What do you do when everything you’ve built is reduced to ash? When the walls that held your memories collapse, the photographs, the keepsakes, and the familiar home scents vanish into smoke? Where do you turn when your life story has been rewritten overnight? This is the reality for thousands of our neighbors in Los Angeles who return to charred remains, sifting through soot for something that survived. My heart aches for the families watching their homes disappear, for the firefighters battling exhaustion, and for the land itself, scarred and blackened with smoke.
In California, fires are no longer rare catastrophes; they are seasonal, relentless, fueled by a changing climate and a world teetering on the edge of transformation. What we face is more than destruction; it is an existential reckoning. How do we tend to the soul of a world in flames? How do we grieve, rebuild, and move forward when nothing feels certain?
Beneath the devastation, something endures.