We drove down from the canyon and turned onto the road that runs along the shadow of the start of the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado sky was a brilliant blue and the yellow grasses of the plains whipped in the forceful wind. I winced as handfuls of dirt sprayed up on the windshield, loose from so many months without a drop of moisture. I looked out over the plains and saw a strange cloud rising up in the distance that made my stomach tighten. I knew that cloud. Fire.
This was 2 weeks ago while visiting my family in Colorado. In 24 hours nearly 1000 houses burned to the ground in a grass fire. In December.
On Thursday 17 people were killed in an apartment fire in the Bronx. Many of them people of color and immigrants. As investigators look into how the accident occurred, a politics writer in New York, Jessie Singer who studies accidents tweeted in response: “Between 1999-2019 in the U.S. Black people were killed in ”accidental” residential fires as more than twice the rate of white people. Their deaths are not accidents but the direct result of infrastructural negligence.”
So what do these two fires have to do with each other? Climate crisis and human rights crisis. For me, they highlight a pervasive lack of care. Lack of care for the land and environment and lack of care for one another and the ways we are all connected.
These events make me feel sick to my stomach, sad, and defeated. As an action-oriented person, they used to spin me into an identity crisis. I should have become a climate scientist, a politician, a firefighter.. something of use…
Now I feel more deeply than ever that the arts, which get defunded and pushed aside are exactly what we need right now (in addition to the climate scientists, firefighters, etc.). We need outside the box thinking. We need to reimagine new ways of being.
And I don’t mean we should all become artists. We need the climate scientist to take a break and join an online tango class, we need the politician to pull out their watercolors after everyone else has gone to bed and let green bleed into yellow, We need the firefighter to sing her heart out through the sad song in the shower with water streaming down her cheeks.
We need this because it provides relief, well being, meditative peace. We also need this because it is how we get unstuck, it’s how we return to old problems with new eyes it’s how we generate new ideas. We need this because it’s the only way we are going to survive.
The day after the Colorado fires it snowed 10 inches of beautiful fluffy snowflakes. What is that but a heartbreaking poem by mother nature to wake the F up?
I know that it is not easy to make time for creativity, especially in the wild pandemic we are living with now, but I’m curious about how you, even in the smallest of ways, are showing up for your creative self?
