Lessons from a Wildfire
Devastating wildfires are burning in California, causing significant
damage in the greater Los Angeles area. Over the past week, entire
neighborhoods of family homes, small businesses, and beloved landmarks
have been reduced to ashes.
And yet, in the face of such loss, I’ve heard many who’ve lost
everything speak of waking up to what truly matters to them. Watching
the news, you’ll hear the same refrains repeated: “We’re just grateful
our family is safe.” “At least we have our health.” “Things can be
replaced.” People recount what they took with them as they evacuated —
family photos, a child’s favorite toy, a cherished heirloom. Small
tokens of love and memory that remind us of what we’ve always held
closest to our hearts.
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 practice and teachings below all speak to this letting go, as well
as the profound lessons of impermanence and compassion wildfires bring.
May they support you in cherishing what matters most.
—Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar
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When his community’s beloved retreat center burned to the ground, Anam Thubten took it as a teaching on impermanence.
To address this deep grasping, we can engage in a practice the Buddha
taught called embodied attention. This is the practice of looking deeply
into everything—without bias, without preconceived notions, without
fear, without resistance. It is a way of simply paying attention to pure
experience. When we inquire into the nature of our own embodied
experience, into the nature of our bodies, minds, and emotions, the
truth of impermanence is revealed. It becomes clear that there is no
certainty, no permanence, only flow and change.
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Diana Winston offers a compassion practice and talk for those facing the wildfires in the greater Los Angeles area.
In this recording of a special session of UCLA Mindful’s weekly class,
mindfulness teacher and center director Diana Winston shares how
compassion practice can support those facing the devastating wildfires
in the greater Los Angeles area. Through a heartfelt talk and a guided
meditation, Winston encourages us to gently acknowledge both our own and
others’ suffering while offering meaningful care and support.
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Inspired
by the life and poetry of Kamo no Chōmei (1155-1216), Zen Buddhist
practitioner David Chang explores the value of cultivating inner
stillness while also bearing witness in times of crisis and upheaval.
In the first of several vivid accounts of calamities, Chōmei recalls a
great fire that reduced much of the capital to ashes in 1177. He writes:
Flames leapt across city blocks as if taking flight. . .
Overcome by smoke,
Some fell to the ground.
Others were swallowed by flames,
Perishing immediately. . .
All the treasures of this world, turned to ash.
In the course of a single night, much of the city was reduced to cinder.
Chōmei witnessed the collapse of many structures, including the houses
of noble lords. The flames were indifferent to wealth and consumed
everything without discrimination, revealing the artifice of social
rank. For Chōmei, the fire imparted the first lesson in impermanence, a
lesson that would resurface in subsequent calamities.
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Laura
Johnson’s eight-month-old cat died as the 2018 California wildfires
destroyed nearby homes. She reflects on how her deeply personal loss
opened her heart to society’s shared humanity.
That afternoon, unseasonably warm and dry for Northern California in
November, I was making butternut cranberry muffins, and he jumped up on
the kitchen counter to sneak a taste of batter. I scolded him sweetly,
kissing the top of his head as I scooped him up and put him down, and
then he slipped out the back window to play in the sun. Half an hour
later, the muffins just out of the oven, a neighbor knocked on our door
to ask if we had a gray cat. “Have you seen Birdy?” my husband asked me
on his way out the door. Outside the woman whose car had hit him was
sobbing beside his little body on the sidewalk. In an instant it had
happened, and he was already gone. It seemed impossible. A few
hundred miles away, the Camp and Woolsey fires had been raging for
several days, consuming places and landscapes and memories and lives.
I’d spent those days sitting with notions of ecological grief, and now
suddenly a more personal grief seized me as I grappled intimately with
shock and loss and change. Cradling Birdy’s little body in our arms,
still warm from the vibrant life that had just left it, my husband and I
wept.
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