On finding what refuses to burn

A benediction from the ash.

I drove under the Wolf Moon tonight while it hung half-burnt out, unnaturally orange from the ash. I saw a deer pick her way along a creek and she was alone. I called after her. I saw three coyotes the size of my dog cross the road and then stop to look back at me, my engine idling, window rolled down. I always stop to talk, addressing them like I do my own animals of course, with fondness and respect. I know they need to kill the rabbits, and it must be hard work, no one’s begrudging them that. Their shoulder blades are visible, angular and jutting upward only because they hang their heads, unsure and a little scared.

We are all doing our hard work while watching our backs these days, hunched, twitchy. It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore who’s a predator or on the top of the food chain when most everyone feels unsafe, and nature is the wildest beast of all.

The fires in Los Angeles are hard to talk about. Overwhelming in every sense. I could tell you the blaze slid down the boulevards where I learned to drive, where I drove out on Friday nights with my friends and we were dressed up, in a childish way, acting grown and alive. We were smoking cigarettes in the all-night diner, wandering Tower Records and junky gift shops and clubs that played music I tried to like. But I only had nostalgia to lose last week, not a home, not a livelihood, not my children’s preschool art, nor my photo albums, or my great-grandmother’s patchwork quilt. I still have all that. I am surrounded by a great cloud of intact things.

It’s hard to articulate why, then, my spirit feels blackened and brittle. Like I’m looking inside myself and I see a charred frame with cleared out rooms, stacks of unrecognizable detritus, and I don’t even care what it all used to be. Did those things ever have value, or did I just imagine they did? I am now walking around inside myself, and it smells like aftermath, like something’s done. Some things are permanently gone. And those things are mostly beliefs I had around invulnerability, if we’re going to get right to it. I am scorched with mortality.

I think, if I may speak for us collectively, from what I’ve felt and observed, we’ve watched hope curl and burn too. We’ve even fanned those flames, which makes perfect sense given what anger can do, the sheer rage sparking from the prevailing sense of powerlessness. It’s been shocking to hear speculation this week that arsonists could be making the fires worse. It’s shocking until I see myself in that glowing mirror. I’m not starting any fires, but I can sabotage like the best of us. Cynicism is a tempting blaze, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sometimes flicking the metaphorical lighter and wondering what would happen if I threw it in.

I’m not going to tell you (or myself) to pull hope out of the flames; you don’t have to. It can resurrect on its own, in its time. Hope is its own thing and never really dies. We know that. It’s not on you to save it.

We have other work to do because the smoke is still spiraling up in small white threads and we need help. I am crunching around, trying not to be afraid of what’s next, but it is harder than I expected to face the losses of the last five years and remain optimistic. I miss optimism like I miss being younger: it’s impossible to reach back and take hold of it, and also I know now it was laced with illusion, and I don’t want it back. Instead, I keep wanting a point in the calendar where we stop counting up from 2020 as hard years, but I haven’t seen the window. My personal pivot has always been encouragement as a postscript; that’s my move, my place. Maybe that move starts to look different when we are smoldering and grief-stricken, heads down and looking for any small sign of ourselves in the ruins. Maybe the new move, the gentler move, is to sift through the ash together and call out, “Here. Here is a piece I recognize, look at the colors."

And then we hold a small trapezoidal shard of ourselves up to the light, turning it, searching until we see which part of us has been undestroyed. What’s true is that so much burns down, and what’s also true is that so much will refuse to. You are not so crumbled as you may feel.

What’s materialized, slowly, over five years of events that should have and truly could have dislocated me as a person is that I am dismantled and yet still whole. I am buried and you can still find me. I am brand new and yet still named. If you swipe the soot off with your thumb, you can still read the word: Beloved. Indelible, petrified. Inflammable.

I talk to the coyotes so they know they’re safe with me. I will crawl around with you in the ash until we find a piece that still bears your name.

You are the Beloved.

Leslie

*image of the fire above taken by my friend S. Patz from an airplane window during landing at LAX on January 8th.