when there is nothing else to do but bow.

for all of us who are facing devastation, now and in the future.

Humans, like everything else, have a wide capacity for mediumship. I know this because when there is a place on fire, my eyes spout water like a hydrant, as if tears could be the waters that quiet the ravenous runaway fires.

Yet, fire has shaped us for a million years, from our digestive tracts to our navigational skills. Fire has made it possible for us to venture far, follow the herds, and know that we will survive, as long as we can blow a flame to light. Fire is death the way Water is life, both being both things, but also truly themselves. We can’t live - or die - without either. Maybe fire has made us like itself, intent to wander, to desire.

*

I sit here looking onto the hipline of the mountain that has claimed me as Hers. I love her like a mother. She lays on her side with her head to the east, feet west, knees tucked up to her belly facing north. I sleep in the exact opposite configuration: always on my right side, feet to the east, head to the west, nose pointing south. I keep the North at my back, as if against a snow drift, allowing glacial memories to enter my dreams through my spine. Sometimes, I imagine her getting up in the darkness, standing with her head near the moon, and taking a midnight stroll. I wake to find the memory of my physical shape in the mountain I am honored to greet. This mountain remembers me to myself, each morning. If I woke one dawn to find her burning, I know I would buckle into a bow, shot through with the mirrored pain of her body burning.

Lands have been swallowed by floods…by mud and silt and sand. Places have been lifted up by spiraling winds, whipping up the topsoil and everything on top of it. Places have been paved over, combed through, razed and plowed into submission. But its the burning, the red tinted air obscuring the scarring of a land beyond recognition, that hits me in the chest and makes my knees give out.

Wild. Fire. Firestorm.

Fire gone truly wild no longer seems of this Earth. The red hot rage is otherworldly, like a monster from one of the graphic novels my son reads. I literally cannot stand in the wake of such fires - I want my face in the clean dirt where I can breathe. I want to turn away. Maybe its because I’ve seen my share of black plumes of smoke, the red alert texts in the night, the string of cars along the highway as people try to move from Fire’s feet. Maybe its because there is a kind of rage - ravenous and undone - that Fire can wield. Suppressed Fire reminds me of suppressed anger, erratic and incomprehensible…it makes no sense to me.

So to you, dear mountain full of white sage and coyote brush. To you, elk and deer tribes, migratory birds who were sheltering in the warmth, and you sweet bees and moths and desert owls and pine nests: I’m going to pretend you can hear these words across lands and language and feel my compassionate ache for your present reality. But also to you, dear reader, who likely knows someone who knows someone who is fleeing Fire as I write, I bow and drop my tears at your feet. Those of us who are safe, in this moment, are sending our solace and strength and the memory of ease for your future self to look forward to.

A flock of geese begin to take on a spiral shape in the distance, open sky. Their form is both chaotic and haphazard, but also perfectly aligned. They move like water, like flame.

“nothing is fixed, including whatever it is that we think we are from one moment to the next.” -Seanán Zook