A few weeks ago we had a brush fire back in our woods. It was between Old Mag Road and the trail to the garden, the place below the electrical lines that is often covered in ferns.

The fire was moving fast, but the volunteer fire departments from multiple townships arrived seemingly just as quickly. Fire trucks lined the whole hill down Fox Gap Road with volunteers pouring into the woods, including kids. Leaf blowers and hoses and rakes. They moved fast. There had to have been more than a hundred people working back there. They got the fire out quickly, working as the sun set to make sure every last ember had died out.

It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed. A reminder of just how much I love this place and how this community shows up for one another over and over again.

Over the last couple of weeks, I cannot help but walk to that spot.

I know that fires can be a necessary part of the healing and tending of the forest. And I know that these woods are too dry for a “normal” spring. I have so much to learn.

But right now, all I can seem to do is wander gently upon the ashes and put my fingers on the ashen trunks laying on the ground. I cannot help but walk slowly, feeling the sacredness of this place- the grief, the fear, the life that will yet come. What could have been. What will be.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a turtle shell…a body mostly charred who had not been able to make it out in time. I ache.

It feels like a giant wound in the forest. One that will heal, but that is raw right now.

I, too, feel my own wounds, my charred edges, the pieces of me that did not make it out alive.

Right now, all I can do is walk tenderly and cry. And come back the next day as the fiddle heads poke through even so.

Sending blessings to each one of you. As Bob Raines said over and over, “there is nothing this mountain has not seen…it is one of the arms of God where it is safe to rest awhile.”