Four years ago, I started writing a book about the spiritual principles and practices that had crystalized for me over my 10+ years of studying and teaching.

Re-reading the principles today was painful in a life-affirming way. They are so true I feel them in my bones; truth aching all the way to the marrow:

Existence is cyclical. We have been through this before, and we will go through it again. This knowledge is both heavy and freeing.

As I watch the shock and disruption of WNC, I remember hazy bits and pieces of my own disasters. There are great clouds over my memories of Katrina — the wisdom of a brain that does not set down memories of things that would only hurt me later. Except for a few things that are seared in my brain like a branding: the rejection, revulsion, devastation scarred as if by hot steel.

But because I still carry those marks, because they now identify me for as long as I carry this body, I can be proof for someone else: You will make it. You will survive. It might feel like you can’t, or don’t want to — I know, because: me too.

And the cyclical nature of time means that it feels like it’s happening again, to me, right now. As if no time has passed I am kidnapped by the viceral memories of the smells, the sorrow, the insanity.

But then the Paradox rises up. I do no trust a spiritual teaching that does not emphasize paradox. Because I am strangely jealous of the folks in Swannanoa and Asheville and Black Mountain and Lake Lure right now. I am aching for their loss as much as I ache to be back there: the crystal clear knowing of what matters and how much doesn’t. The brotherhood of loss, and the family and connection and understanding of everyone else out there, knee-deep in the muck.

I cannot explain to you the feeling of fulfillment that comes from working together to rebuild something after a loss like this. Of knowing you are one of many, who are being pushed to their limits, learning everything they didn’t know about themselves yet. We do not see who we are until we are tested, and this kind of devastation is a litmus that everyone passes.

And that takes me to another key principle: You already have everything you need. It’s been here the whole time.

Every experience, every friendship, every ritual, every earwig, every dirty joke — you have everthing you need, right now, to get where you’re going. Our spiritual paths are not about finding or becoming someone new. They are about revealing who’s been here all the time.

Giving us the fortitude to sit with what is. To accept reality, just as it is, and to sit with it. To hold an entire world of devastation and hope in our hearts. And to do that, we don’t need more — we let go of more. We make more space. We drop the things that are unnecessary, over and over, breath by breath.

Pain and suffering are essential. There is no way out of this life without deep, heart-wrenching, gut slashing pain. Whether you are experiencing the wrenching yourself, or feeling it because of the pain of others near or far.

Pain is our call to awakening. Nothing less. If we were always comfortable, we would never go searching for meaning, or for something else that mattered.

And watching pain in others is so unbearable for most of us that we are compelled to do something about it. The number of people in the wake of Helene, and now in preparation for Milton, who are sacrificing their own hard-earned cash, disrupting their own lives, and are doing anything and everything they can to reduce the suffering of folks they will likely never meet… this is what pain and suffering do.

They draw us to each other.

It is the ultimate of paradoxes — the thing we want the least magnetizes us to what we need the most.

We need each other. That is the most important principle to me so far: You cannot go it alone.

We want to believe we are fiercely independent. We praise the lone wolf who can survive in the forest with a bowie knife, compass, and some chewing gum.

But we were not made to go alone. Isolation is a form of torture because our brains and nervous systems are wired to each other. Sometimes I think, “There’s only one of us.”

This is why when people say to me, after lamenting how sad or overwhelmed or angry they are at the state of the world, that “this isn’t my disaster,” I remind them: yes it is. Yes, It is your tragedy. Yes, it is your pain. Yes, it is your suffering and hunger and fear and confusion and numbness.

You are feeling the truth that we are all connected to each other. We only exist for each other.

Do not shy away from your pain right now — because it is a call to connection. It is a balm that only community can give.

We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again, and it’s happening in the past, and the present, and the future all in this one breath: And I’m right here, with you, the whole time.