Inspire № 2 | Dialogue with Pi

Resilience and recovery from Supertyphoon Rai

Jan 04, 2022

True creativity, in the sense that I know it, is the work of transforming something in the world through an act of love. Sometimes we get to choose our creative process; other times — as with my friend Pi — a cataclysmic event compels us to create a new world from the scurf and detritus of the old. The stories that we make from our experiences of disaster determine how we rebuild our lives in their wake. Such creativity emerges in the moment, and yet is timeless.

In a Category 5 storm, the wind does not howl — you hear it whistling, like a haunting pillar of sound whipping through the air as the raindrops pelt down in a stream upon the roof of your shelter. Everything that you have is saturated by the time you can hear that whistle, so the rain doesn’t much frighten you: it’s that spectral wind, powerful enough to tear the leaves off branches, that could send your roof flying or knock debris towards you in the storm’s path of unhindered violence.

When you have lived through a storm of that scale, you know that things are not going to be the same for a long time afterward. Supertyphoon Rai (‘Odette’) surged through the Philippines on December 17th, 2021, affecting three million people, displacing one million, and taking more than four hundred lives. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were left without food, water, power, fuel and adequate shelter. My friend Pi, the originator of Maia Earth Village, has been working on the relief effort in the aftermath of the storm with local communities on the island of Palawan.

This dialogue came out of a disaster zone, and our theme today is resilience. What does it take to live through the loss of everything, and to set about the task of rebuilding from scratch? The ecovillage that Pi had built from the ground up was razed to the ground, save for the dwellings constructed of earthen materials. All of the surrounding rural settlements were obliterated by the storm. But on Palawan right now, it is a secondary matter to dwell upon lost dreams: all the efforts are focused on community recovery.

Pi shared this in the immediate aftermath of Supertyphoon Rai:

For over ten years, Maia Earth Village has undergone an arduous ecovillage journey involving its many residents, visitors and neighbors, both local Filipinos and foreigners […] who share deep intentions to live in community in harmony with the earth and the organisms that live in it.
Through its existence, our village had been involved in numerous disaster rehabilitation processes. Amidst typhoons, earthquakes and other forms of crisis, we have witnessed again and again and again what it means to undergo healing and strengthening after the individual and a group of people have undergone modes of deconstruction. […]
At the moment, we live in a sort of Earth Camp, surrounded by remnants of forest, human habitation. Where we have visited and helped ground zero communities in the past, we find ourselves not just in ground zero. Verily, we are ourselves, within the profound and proverbial, reflexive Zero Point.

Maia Earth Village, Palawan, Philippines

The narrative of resilience is predicated on the experience of trauma: without knowing loss, without knowing pain, we cannot know how to respond to a crisis. The caveat here is an understanding of crisis as a normal part of life, rather than a freak aberration from business as usual — we adapt to disasters by living through disasters. Pi said, “The energy of purity is right now in the disaster zone. The more things got broken, the more things got fixed.” By looking at the crisis with a resilient perspective, the extent of the damage becomes a measure for what possibilities may emerge in the process of recovery.

In the context of self-development, resilience refers to one’s ability to navigate through life challenges with a minimum of emotional reactivity, refraining from narratives of blame and victimhood in response to difficult circumstances. When it comes to a humanitarian crisis, however, resilience takes on a different meaning entirely: when one’s whole community must function, by necessity, without basic amenities in place and with limited supplies of food and resources, then the capacity for resilience is the function of a deeper will to survive. It’s what allows one to create a field of abundance from the wastelands of devastation.

Being who I am and living where I do, it has been necessary to cultivate resilience in both senses of the word. Our ecovillage passed through a Category 5 Cyclone relatively unscathed in April 2020, however several nearby villages were destroyed. We supported the relief effort implemented by indigenous civil society by contributing project funding and skilled personnel; even so, it took the better part of a year for communities to recover from the damage. In his immediate response to the typhoon, Pi has shared:

Somehow I feel that everything I’ve gone through prepared me for this. I’m feeling called to rise up to an occasion that I’m still only beginning to understand, to relate to. There’s a lot of mixed feelings in the air … There’s a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of skepticism and yet there is a lot of room for hope.

Whilst the storm is surging around you, you are not thinking of the aftermath, of the long process of recovery. Listening to the wind as it whips the air around you into a frenzy of destruction, you are most concerned about your immediate environs and the level of threat posed to you by nearby tree branches, flimsy wooden structures, or rising floodwaters.

You are stressed about the inevitable spoilage of staple crops like coconut and banana, toppled by freak winds, and the over-flooding of rice paddies or taro gardens which will lead to rot and decay of your main food supply. You are stressed about the state of your water catchment and irrigation channels, imagining lengths of precious polypipe washed out into the waterways. You are stressed about the film of mould gathering upon everything indoors. But as those vicious winds rage around you, the primary question you ask yourself is, will my shelter withstand this?

Our tropical homes did not weather this recent storm since our engineering ethos had been built on folk wisdom. Palawan supposedly avoids the typhoon pathways that normally exit through the Northern parts of the Philippines. None of the locals remember a storm such as this, they have no words for it, no images to signify its wake.
Traditionally, local Palawaneos use light renewable materials for their homes which allows for passive ventilation and lighting conditions. This recent contact with a Category 5 typhoon holds the space where climate change enters a wide field of perception, creation and experience. In that space, there are opportunities for local transitions amidst global transformations.

Donate to the Relief Effort

What Pi is pointing towards is that the narrative of global transformation is beginning to intersect with stories of resilience and recovery that we find on the level of locality and community. Our lives are being touched by forces that were incomprehensible to most of us a mere decade ago. Community-led initiatives are responding to this intersection to create feedback loops of sustainability and regeneration in the wake of a disaster. Pi illustrated this creative dynamic at play through a past project:

The pandemic taught us a lot. We got a lot of donations in the beginning of the pandemic. People were really suffering the loss of jobs and local livelihoods. So we decided to do a food exchange program. When people gave us the money they thought we were just going to give away food, but we realised that we didn’t just want to give it away. We wanted to create a co-op system.
The success of this program had a lot to do with the art of holding space for conversation. What we were able to do is take in the village leaders of the 19 puroks that make up the barangay and we were able to negotiate how much a kilo of rice is worth in exchange for either an ecobrick (which meant they were cleaning up the environment) or a sack of cow manure or a sack of chopped up banana trunks or carbonised rice hull or carbonised coconut peat.
We could dump stuff like that into a compost and then sell in the city, because we felt there had to be a way to establish a connection between the urban and the rural. Then we would take the money that the compost would earn in order to buy more food [for puroks] that could generate more exchanges.
We were able to run that program for about 6 months. It was intense, it was tiring. It was a selfless act, really. We would wake up early in the morning and up until night we were just delivering rice or picking up manure.

There is a lot to love about a bartering system based around exchanging poo for food. It retrains our concepts on what is essential to life: the systemic needs for a clean environment and sustainable agriculture find a point of convergence with satisfying human hunger through this kind of energy exchange. Essential needs are met on every level.

The consumer mentality trains us to satisfy our immediate hunger by going out to hunt for a desirable product. Maia’s food co-op project disrupts this tendency by requiring that communities hunt for waste, viewing it as a tradeable commodity, in order to get food. Hunting and gathering is lifted to a different order, with this primal human instinct working to feed the environment as well as the community.

I’ve traveled the world and I’ve seen what happens to places that get a lot of relief. When we look at the work of large aid organizations there’s a certain way of helping that doesn’t really help. I’ve been noticing that in really deep ways. The kind of help that actually destroys.
There’s like an addiction when people receive help from the outside; there is less of a chance that they help themselves … This kind of aid relieves the symptom but doesn’t got to the root, doesn’t help to alleviate of the source of the problem.

The resilient approach to disaster response, then, is one that resists the traditional logic of giving and receiving aid and instead acts creatively on the community level over the time it takes to regenerate, rehabilitate, and strengthen local systems. Disasters of the scale of Supertyphoon Rai cannot be prevented, and the destruction they cause to communities cannot be avoided. However, through adopting resilient attitudes to how we think about ecological crises, we are able to respond with regenerative processes already in place for recovery.

Donate to the Relief Effort

Fundamentally, what needs to be acknowledged is the scale of transformations — social, economic, and ecological — that take place in the wake of a disaster. The extent that civil society groups and local administrators are prepared to live out these transformations through a crisis and recovery process signals, in this sense, the degree of community resilience.

There’s a shift in the way of seeing, in the way of experiencing the world, of the perspectives and behaviours that create our world. I appreciate the power disasters hold in shifting all these things at the same time. […]
Everything we understand is what we create, and everything we create is what we experience, and everything we experience is what we perceive. So there’s this feedback loop. And sometimes one of the elements of that feedback loop will change and sometimes all of them could be altered at the same time.

My reason for initiating this dialogue with Pi in the aftermath of Supertyphoon Rai was to explore the topic of resilience on a few different levels. Pi offered this sharing at a time when the trauma of this crisis was still painfully fresh, and yet his unique experience of holding space for healing through innerdance and various disaster relief programs meant that whilst feeling the grief that is natural in such a moment he was able to listen to its deeper meaning. This is rare.

Through my writings on bereavement, I explored the vital role of storytelling in the process of recovery. In fact, on the (endless) night that followed the death of our son, Pi was the first person that we were able to speak with about what happened. He helped us to deal with the grief by really meeting us at the level of intensity that forms through the shock of a major loss. From that point we were able to explore the meanings that made our devastation bearable and our recovery possible.

Not a lot of people have asked me the right questions and I think that the question you posed and this energy you requested to be sent over was well-placed for me to be able to unravel — even for myself — what the picture really is here.
For me, continuity is the opposite of distraction. When you look at the word rupture, the [suffix] rupt is also in disruption and eruption. I like discontinuities. I like shock, I like breaking apart because it’s also a breaking down.
When continuity is broken a much larger continuity seems to be woven. So when a small continuity breaks [in a crisis], we actually see a much larger story telling the story of all stories. Not just the story of culture or the story of the biographical. Those things are important, they’re valuable, but at the same time they need to interrelate not just with the story is but how the story is written, like a meta-narrative.
It feels like the human consciousness is now being paved for coming into that level of understanding that belongs to babies and sages.

Resilience, then, has a lot to do with how we contextualise disasters; what narratives we bring to them, what stories we tell about them. Has this crisis come to destroy my spirit or to liberate me from suffering? From our experiences, we know that major disasters take a lot of strength to pass through, but that the efforts we make to restructure systems of living from the ground up are ultimately part of a greater narrative of regeneration and holistic, conscious progress that will build a more loving society.

We cannot see a disaster as a simply a disaster. There are so many stories that emerge and develop from a crisis that are about healing, connection, faith, unity of purpose. A space emerges for meaningful conversations about the meaning of community, the purpose of shared living. In the wake of a tragedy, I have laughed deeper and held people closer than ever before. In grief, one becomes alive to a sense of awe incompatible with business as usual; and at such moments, one’s worldly matters fracture into dust and fragments.

We weather the storms of this world for a good reason: they make us more resilient, more aligned with purpose, and perhaps more awake to our humanity. Eventually we recover from the shock of devastation and move on, remembering the crisis as the event that augured our rite of passage.

Inspire № 2 | Dialogue with Pi

Resilience and recovery from Supertyphoon Rai

Discussion about this post