News sources are reporting that the French Quarter will re-open soon. A new beginning. The Great Return. It has come a little sooner than most thought. It has surprised many that it is happening at all. But it is happening. And so we walk back in. We clean the streets. We open the shops. We pour the beer and don the re-strung beads. But can we ever really 'go back.' You see, there is a new dance partner waiting on the floor. And a new type of ale being poured with each shot. Something that wasn't there before. And it is ground into the very molecules that make up The Big Easy. It has a name...
Awareness.
Awareness of what? Awareness of ourselves, our vulnerabilities, our significance, our insignificance. Awareness of our capabilities, our failures, our inequities, ...our connection. Strangers used to pass with our indifference. But now we know one another. Not by name... but by heart. We each know what the other has endured. We know what the other has survived. And that is a knowing that may fade in time, but it will never disappear.
The very ground itself for all of its apparent toxicity, is now sacred. Something of great significance has happened here. Compare it to the great battlefields of the world. Or Hiroshima. Nagasaki. We may even find one day that this was the payback. Pre-planned and manipulated. All the more reason to sit back and re-think the life that we have lived here. All the more reason to face ourselves, to see ourselves as we really are. We have the opportunity. Katrina has put the proverbial sand in our shoes. We may put them back on. But they will never feel as comfortable as they once did.
New Orleans may try to become what it used to be. We may set up shop and attempt to carry on as if nothing is new here ...as if nothing has changed. But can we ever really 'go back'? Maybe. Maybe we can. But I hope we never do.
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