Lessons from a Wildfire

 

09.18.2020 LESSONS FROM A WILDFIRE Significant wildfires are currently burning through California and Oregon as we approach the height of wildfire season on the West Coast of the United States. Though wildfires are a natural occurrence, the heating of our planet has vastly increased the likelihood of these fires starting and spreading more widely than in the past. This season’s fires have already displaced thousands of people, scorched millions of acres of land, and painted the sky an unsettling shade of red. It’s enough to give you that uneasy churn in your stomach: things feel so wholly out of our control. “So what to do for practice?” asks Zen teacher John Tarrant in “One Day, My Child, This Will All Be Yours.” “More is required than trying to calm the mind,” he writes. “‘Stop the fire on the other side of the ocean,’ goes one koan, giving us an impossible task — that’s an honest description of what we have.” In her poem “In Blackwater Woods,” the late Mary Oliver shares of losing a cherished forest to a fire, writing of how the trees “are turning their own bodies into pillars of light.” She finishes with a great teaching: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. The three pieces below all speak to this letting go, and the profound lessons of impermanence, compassion, and grief a wildfire brings with it. As the flames rage on, we can learn to appreciate both nature’s wrath and beauty, understanding our place in the balance of things. —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, LionsRoar.com

One Day, My Child, All This Will Be Yours Zen teacher John Tarrant on climate change, the Australian fires, and the magic of the primeval forest. Australia has long been a fire ecology, but the current situation is extreme — it’s climate change. We’re in a different world from the one we hoped for, and the rainforests are likely leaving. The forests will still in some sense exist, like the ice age rivers and the mammoths that swam across them, and the lakes and hippos that are still carved into rocks above dunes in the Sahara. Now the forests too are moving into the unseen world. When my time comes and I go into the bardos, perhaps those paths will be there and I will walk them again.

Lessons from a Wildfire When his community’s beloved retreat center burned to the ground, Anam Thubten took it as a teaching on impermanence. Instead of futilely fighting loss, he says, let it be our invitation to freedom and spaciousness. The loss of our retreat center in Big Sur was a profound teaching for me, even more profound than the Buddha’s own words. When we find ourselves completely powerless in the face of nature’s wrath, there is nothing left to do but surrender to the truth of things, to give in to a state of not knowing. This is the profound side of insecurity. If we let go into the truth that nothing can ultimately be relied upon, that no one thing in this universe lasts forever, even our own bodies, there is something left. It is a kind of groundless ground, the emptiness that pervades the fullness of things. The Buddha called it dharmata, the spacious expanse.

How Personal Grief Connects Us to Shared Compassion Laura Johnson’s eight-month-old cat died as the California wildfires destroyed nearby homes. She reflects on how her deeply personal loss opened her heart to society’s shared humanity. Over the next few days, the loss from the fires continued to mount, the human death toll ticking upward with hundreds more missing, and thousands of animals dead or injured. This, of course, situated in the broader context of climate chaos fueling suffering everywhere in the world. As we grieved for Birdy, we grieved for all beings, human and nonhuman, nearby and far away. And questions arose: How do we consciously join our personal grief with collective grief? How do we hold it, tend it, share it, use it as a pathway for healing? How do we avoid disassociation and numbness when opening to what feels so painful, so overwhelming, so immense?

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