somatic responses

There's a hurricane headed towards Florida today, and I feel like something isn't quite right. I am not in Florida, but my body feels off. I feel sluggish yet antsy. I can't seem to focus. My mind is uprooted. I keep thinking that I forgot to do something important, that I should be doing everything and nothing at the same time. I am anticipation. There's a hurricane headed towards Florida, and even though I'm not there, I can understand what people mean when they talk about somatic, embodied responses. Like most Floridians, I can archive my childhood by weather--hurricanes, yes, but really all matter of storms, lightning strikes, floods, tornadoes. I remember my brother driving us to church and the wheels through the puddles arced the rainwater up and over the side of the car like some eerie combination of tunnel, bubble, and fountain. I remember seeing lightning strike a tree outside my bedroom, the whole trunk ablaze in an electric blue like a neon sign and then darkness and the surreal feeling of solitary awe at being the only audience for an act of god. I remember twisted trees and gaping wholes where roots used to be and my best friend's yard flooded and full of downed live power lines. 

Coincidentally, this week I re-read one of my favorite stories by the southern writer, Eudora Welty, called "The Winds." Based on Welty's own childhood experiences of tornadoes in Jackson, MS, the story describes a young girl who is plucked out of her bed during a storm on the night of the fall equinox. Her whole family gathers together, waiting out the winds from the storm. The girl drifts in and out of sleep and memory as she thinks about the end of summer. The first time I read it, I remember being shocked at how perfectly it captured my own experiences lying half awake listening to the sound of the wind whistling through the still and quiet house, waiting anxiously for the sound of something crashing outside, fretting about ghostly images of someone out in the storm, exposed to the elements. As a child, storms were scary, but they also had this surreal, dream-like quality that Welty captures. School and work got cancelled. Our family would be there altogether like a unit. With the power out, the house was always silent in a way it never was, candles casting shadows like a surrealist fun-house.

Now though, storms come with deeper concerns. Are these happening more than they used to? Is this already the effects of climate change? Can we even imagine what future storms will be like? The fact that feeling this hurricane in my body is my strongest touchstone for a kind of somatic trauma reveals only my privilege. That I mostly remember the surreal experience of storms shows only that we were lucky, that these were events in my life and not tragedies. We know that climate change will affect and already actively is affecting our most vulnerable populations first and most violently. But I can't help but wonder too, probably of much smaller concern, about the somatic changes climate change will bring. If experiencing weather events like hurricanes, even in relative safely, has a bodily effect on me, what kind of bodily effects will come from increasingly volatile climate changes? We imagine adapting these very geographic postapocalyptic scenes of scarcity or excess--deserts, floods, sickness--but what will our nervous systems do? how will our brains rewire themselves? will we even conceive of time, of identity, of creation in the same way?