What do you do when the world is on fire?

I wasn't planning on writing this...

What do you do when the world is on fire?

Literally. I’m straying a little ways away from my usual topics, but today, my entire being is set ablaze with this very question - What do you do when the world is on fire?

The summer came with blazing flames here in my home country of Canada that threw a thick blanket of smog over our homes for days on end as people lost their homes and their lives, as the blaze tore through families, leaving but a scar on the path it ripped on the earth. It seems this is also how summer wants to go.

What do you do  when the world is on fire?

A war rages on in Ukraine and Sudan and there’s been a coup in Niger and too many  conflicts to keep track of and there are droughts where there shouldn’t be droughts, floods where there shouldn’t be floods, hurricanes and tornadoes where there never used to be so many. The fires continue to rage on, worst, it seems with every passing day. What do you do when the world is on fire? I see the images coming in from Maui and I feel my heart itself is ripped and shredded in a million pieces. 

I’ve always been an optimist. I’ve always been one to invest my focus, my attention and my energy in a vision for a better future. I’ve always been one to double-down, when things get bad, on the faith that we are presented with the challenges (and, unfortunately, the disasters) we need to shake up the status quo and take us into the next (better) version of ourselves. I still believe that and now again, I try to double-down on this very faith. 

But what do you do, truly, when the world is on fire?

Is it really enough to “man our post” as best we can? 

It feels trivial, when the world is burning down, to talk about beauty and good and joy, to talk of lightness and inter-human love. Orwell, famous for his political resistance, was however also a keen gardener, a “watcher of clouds”, one who revelled in the great beauty that was that of a blooming flower (and was also criticised for doing so). My day job is one that can take me in extraordinarily caustic situations, where ideology rubs up against reality, a whole lot of ego and a bunch of distorted and politicised “facts”. Beauty has never been so important to me.

Growing up, I was the child who took refuge in books as an attempt to understand the world that was going on without, I was the child who cried and cried and cried as my father read at Easter the passage of Christ in the garden of olives and my sister looked on, confused and troubled. I was glad when I realised my name “Camille” sounded something like that of “Chamomile”, a flower I adored and, a few years later, was embarrassed at feeling so seen when the children I babysat said I was not a lion, nor a mamma bear, but rather something like a mother sheep. 

I was too sensitive a child, every discordant note in the great big scales of life would strike me like a pointed dagger in a soft, naked breast. It seemed (and felt) like I would always be on the verge of crumbling into slithers of dust until my grandmother advised me one summer evening as the horizon was set ablaze by the setting sun to rest upon beauty, to make it my cane, my crutch, my super power. 

So I did and from that well of sensitivity came a force I had not known before that opened my heart, set it in my open palm and allowed me to dream and feel in ways that had previously felt too big and treacherous waters to tread. 

That sensitivity allowed me to question what was hidden to the naked eye, to interrogate ideas when they became suspiciously easy, to form a core of experiences and values that were defiantly my own as I tried to tread an elusive centre, as much as I possibly could, armed with the intimate knowledge of the grace that is a blazing sky in the setting sun.

How does one cope when the world is on fire?

From that well of sensitivity, there came a roaring lion, which I fed bits and pieces, more and more until it grew big and strong and sought larger battles to fight on his own. As this lion grew, I encouraged him to take the place of the mother sheep whom I tried with a vengeance to make disappear. I dreamt bigger, I roared louder, I ran faster. 

Every now and then, however, the well would reopen and the waters come rushing back and I would whip the lion held in chains for him to stand up, to step up, to order the waters recede from the dry and barren fields. 

I had forgotten the Nile floods the plains of Egypt and fertilises the earth in its doing so. I had forgotten, also, that the lion is the lamb and maybe some of that mother sheep too. 

So how does one cope when the world is on fire?

I still don’t know but the question burns through my bones and it probably does for many of  you too. 

I am deciding once again to invest in beauty (the soon-to-be webshop is one such project) for that is perhaps the greatest arm I know that I can wield: to invest in the people who I know also feed off of that very quest for the just and the beautiful and work to create it too. 

Is that too light a task? Is it enough? Maybe, surely not. 

But  then there is me and there is you and there is your neighbour and your friend, your sons and your daughters, your husband, your wife, your sister, your brother, an entire community of individuals participating in this grand and fragile project that is that of building up our humanity. 

As the world burns down in flames, I wish for myself and for all of us that we let the lion lay with the sheep awhile so that the lion may become the lamb and that the lamb may become the lion too.  

I was not expecting to send this note today, but as my dear friend Sarahbeth noted in her most recent newsletter, the drums of grief and life and love are beating, asking to be heard. 

Xxx

Camille