The Palisades fire over these last 48-hrs has been devastating. Homes brewing coffee and preparing for school and day care, the work day and shopping are in ashes. Entire fortunes and legacy properties, now smoldering in the Santa Ana winds. Whole landscapes removed, erased. No bearings or landmarks remain except for chimney’s, also smoldering.
The degree of devastation is not unique when looking at this past year’s hurricanes, tornados, floods and storms that have touched US lives. The pause underway for tens of thousands is shock, plain as day. It will take days, weeks, months and years to get back on solid ground, for many.
And there is an audible surfacing…the invitation that so many face when everything is lost…should I go or should I stay.
Here’s what I know about the Palisades. It was my home for the first 17-years of my life. It fits like a familiar glove. But that’s all it could do when ever I came back to visit friends there, feel familiar. Growth was always on the horizon and I lept at it.
Asheville was one of the places I ended up, and left recently, only months before the floods of Helene that wiped out whole eco-systems of culture and vibrancy.
And what I knew about Asheville, and know about the Palisades is community is alive and well. And it never existed in the buildings. It was in the people, in their relationships. Living in these respective communities was a verb.
Resiliency will prevail in the aftermath, be assured.
But here’s what’s at stake, as these sorts of calamities are likely not isolated incidents. Nor rare.
There is a deep legacy and experience of community that exists in the bones of those who lived there. The invitation to everyone from these communities: consider this experience an asset to carry forward, elsewhere, everywhere.
We have some major learning to do as it appears so obvious that climate, our politics and our economy is knocking hard on our doors of comfort and asking to be let in…whether we like it or not.
And there is a depository of wealth, and wisdom that has been nurtured in these places like the Palisades, and Asheville. And some are indeed, moving on and with them a quiver full of reference points for what community looks like, how it acts, how it connects and how it thrives.
A migration is indeed, underway and on those winds and in these waters, messengers are traveling. Welcome them as their stories, and experiences will grow us all.
