Scorched Earth and Green Shoots: A Powerful Lesson in Resilience
Jemima, an English copywriter, lives in Portugal with her Belgian partner, where they have rebuilt a smallholding and are reconnecting with nature after devastating wildfires swept through the region in the summer of 2017. Here she reflects back on the extraordinary lessons of joy to be found when disaster strikes.
There are few things more satisfying than sinking your fingers into the earth and lovingly tending to a garden that feeds you. Watching hard work translate into tangible delights — each one filled with good intentions and ripe for the kitchen table — has always offered me an overflowing source of pleasure. For almost a decade I have enjoyed this place, driven by the seasons, riding the cyclical wave of growth and decay as nature gave me grace to assert my influence over a tiny slice of its bounty.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I never imagined that I would see destruction come to define this soil, this garden, and this beautiful region so dear to my heart. But then I also didn’t anticipate that I would come through such devastation not only emotionally intact but enriched in my appreciation for the complex experience that is life; with a newfound resilience and a fresh understanding of the great fragility of existence.
Portugal’s summer seasons are long and overbearing, but the country’s inhabitants display a glorious tenacity and self-sufficient nature; an intuition that chimes with bygone eras in nations as inclined to travelator-esque lifestyles as my own.
Families farm their land together, whether a donkey or a tractor pulls the plough. A teenager sits on a step in the village, expertly plucking a chicken. To me, it feels deeply romantic and experientially raw. The sun beats down on the earth in a way that urges effort to shade wilting flowers that would normally turn their heads proudly to the sun, and I find myself wondering if I can truly remember what rain-soaked earth smells like.
The droughts and forest fires that visit us every year are an intimidating reality for all, but nobody envisioned the scale of catastrophe that came to pass in 2017. Roughly 520,000 hectares of land burned over the course of the year, claiming the lives of more than a hundred victims and destroying thousands of homes, farms, and businesses. For us, it was October and the very end of the dry season that brought the flames that took our home, fanned mercilessly by Hurricane Ophelia. Loved ones in England told me afterwards that even so far away, their sky had turned an unnerving sepia shade as the smoke of our livelihoods mingled with dust carried upward from the Sahara.
After the fire, the landscape looked like the desolate remnants of a war zone. The scent of charred earth lingered for months and all was transformed into a monochromatic palette of charcoal grey, jet black, and yet more black. We all reeled — our faces as ashen as the scenery — and tried to grasp what had happened to our wild and beautiful surroundings, now so lifeless and ghostly.
In that moment, I felt broken, utterly lost, and gripped by a fear that I would never feel able to relish in life’s delights again; anxious that they would be repeatedly snatched away from me. We stayed in a home that was not our own and felt for the edges of a bubble of absence that surrounded us. All of the familiar objects that we had long attached our senses of self to and the comfort of our own space were missing, and we yearned. But we also began to rebuild, nurturing the beginning of a reclamation.
Months passed, and the season shifted without a whisper of life from the land. I wondered if the birds would return; if the summer song of chirping crickets was lost forever, and if we needed to find the strength to adjust permanently to a new reality of absence. But in an instant, a crack appeared in the bleakness.
As we walked hand in hand on a blackened path that would stain our shoes and leave a dirty trail when we returned indoors, my partner suddenly knelt down on the floor, beckoning me to follow. I knelt too, and I marvelled. Surely enough, there was the tiniest, delicate pink flower on a single stem, standing proud above the sooty ground. It would have been so easy to miss, but there it was.
Nature was still with us, and the first flickers of life were about to emerge. With grubby knees and overflowing hearts, we felt victorious.
Slowly, glimmers of existence began to shine all around us: the first realisation that birdsong could be heard lilting through the window; the first glimpse in peripheral vision of a butterfly dancing. Tentative little strands of luminous green began to band together in gleeful protest of all that black, wherever we glanced upon the ground. An astonishing eight months after the fire, the first minuscule emerald shoots appeared on some of the skeleton-like remains of trees that stubbornly arched towards the cloudless sky.
With each unfolding leaf and every insect that crawled or buzzed, my confidence began to creep back, tiptoe by tiptoe. But not only that — I also saw every detail with a new kind of clarity. Whether it was the honey scents of summer flowers, the first sip of a glass of table wine served in the village, or the connections I shared with my closest companions, the literal and metaphorical flavours were stronger.
My all-consuming fear slowly rolled back, and I began to feel a new kind of resilience growing within me. Better yet, under the guidance of this personal unfurling, I discovered that there was a lesson demanding to be learned. It called out with a perfect kind of intuitable annunciation that I can only try to do justice in letters and sentences.
We all fear the encroachment of a great cataclysm in our lives. The lesson lies in discovering that while we can take great care to avoid disaster, it is more vital that we commit our minds to revelling in our simple existence, regardless of potential perils ahead.
We can never have absolute control — no matter how much we wish it so — but we can be utterly and intentionally present. We can take stock of our fortune, in the abundance of our friendships, and the beauty around us. We can savour everything and seek to appreciate the depth and breadth of each moment that life offers up to us.
No doubt, the impacts of the fire will take an untold number of years to dissipate, and the scars of this experience are something that each of us will carry with us always. But through time and in healing, the community has pulled together in all its diversity. Qualities emerge such as compassion, respect, supportive nature, and camaraderie. Of course, we each intrinsically held these qualities in vast capacity before the fire, but in experiencing a worst-case scenario, we were able to see the most beautiful inner aspects become universally external.
It is not that we are infallible, or that loss cannot be deeply wounding. But we, like nature itself, are truly resilient, and joy always returns.
As the opportunity arises for me to begin planting crops again, the vegetables won’t be held back by the loss of the garden that held this space before them. They will shoot and swell without hesitation. So if you find that fear causes you to pause when you should be finding delight, or if you are deep in the depths of a grief that feels unending, remember that within you lies a core resilient nature and an undefeatable capacity for happiness. Dig deep for these things, be patient if you must, and be kind to yourself always — but do not be afraid.
