there is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching the land you love turn to smoke. for over a week now, our foothills have been burning. the Aspen Acres fire has moved through precious communities — places that have felt safe to us. they are where we hiked, where we knew the shape of the ridgeline against the sky, where some of us built our whole lives. thousands of our neighbors have been evacuated. many still don't know if their homes are standing. some already know they are not.

if you are reading this from inside that experience, or from just outside it watching people you love go through it, i want to say the thing that trauma work has taught me above almost everything else: there is no wrong way to be feeling right now. numbness is not weakness. tears are not an overreaction. rage at the sky is not dramatic. your nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do when the ground itself stops feeling safe.

for those of you living it directly

if you evacuated, if you're waiting for word on your house, if you've already lost it — your body has been in survival mode for days, maybe longer than you've let yourself notice. that matters more than it might seem. the nervous system doesn't clock the difference between "the fire is still burning six miles away" and "the fire is in my living room." it just knows danger, and it stays braced for it.

so the first thing i want to offer you isn't advice. it's permission. permission to not be okay yet. permission to feel oddly calm one hour and shattered the next — that's not you failing to cope, that's what regulation actually looks like when the threat isn't fully over. permission to grieve things that feel "smaller" than a house — a garden, a view, the quiet of a place, a version of normal you can't get back to yet.

a few things that can genuinely help while your body is still in this state, not as a fix but as an anchor:

your breath is one of the only parts of your nervous system you can reach directly. when you notice your chest is tight or your thoughts are racing, try making your exhale longer than your inhale — in for four, out for six or seven. this isn't about calming down on command. it's about giving your body evidence, slowly, that it's allowed to come down out of the high alert it's been living in.

let your hands do something. fold laundry, dig in dirt, hold a warm mug, press your palms flat against a table. trauma lives in the body, and the body often finds its way back before the mind does. you don't have to think your way out of this. you can feel your way out of it too.

be careful with the news cycle and the acreage updates. staying informed matters, but there's a difference between checking in and marinating. give yourself windows where you put it down, even for twenty minutes.

and please, let people help you. i know how hard that is for those of us who are used to being the strong ones, the ones who hold space for everyone else. this is not the week to prove you don't need anything. accepting a meal, a couch, a hand with paperwork — that is not weakness. that is community doing what it's for.

for those of you holding space for someone else

maybe your home is fine and someone you love's isn't. maybe you're a practitioner, a neighbor, a friend who wants to help and doesn't know how, or worries anything you say will land wrong. i see you too, and i want to gently say — you are allowed to be affected by this even if you didn't lose anything. holding space for grief you're not the center of is its own kind of weight, and it's real.

when you're supporting someone who is displaced or grieving a home, the most healing thing you can offer usually isn't a solution. it's your steadiness. you don't need the right words. you need to be a nervous system that isn't in crisis, sitting next to one that is — because our bodies borrow calm from each other. that's not a metaphor, it's physiology. your presence alone is doing work.

resist the urge to rush them toward silver linings. "at least everyone's safe" is true and it can still land as dismissive when someone is standing in the ash of their kitchen. let people be devastated in front of you without trying to fix the devastation. ask what they need instead of guessing — sometimes it's practical, sometimes it's just someone to sit with them while they don't talk at all.

and take care of your own capacity. you cannot pour from a nervous system that's also running on empty. it's okay to help and also need to step away and refill.

what tragedy also reveals

there is something else true alongside the grief, and it deserves its own space here, because it's part of the healing too. tragedy has a way of showing us exactly who we are as a community, and this week it's shown us something beautiful.

people who lost almost everything have still shown up to help set up donation centers for their neighbors. volunteers who have no personal stake in these mountains have been driving in from surrounding towns just to serve meals and set up water slides for evacuated kids, because a child deserves a moment of joy even in the middle of losing their home. strangers have opened their homes, their trucks, their wallets, their weekends. shelters filled almost as fast as the evacuation orders went out. this is what happens when a community remembers it's a community — not because the danger disappears, but because no one has to face it alone.

this is the part of trauma that doesn't get talked about enough: it isn't only rupture. it can also be the thing that softens the walls between us. the person who wouldn't normally ask for help learns to receive it. the person who's never volunteered a day in their life shows up with a truck bed full of water bottles. we are reminded, sometimes at great cost, how much we actually need each other — and how willing we are to show up when it counts.

that thread of connection is its own kind of medicine. it won't undo what's been lost. but it is proof, in real time, that this community knows how to hold itself together even while it's breaking.

a word on collective grief

this fire isn't just individual loss stacked eleven thousand times over. it's a collective wound. our community is going to be metabolizing this together for a long time — longer than the containment percentage will suggest, longer than the news will stay interested. healing from something like this isn't linear and it isn't quick, and it doesn't happen alone. it happens in kitchens and donation centers and circles like the ones we hold at the studio, in the small acts of people showing up for each other again and again.

if you need a place to simply be with what you're carrying — not to perform okay-ness, not to have it fixed, just to be held in it — our doors are open. whatever you're feeling this week, it belongs here.

we will rebuild what can be rebuilt. and what can't be rebuilt, we will grieve together, for as long as it takes.