Still smoldering

We carry on the new year

Hello friends,

Happy Gregorian New Year to all who celebrate, and hello from charred and weary Los Angeles. My immediate family and I are safe, thankfully, but everything else feels in question. Our immediate and wider human, animal, and plant communities are grieving what has already been lost.

There is a terrifying chaos and violent insatiability to fire. It can move so fast and ingest so completely. Everything you owned, vaporized into hazardous air before you even catch your breath. The canyons, hillsides, and forests that we love deeply changed — some still smoldering and burning.

Fire eats air, which helps it grow big and strong. There had been a wind advisory heading into last week and the Santa Ana winds were afoot. I never understood what these winds were until I felt them last year. Unsettling, warm and violent. The tents at the farmer’s market went flying. They’re sometimes called ‘devil winds,’ originating from somewhere high pressure and high up and tumbling down slope across the Great Basin — the watershed areas spanning Nevada and parts of Oregon, California, and Idaho.

I have so much to learn about meteorology. Who can really understand how wind works and where it really comes from? Why is wind? I won’t pretend to understand. But you feel it and smell it and you know it’s there. You see what it does. It’s responsible for most of Los Angeles’ wildfires.

Joan Didion’s essay “The Santa Anas” resurfaces around such times, for good reason.

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Wind has a way of making everything seem as silly as it really is. And not silly as in unimportant, but silly as in illusory. Impermanent, unreliable, on the edge.

While there is a pungency when this all happens in your own home, you have in the back of your head the clear understanding that this has happened and is happening elsewhere and to others many times. Grief is like that — universal in one light and yet so deeply personal in another.

Experiential intimacy might be one of my favorite types of intimacies and unfortunately catastrophic events create this for people who live in the same place. These events draw us closer, soften us, and open us back up to our neighbors and community members, like we might wish we could always be.

Thank you for your check-ins and the support - moral, financial, and otherwise - that many of you are proferring to those in need. For ways to support, you can visit Mutual Aid LA Network, Altadena Girls, or show some love to the GoFundMes of displaced Black and Latinx families or those with less than 20% of their goal.

Care for self and others is what we all need most right now - whether you’re in LA or not. All we can do is our best, with the capacity that we have in the moment.

Last night I led a Tonglen meditation in our beloved neighborhood plant nursery. Tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice of taking and sending. The practice is brave because you are asked to not just sit with the enormity of suffering, but visualize and breathe it in. It’s also an empowering practice because it is the alchemical force of your breath, the rhythmic in and out, which transmutes said suffering into the healing compassion you exhale. By the end of the night we were drawing in the suffering from far and wide, of Gaza and Sudan and the arctic and more — sucking it into our lungs and pores like the biggest, bravest most beautiful vacuums ever — and exhaling great swaths of compassion to reach around and swaddle every sentient being on and including our battered planet

On that note, I’m very happy to welcome some new Birdseed readers to the mix. Thank god you made it! We’ve been waiting for you. Check out the ‘about’ if you’re wondering what you got yourself into. More about me: I’ve been a Buddhist meditation teacher for almost a decade, a reproductive justice advocate for nearly two, a writer since my first angsty journal, a humor-lover since my first issue of Mad Magazine, and a seeker this whole life and all the previous. Birdseed is a funky-sweet blend of these things. The rest of my time is spent painting placentas, offering fertility + grief support, leading plant meditations, and coaching leaders on narrative and voice. I hope you enjoy and my inbox is always open for you.

Now, back to the present moment:

air quality is improving through still questionable

vibe is frenetic

mood is tender

energy is heavy

wind is calm

I’m kicking off the year with a series exploring some of Buddhism’s most foundational and well-loved frameworks. These are frameworks for understanding the Buddha’s teachings, and which are simply about getting free, getting grounded, and becoming tender, open-hearted.

We’ll examine frameworks like the eightfold path, the four noble truths, the three gems, the five remembrances, the ten perfections. So on and so forth. Like flat, stark bangs being teased into full, sexy three-dimension by the right amount of Aquanet and the perfect comb, I will attend to these ideas with TLC and some razzle dazzle. My hope is that we’ll connect dots that illuminate old wisdom in new ways that hit straight to the heart. And obviously, pop culture, biology, my childhood journals, and other sundries will figure heavily in Buddhalogical analyses.

If you’ve been curious to understand a little bit more about Buddhism or yourself in relation to the world, or if you need any kind of buoy at this time, this could be for you. The world is wild; I feel like now is the time for this.

All of these concepts (ancient listicles?) exist in intimate relationship with the other, so in a way you can start anywhere. One will lead you to the other like a Wikipedia of ahas. It is actually not which Russian nesting doll sits within the other, because Buddhism is not offering a linear, hierarchical reality to grasp. So we’ll just start somewhere.

We’ll begin next week walking through the Noble Eightfold Path, which the Buddha outlined as a practical guide to attaining enlightenment in his first sermon after attainting enlightenment himself. It’s a love song to the middle path and the vibe of equanimity.

Buddha was like, I did it people! I fucked up a bunch of times so I can tell you how not to. Here’s how you can also embody big enlightened energy. And the monks were like, wow, *only* eight steps?! That’s fewer than twelve ;) LiFe hAaAaCk. I’m IN! But then it turned out you could (and likely would) spend many, many lifetimes on the first step alone.

But still! In the Eightfold Path the Buddha is at least offering us some structure for the chaos, which I personally appreciate. There’s a realness to the path because it’s grueling as hell.

I love this reminder from Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who embodied a tremendous vibe of organized chaos himself:

“Buddhism promises nothing. It teaches us to be what we are where we are, constantly, and it teaches us to relate to our living situations accordingly.”

“People complain that Buddhism is an extremely gloomy religion because it emphasizes suffering and misery. […] But if we wish to pick flowers from a tree, we must first cultivate the roots and trunk, which means that we must work with our fears, frustrations, disappointments and irritations, the painful aspects of life.”

We must work with the Santa Ana winds that ruin our lives and the remnants that remain.

We’ll begin with the first step of the Eightfold Path, Right View, next week. The full series will be available for paid subscribers but I’ll also make swaths of it freely available. I live in that space between believing writers/teachers should be paid for their time and effort, especially if that work touches you or enriches your life, and the belief that dharma teachings should be free and accessible to absolutely everyone no matter what. I rely on your support to keep going, and you can upgrade here if you’re able to. So very grateful for you!

Speaking of the right view, here’s one very close to my heart:

Mandeville Canyon at sunset on January 1, 2025. Not sure its current state after the Palisades Fire but I’ve been thinking of it often. <3