The 10th Annual Commiseration of Hurricane Katrina

Straight out of the gate, let's get one thing settled - Hurricane Katrina was an awful, devastating, murderous storm-turned-manmade-disaster, and those of us who were painfully affected will never forget because it is an indelible mark through the timeline of our lives.

Well hell, I could probably just end this post right here. Did you hear me? We will never forget because we can never forget.

La Liberté

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall..." said Robert Frost in his poem "Mending Wall." Being the Romantic poet he was, it's easy to interpret his words as having to do with nature. Here, he says, walls have no place in nature. Why? Nature is wild and free, sprawling, uninhibited, and walls are the antithesis of freedom. I sometimes think of this when I consider the levees that protect our city and they actually do. The Great Mississippi River is "contained" by man-made barriers of rock and earth, but the wild river resists containment. The challenge of human engineering is to keep it bounded by these walls because, as we all well know, once that river breaches those boundaries, it will never again be contained. It's just not meant to be.

But we can also expand the definition of wall to include those we put up in our minds and around our hearts. And since we are nature - made of stardust, water, and earth - we are naturally compelled to be free as well. People go crazy confined in a cell for too long - we yearn for freedom. But what is it? Freedom transcends an outward appearance or an outward structure. Think about it... some people with all of the wealth they could ever need and more find themselves enslaved by drugs or greed. Freedom has to be more than what society calls free.

I propose:

On Things Lost

I may not know all the details about the history of the LeBeau plantation. Sure, it was an antebellum plantation home turned hotel turned abandoned historic monument. But I don't know who the owners were at any given time or why it fell into utter disrepair. Not that the full history of it isn't important, and not that I haven't read up on it a little. It's just that LeBeau and I, we sort of have our own history.

Photo I took on my last visit to LeBeau

Gettin' Back to It

Since the longer, deeply personal post is still in the works and might not come out for a little while longer, I figured I might as well start here with a micro post. And here it is.