permission to wield the flame
What’s the point of talking about self understanding and self love when we need more love from each other? Meaning am I making a difference that is good and enough?
The Art of Good Enough is a space of gentle words and imperfect practice, exploring how to grow a more loving relationship to yourself and the world around you.
The question I was trying to answer in this piece is what do I do with the myself when it feels like there’s too much of everything else–too much urgency, too much to care about, too much to do that is outside of what I still think matters (very much so), but maybe feels like I can’t really talk about? Meaning what’s the point of talking about self understanding and self love when we need more love from each other? Does it really matter? Am I making a difference and is that difference good or ever enough?
In relation to this question (these questions), I’ve been really struggling to write to you all lately. Everything big and macro feels like a wildfire, uncontrollable and inescapable, that I have to pay attention to the expense of everything else. This is a piece questioning this all or nothing mentality, offering us all the idea that maybe there are other ways to burn.
Journal Prompts you might resonate with are as follows:
How’s your heart?
In what ways might you be feeling like you are not good or enough? (externally/ internally)
In what ways might you be ignoring yourself? And why? Is that really helpful?
Leave a comment or reply to this email and let me know what resonates. I’d love to hear from you.
With love,
Kim
permission to wield the flame
For more than 13,000 years, tribes like the Karuk and North Folk Mono whose lands reside on what is now called California had been practicing controlled burns. Such “good fire” as it is called was an integral part of the ecosystem. These burns cleared away ground cover to make room for more water to reach roots, promoted ecological diversity and the spread of fire dependent seeds and carefully tended to the underbrush to reduce the risk of large, uncontained wildfires. The practice of controlled burns lasted until the 1850’s when Califonia banned the practice.1
For the last 170 years undergrowth has been allowed to accumulate leading to the massive wildfires we see today. These fires do not create. Instead they destroy. The soil bakes from the heat, kills fire dependent and non fire dependent seeds and gets to a level of intensity that people can no longer suppress.2
The same things is happening to our country. We are seeing the undergrowth of a country, having accumulated, largely untouched for centuries, go up in flames. This country we all say is free, but this country is mostly pain. I look at that 1850’s ban on controlled burns and I see how much the North Folk Mono lost to white settlers and the American government. How they had to flee from kidnapping and violence, how the Gold Rush forced a year long war leading to treaties that went unacknowledged. This government has never worked for everyone. This government has always in some way obscured the light.
So here we are at the center of a forest covered in brambles and I feel selfish for wanting to write about individual self understanding when there is so much wildfire.
***
Controlled burns are an effort to reconfigure the ecosystem for our benefit. They require time, dedication, and an understanding that the work is never finished. This requires a duality of ourselves because we are both connected to the collective and firmly rooted in our own wants and needs. We are not only ever one thing. We burn the forest for the good of the water that now can be held in the soil, for the trees that now bear more fruit, for ecological diversity and we burn the forest for ourselves so that we might eat that fruit and drink that water and benefit.
This is to say, we love the forest for ourselves and because we love the forest for ourselves, we willingly wield the flame. As Lilla Watson, Aboriginal elder, educator and activist, acknowledges when she says, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Tending to the forest is not something we do just once and then sink back into our lives. After all, what are we tending to but the ability for all of us to live our lives with abundant, rich root systems. “Everything is on fire/” Nikita Gill writes, “Everyone I love is doing beautiful things/ And trying to make a life worth living,/ And I know I don’t have to believe in everything/ But I believe in that.”
We have distanced ourselves from the interconnectedness of the collective and individual. Failing to see how “your liberation is bound up with mine” means we forget to believe in each other.
Burn the hazelnut shrub and you have longer and stronger stems for basket weaving. Burn the pine and leave room for the oak tree, creating a new food source. Burn with the thought of a 30 year cycle and think of the generations to come–
A UC Berkeley study found that the forest biomass of the Klamath Mountain region in California used to be half of what it is now. This difference is directly related to the controlled burns carried out by the Karuk and Yurok people for thousands of years. The entire landscape used to have roughly 40% less capacity, creating more space for smaller trees and a greater variety of plants and bushes. Ultimately, the land influenced by human hands, cultivated for our own benefits, was more resilient to wildfires.3
What we burn, we have the capacity to reshape with balance and relationship, for the benefit of all us.
***
So what do I want to burn? And how often, and in what way? How much?
I know I need to engage with the macro of my nation but also the forest has been too crowded, too full of dead things, too easy to set on fire, for too long and there are so many small and still important ways that “my liberation is bound up in yours” that makes all of our lives worth living.
The part of me that wants to be good and enough feels that she must discard everything that burns within her to make room for someone different. And she doesn’t know the “right way” or “what to really do” but she does know how to listen because being able to feel this endless sea of Grief, hold it in her hands without trying to change the feeling, is an ability she has spent a decade practicing, just like she has spent a decade learning to open her heart, enough to let Love in. And even though the world is on fire, she smiles more, more than she ever has, and the laughter meets her eyes, and her friends know when her birthday is, which seems like a small gesture, unless you understand what its like to be a body but not a person And now you are both for the first time I am thinking about generations. I am burning the ponderosa pine. I am wielding the flame to make life worth living, and I know I don't have to believe in everything
But I do believe in that.4
Cagle, Susie, and Alexandra Hootnick. 2019. “'Fire is medicine': the tribes burning California forests to save them.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans.
KCET. 2016. “Cultural Burning | Tending the Wild | Season 1, Episode 1 | KCET.” YouTube.
Robyn, Schelenz. 2022. “How the Indigenous practice of 'good fire' can help our forests thrive.” University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-indigenous-practice-good-fire-can-help-our-forests-thrive.
Thank you Nikita Gill–Gill, Nikita, @nikita_gill, July4, 2025
