It was September 10-12, 2006. I had been thinking back to five years ago on September 11. At that time I was working in a community mental health centre in Shelby, North Carolina. I was a senior psychologist attached to the Child and Family Division.

I lived about 50 minutes to the north in a place called Morganton, and the drive down a narrow, country highway was usually a slow one, as inevitably I would get stuck behind some slow-moving truck hauling chickens.

When I left Morganton the world was one way, but by the time I reached Shelby, the world had begun to turn into something else.

In the hallways of the mental health centre people looked anxious, and they were standing around listening to the radio that usually played soft music, only at that time it was playing news, and the news was coming from New York.

As the events of that day unfolded, I gradually lost the ability to concentrate on my work. If I was not standing in the hallway myself, I was staring out the window in my office. My clients had cancelled.

There was paperwork to do, but I couldn't do it. I put in my time and then I went home. Something very big had overtaken my life, sweeping over it as if it had not been there, yet, making me somehow part of it as well.

On September 10, 2006 I was nailing plywood up at my apartment and helping with my neighbours' places. Hurricane Florence was a day away.

I saw a lot of people out still driving around as the storm grew in magnitude.

For some, no doubt, this was not a big deal, but this was my first hurricane. For some, it was an event, but a minor event. For me, it was a major disruption.

When the storm came I noticed some things ? some weird things. The wind stripped the leaves right on the tree, shredding them and plastering the wall with bits and pieces of vegetation.

The wind put parts of leaves between the duct tape and the window glass; you could see the leaves there from the inside, as if I had taped them to the window.

We lost power early on the morning of the 11th, and it did not come back for some time. We took a walk down into Hamilton, along Front Street as the winds were dying down later that day.

While walking along next to the water I saw a little bird. It was out walking too. It had its wings tucked in close to its body.

For a moment I tried to imagine myself with that bird's perspective. What it knew was right then and right there. Take one step along this cement dock; look this way and that.

Take another step. Brace yourself against the wind. Don't unfold the wings right now; that would only take you up into the turbulence.

That bird knew nothing about the people of Bermuda and what Florence had cost them, nor about what had happened in New York five years previously on that same day.

Sometimes, I think people resemble that bird. Take one step here, right now, and get that new CD, play that new video game, go to the club, feed your face, make love, make money, get more. Don't unfold your wings because that will only take you up into the turbulence.

And there is turbulence. We may read about it, see it on the television as if it's happening in fiction, in another movie about extraordinary things or to people far away.

However, the turbulence is actually all around us, and it swirls in various forms. If we pay attention we can see it in the shape of spiritual atrocities, political outrages, financial oppressions, educational poverties, droughts of compassion, and in the terrorism that inhabits our entire world.