Hope is a discipline. Like gratitude, when you exercise it often, the neuropathways in charge expand and change how you see the world. Although I write a Substack to inspire hope for this Earth, I feel grief like anyone else, especially when it comes to wildfires in California.

What do you see in these photos? Two of these are two years old and two are from this year. This is the fire scar of the Caldor Fire, which in 2021 burned 221,000 acres of forest and 782 structures. It also scorched through so much paradise, including a ski resort, multiple mountain bike trails and a section of the Pacific Crest Trail. My daughter and I counted 351 rings on a tree that was killed by this fire.

For a long while, all I could see was the dead trees and the ash. I cried next to a dying tree whose sap was so red it struck me as blood.

Now, after three years, I don’t see the dead trees as much anymore. I see the ones that survived, the mosaic of forest that did not burn, weaving through charred devastation, where the fire performed a healthier function of thinning the forest. I see the sturdy wildfire-proof underbrush of manzanita, bitterbrush and snowbrush, whose roots can miraculously survive even the hottest of these blazes and absorb the ash’s fertilizer, then shoot out bigger and stronger than they were before. Wildflowers are everywhere now. I understand why fireweed is so named.

I’m reminded that nature knows renewal like nobody’s business. I feel hope.