Practicing Gentleness After the “Fire”

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living through concurrent crises.

We all know the wave of exhaustion that follows a single emergency, when we have extended beyond our limits and are finally able to rest and reset life to normal. But with concurrent crises, before we've had time to catch our breath from one event, another arrives:  Political upheaval. Ecological disaster. Personal loss. Community grief. The world seems to demand our care, tending, presence, attention without pause. Unable to fully rest, we just get deeper and deeper into overwhelm. When the fire of crisis never ends, we can burnout - 

And yet, fire has always carried a paradox.

Fire destroys, but it also transforms. The white-hot intensity of fire changes the landscape in ways that cannot be undone. After a fire, there’s no going back to being unburnt. Fire burns away what can no longer remain, and yet the mark of being burnt will always remain. In the transformation, fire clears space for new growth. As difficult as these seasons can be, they also ask something of us: What is no longer ours to carry? What is now gone that we should let go of moving forward? What beliefs, habits, or ways of relating have been burned away because they no longer serve? What is trying to emerge on the other side?

The challenge, of course, is that we are rarely given the luxury of waiting until the fires are over before beginning to recover.

As leaders, we often cannot postpone grief or decision-making for some future moment when life finally becomes calm again. Grief is not outside the work. It is central to the work. Grief slows us down enough to acknowledge that we have loved something deeply enough for its absence to matter. It softens the parts of ourselves that constant urgency threatens to harden.

If we skip mourning - the sitting with and processing of grief - the avoidance can pull us toward numbness, cynicism, or despair. The goal is to be comfortable enough with grief to stay present in the spectrum of emotions that surface. To do work in small doses and with intention - particularly strategy decisions and large changes as a result of crisis. To stay present, caring, and patient with ourself and others.

We take inspiration from ash: practicing gentleness, softness, and lightness with discipline, not deflection..

It looks like emotional pacing rather than emotional depletion. It looks like accepting help before we are completely exhausted. It looks like tending to one another's nervous systems as carefully as we tend to our strategies. It looks like remembering that resilience is not measured by how much we can endure alone, but by how well we remain connected while enduring together.

During a recent conversation, Teddy shared a reflection from the Wild Alchemy Deck by Kris Krans:

"One of the lessons of the cards is ash as a material that comes in the wake of fire. Part of the medicine of ash is... it gets over everything. It's really light. It's really soft. There's a gentleness that I think is necessary in the wake of big fire moments."

The guidebook for the Wild Alchemy deck reads, "Be gentle with the process as it is delicate and sacred. The Ash card asks us to tend to the true nature of endings, grief, and letting go."

Ash carries an unexpected wisdom. It settles quietly over everything the fire has touched. It does not erase what happened, nor does it pretend the landscape is unchanged. Instead, it offers a kind of covering, and a reminder that after great intensity, life often asks not for more intensity, but for tenderness. 

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller writes, “Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was. . . This sacred season in the ashes was the ancient Scandinavian community's way of acknowledging that one of their people had entered a world parallel to but separate from the daily life of gathering food, feeding children, and tending fields. Little was expected of them during this time, which often lasted a year or more. The individual's duty was to mourn…”

Perhaps this is the invitation of this season: to recognize that gentleness is not separate from courageous action. In fact, it is what makes courageous action sustainable.

The work ahead will continue to ask much of us. There will be more moments of urgency, more reasons to organize, more opportunities to show up for our communities.

May we also remember to become, for one another, a little like ash: soft where the world has become hard, light enough to settle gently, and protective enough to create the conditions where something new can begin to grow.

—

This blog piece is the final installment in this series. 

Over the series, you may have noticed an arc of movement: 

Diagnosis (The Body Politic Has a Fever)

Regulation (Feeling Without Collapsing)

Connection (Being Herd)

Leadership (Co-leading)

Integration (How we continue after transformation)