Have you read Part 1? If not, that’s okay. This post can be read as a stand alone, although I do recommend circling back for the full story 🙂
Skeletons
Many nights ago, I set out at sunset and took a walk out on the trails behind my home.
I’ve walked or ran these trails countless times, beginning back with the occasional hike during my childhood days, and now regularly that I’m back home and living nearby.
At first glance, these trails don’t look like much, made of dirt and rock and lined with bushes, many of those quite prickly. Yes, they’ve grown feisty, but beyond the brown and gray that now marks the mountainsides, there is a richer story to tell.
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These trails, the ones made of dirt and rock and shrub oak and locusts – they have another companion. They’re impossible to ignore, for they lie on the ground, crisscrossing and forming obstacles.
As I walk along the trail at night, they make themselves known, creaking and groaning, whispering to me of a life that once was, and a life that has changed tremendously.
And, as they whisper, they have quite the message.
A Shifting Land
Wildfire has been a part of my life since my earliest days. Since kindergarten, the regular fires have come through our forests, the most severe happening once a decade and bringing catastrophic destruction across the land, and even once throughout the town.
As I’ve grown in age, I’ve been out in the world cultivating new experiences and enriching my life. Meanwhile, the land around me has taken a different course.
My parents, too, grew up on this land, and they speak of hiking the same trails that I do today, although for them, walking these trails was a different experience. My experience involves a desert landscape, and as my feet cross dry dirt, rock, and sand, I am able to look far out in any direction, my view unobscured.
As I walk, I think about my parents walking this land, being cloaked in a rich forest, being bathed in rays of sunlight.
I enjoy the full intensity of the sun that beats down on me, as I am a desert dweller and have become accustomed to the strong rays that drench my skin, unbroken by anything except the ever-thinning atmosphere up above.
I let myself enjoy the sun beating down, and as I take the next step, I imagine how it would feel to be cloaked in a great forest of ponderosas.
Babies
After the fire that ripped through my home forest (and a good part of town, itself), there was a bit of an effort to regrow.
While it saddens me that the effort wasn’t stronger, the heart that drove the community to replant manifested in something that has brought tremendous joy to my world:
Babies.
That grew into adolescents.
And now continue to reach towards the sky…
The young ponderosa forest on the outskirts of town is one of my favorite grounds to go train as a runner, or more simply to just go walk through and enjoy. And, on days that I’m feeling particularly open, an area to sit, to soak in their young energy, and have a little chat.
Of course, the ponderosas have companions – aspens whom, themselves, have grown up over my lifetime, along with the oak and other life that brings vitality to the land.
It’s a land that brings me great hope and joy, and a land that speaks to me with direct connection to Mama Gaia, herself.
The lands that have been replanted by us humans appear to be flourishing, and I know that our dear Mama Gaia is grateful for the help that us humans have provided. As I walk through the land, my heart rejoices as I am moved to bring this same resonance of light into the world.
As I turn my head, the line of young ponderosas ends, and my energy shifts as I am once again struck with the reality of these dear mountains.
Fires and non-Cycles
Over my lifetime, I have had plenty of opportunity for people to educate me on the naturalness of fires…
It is natural for fires to start. Fires move through the forest, burning down excess growth.
It is natural for fires to burn down forests. Trees and plants and other living beings in the forest work through cycles, and as they burn off, they create space for new life to grow up.
Cycles, that’s what governs the land – including the forests – and fire is a completely natural part of it.
As I walk the burn scars that now make up the far majority of my home forest, I have had plenty of time for nature to inform me, directly, from her own self, that this is not that same story.
The fires that have burnt down the forests that once covered my beloved mountains are not a part of a balanced dance within nature, one wherein the excess trees and shrub are burned away to make room for life anew.
The lands I walk – the ones that burned 10, 20, 30 years ago – they do not now come back. The ponderosas that once ruled the land are gone, except for in the small locations where us humans decided to replant them.
And, while the aspens have sprung back in small groves over the past decade, and while their spread is much more rapid than that of the ponderosas, one glance at the mountainside makes it clear that the trees are no longer dominant here.
The fires that have burned have taken them away, and what has emerged is a vast land of desert shrub.
What’s happening in my own backyard is not the balanced dance that nature has waltzed for the past tens of thousands of years.
What’s happening now is something very different.
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As I turn my head, out on the vast expanse that is raw forest land, I see a different story.
I see skeletons, and I see the brown/grey earth they lie upon, and I know that it is a land that, on its own, does not return. Maybe once it would have, but those times are gone.
Those times are gone, and I know this because of what is right in front of my own eyes. The reality I have spent my 3 decades living is that our climate has shifted, and continues to shift with a projection that signals far greater terror.
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Ugh, climate change, do we really have to go there?
The thing about the terror of climate change is that it has been loudly sung, and as it has, it has largely been ignored.
Understanding this, I do not sit here writing today to echo the messages once more. Yes, we have plenty of data, and the projections paint a clear picture. Yet, it seems that us humans don’t listen in this way, so instead, I come with a different sort of message.
The skeletons of the once great ponderosas that covered the land – it is their message I bring to you today, and it is this:
Our dear mama Gaia, she is a giver. She provides for the world, supporting and nurturing all of us beings.
Our dear mama Gaia, she is strong. She is able to give so much.
And, as such, us humans have been able to take so much.
Now, our dear mama Gaia – she is hurting….
We have taken and taken, and with an attitude of disrespect have not been able to return many gifts.
Still, our dear mama Gaia gives, and as she does, it becomes clear that we are reaching a breaking point.
Us, collectively, as human beings, are reaching forward towards a breaking point. And so it is to this arbitrary point that we focus our attention on, ever in the future.
And, as we do, we send out proclamations that we must save our planet before it is too late! Proclamations – for days of a future reality that we’ll get to working on when the time truly comes.
The skeletons of the pondersoas continue on with their message…
My dears, it is far past too late.
There is no saving what once was.
The trees are going, going, …
The lands of New Mexico, and those of many else on our dear Mama Gaia, they have already been moving through this drastic transformation.
The forests of this great land have been dying, and now continue to die out at extreme rates.
It’s an already horrific reality.
And yet….
Still, this is not the main point of the message from the skeletons of ponderosas. They continue on, with a clear message for me to share here, with you.
Our dear mama Gaia, she hears us when we cry out that we have to save her. That we must take drastic action and save her now.
But our dear Mama Gaia, she need not be saved, for she is strong and ever-lasting. She has weathered great storms in the past, and she knows how to carry on.
It is us, and the other dear beings that she cries for now; worrying, as she does, that the life that has sprung forth on her spansive and diverse grounds – that this life has forgotten the rule of the land.
We need not save the planet.
But if we do care to save ourselves, along with the remarkable diversity that illuminates this planet, then the time is now – has always been now – to change our ways.
The Winds of Change
It’s two months later. The winds of winter have moved on, and the wild, dry winds of spring have set in.
And all around me, the fires burn.
It didn’t take long once the snows melted. As the the sparks ignited and took off, a fierce rage through these beloved lands, the ponderosas continued to move on from our Earthly realm to the realm of whatever-comes-next.
All around me fires burned, and as I took each step up the long slope, I was filled with heart break and terror.
The smoke was closing around me, signaling an omen that I probably shouldn’t be here. But the fire that had set in just a few miles to the south hadn’t been moving much, and I felt driven to hike up to this tall point so that I could look out and see for myself what was happening.
The smoke was setting in, but things felt calm, so I continued onward.
I gained the ridgeline, and everything started to shift.
The skeletons of fires past – the ones that have remained standing tall, a decade past the fire that took their life – they howl as the wind rips up the ridgeline.
A warning – this really isn’t somewhere that’s safe to be.
I continue onward, my heart racing.
I continue onward, and as I begin to crest the top of the mountain, I enter the maze.
This maze is one I’ve set eyes on many times. As a frequent traveler here at the top of this mountain, I’ve ran or skied by it many times, always pausing to glimpse in the direction of this mass graveyard.
This day I choose to enter the maze, made up of the old trees laid to the ground, crisscrossing, forming layers. I weave through along a sort-of-trail as I make my way to the backside of the mountain.
The wind picks up, and I exit the maze into the meadow.
And what grips me is cold-blooded fear.
It’s primal.
A blueprint established in my DNA, long passed down from ancestors learning hard lessons from the power of this force.
As I stand in the meadow and look down on the smoke, wind howling in my face, I take the warning in fully.
Fire.
Do not fuck with fire.
It’s here, and it’s real.
And there is no more dancing around the subject.
There is no more dancing around the subject.
The lands of Northern New Mexico have dried up and are now being torched.
As I write these words today, our home fire here in the Jemez mountains is becoming a lesser threat to town, picking, instead, a course out towards the already burned lands. It’s a sad story for the still-living forests and recovering lands, along with those who built their homes upon it. Plus, living through the stress and uncertainty over the last weeks has been a dear struggle for us all. Still, it is a story that is coming to an okay ending thanks to the amazing work of one hell of a fire crew.
Across the Rio Grande Valley, a different story is being told.
Acres. Hundreds of thousands of acres of expansive ponderosas, along with the many other spectacular life forces on the land, have been going up in flame for weeks now.
100,000 acres. At first, that was a lot!
200,000, that was heart wrenching.
300,000 – how can this possibly be our reality?
And the fire rages on.
Today I looked out on the smoke plume. I was lost for words as a deep, deep state of dread and despair sat in. How could what I was seeing even be possible?
The force of fire is incomprehensible.
Our lands here in Northern New Mexico are forever changed.
As I mourn the loss of the ponderosa, the aspen, and all of the diverse life in which we have made our homes, I can only wonder, how long until we, ourselves, become the ponderosa?
Read Part 3 – Creating Space to Dance in the Light (link active 5/23)
Damn, ya’ll. This one was tough! As we soak it in (and yes, I ask that we do, indeed, soak it in before returning to our ever busy lives), perhaps we take a moment to ask ourselves what it could mean for our own lives. Then, when we are done with the heavy, let’s take a moment to find some space to let some light in 🙂 – as for me, well, you know where I’ll be! I’m heading off to find some lively forests, unencumbered by smoke, to go do my thing. There’s still beauty to be found out there. Thanks for following along as we continue to balance it all.