First Response: Centering Love Amidst the Burning
Love and fear in the face of disaster. Creating the world through response. Ashes to ashes and the invitation to the soul's growth.
Those of us who have lived in fire country, hurricane zones, flood plains, or along volcano paths—those who have stood in the ruins of a life that once was—know the raw truth of loss. To watch everything burn, sink, or wash away is to face the fragility of life itself. But it also invites us to come through transformed, with a clarity on what matters in life. This is usually startlingly simple: love, connection, and presence.
And yet, in the first moments, our responses often arise from the unprocessed depths of our emotions, karmic imprints, and patterns of being. Disasters reveal the full spectrum of human responses, from the deeply compassionate to the divisive and self-serving. Viktor Frankl wrote “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Some respond with gratitude and a profound awareness of life’s essentials and survival. Some go numb, and dissociate. Bitterness and raw grief over material and emotional loss. Confusion and the struggle to adapt to a shifting reality, or maybe even panic, unmoored in the face of instability. An existential despair, that can leave us grappling with meaning and purpose. Or anger and regret, an acknowledgment of missed opportunities to act on climate earlier, with frustration at ignored warnings and unheeded science. There can even be a sort of fascination and guilty awe at the power and spectacle of destruction. Some feel the clearing and possibility in a new beginning and find in it the decisive strength to turn away from a life that wasn’t working for them anyway.
Within the two broad response orientations (Love/Unity driven, or Fear/Separation driven), there are so many nuances within them. I have named some that I see in emerging already. Can you see these in yourself and others? What else do you notice? What are the subtle flavors of what arises in you? Those and many more are in the collective. And if you’re not landing in love, inquire: what movement can you invite to get you there?
Response with Love and Practical Assistance.
Some do “love” with a flavor of true acceptance and presence, meeting the moment as it is, cultivating reverence for life even in the face of loss. This is a movement that comes from a true pure love, where we can hold space, offer centered empathy and grounded compassion.For some this love is tinged with a flavor of inevitability or despair, which also has subtle distinctions. The despair can come with powerlessness, with the the expectation that we won’t be able to impact climate. Or a flavor of despair that expects humans to be shitty to each other in the aftermath. If we have trouble with boundaries, the love can come with a porous kind of collapse boundaries, where one loses oneself in shared grief, feeling the unity of suffering. It can also come with a kind of stoicism, acknowledging the inevitability of cycles of destruction and renewal. Have a look: Is there a way to move into this space of centered love and holding, and not bring along the despair?
Responses with Blame and Division Layered over Love.
This can take the form of blaming the government for systemic failures and unpreparedness, the city, the electric company, or even conspiracies that suggest that disasters are military technological weather manipulations deliberately engineered for control. There will also be a good deal of blame cast on corporations and capitalist greed, and anger at profit-driven practices that fuel climate crises. You see a flavor of blame that speaks to God or religious wrath, viewing disasters as divine punishment or moral reckoning. There’s even a kind of Schadenfreude from those who see suffering in places with the opposite policital leaning consequence, that kind of comes with a coldness, a moral superiority that judges victims as “deserving” based on ideology or beliefs.
Disasters also reveal shadows in each of us and in the collective, such as charitable scams, exploiting generosity for personal gain; looting, taking advantage of chaos to steal. Self-serving actions of all types that use disaster as an opportunity for personal or financial advantage stem from a foundationally separation consciousness. If you’re a coroporate bot farmer or a political entity, search your soul and stand the fuck down.
Notice: Do you see how this sits on top of a core architecture of fear and separation (and also how this makes people vulnerable to bots and manipulating political entities)? Blame deepens the wounds that disasters expose. I find that blame also a pointer to an ultimate unwillingness to take accountability in our own lives. Climate non-response and lifetstyle and political choices live inside of each of us. There is no “out there”, there is only “in here”: blame in all forms is an unwillingness to look.
A Call to the Highest Response
Disasters strip away the superficial layers of life and confront us with the truth: everything burns in the end. Our houses, our belongings, even our bodies return to dust. What remains—what endures—is not what we own but how we love, how we care, and how we show up for one another.
So, this is a call to be utterly unmanipulable and stand firm in your love. Even when others are moving in a loud and shrieking emotional maelstrom. Step into the highest, most centered version of yourself. Feel your feelings, your anger, your fear your grief if it arises, but don’t dump it into the world. Move from the radiance of your soul, and if you forget and fall away, invite a swift return to love.
My friend Amy Fox was talking yesterday, and offered a resonant truth: as long as suffering is the only thing that motivates us to grow our soul, suffering will continue. Until we can grow our collective soul by choosing a positive and inspired future for all, we will confront disaster upon disaster. As we look at the immediate and the systemic shadows—our personal and familial shadows, our collective system shadows—we are invited to grow our souls, to grow a new culture, from a love driven vision of a positive future.
The fires may burn, but they do not consume what is eternal. In Hinduism, the concept of vibhuti—sacred ash—reminds us of impermanence and transformation. This is the truth carried in the Christian prayer “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: fire distills. Ashes signify what is left when the fire of life has consumed all that is temporal and material, reducing the ego and possessions to their essence.
They invite us to remember our true identity as eternal beings, distinct from our homes, possessions, and money. We are not our houses, our belongings, our businesses, our positions and stations in the world. We are something deep and eternal. Everything we hold onto will eventually return to the earth.
So bring water, food, shelter; lay any fear driven responses right into the fire and let them burn away. Anchor the response in what cannot be destroyed: the soul, our love, and our connection to the web of life.
Some Ways to Practice Self and Community Care
Slow down to the pace of feeling. Stay as present as possible with self and each other. Breathe deeply. Notice this moment and only this moment. Stay with each breath, each sensation, and each feeling without clinging to it. Presence is the foundation of clarity.
Move energy, and let the body process what words cannot. Move your body—dance, cry, breathe, sing, sweat, lift heavy things.
Create any kind of routine you can.
Have mercy on yourself and others while moving through the spectrum of emotions. Grief has its own timeline.
Care for yourself and others in simple ways. Share food, offer a kind word, listen deeply. Offer time, resources, or compassion where it is most needed.
Make art. Write, paint, or create to transform grief and loss into meaning.
Do it together, organically or in more structured circles of communal grief rituals. We don’t have to hold our responses alone, we can do it in relationship. This loss is a loss for all. There I am. We hold the experience collectively and allow mourning to be shared.
1 minute of our love song to Los Angeles when we are all living there, in 2019, with two of my sons.
From the aftermath of the Santa Rosa Fires, in 2017.
And Then it All Burned
....And then it all burned.
I didn’t know what to take.
My grandmother’s painting.
A box of papers, old pictures.
Warm clothes, a tent, blankets.
Stuff for the dog.
For a single moment it's that night again
When the fires ravaged us block by block
Winds whipping the chaparral
Our neighbors died in their pool
The old growth timbers fell onto them
huddling together in the dawning light
The flames ate the weaving, the painting, the carving, the writing, the planting, the art that was the old life
Consumed the places we danced, fought, loved
Rendered our children homeless
Remade us each forever
And so it goes, always
The encapsulation of infinite moments and many years
into a single diminishing phrase
I made this book
I earned a PhD
My wife had cancer
I took a company public
I raised four children
I loved him like that
You don’t have to tell me what happened exactly
A cloud of your own silent song surrounds you
You're garlanded with a compassion common to those who have lost
Badged with an indifference to possessing
The poem of your life is tattooed on your forehead
Your eyes tell me that you have looked at another with love
Your hips say that you have danced
I have decided already, if you will have me
that I could wake up with youfor the next ten thousand mornings
We take anise cookies in brown paperand walk to the end of the dock
It is high-tide and we drape our feet into the cold waters
Awakening the bioluminescent swarm
The whole world sparkles now
I thank the unknown things that have happened
and made you into this woman with the strong back and gentle eyes
Who has laid her head onto my shoulder
Pulled the fleece around us both
Who holds her gaze wide opento face the winter sea.
I like how you brought this into the personal. What can we change within ourselves?