To everyone who helped me after the fire
Radical Belonging
2020 UPDATE:
Fires are raging again. To support our brethren in Australia, see a list of worthy causes here. This is our future. We must be there for each now, more than ever. This is my story for how much donations matter. We belong.
….
To everyone who helped me after the fire,
I’m new and naked, completely changed. You, dear village, human community, have re-forged my world. You literally gave me everything.
A wildfire devoured my house, my workplace, and almost everything I have ever owned. When the ash settled, I had on old, skimpy pajamas and the flip flops I ran out of the house wearing that night. Even my cell phone burned. I assumed my car was gone too, but grace intervened. When they lifted the barricades a week later, I found my car, smokey but intact, surrounded by burn zone on three sides.
So. I had my car and my pajamas. And that was it.
From the ashes of my altar
Gone were the other the thousand things, the do-dads of my thirty-three years. Gone. Whether purchased, gifted, or made by hand, it was all ashes to ashes. I went back to dig through them, and the actual ashes were fascinating and beautiful, but that’s another story.
I had no physical belongings left and a broken heart. The broken heart is another story, too.
And then, you, my mighty human family, rose up. You gave me everything: shelter, clothing, money for basics, solace, meals, hope, hours of talk, and dark, wonderful jokes. When it all burns down, I highly recommend rebuilding your life on a foundation of nice, black, gallows humor.
People from every nook and cranny of my life helped me. I knew I could count on some of you. You were there when I asked. You know who you are.
Many others showed up unasked. I hadn’t spoken to some of you in years. I didn’t think some of you liked me. I don’t even know who some of you are. My childhood friends, acquaintances from odd jobs I had in college. My parent’s childhood friends. Their friends. Strangers. Stranger’s moms.
Multiple strangers literally offered me the clothes off of their backs, cliches come to life. A friend of a friend offered her vacation cottage as temporary shelter. By rights I was homeless, but for weeks I stayed in a cozy cabin on the riverbank with roses and persimmon trees. I started the slow road to remake my life. Pro tip - start with socks, underwear, and a toothbrush.
The next breathtaking blessing was a FEMA apartment. Taxpayers paid for my home for the year after the fire. When 5,000 buildings burned in a county that already had a housing crisis, rental rates inflated. Insurance companies could pay those rates, but I could not. Since the yoga retreat center where I was employed also burned, I was unemployed and homeless in one go. I’m not sure what my life would have looked like without the FEMA apartment. Your taxes are your love made manifest through federal disaster relief housing and other assorted social safety nets that I landed in. I needed them.
Just a small smear of carbon, RIP sweet little house.
From here on out, I’ll pay my taxes in the spirit of your generosity, to willingly support the fabric of society. I want to be like the auto-shop guy who offered me the coat he was wearing. He pled with me to let him help, somehow, someway, anyway. We were made to help each other, made for love. We were born for this.
Strangers on social media offered me a used desk. On their way to bring it to my new little FEMA apartment, they went shopping for everything I needed. The kindest family showed up at my door with a desk and full Target bags: a rug, a shower curtain, a broom, and tissues (tears aplenty in those days). Their 8-year-old daughter picked out a doormat for me. It reads “Home Sweet Home.” I still tear up when I see it. Then I use the tissues they gave me.
My home sweet home is here, on earth, wherever you are, human village.
I have dozens of stories like that. It’s been like a trust fall with people who never agreed to catch me. It was less of a safety net and more like a safety trampoline. Without hesitation, you all reached out in a web of multi-colored arms. And I bounced.
I built my life back up around me with what you gave me. When I look around my home, so much of it is from you.
All of my new belongings are objects of profound power, each and every one a conduit to my larger belonging.
Now, in this new life, my only longings are to love.
I am clothed in your love. I walk on shoes of love, cushioning my steps on the earth. I’m adorned in love and floral prints. Your love is my stretchy pants and soft socks. Love is my soap and scrub and clean.
I’m a yoga teacher, so I never had a lot, but I once had pride in the life I had worked for. But I have not earned this second life I have around me now. Simply, you gave and I received. Gratitude does not even begin to touch what I feel.
I am absurdly lucky to be living through a natural disaster from the first world with privileged family, friends, and a well-off community to help me. Many fire survivors are nowhere near this fortunate. Across the world, many climate refugees will never fully recover.
Some women in a nearby wealthy wine country town started a used clothing “boutique,” free for fire survivors. They gave me nicer clothes than I had before the fire. They had more donations pouring in from all over the country than they had people to take them. An elder volunteer tried to convince me to take a second-hand cashmere sweater. It was too big for me. “I should leave it for someone who will love it.”
She insisted, “You just please take it and do the dishes in it, dear. That’s what I do with mine.” Is that what being wealthy is like? Doing dishes in a cashmere sweater? I accepted the sweater. I do the dishes in it.
With what you gave me, I nested and rebuilt the basic things of first-world life. Each little thing reminds me of your generosity.
I lay my head on a pillow of love at night, and boil water for tea in love each morning. I type this on love, and my replacement phone sings with your love notes and laughing emojis. I turn up the heat with love and a love shell keeps the rain rolling off my back. Every object I own now has a person and a heart story behind it.
I’ll never think of a living being as stranger again, for I have learned that no one is strange to me. I belong to all of you, and you are mine.
So, I eat love, and I drink it, every sip. My new journal is bound with your love. Love is the ink that will write all my stories. I sit on love when I pray, and I whisper each mantra on a garland of love.
Your love is overwhelming.
Whatever I do in this life, I must endeavor to make it brave and holy, for what am I, but a living reminder of love made manifest? What are we all, but love songs to each other?
Your love is breaking my heart. Open. My only belonging is to love, and every belonging draws me back to love. I am clothed in love. You wrapped me in silk sarees and gave God back to me.
I am made of your love. I am love. I am.
Aham Prema. Aham.
अहं प्रेम
2020 UPDATE:
Fires are raging again. To support our brethren in Australia, see a list of worthy causes here. This is our future. We must be there for each now, more than ever. This is my story for how much donations matter. We belong.