August, Wildfires and Beginning Again
Hello August
Even as I write it, I feel my body exhale. Summer has never been my jam, but August… life begins again in August.
As I write this, I’m hearing the sound of rain on the patio. Our palomino puppy is asleep on the couch across from me. The shelf that once held vigil to my grief now holds a golden lantern, a type writer, candle sticks. I’m sipping ginger tea and writing poetry and yes, life begins again in August.
I lovingly refer to my transplanted liver as a Leo. I received my transplant in the thick of Leo season, and as a Leo rising by birth (with a natal chart comprised of mostly Fire and Water signs) I feel oddly comforted by this fact.
July has been taxing, on my body and on my heart, with so many shifts occurring underneath the surface, and as I wait with baited breath for the transformation that I know August is capable of, I find myself reflecting on both the season that has passed and the one that will be.
I’m approaching 4 years post transplant, and with every year that rolls by it feels different. 4 years ago, on the cusp of this, I only wanted 1. A singular year filled with life so rich it ached and I would be content. A year would never have been enough, and I’m ecstatic that not only did I get a year but a lifetime, that not only am I planning for the next season but planning for years down the road. I have dreams for the next quarter century, not just the next quarter on the calendar, and I don’t think that can really be understood until one has almost lost everything. There will come a day where I will have had this exact liver longer than the one I was born with, but for now it’s 17% as long.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve written a lot about what it cost me to survive. I’ve poured my soul onto paper, written for major publications, turned my story inside out in an attempt to find gold, and I have. I’ve made gold from every part of my story. And I realized that at some point, you have to stop bowing to old stories and step into a new way of being. That’s the scary part, right? It’s never just surviving but what do you do with the survival?
What does one do with what remains?
This summer I watched alongside the rest of the province as my favourite place on earth burned. And then I watched as, little by little, first responders and those in the now evacuated town reported wildlife returning. A mama bear and her cubs wandering through the burnt ash. Proof of life. And I thought about fireweed, and how it’s one of the first things to return to land where fire has passed over. It’s proof that life is returning.
In the face of near desolation, life returns and begins again. This is the nature of things. And while some things are extinguished by the fire, never to return again, there are others who find the fire necessary for their species survival.
I think I might be like that.
The fires came through, burned what I knew to the ground. There were signs of life reemerging throughout my recovery. And now there is rebuilding what was lost. Not the same, of course. Different. Maybe better.
In all this pondering, I’m reminded of Holly Ringland and the words she wrote in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. She says “It had enchanted Alice, the idea that breakage and repair were part of the story, not something to be disdained or disguised.”
There were chapters that cost me everything. There were chapters where life returned, slowly. And there are chapters of rebuilding. There is gold woven throughout the whole story. Breakage and repair, there is room for all of it.
I feel myself sigh at the transformation of it all.
Nothing is ever wasted.
