Do intentions matter?

Over the past few days, I’ve seen too many photos and read too many stories from the city of my ❤️, Los Angeles. My heart aches for all those homes lost. People lost. Businesses and jobs lost. The daunting prospects of recovery and rebuilding. Not everyone there is wealthy, nor are all those neighborhoods filled with the residences of celebrities.

I’ve seen videos of terrified wildlife fleeing from fires, including a cougar with her two cubs running behind her—so beautiful, so scared. I’ve seen horses being rescued and taken to shelter in safe sites, and offerings from other communities of the number of horses they can take in. Many pets have been placed in shelters until their families can figure out where they’ll be staying or going next.

So many have lost their homes, all their homes’ contents, and sometimes even their vehicles. Meaning to be reassuring, people offer, They’re just things. They can be replaced.

Not all things can be replaced.

I thought of my decades of photos, my own and my mother’s. My father’s art. My lifetime of journals. My father’s military records. My mother’s genealogical records.

I thought of all the mementos and items Tom’s parents have saved his entire life and given to him on special occasions. His rocking horse. His family Christmas ornaments, including some from his grandmother. His parents’ art.

My teddy bear. My dolls, and I don’t mean that massive collection of Barbies so much as my baby dolls and the dolls my father brought back from Korea and Japan. Some of the Barbies do have deep sentimental value, too.

I thought about Tim’s violin, built by his grandfather. The portrait of Rex done by a local artist and gifted to him by Laura. The plant he brought back from his grandmother’s funeral that he’s kept thriving for several years. Lynne, too, has two plants, one that came through various relatives from her grandmother to her; another that was her mother’s, who died in 1978. I thought of the carousel horses that were gifts from her late husband.

Debby lost some very precious keepsakes related to her children during our flood in 2017, and a couple of things I valued from my teenage years went missing, maybe inadvertently thrown out with larger items. We’ve lost a lot over the years, but we’ve never lost everything, as is happening to so many right now because of the L.A. fires.

Some things can never be replaced because most of their value exists only in our hearts and memories. Sometimes, when our hearts are broken, those things give us something tangible to cling to, just as our companion animals give us the will to be strong, to keep going.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a stranger, maybe someone’s neighbor or a passerby, as she realized she saw movement on a property, and used her hands to pull two surviving fish and two turtles, all struggling, but alive, out of someone’s koi pond in their yard next to their burned down house. She put them in a cooler that she filled with their water to transport them. (There were others, fish at least, that hadn’t made it.) Imagine losing everything but what you could take with you, and then being reunited with those four little survivors, and what they might mean to those people. The kindness of that woman is immeasurable, and she’s just one of so many who are trying to do something, anything, for their fellow Angelenos.

There’s so much heartbreak in these losses, but there’s also heartbreak in the vitriol from the usual choir of cruelty. I can’t understand, don’t even want to understand, how people can be so small, so hard, instead of just kind. Even in thoughts. In words. Just kindness. It costs nothing to be kind.

Do intentions matter? Yes. I absolutely believe they do.

Over these days, I’ve turned to music from the CDs that live in the sanctuary closet with a lot of the things I once used in my practice. They’re meant to comfort. To help someone relax. To be a channel to healing. I have more, but these were ones I pulled out so far.

I’m grateful for artists and their music, as I am for all those who provide the movies and television shows we watch, the books we read, the art that intrigues us. So much of the creative output that entertains and enriches us comes from that concentrated part of the west coast.

There are two realities I hold on to. First, our strength and resilience are the reason we persevere and rebuild. It’s how San Francisco has come back from earthquakes. How New Orleans came back from Katrina. How New York came back from terrorist attacks. I’m picking big cities because right now it’s Los Angeles, but across the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, the West and Northwest, this same spirit has driven us, as it will North Carolina and other areas impacted by disasters, whatever their causes.

And second, the abundant kindness we show to those who experience catastrophe reflect the best in us. Whether we give our time or material support or let our thoughts, words, actions, and prayers come from kindness, infused with the energy of good intentions, we get to choose to be a part of one another’s healing instead of their suffering.