Nyasha’s newest tattoo is a Phoenix feather, placed very obviously on her lower arm. If any of us are tattooed soon, her leadership should be noted. A Phoenix related art piece suites the current situations of our collective experience.
Crash and burn. Rise from the ashes. Crash and burn. Dramatically rise. Crash and burn. Again and again, we lift ourselves out, feathered in glory, growing, learning, evolving.
Like the movie I Am Legend, we walk away from total devastation, somehow still whole, yet wholly different.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, our backdrop has emerged looking like that movie set. The forests are burning. People are evacuated from their homes, families have been lost. A nurse told me a horrific story of a young family, the parents both burned over 60 percent of their bodies, the woman pregnant with her second child, the one year old dead.
37 Oregon wildfires have burned about 1 million acres Credit: Molly Gochenour
It is worse than I can remember, and I hear that fire season (the time of year) has yet to begin. Many miles from the situation, our skies are bloody, dark and thick like an overcast day. Flecks of ash fall like the time of the Mount Saint Helens explosion. Breathing is labored.
My prayers are growing deeper, more desperate, yet more resolved to incredible circumstances.
May we rise yet again. Learn something. Be better than before. Fly on glorious, shimmering wings.
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