Feeling and Breathing the Northern California Wildfires

The saying goes, there are four seasons in California: flash floods, mudslides, wildfires and pride parade.  At this point we're deep in the wildfire season.  Where I sit in Sacramento we're breathing smoke and seeing haze from a huge fire near Redding to the north, the massive Ferguson fire conflagration to the south, and another flare up in Lake County northwest of here.  It's literally hellish.

On a personal level my family's cabin in Foresta, a community inside Yosemite National Park, has been threatened for days by the Ferguson blaze near west of it.  Foresta has been evacuated for about a week.  As of this morning, the USDA has not lifted the evacuation order for Foresta or several other parts of Yosemite.  

The previous primitive A-frame version of our cabin and most of the homes in Foresta were destroyed by the "A-Rock Fire" in 1990.   The A-Rock Fire was called a "hundred year fire" at the time, which meant that a fire like that was predicted to only happen every 100 years.   With that in mind, like many of our Foresta neighbors, twenty years ago in 1998 we rebuilt on that land a real house to the code of the surrounding county.  Since its rebuilding, Foresta has survived another 3 or 4 fires (4 assuming we survive this one--fingers crossed). 

We even have a "Foresta Forever" t-shirt that lists the A-Rock, the Meadow Fire in 2009, the El Portal Fire in 2014--some people have chosen to scrawl in the Dog Fire (in 2015 or 2016?). Last year we weren't evacuated I don't think but we were chased out by smoke from a fire nearby.

I have very mixed feelings about the survival of our Foresta cabin.  Yes, I would love to be able to continue to go to our beautiful sanctuary in Yosemite the rest of my life.   But I am much more concerned about the safety of the full time residences in the wake of the Ferguson fire than I am our vacation home.  The ravages of climate change make me sad and angry.  Increasingly I feel that we are living on borrowed time up there.    And I am heartbroken that 2 firefighters have lost their lives fighting the Ferguson Fire.  

What energy, space and consciousness can me, my body, and our body politic be, such that we can quench the thirst of the earth, restore the habitability of human habitat on earth for the long term?