Meeting the Moment

In January, as wildfires consumed large swaths of Los Angeles, I found myself doing my best to offer solace to friends and family members who’d lost their homes. Those who had so far been spared anxiously tracked weather reports, their well-being a simple matter of the wind’s caprice. With bags packed and nerves shot, they waited for an order to evacuate.

From New York, I watched as areas so familiar from my youth vanished, burnt beyond recognition. It’s a strange kind of grief, weighted with shock and disbelief. The fires didn’t just consume houses; they erased an entire past, the very landscape that had shaped so many lives.

For me, the devastation became a symbol of something larger—the sense of impending chaos many of us feel in a world we often no longer recognize. The fires, in all their ferocity, seemed to embody the uncertainties that press on us daily. Amid climate change, political instability, catastrophic wars abroad, and social fragmentation, we live with the pervasive sense that there is no normal to return to. What will replace it has yet to take shape, and convincing visions of a better future appear to be in short supply.

Impermanence is one of Buddhism’s core tenets. And yet there’s something about living through times of frequent and sudden change that sharpens our awareness of this truth, heightening our fear and our longing for solid ground. We are confronted with the fact that uncertainty and instability are not aberrations; they are the norm, something we come to see through practice in cooler times.

I’ve never expected my practice to shield me from life’s vicissitudes but instead to offer tools to navigate them with some degree of wisdom and grace. The cultivation of inner stability is not just for personal refuge; it is also a responsibility. When we steady our hearts, we become a source of calm for others. And while we all struggle with reactivity, fear, and anger, there are moments when any of us can hold space for uncertainty, manifesting a reassuring presence in the face of profound disorder and loss.

In the 1990s, the writer and longtime Tricycle contributor Pico Iyer lost his family home—and nearly his life—to an arson fire. I recently interviewed him for our podcast, Tricycle Talks, about his most recent work, Aflame: Learning from Silence. A book about the contemplative life, it is also an eloquent study of life’s precariousness, the hidden instability that underlies the beauty of the coastal landscapes he describes. Back then, in Time magazine, Pico wrote about his harrowing escape from the fire that took his home. He ended the essay with the solace he took from a manuscript he had managed to grab before fleeing. In it, he had copied a poem by Mizuta Masahide, the 17th-century Japanese poet:

My house burned down.
Now I can better see
The rising moon.

A high bar, to be sure, and perhaps too early for such thoughts. Just the same, I sent Pico’s article to my brother and sister-in-law, who had a day earlier lost a family home. I wasn’t quite sure how they’d receive it. To my relief, my sister-in-law, like Pico, took comfort in it, posting the poem with a photo of the charred ruins of her house.

I used to think the strength and the resilience that the dharma can offer were reserved for those whose practice ran much deeper than my own. I realize that to believe this was to shirk a responsibility. As one of my teachers once told me, “I’m not special. Any of us can do this.”

The chaos may feel overwhelming, but the essential truth of the teachings—and their transformative power—remains steadfast. Our task is to meet the moment, to steady ourselves, and to offer the fruit of our practice to all those willing to receive it.