As many of you have seen in the headlines, the Hill Country in Texas has flooded once again. A year ago on July 4, the rain came and washed away much of Kerrville, Texas. Families banded together in an effort to help those who lost everything. Lives were lost, people were displaced from their homes, and the clean-up took its toll. The community experienced a shared PTSD, but persisted through and found a way to rebound. This July, it happened again. Rain poured down up to 20 inches in surrounding areas, the Guadalupe rose up in the dark without restraint, and by morning, for the second year in a row, families here were standing where their homes used to be.
Adi and I just happened to have to return to Galveston to tend to some business on Monday, and little did we know we would be returning to an entirely different place. We were supposed to return mid-week but were told to hold until the roads cleared and the shelter in place had expired. When we returned on Saturday, it was time to get back to work.
Our friends at Sovereignty Ranch, Mollie and Elias, jumped to action for the second time in a calendar year by cooking meals for the first responders and those who lost their homes. Their farm to table restaurant, the Barn, became ground zero to begin preparing meals.
For Adi and me, our part in this has been simpler. We are helping put the boxes together, and through our foundation, Thriving Healthy Strong, we are preparing to put our freeze-dried organic fruit into the hands of people who lost their pantry along with everything else. We will continue to pack the boxes by hand with the folks at the Ranch in the coming weeks and drive them out to where people most need them.
We all know, the hardest part comes after. This community will be hurting long after the news moves on. The cameras will leave, the floodwater will pull back, and the ones who lived through it will be left to build their lives a second time.
Life has a way of finding a person's purpose, and Adi and I are discovering ours. For me, more reluctantly than Adi. I am learning that if we ask, God will lead us to our purpose. My job is simply to surrender.
A flood sorts the important from the rest. The water takes the house and leaves the family standing in the yard. It takes the car, the closet, the photographs off the wall, and returns the only things that were ever ours: the people beside us, the love we managed to give while we had the chance, and the certainty that we were put here to carry one another.
I used to measure a life by what a man builds. Now I measure it by what he is willing to give away. All of it is on loan, the walls and the years and the good fortune we mistake for our own doing. The flood collects what it lent us and leaves us with each other, and that is the one thing it can never take.
Hold whoever you love closer tonight. Tell them the thing you have been meaning to say. Somewhere in Kerrville a family would give the world for one more ordinary evening, and right now you are holding one in your hands.
If you are wondering how you can help, Adi and I would be grateful for anything you can send. Every dollar becomes a meal, a box, a morning that is easier for someone who lost what they had only last week. We have provided a link below.
The Guadalupe runs brown and swollen past the tree line under a sky that has not finished with the day, the road ahead of the truck gone to water, and in the side mirror a small reflection of the two of us sitting dry in the cab, still holding what the people across that water lost in the dark. A river does this. It rises without warning in the night and by morning it has sorted the important from the rest, taken the house and the closet and the photographs off the wall, and left the family standing in the yard with the only things that were ever theirs. Everything else was on loan. We forget that on the ordinary days, when the walls hold and the roads stay dry and we mistake our good fortune for something we built. Then the water comes and collects what it lent us, and it leaves us with each other, which is the one thing it was never able to take. Look at the small evening in your own hands tonight, the roof still over it and the people still in it, and understand that somewhere upriver a family would give everything they have left for exactly this, and that this was always the treasure, sitting quiet in the middle of an ordinary night, waiting for us to notice before the water taught us how.
I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.