From the ashes

I’m not sure where it comes from, but as storytellers we tend to see the narratives unfolding around us as being finite, when in fact nothing ever begins or ends, it just constantly changes. As soon as the smoke of a wildfire clears, you can see the forest floor beginning to regenerate and derive life from the remains of what came before. A very profound feeling grief has started to frame so many of the memories that I hold dear because they reflect a period of time in our history that for many many reasons will no longer exist as we knew it. The world I grew up in had many challenges and the older I got the more frustrated I began to feel towards the minimal progress we were making as a species towards a sustainable way of sharing this planet. But I still saw hope. Hope enough to bring new life into this crazy world…maybe because of some biological imperative to populate but I think I believed that this world was a place that could be treated differently and taken care of in a way that would allow my grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren to continue to enjoy it. When I turn on the news and when I look at how limited and confined our life has become, I can’t help but think this is not the world I wanted to bring my boys into. On top of all of the things that moms worry about, the hours of lost sleep, spent concocting what if scenarios, now we have to contend against an invisible, insidious virus that stands to take away people who our babies have grown to love and cherish. We have done our best to try to impart upon our four year old the facts that he needs to know so that he can understand this new world he finds himself in but despite every effort we make to protect him, he is still afraid that one of his parents will get coronavirus every-time we leave the house. I need to find a way to make the problems that we face as a society into opportunities for young minds re-mold the structures of the past and evolve as a species. In a lot of ways this is a blank slate for us, a chance to examine what wasn’t working and refocus our priorities around what we now know to be essential when everything else is stripped away. Our dreams for the future can’t be built off of memories from the past but for the sake of all of those to come after us we have to figure out a way to regrow from these ashes 🌱