“Hope”

I titled this photo “Hope” after I came across this scene this week. For the last several months I have passed by a burn site. The building were the fire happened is/was adjacent to the natural foods store in my town & so, somewhere I frequent with regularity. As the days turned into weeks turned into months & the season changed, the site abandoned with no clean-up has become a visual fixture for me: a semi-permanent altar to destruction. 

We of the trials by fire have had an arduous road these past half dozen years, with more & more catastrophic fires wreaking massive havoc on our communities. I, sadly, know far, FAR too many folks who have lost everything in the blink of an eye. 

What isn’t said is that it takes years to recover. The first year is just shock & triage, trying to piece back together some semblance of normalcy while homeless & traumatized. The years that follow are spent feeling the grief, finding a way through, and wading through a mighty river of impossibilities –“rebuilding” something that was created over many years takes so very, very long. 

Then there’s the PTSD that recurs every fire season; which is akin to having it all happen to you again as you perhaps run for your life again, evacuate your makeshift home, and live in dread & smokey disarray. 
While we can make light of these tragedies & we are incredibly resilient & there is always another chance to do it another way, there is also this: the visible destruction that strikes a chord that reverberates on & on… 

And yet, even as the climate chaos has taken so much time & energy from us… even though we are insecure & scared & confused about how to heal, there is sometimes (often?) miraculous grace. There’s a tomato that says, “Why not grow right here at ground zero?” 

This Autumn has been a collective breath of fresh air both literally & energetically. My nervous system has not been so calm since September 2017. The blesséd rains just keep falling & everything is green & wet & vibrant. I give thanks every day for the gift of this reprieve. Every.Single.Day. 

This unlikely tomato is an ally & a teacher to me. After I went shopping yesterday the green caught my eye & took hold of me. It’s not a pretty picture really, but to me, it represents incredible potential. 

This month I am writing my next novel –the second cli-fi & eco-fiction book in the trilogy I’m currently crafting. The theme of the novel is healing & the setting is the garden. Maybe there are still opportunities for us to heal & grow? I hope so.

For those of you that don’t know, I wrote my debut novel about the impact of the wildfires on California’s rural population. “Wildfire Weeds” explores some of the sentiments I expressed here in a fully developed book. The plot follows a farming couple through several days in the Fall harvest season. I’m super interested in exploring the theme of hope in the eco-fiction and cli-fi genres in my upcoming trilogy also.