crazysalad

The largest fire ever known

Everyone in San Diego has been touched by these fires.
We all know someone who has been evacuated, who has been forced to leave their home, not knowing if they will have a home to return to.

San Diego County Fire Map

Those not affected directly sit at home and wait. 
We have been asked not to use freeways, cellphones, power.  We email friends, offer our houses as shelter for evacuees. 
The schools are closed for the week.
The sky is grey with ash. 
The air burns our eyes and leaves our throats raw.
We watch the news, watch and wait for the weather to change. 
And the fires continue to burn.

photo Sean M Hafffey/San Diego Union-Tribune/Zuma Press

I think of the firefighters who are out there night and day and night.  The word hero doesn’t even begin to describe them.

And I think of how lucky we are to have evacuation shelters and stadiums and friends to turn to (and homes to return to).

And while 250,000 residents of San Diego have been evacuated, I can’t help but think how that compares to 4 million other civilians who have been forced to flee their homes.

If your house isn’t burning, what do you do?  Do you go and help your neighbor?  How far do you go?  How big is your neighborhood?

   

The largest Fire ever known
Occurs each Afternoon --
Discovered is without surprise
Proceeds without concern --
Consumes and no report to men
An Occidental Town,
Rebuilt another morning
To be burned down again.

--Emily Dickinson

Love after Love

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

--Derek Walcott

Thanks to CC for sending this to me. 

And for teaching me

how a small act of kindness
can crack open a heart
and bring in the light.

 

Come, My Friends

...I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

...I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought....

...Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

                -Alfred Lord Tennyson,
                  from “Ulysses”