A thing with feathers
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked back on those years.
What has emerged from the ashes of those memories is a sense of bittersweetness for what once was, and forgiveness and gratitude for all that has followed.
As I write this morning, the Pacific Northwest is experiencing a heat wave. Temperatures have been unrelentingly hot and my revolve around trying to stay cool. Just across the border in far northern California a fire is raging through parts of the Klamath National Forest and along the Klamath River where I began my Forest Service career over 40 years ago.
Our home along the river where I was married and where we brought our baby daughters home from the hospital has burned as well. Now the fire is threatening to burn the small town of Yreka along Interstate 5 where I also lived and worked for many years and raised a family.
In the wake of such devastation, it is almost impossible to take it in much less comprehend the full impact. In the last few days, an image taken from the bridge on the Klamath River that led to our place along two and half miles of bumpy dirt road is seared in my mind. The view is looking upriver toward the old homestead, and the entire scene is of an eerily glowing landscape splattered with flames, the fire appearing to have consumed everything in its path. I can feel the panic of the people and animals desperately fleeing from its unrelenting heat, smoke and blazing hunger. I can’t shake the sense of time slipping and falling into the river like the burning logs and debris.
Is it possible to eventually become numb to our rawest human emotions? After so much tragedy and loss in the last few years and all the shocking news stories one after the other, watching our world seemingly crumble along without any sense of order or control, it certainly would seem we would reach an intake threshold. And in some sense, that feels true for me. My mind can only absorb so much pain and suffering and then it starts to spill over the top. Yet, when the loss is deeply personal it somehow breaks the dam, and all the stored grief comes pouring out.
I want to have answers, I want to offer words of comfort, I want to hold on stubbornly to the hope that has carried me through so many hardships before. Hope that better days are ahead, hope for restoration and reconciliation. Hope that our individual and collective spirits can rally and pull us back up.
Hope is an interesting concept; “the thing with feathers” as Emily Dickenson describes it, that stirs and flutters in our hearts even when all has been lost. Hope is a companion to its cousin, Faith, that allows me to believe in something as yet unimaginable but that I know to be true.
I’m reaching deep for both today as I take in more sad news. There is also something else stirring up in me, that very human quality of wanting to make meaning out of the big things that happen in the world and in our lives. I once heard, “we are meaning-making machines” and so it seems we are. Or I am.
What significance is trying to form in my own meaning-making machine around this crisis? Even as I mourn the loss, not just for my remembered past, but for the tragedy of those that have been immediately impacted from this disaster, a tiny seed of understanding stirs within.
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked back on those years. There is a sadness and some guilt for the way things didn’t play out in my life in the ways I thought they would back then. There are some difficult memories as well. But what has emerged from the ashes of those memories is also a sense of bittersweetness for what once was, and forgiveness and gratitude for all that has followed and continues to unfold in this exploration of living.
There is something purifying in this for me. Just as fire is reckless and impartial in its devastation, it also prepares a way for new life. The metaphorical fires within my life have done the same. Sometimes the seeds that are scarified in the flames are released to begin again.
I cannot bring back the past, nor can I rewrite my own history. I can only move forward, honoring my experiences and growing from them. As I write these words, they sound cliché, and yet they ring true for me. In my mind’s eye I am holding those memories in the palms of my hands like a bird rescued from a net, and I am lifting them up in the air. The thing with feathers takes flight.
