As I watch the city of Los Angeles burn, my mind drifts back to my thoughts as a teenager. The burning city, the burning world, ravaged by wars and fear, reflect my fears and devastations. Our mental and spiritual devastations. The desert left by the fire mirrors the desert of nothingness that surrounds us, born of an economy we have become servants to, rather than harnessing it for our own well-being and that of the world.
It’s banal to say, perhaps even pointless. Maybe a bit immoral and crude in some way. But the burned houses in Los Angeles are the nothingness burning. A nothingness made of stories, of people, of the dead. A nothingness to be respected, before which my own nothingness can only bow. But it is still nothingness. It is the nothingness of modern society, producing mass-made wooden houses, shopping, and Botox bars. It is the nothingness of a collapsing world that comforts itself with the trivial. And in that triviality, we exist, live, and die, all of us.
Like fire, which always remains the same but is always different from itself.
