There is a beauty to destruction. It’s difficult to admit when faced with the reality of people losing their homes. But the fact remains that the sunset through the smoke has a mystical quality to it. Fire has long symbolized destruction and rebirth. Phoenix from the flames. Burn down and grow new from the ashes.

D.H. Lawrence captured this rebirth in his poem, “Phoenix”

“Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
immortal bird.’
—

There is a fire consuming 5000 plus acres of forest near my home.

It’s not close enough to harm me, unless something drastic happens with the wind and we lose all firefighting capabilities, but there have been a lot of evacuations with more to come.

This was my view this evening, after the wind shifted. It went from 600 acres to eating up 5000 plus acres in a matter of hours.

There are firefighters and aerial water drops and I don’t know what all but people are out there risking their lives to try to contain this massive fire.

My heart goes out to the people who have had to run ahead of the storm, whose homes are at risk and who might return to charred remains of a lifetime worth of memories.

I hope the nesting Peregrines found their way out of the forest before the flames.

And I wish luck and cooperative weather to the people on the front lines at Granite Mountain and beyond.