January 25 2025

I kept the ashes from three years ago. There was a fire that burned for six months — my dog died, my woodshop burned down, my marriage ended. I was not the victim of any of it; my dog was old, my marriage’s failure was 50% on me, and my garage burning down was 100% in me. None of it was intended, but things always fall apart eventually.

I was lucky, if you can believe it. I had some good friends that counseled me to literally sit in the ashes, to let their reality pass between my fingertips and touch my tongue.

I listened, miserably, in misery. I waited. I wept and screamed and ate a lot of cookies and didn’t drink because boy did I not need to intensify the suffering. I could play that tape forward and it was not pretty.

I remember going to AA meetings during those months, and this one guy saw my grief-stricken face and asked me about it. I told him, and he smiled. I hated him so much. He said, “Oh man. You’re in it.” Then he hugged me, smiled again, and walked away.

In the ashes there are no easy answers, and anyone that gives easy answers is just asking to be punched in the throat. You’d think Captain AA Smileypants would have been the punchable one, but far from it. What else can be said except to name the fact of it all? It’s maybe the most true thing I’ve ever heard.

Now, three years later, there are still no easy answers. Answers don’t seem to be the point of anything at all. I’m no longer in the depths of it, and things have settled and are beginning to open a little. What I can tell you, miraculously, is that I now have a gratitude for the fire, and that is only possible at this point because I was willing to, and guided into, loving those ashes, loving what I could not understand, even while they were still smoldering.

•••••••••

“Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,

your own house turned to ashes.

Everything consumed so the road could open again.” (D. Whyte)