Hello, my name is Kimberly and my friends call me KC.  I would like to offer you some words of wisdom from my experience acquired during the past decade behind the front lines of firestorms.

Please practice self care (please see this link for local offerings in PaliBu), have gratitude for anything and everything, drink water often to flush the toxins and eat as much fresh produce as possible.

Managing communication carefully in order to have frequent restful breaks is essential.  (Pacing) Disasters are like drinking out of a fire hose. What I see happen after firestorms is people engage til they can’t do it anymore. They step away and many don’t come back. Their lessons are valuable to optimize recovery in future firestorms and their hard earned wisdom should not be lost.

CLASSIC FIRESTORM SCENARIO: Fire destroys a town as persimmons ripen on the trees in the fall landscape. After the fire, those persimmons are the only color left in a black and white landscape that crunches beneath your feet. The people, the birds … everyone is gone. It is quiet and lifeless.

That doesn’t last forever, but it is devastating. The door has closed very definitively on the past, and the new door to the future is yet to be found.

Yet slowly, moment by moment the landscape begins to change with the first rain. The bugs, the mice, the birds slowly emerge… and the starving cats with their burned paws barely manage to find food. But as time passes the trauma begins to be erased as the new possibilities emerge… The people return, clean, rebuild, reconnect and life goes on… in a very different way.

Disasters bring out both the best and the worse in us all. It pushes our capacity and by stepping through that experience, it changes each of us in profound ways.

I wish you well in your journey home AGAIN. ~ Kimberly (KC)

Here’s a video I have shared with firestorm survivors in the past. Perhaps it will help you feel better too about community and about finding your own strength.