What’s Meaningful?
Now that the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs, the High Park fire near Ft Collins and the Flagstaff fire near Boulder are more (than less) under control, I write about what I learned from a friend who has gone through a difficult month. We had friends that were affected by all three fires: everything from prepare to evacuate orders to evacuation to housing evacuees. But the lesson came from a friend who lives up in the mountains behind Ft Collins.
He and his family were evacuated weeks ago and within a few days they had lost their barn and sheds. In the immediate area where they live, there were 11 houses when the fire started; in an early briefing after evacuation, they learned that nine of the houses were burned down. His miraculously was one of the two still standing. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Many days of silence followed that briefing. Was their beautiful mountain home gone? Had everything been ignited in fire? They were left to wonder.
The last time I saw him, he had just learned the final toll. His evacuation had ended, and he was able to return to inspect what was left. On one side of his property the fire had burned along the fence between he and his neighbor’s property. The fire had burned everything on the neighbor’s side and left everything green and untouched on his property. He described one area of his property where he had stacked 30 cords of wood for winter. The wood was gone—just gone, leaving just an inch of ash in its place. A winter’s heating wood gone in the flame of a very hot and fiery summer. Their house thankfully was still standing, but he described distant hills behind it that were blackened by the blaze. The ponderosa and lodgepole pines on closer hills were still green, standing, untouched. Finally he described with moistening eyes his experience climbing his front porch and looking out to the front: a meadow and the surrounding aspen: It was all untouched. He said to me, “I never knew how much that meadow meant to me.”
It’s all left me wondering: What is it in my life that is particularly meaningful, and I don’t even realize it?
