The light comes through

A journey to mindfulness through fire

Sunrise at Tassajara, January 2, 2026

There is a book called "Light Comes Through” by Dzigar Kongtrul that was recommended to me while I was in the dark cold of Vermont staying near a zen center in the winter of 2022. I puzzled over the book, reading and re-reading it, wondering exactly when my own illumination might happen. I tried so hard to summon it through the pages and adopt the words in my head in the way that mantra can be used to meditate upon. But I was quite thoroughly in the dark. I will come back to this inquiry as you read on.

It's been some time since I brought this blog back to fire; perhaps that is the interval of time that a new chapter needed to grow from the ashes and emerge. As you might recall, in 2022 I entered and departed a season in fire suppression with a federal agency. My last piece of that season exploded like a spark in a beetle-killed forest. It was shared widely across the internet. People commented on the post directly and also indirectly on re-shares of the post across social media platforms. Some people thanked me, others empathized with me, and some even commented “this job is not for everyone”. I even later found some of my words from that letter quoted and published in someone else’s book. While a dear mentor once told me “your sensitivity is your superpower”, at the time my tools for processing grief were minimal. You could imagine my effort at processing said grief on the internet was a flailing attempt that then landed far short of what I needed. When it was dubbed a “resignation letter”, I decided to resign myself from the internet and social media at large. At the time, I did not know that I was traumatized, nor did I have the words to express it or find support.

I decided to step back from a public-facing media presence. I even changed my Substack username to one of my nicknames to draw attention away from myself. I can look back now and readily say that my season in fire suppression exposed psychological ground that I needed to recover in search of a forgotten inner presence. In the following period, it felt like I was painstakingly gridding the black, in search of myself to no avail. For awhile, the black stayed black. I did not yet know the extent of what had been suppressed went back farther than that year alone and would take some time to recover. I did not know how long that time in the dark would take.

It was hard on me and those around me. My family and friends worried about my mental health. Meanwhile, I turned inward, cold-trailing decades of pain until no ground was left untouched. I chiseled slowly at my capacity to hold space for myself. I let very few people in. It was a raw time.

The change in internal scenery happened equally slowly. I spent a year doing a yoga teacher training in the Columbia River Gorge, through which I found a grounding place. I met a teacher who transformed my understanding of breath as an alchemist for healing and helped me to free up stuck energy in my body. I started to focus on running, finding freedom in pure movement. I took a job in prescribed fire, finding medicine in developing an understanding and building a relationship with rather than against fire. Change was slow, but so is building muscle. I focused on resilience. Fast forward to this past winter.

The moment that light came through, followed a moment in a garden with a facilitator of a weeklong mindfulness retreat for wildland firefighters that I attended at the turn of the New Year. That particular day of the retreat was day two or three. I had not yet slept since arriving, I had arrived to this retreat feeling like an imposter, along with somehow I was holding way more grief in my small container than I could process. I was absolutely swimming in it and afraid to expose it. I went in distress to the facilitators and one stepped out to walk with me. I told her I did not think I could attend that afternoon’s session because it was just too much to hold. We went to sit. I shared some of everything I was holding. We spent a long while in the garden while she held space. After a while she said, That is a massive amount of grief. It is totally okay if you don’t want to attend the afternoon’s session. However I am going to make an invitation to you, you get to decide. I invite you to share what you are feeling with all of the wildland firefighters attending this retreat. You don’t have to tell them what the grief is from, but you could let them know that this feeling is coming up for you, that you are falling apart a little bit and you are not sure how to hold it together. I will make this space for you at the beginning of our next workshop session if you would like to say something.

Her invitation to be seen caught me so much off guard. I saw a glimmer of the portal she was offering me to walk through and it was so foreign to me, I decided to try. We walked toward where the group was gathering. She introduced the topic of the next workshop, and then said, before we get started, one of our members has something they want to share with all of you. The other firefighters looked around. I took a deep breath, tried to source all of my strength, noticed the tears immediately rolling nonstop down my face, and spoke.

It was not the strength and self-reliance I had been working to build for so long that held me up in that following moment — instead it was twenty firefighters of all walks of life who enveloped me in the most massive hug of my life that allowed me to finally soften and look kindly at my experience.

This was the moment light came through and pierced the last of the dark.

I met the eyes of every human in that group and saw their tears also. That thing that I had been missing was giving myself permission to be a human amongst humans and experience for the first time, a limitless compassion for the magnitude of that, for our shared experience. I am so grateful to my Tassajara community for waking me up to this.

I had arrived to this retreat in the mindset of imposter syndrome thinking I knew something of mindfulness; I had no idea that quite ironically the imposter was the version of me that was still finding ways to withhold my sensitivity and mask my truth. I left knowing I am fully held by a community as a whole being, ugly tears and all, and this has only grown my capacity to hold that space in return. I want this for everyone. I am extremely grateful for this journey. I am deeply grateful for and inspired to cultivate spaces to hold our collective human experiences with compassion and without judgment. I believe that healing ourselves is ultimately what brings healing to our earth.

I can now look back at my exit from that 2022 fire season with compassion for that version of me who did not yet have the tools, and wanted to write you from the July 6th, 2026 version of me who is now on the way to developing some tools and learning new ones and grateful for opportunities to share them. I am grateful to connect with you.

Recently I was very impacted to hear of the deaths of three wildland firefighters on the Knowles Fire in western Colorado, in late June. It turns out we are all not separated by very many degrees. I am holding the fire family and all of those impacted by these losses, in my heart. For each of you, I hope you can find the space to take the moments you need to honor what is coming up for you. I am sending my love.

With a bow to this moment and to you,
Lucy