track star Norman Tate practicing in Van Cortlandt Park 1970

Last Friday, after 5 days of living without power, ‘the improvised life’s assistant Dese’Rae L. Stage sent us this email:

I don’t think I even realized it until yesterday, when I had to jump through 10 hoops just to get ice and dinner. I was like, “god, I’m exhausted,” and it took me a second to realize why that might be. It’s amazing how adaptable we are, but there sure are limits to that.

Even having NOT been hit hard in Harlem, we feel disoriented, tired, FEEL the wound of this city, and the people who have lost so much whose reality we can’t even imagine.

Author Judy Upjohn alerted us to this recent New York Magazine cover which conveys the scope of the hurricane and also leaves out SO many people that we would discover had been slammed.

Hurricane Sandy New York Magazine Cover by Iwan Baan
photo: iwan baan

Her words potently express what seems to be in everyone’s heart these days, as they continue to deal with the shock of an event that was as deeply troubling as 9/11:

It sort of breaks my heart to look at it, yet I can’t stop glancing. As minor as it was, the cold dark silent week on Bleecker Street has had some kind of permanent effect, a hard place that lives in the dark splotch this photo captures. At least today, rested in the sunny hot-shower fragrant colorful fresh food environs of Willow [upstate New York], I look at the dark spread and the retrospective futuristic dread feels permanent. 
“Retrospective futuristic dread feels permanent”. That says it all. Our question is one that we heard years ago and which we continue to ask “Where is healing to be found?
“Where is healing to be found?”
Many places and ways. We are heartened by this picture of track star Norman Tate working out in Van Cortlandt Park, The Bronx in 1972. Reminding us that what human beings do…is…
leap, fly, try, anyway…
despite it all …
Thanks Judy! Photo of Norman Tate via The Lively Morgue.

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