. On Memorial Day 2015 they were upstairs in bed when a friend phoned late in the evening. It had been raining upstream and there was a literal wall of water heading their way. Luckily they picked up the phone, heeded the warning immediately, and after grabbing computer and purse headed out the front door. If they had gone out the back door, which was their normal path, they would have been swept away. The water was already up to their waist and they waded, bags over their head, to higher ground.

After the water receded I went to help them clean. There was a line of mud four feet up the wall of their home. Almost everything on the bottom floor had been under water and coated with thick, dark mud. Shiila gave me a pressure cooker that she didn’t know what to do with; when I opened it later at home it was filled with mud.

Post-flood May 2015 at Shiila and Dan’s house

In that flood 13 people died, and 350 homes were destroyed, and 1,000 people were displaced in the tiny town of Wimberley. John McComb was vacationing with wife and two kids and a group of friends when the floods came. The house they were staying in was swept away down the river and smashed into a bridge. He was the only one who survived; they never found his 4-year old daughter’s body.

Now ten years later John is back in the Hill Country, working with Texas Search and Rescue looking for those who are still missing from the July 4th floods of the Guadalupe River.

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I share these stories because I want to give context for my sharing about the July 4th Hill Country floods. As of today 120 people have died after the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes in some areas in the early morning of July 4th; 173 people are still missing.

To put this into a global context: 105 people were killed in Gaza yesterday by Israeli forces, and numerous people killed in the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Sudan. Every day 25,000 people die of starvation around the world. Each day 100 people die in car crashes in the United States alone.

How do we face this much death? How do we stay soft in the face of such grief and despair of the survivors? How do we turn to face tragedy without numbing or drowning? How do we help when there is so much help needed?

What does not help:

Jumping to assigning blame.

Was there a lack of warning? Yes.

Are there breakdowns in support systems happening, both unintentional and intentional? Yes.

Were buildings in the flood zone. Yes.

Loves, we are going to be seeing and being impacted by more devastating disasters and ongoing wars in our lifetimes. This is because of a multitude of factors, including:

One, disasters from around the world are now reported almost instantaneously via the internet. This leads to an emotional resonance and impact with larger groups of people.

Two, climate change is changing the intensity and scope of natural disasters. In the last two weeks there were not just the Hill Country flood, but three other devastating “100 year” floods just in the United States. Wildfires are burning hotter and longer, flooding much more extensive.

Three, humans are not so great at getting along with differences or taking the time to get to the root of hurt and conflict to create change.

The remedy is not to quickly figure out who is at fault and fiercely hold our position. This is a way to avoid our own emotional content. Blame and anger are much easier to push out onto someone else than experiencing our own human vulnerability and overwhelm.

We need instead to come together with creative solutions. To explore what happened and learn. To gather our local communities to create stronger systems of support. To understand that what was “normal” in the past is not longer a benchmark we can measure the coming days by. To understand we are in each other’s care. To continue to work to hold accountability and understand responsibility from careful reporting and research.

From the Rebecca Solnit writing for The Guardian:

“The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this is equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/08/national-weather-service-cuts-texas-flooding

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We need guidance for these times from people like Rebecca, who is the author of numerous books, including A Paradise Built in Hell:

The most startling thing about disasters is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

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Let’s be the ones that hold a vision of a less fearful and more resourceful, creative, wise, and spirit-guided response to the complexity and intersections of natural disasters, climate change, politics, and human choices.

Let’s be the ones who can hold conflict with love and our much-needed grounded, heart-centered, tender presence.

Let’s be the ones who can be in the tension of contradictions and not immediately collapse to one side or the other, but root deeper into the moment and ask:

“What is needed here? How can I truly help?”

Building the skill of staying with our own sense of helplessness, grief, and sorrow is going to be more important than ever.

Here’s a poem I send your way today…

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From Fables and Spells by adrienne maree brown
https://bookshop.org/a/8877/9781849354509

Copy and paste to share this with a friend, stranger, or beloved:

radical gratitude spell

a spell to cast upon meeting a stranger, comrade or friend working for social and/or environmental justice and liberation:

you are a miracle walking
i greet you with wonder
in a world which seeks to own
your joy and your imagination
you have chosen to be free,
every day, as a practice.
i can never know
the struggles you went through to get here,
but i know you have swum upstream
and at times it has been lonely

i want you to know
i honor the choices you made in solitude
and i honor the work you have done to belong
i honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself
and your journey
to love the particular container of life
that is you

you are enough
your work is enough
you are needed
your work is sacred
you are here
and i am grateful

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I am so grateful to you.

What is one of your favorite poems / paragraphs that bring you courage or remind you to stay steady when times are scary or hard? Share below. Let’s nourish each other with inspiration and share the ones who are dreaming a new way of being.

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If you feel moved, here is a place to donate directly to those impacted by the Hill Country July 4th floods:

https://cftexashillcountry.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create/fund?funit_id=4201