I’m learning there are no shortcuts through grief. Like the landscape of Eaton and Millard Canyons, which are closed for the next year to allow the soil and the plants to begin their recovery, the process of healing will take weeks, months, years. The pain is less sharp than it was immediately after the fire, but the ache will always be tender, the way scar tissue never quite feels like healthy skin.

Before the Eaton fire, I wrote and thought a lot about fires. I considered ways in which fire can bring about renewal and transformation, and burns whose sole outcome is violent eradication. As someone who grew up in this wildfire-prone part of the world, I was fascinated by how the ecosystem evolved to coexist with fire—periodic burns facilitate the reproductive cycles of California plants like redwood, Matilija poppy, and lupine. I marveled at the massive, charred trunks of the Sequoia trees in Muir Grove, their towering canopies green and alive, their century-old heft dwarfing my human sense of time and scale.

When I try to comprehend the magnitude of material loss resulting from the fires, I feel immobilized by the idea of investing my time, labor, or care into something as fragile and fraught as a physical object. I have never perceived the precarity of material things more acutely than in the past six months since the fires. I have also come to understand the resilience and beauty of less tangible things—relationships, community, a sense of place, ideas, and memory—in ways I hadn’t fully grasped before. These remained intact when all else was reduced to carbon, and without them I’m certain I would have been obliterated. I struggle to reconcile my devotion to the overlooked with my worry that any thing I make will inevitably be less interesting than the overlooked subject itself. I studied the animals, the plants, and even the compost in my garden and felt satisfied just building an environment for them to live in. Tenacious clusters of blooming desert bluebells, evening primrose, nodding needlegrass, and poppies have emerged from the scorched earth in my garden, in spite of the dematerialization of everything else. Tall sunflowers have self-seeded in my former vegetable beds and are already at work pulling toxins out of the soil, and the oak tree is sprouting delicate new leaves along its blackened branches. Bees, birds, and butterflies are coming back too, moving forward with their lives and laying the groundwork for us to do the same someday. They do all of this whether we tend to them or not, whether we notice or not. I’m grateful just to be paying attention.

—Ariane Vielmetter

Ariane Vielmetter (b. 1987, Tübingen; lives and works in Altadena) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2012) and BA from University of California, Los Angeles (2008). Solo exhibitions have been held at Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco (2019); Staging Gallery, Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco (2018); and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2018, 2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Chan Gallery, Pomona College, Claremont (2017); Vacancy, Los Angeles (2016); Embassy, Los Angeles (2016); and CCS Art Gallery, University of California, Santa Barbara (2014).