You are Here, Recovering and Resilient
a writing prompt for you + Ada Limón poetry + April Writing Hour
Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.
We’ve crossed the six month mark after Hurricane Helene. Here in western North Carolina, the work of recovery continues. With the number of rumbling trucks full of debris on the road, I wonder: How are there still so many downed trees? How is there plastic still in the branches over the river?
In a meeting this week, I learn that over 8,000 homes in one county, and 80,000 in the region are on the habitability damages list. Estimates of recovery costs are over 7 billion dollars, and our governor’s funding extension request was just denied by the federal government. In that same meeting, I see again a graphic about the long, messy movement of recovery from disasters, and recognize the downward slope of the disillusionment stage we are approaching. From colleagues and community leaders, I hear stories of exhaustion and frustration, of determination, and of stubborn gratitude.
The scrappy little team I am working with in our presbytery (a regional group of churches) is called the DRT. The acronym officially stands for Disaster Recovery Team, but I have to remind myself what that R stands for. Sometimes we get called the Disaster Relief Team. We have indeed done relief work, supporting our congregations in their initial and ongoing supply distribution of food, water, propane, and more to those most in need. We could be the Disaster Resources Team, as we help distribute grant money from so many generous donors. We might be the Disaster Reconstruction Team as we prepare for volunteers to come wield hammers and hope through the summer and fall, likely for years to come. But we could also be the Disaster Resilience Team, as we turn toward preparing our churches and communities for future disasters. The spring wildfires in our region were just a taste of what is ahead.
Relief. Resources. Reconstruction. Resilience. Recovery takes all of those.
As I write, I recognize that I’m not just thinking about recovering from hurricanes and wildfires. There are other disasters unfolding.
The disaster of democracy under attack. Deportations. The suppression of science, equity, humanitarian aid, and free speech. Identities being erased. Plus all the personal disasters that keep unfolding.
How long will it take to recover from these other disasters? Will we have the resources to do it? Where is the relief? How will we reconstruct a functioning life/society that works and cares for everyone? Probably this disaster will make us more resilient, but can we draw from the resilience we already have, digging deep right now? Can I? Who is on that Disaster Recovery Team?
One of the resources for recovery, relief, and resilience in my toolbox is poetry. Each week during April—National Poetry Month—I’m sharing a poem to help us begin to write about what matters, right now.
This week’s poem was inspired by a dead dogwood tree in my yard. Last week, six months after Helene knocked down big trees, a smallish pink dogwood split in two in the wind, revealing a hollowed-out trunk. Half of it lay on the grass. The other half kept blooming. It reminded me of the poem by Ada Limón, shared below.1 I hope it inspires some writing about resilience in you.
a writing prompt
Read the poem by Ada Limón below. You can find a word, a phrase, an image, or an idea, and start writing there. Or, use the question she asks in her Poet Laureate project as a starting place:
What would you write in response to the landscape around you?
Salvage On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive from nature’s need to propagate. One side of her is black ash and at her root is what looks like a cavity that was hollowed out by flame. On the other side, silvery green broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter light and her bark is a cross between a bay horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety like the animal’s neck she resembles. I have been staring at the tree for a long time now. I am reminded of the righteousness I had before the scorch of time. I miss who I was. I miss who we all were, before we were this: half alive to the brightening sky, half dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry. I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life. —Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. As her tenure comes to a close, her signature project “You are Here” celebrating poetry and the natural world, with public poetry installations in some of our national parks, is more important than ever. If you like, you are invited to share responses to her question “What would you write in response to the landscape around you?” on social media using the hashtag #YouAreHerePoetry. Her beautiful poetry anthology is You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World.
April Writing Hour - Sat. April 19 | 4-5 pm Eastern
Want to join a group to write and practice being resilient together? My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.
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Join in the conversation with others in the comments. Tell me what you think about the prompt, or where your writing takes you.
Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!
Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.
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It also helped that it showed up yesterday in the Brevity blog, with insightful notes from Tamara Dean. https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/04/15/environment/
What would I write in response to the landscape around me? I have noticed a lack of birds in my garden this spring, and that my boot bird house appears to not be inhabited yet, and that my bird feeders are empty, which is likely one factor impacting a lack of birds. Yet, I walk daily past the empty bird feeder and don’t make an effort to clean and refill it. Why?
🤷🏼♀️
This is what comes to mind and will probably write about.
See you Saturday. I invited a writing friend to join.
Julie, I love all the different definitions of DRT and your expression of just how long and multifaceted recovery is from a natural disaster.
I fear that recovery from our current national disaster will be far more challenging for many reasons. To begin with, almost half the country doesn’t see it as a disaster at all, but as a triumph. So there’s the problem of perception.
When there’s a flood or an earthquake or wildfire, people aren’t cheering on the sidelines or saying it didn’t happen at all or that nothing is wrong.
And with natural disasters, they have a beginning and they have an end and then there is the recovery. Our national disaster is continuing to unfold and escalate on a daily basis, with much of the long-term damage hidden from view.
How can we get to recovery if the disaster is ongoing?