Today is the first day of Holly Days 2017: Unity.
To read my facebook feed, especially the comment threads on political issues, is to feel a deep fracture among my brothers and sisters. Unity feels impossible as the rift only seems to grow wider and deeper with each flaming comeback.
The wildfires this season back home reminded me of another fire season, back in 1993, when our own home was threatened hourly by the Old Topanga Fire. It was a terrifying time, but despite the name, no homes in Topanga were lost thanks to the amazing efforts of firefighters from all over the state. 329 homes in Malibu were destroyed, and had the wind shifted differently, we might have been among them.
If you left the canyon once the boulevard was closed shortly after the fire started, you could not return. Like many of my neighbors, we chose to stay to defend our homes ourselves, isolated and separated from our family and friends in the flats. We laid out hoses, filled trash cans and our canoe with water, and waited. The speed that these Santa-Ana-driven fires can travel is fearsome, so most of us couldn’t sleep fretting that it might change direction as we slept.
The best vantage point to judge fire’s whims was at the elementary school, which was also where all the fire crews from other counties were bivouacked. It was bizarre to be standing with our kids at 3 AM watching the magnificently beautiful but awesomely destructive fire crawl across the far side of our canyon. Stranger still to so often find our kid’s 1st grade friends and their families already standing there, having the same fretful nights as we were. While we watched we shared stories and news about the fire forging extraordinary bonds on those nights that would persist for decades.
It was surprisingly how many those fire stories were about interactions between wildlife and humans. The Santa Monica Mountains are a richly inhabited wilderness. Sightings of rabbits, coyotes, raccoons, quail, vultures, hawks and deer were a daily occurance, with bobcats, mountain lions, and all sorts of other more timid creatures not uncommon. One fellow told of stopping by the side of the road, and a rabbit jumping in his car, another of hiking into a clearing near the front, and being joined there by a family of deer. The fire made the chasm between the wild and civilised snap shut, beast or man, we became just living things threatened by the same indiscriminate horror.
A common enemy forges unity. Our common enemy in these dark days for American governance is not any man, but a corruption of our system of democracy, our faith in which has allowed Unity among our always diverse people. On either side of the current rift, we all face the same fire that threatens to burn down our republic to replace it with a sort of neo feudalism. Rather than heaping ad hominem scorn on those that worship the wrong god, lets reach across this divide and join to staunch the flames and strengthen and repair the democratic institutions that unite us.
Happy Holly Days!
HOLLY DAYS 