Hands in the earth.
Feeling for healing, what my homeland must be reeling from. Giving some TLC to some stressed outside and inside plants. I drove home from the desert into an ominous brown cloud of smoke from the wildfires hanging over my hometown here in SoCal. The sky looks clear. The Air Quality Index says it’s safe, but there’s no telling what else might be in the air.
All of this was so bad. I don’t think I can add more than what has already been said, seen, shown…lost. I personally know of three families who lost everything in a single night. I knew, as the Palisades fire broke out while the wind forecast looked incredibly dire, that it was going to be a long and horrible night.
That will forever be known as the day LA burned. Like so many, my heart broke as I could only watch from afar. I could only check the Watch Duty app over and over again, post and send resources on social media. Since I live in a fire-prone area, I’ve been through this so many times myself. So I did everything I could to tell friends what I know from experience. To anticipate the evacuation orders. To be ready. To help those who need the most help as much as you can. I got maybe three hours of sleep that night.
What was no help at all was the barrage of misinformation coming not just from strangers online, but from people I know. One so-called friend who insisted this was the best time to rain down f-bombs and critiques of politicians at me, along with some bizarre rants and misinformation. This was echoing much of the lack of empathy people were seeing online, as if Angelenos somehow deserved this. No one deserved this.
Being from here and having lived through many fires, I can sense some of what is coming. The winds will persist, hopefully not causing any more catastrophe. The containment lines will hopefully hold. The fires will still burn, though much of LA will move on towards business as usual. It will take years for people to rebuild. We will hopefully get one good rain, but then comes the danger of landslides.
So many here need healing. But I have been seeing just how much this giant, sprawling city that’s more than one city has come together. People have opened their homes at a moment’s notice. People have opened their pantries, their hearts, their wallets to help. Donation centers are overrun with supplies. And still people want to help.
This is the real LA. The rest of the country labels us as a town of fakes and phonies, but this is who we really are. It is no shock to me just how much people have come together. There is still so much to do.
Hands in the earth. Feet on the ground.
