Los Angeles
by Andrea Scarpino
This week, as fires burned in Santa Barbara (about 80 miles north of where I live), I thought a bit about loneliness. Seeing photographs of evacuated people lying on cots in shelters, of homes reduced to scorched earth, of trees burnt black all the way to the tips of their branches, made me remember how much we, as humans, are really alone. No matter our technology, our missions in space, our explorations to the very depths of the earth, we are lonely creatures, unable to commune with very much outside of our species and dependent on the simplest things for our survival. A spark of fire and a mountainside goes up in flames, a hundred houses burn. Fire rages unpredictably through canyons, lifts unpredictably on the wind, jumps across highways and rivers without any discernable pattern. And at the end of the day, all that we’ve created for ourselves looks like loneliness. Broken. In ashes.
But there’s a beauty, too, in those photographs, in the billowing smoke moving down the coastline. A beauty of the ephemeral, that which passes faster than we would like. A beauty of the delicate. Because even mansions are easy to destroy. Even metal and stone and bricks—given the right temperature, conditions, heat, everything that humans create will burn. All the physical things of our life will dissolve back into earth, air, water—the most basic elements.
Of course, this isn’t to say that people who lose their belongings and homes to fire should look on the bright side of things, should relish the beauty in it. Natural disasters are terrible for many reasons, just one being that they remind us of our fragility, how no matter our wealth or brilliance or kindness, we are all susceptible to the terror of a spark, a lightening strike, a fierce wind. This is just to say that fire is a type of loneliness, a reminder of the strange place of humans in this world. How we have created more than any other animal, and yet, at the end of the day, we are just as vulnerable, just as subject to the laws of nature as the rattlesnake, the tumbleweed.
Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB
Visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com
Planet of the Blind 
Beautiful post.
LikeLike