Healing

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Like many people I have been transfixed by the fires in Southern California, held hostage by the incredible video of the all-consuming flames and pierced by the wrenching heartbreak of families losing all their possessions.

For me the fires have become a metaphor for the unintended consequences of living an unexamined life. It is not my intention to blame the victims, but to call attention to how we think and the unintended consequences of the decisions we make.

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis gave a context to these feelings in an October 24 video interview posted on the home page of www.etonline.com: Òwe build houses where we shouldnÕt build them, we are living in the worst draught the country (Southern California) has ever seen and we pretend like weÕre not. ...we live in Southern California and we are surprised that there are brush fires--that houses are being lost? We have done this, we have created all of this... global warming, compounded with building houses in places we shouldnÕt, etc...Ó

I believe the jury is out on global warming, but CurtisÕ statement makes a valid point.

Back in the late 1980Õs early 1990Õs my wife and I lived in Pasadena, a city in Southern California that backed up to the communities of Altadena and Sierra Madre, which was situated at the foot of the mountains of the Angeles Crest National Forest. Those mountains (hard to call them that after living in Colorado) were usually burned by nature or arson about every ten years. In Ô89 or Ô90 a fire started by arson in Sierra Madre soon spread to Altadena and the surrounding mountains, burning several homes.

A group of neighbors in my neighborhood formed a vigilante force to protect some of the endangered homes. About six or seven of us, with tools, piled into the back of a pickup truck and headed toward the fire. After successfully avoiding police barricades we entered a nearly abandoned neighborhood shrouded in smoke and ash close to the fire. Most of the homes were on acreage with long narrow lots composed of chaparral and oak trees covering hillsides and ravines within 20 to 50 feet of the homes. We chose a couple of houses closest to the fire and ventured into the backyards.

We were shocked to find yard after yard with hillsides overgrown with dead brush and ravines chocked with tress and years of leaves. It would take a small army hours to clear those hillsides and ravines.

We did what we could then got back in the truck and drove away. Fortunately the wind changed direction and the fire went back up the mountainside. It was extinguished several days later by air tankers.

Our unexamined lives, like those hillside and ravines, need to be periodically cleaned. Often we donÕt notice the danger of what we have neglected to do until it is too late. Then, and only then, do we act to save what we can and often it is too little too late.

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