“We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.”
Mary Oliver
I can’t find any comfortable place to file these latest firestorms away and I’m loathe to glibly show something comforting and pretty while ignoring the momentous, lethal tipping point we are being forced by nature to look in the eye, to bow to, to run from, to finally, in our horror …acknowledge.
When dominoes are all lined up, just so only the miniscule amount of force required to tilt just one of them past its tipping point will topple ten thousand as easily as it will topple two. We are seeing that happen in real time in one of the largest, wealthiest, most modern, most creative and influential cities in America. You cannot hide from the raw power that is on display, that has been unleashed.
My friend Lor in a recent comment sent me back to a piece I posted in September of 2023. Apparently that is when (and where), we first met. Wanting to get a better sense of that meeting I scrolled back to the post that first prompted her to ‘knock’ at my front door in response.
From that essay, penned just days after hiking through a vast, burned out forest:
“Life is tenacious and wildly creative, and has, again and again found ways to adapt, change, survive. Life will almost certainly survive this increasingly hot and fire-prone chapter that we are moving into with rapidly increasing speed, but there are no guarantees that humanity will. Life doesn’t need us the way we need it. And when we fail to act as responsible citizens, when we set ourselves above everything else and become such a burden on the rest of life, to the point of threatening its continued existence by wildly overpopulating the land, and shitting where we eat, and polluting, and consuming, and dumping, and capriciously playing god with the lives of other life forms, we may be, inadvertently triggering Mother Earth’s need to reign in any life form that becomes powerful enough to threaten the futures of all life forms. We may be setting ourselves up to be brought low. And probably we will have deserved it…
“The weird part is that though I don’t have some innate sense that humanity is going to rise to the occasion and meaningfully improve its collective citizenship grade anytime soon, I have profound faith in life to find a way, with or without us, or in spite of us to continue to thrive and diversify, and adapt to the curveballs of a continually unfolding universe. Life I trust. Humanity, not so much…”
Obviously, I cannot know if there will be anything at all helpful here for you in this weighty swirl of displacement and newly visited consequences. But for some of you, maybe …just maybe.
If you knew...
If you knew it was your last month, or year, or wilder yet, Earth’s last generation, …if there was no turning back, if that last tipping point had done tipped sideways and so much beauty spilled out, and there was no faint hope of some last minute reprieve…
Lor knows where it’s at. I look to her for context that’s a wise twist away from my own framing and am always the better for it.
I guess there was a much more important reason to send you back to “If you knew…”
I woke up in the middle of the night last night , in doing so, I woke my husband up. He asked if I was ok. I said no, I was thinking about the fires and realized, it was the first time I focused my eyes away from humanity and was overwhelmed with the thought of the rest of the living, breathing beings trying to flee or have perished.
The view has changed since September of 2023, as we track the fires and devastation . Some of us watching in horror from another state, from a place of calm and peace. It brings new meaning to your words. (And it is helpful)
“I have profound faith in life to find a way, with or without us, or in spite of us to continue to thrive and diversify, and adapt to the curveballs of a continually unfolding universe. Life I trust. Humanity, not so much…”