I’m here in Los Angeles during the 2025 fires. My location is under mandatory evacuation orders. But I decided to stay here at home for a few reasons. 1. there were no nearby hotels with vacancies, 2. to protect the property from possible looters, 3. it is easier to take care of my cats here, and 4. I want to be able to hose off the property up until the last moment. It’s a weird feeling because my neighborhood is a ghost town and the entrances are blocked by the National Guard.
The firefighters are doing an incredible job of keeping the fire from passing Mulholland Drive. Thanks to them, today it is looking like my residence is relatively safe.
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But on Friday night, when the evacuation was ordered, the danger felt real and present. I thought all of my belongings were going to burn up. And I have more things that are valuable to me than I can fit in my car. I have no money at home, no jewelry, stamps, securities, coins, or designer goods. But I have many things that I cherish.
These things include every book that I have read since childhood, most of which are marked up in pencil with copious notes. It also includes thousands of pages of unpublished notes and drawings. I also still have all my toys from childhood and all my clothes since high school. I have every old cell phone, pager and computer that I have ever owned each with hundreds of messages that have not been transcribed. I’ve also finally gotten my home the way I want it and recently felt no need to make further purchases. So the idea of losing everything was emotional for me.
I have been robbed before and my house has been burglarized. Home invasion is a scary thing and when you have things that you’ve bought or built taken from you, you start to lose any feeling of ownership. Even though my belongings would not be valuable to a thief, and may be safe for that reason, they can easily be taken away by a fire.
At first it was a frightful realization that there was a good probability that I would lose the vast majority of my property. And for hours, my imagination modeled those circumstances. But as the hours passed, it became less scary and more freeing.
In Buddhism, they recommend that you die before you die. By playing out your death in your head you take away all its power. As I contemplated the fires, I felt more and more viscerally that my possessions are meaningless and this experience has helped me grow as a person. This has even extended to other things such as my entries here on this blog. If a hacker erased the last 13 years of my posts here, I would be ok. I am trying to play with the idea of losing everything without losing myself.
Tonight the winds are predicted to pick back up. Because the prevailing inflammatory conditions are probably due to climate change and global warming, fires like this may be increasingly common. But I have confidence I would be able to get out in time and no longer being as worried about the material objects feels great. I hope the experience helped wire my brain for gratitude and nonattachment. I also hope, even if just in some small way, reading this has done a bit of that for you.
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