There’s something strangely familiar and magical about the eye of a hurricane—how it can be so quiet and full of repose while everything around it breaks.
Seemingly a paradox, but more of a metaphysical dialectic—the center of the storm being still
and pausing time for a moment-- like so many of nature’s sublime offerings fr
om solar eclipse
quietude to surreal sweeping devastation of a tsunami. Hurricanes feel unique in the ability to
encompass an entire catalog of attributes that touch each aspect of human awe. The eye,
especially, as it offers us awe quite like the stillness that feels briefly a lot like death. Or maybe
like being born.
My grandmother died just after sunrise on August 26, 2011, in Wilmington, North Carolina, as Hurricane Irene reached her peak just offshore. A Category 3 system, Irene spun her spiral right past the coast I’d grown up on. It wasn’t the most powerful or devastating hurricane I, or anyone had seen, but for me it felt ancient. Elemental. As if she wasn’t just passing by but calling someone home.
My grandmother Ethel Booth—fierce, kind, and luminously wise—was 93. Her mind had been unraveling slowly from dementia, though there were moments in those last weeks when she’d snap back into a clarity so precise, it was like watching cumulonimbus and stratus clouds part in the middle of a tempestuous squall. On several occasions I would be in the middle of what I believed to be a conversation between me and her. Only to realize that she was talking to people who weren’t in the room in the sense that I was.
One afternoon, my grandmother looked beyond me and said, almost casually, “I don’t want to get wet.” There was no rain that day. The sky was still. But momentarily my hubris intimated to me that I knew what she meant. She didn’t want to drown in the storm of forgetting. She wanted to ride out on the wind.
Light. Dry. Unbound.
Hurricanes as Living Things
Meteorologists will tell you hurricanes form when warm, moist air over the ocean begins to rise. This conjuring creates a vacuum beneath it, and more air rushes rapidly in. The Coriolis effect— caused by the magical physics of Earth’s rotation—makes this whole system begin to spin. Over time, that churning becomes a storm, and the storm becomes a being.
NOAA describes hurricanes as the most powerful weather events on Earth. One storm can release more energy than all the world’s power plants combined. But science only tells part of the
story. If you’ve ever stood on the coast as the outer bands roll in—sky bruised, surf pulling harder, air electric—you know hurricanes carry something else. A presence. A spirit.
The Taíno people, Indigenous to the Caribbean, knew this long before satellites or spaghetti models. They believed hurricanes were the breath of Juracán, the god of wind and chaos. Juracán lived atop El Yunque, a mountain that remains shrouded in cloud and legend. When he stirred, the skies would boil, the seas would rise, and lives would shift. The Spanish took the word juracán, reshaped it into huracán, and passed it on to English. But the sacred heart of that word—the knowing that storms are messengers—remains.
The Ocean Is Where I Remember Who I Am
I was raised on this coast of southeastern North Carolina. And, the swimming, surfing, paddling that came to me as a young child (and that I’ve held so close my entire life) has been an embodied and enacted talisman that has saved my life in so many different ways and different times. The ocean raised me, and at once renewed me and sanded me down, taught me to pay attention. Each wave, each paddle stroke, is a small kind of prayer.
I paddle until I find myself again. Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes it takes miles. But the water always answers.
Today, I’m an English professor at UNC Chapel Hill. I write in the health and environmental humanities, exploring the ways bodies, environment (especially blue aquatic ones), and language intersect. But it all traces back to the ocean. My first real questions about life—about divinity, about death, about the soul—they all rose up between waves.
I learned to listen to water from my mother and my grandmother. They gave me the sea not just as a playground, but as a teacher in much the same way as Neruda intimates needing the sea because “it teaches me.”. Relatedly, the ocean is often and always where I return to make sense of things in much of the same way that Eliot interpellates certain spaces of relations that can situate oneself “at the still point of the turning world”. The profound liminality of the interstice of ocean, land, and sky is where I returned when I knew my grandmother’s time was near. This is the same mindful sojourn I make (and have made multitudinous times) for the repose that the beaches and Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Southeastern North Carolina have always given me.
The Sacred Spiral
Hurricane Irene had been born far out in the Atlantic. She gathered herself off the coast of the Lesser Antilles, fed on warm currents, grew metaphysical teeth and bone. By the time Irene reached Southeastern North Carolina, she had become a vast hurricane—so wide her wingspan stretched hundreds of miles.
But it wasn’t just her size. It was her timing.
The morning my grandmother died; the winds outside had that waiting quality—like breath held just a moment too long. Her chest rose and fell. And then... it didn’t. There was no drama. No gust. Just a stillness that felt complete.
Later, I looked at satellite images of Irene and saw the spiraling storm just off our coast, like a great eye watching the edge of the continent. Irene had skirted Southeastern North Carolina, not striking directly, but making her presence known. After Wilmington, Hurricane Irene continued up the East Coast, making landfall in New Jersey and marching through New York and New England. Across the U.S. and the Caribbean, Irene left behind at least 44 lives lost—most taken by water vis-à-vis flooding, by trees surrendering to wind, and by the chaos that follows when earth and sky collide.
But inside my grandmother’s home in the Pine Valley neighborhood of Wilmington—where she had lived since the late 1960s, founding and directing the guidance and counseling program for New Hanover County Schools, and then in retirement enjoying her yard, the beach, or the golf course—the storm sounded different. It was softer somehow, more like a breath being released. While others braced for rising waters, we watched my grandmother rise with the tide, carried not by panic or fear, but by something elemental—like gravity, like grace.
Dozens of lives were lost. Billions in damage. But that morning, she had only taken one from me. And even then, it didn’t feel like taking. It felt like lifting.
In Stormlight: Rising Through the Eye
I think often now about what my grandmother said— “I don’t want to get wet.”
At first, it struck me as simple. But over time, her words have come to feel like a mantra. A quiet declaration of strength.
Granny lived her life with clarity, calm, and intention. She led with vision—not for personal glory, but for the good of others. As the founding Director of Guidance and Counseling for New Hanover County Schools, she helped shepherd the system through desegregation. Long before justice became a catchphrase again, she embodied it. Her strength was rooted in empathy.
She moved through life like a boundary current—steady, but powerful enough to shape coasts.
As matriarch, educator, advocate, and friend, she helped others navigate stormy waters with grace and grit. Her presence remains in every life she touched—an enduring light. A true North.
“I don’t want to get wet,” she told me.
She didn’t mean she feared the storm.
She meant she didn’t want to be swallowed by it.
She wanted to rise—not sink.
The Taíno believed hurricanes could carry the souls of the dead, spiraling them from this world
to the next—a sacred journey, a stairwell of storm and wind.
I believe Irene was her vessel.
And now, when I paddle out after a storm—or even on stiller days—catching those long, glassy
swells that follow in its wake, I still feel her nearby. I hear her voice:
In the hush between sets.
In the curl of light on the water.
In the salt wind at my back.
The ocean has never stopped speaking. And neither has she.
