The Trickster is alive, dancing in the flames that lick the hillsides of California, hiding in the shadows of crumbling floodplains, and laughing at the edges of our carefully planned subdivisions. We summoned him, not consciously, but through the slow erosion of balance, through our insatiable hunger for more, through the illusion that the grass is always greener elsewhere. We conjured him when we forgot the lessons etched into the land and chose convenience over cooperation, spectacle over stewardship.

Fire, after all, is not new to California. It is as much a part of this landscape as the chaparral and the coastal oak. The land knows fire. It thrives on fire. Fire clears the deadwood, cracks the seeds, renews the soil. But the fires we face today are not nature’s gentle pruning; they are her roaring reminder of debts long overdue. When we built gas lines and power grids through dry, wooded canyons, when we chased views rather than wisdom, when we ignored the land’s need to burn and reset, we invited the Trickster in.

In mythology, the Trickster is not evil, but a force of chaos and revelation. He unmasks the hubris of those who think they can control nature, exposing the fragile scaffolding of our illusions. These fires, these floods, these storms, they are not Gaia’s vengeance. They are her rebalancing act, her way of reclaiming equilibrium in a world we have thrown out of balance.

I grieve deeply for the losses brought by these fires, including my own family’s suffering. My grief is not directed toward individuals, but toward the societal machine that traps us in untenable systems, one that encourages short-term gain while ignoring long-term consequences. It is this machine, not any single person, that pushes us into situations we cannot escape, driving cycles of destruction

Beneath our greed lies fear, the fear of scarcity, the fear of irrelevance, the fear that if we don’t grab what we can, we’ll be left with nothing. This fear has driven us to carve up the earth, to build houses on fault lines, to channel rivers and drain wetlands, to turn cooperation into competition. But nature thrives on connection. It is a web of relationships, a symphony of cooperation where every part plays a role. When we sever those connections, when we treat the earth as an object to be exploited rather than a partner to be nurtured, we invite chaos.

Our survival depends on embracing the interconnectedness of all things. We are not separate from the land; we are part of it, co-creating its rhythms. The health of the land is our health, and living in harmony with it means recognizing its processes, not taming it, not forcing it into submission, but adapting to its wisdom. When we see ourselves as collaborators rather than conquerors, we honor the land’s dynamic nature, allowing for a shared flourishing.

The Trickster is not just in the flames; he’s in the systems we’ve built. He’s the architect of the absurdities we now face, a world where greed drives development into disaster zones, where we privatize water while the land dries, where leaders unmask the very systems they benefit from.

The Trickster’s presence is not comfortable, but it is necessary. He forces us to confront what we have wrought, to grieve what we have lost, and to imagine what might still be possible. Welcome to climate grief, all who mourn the burning of the LA Basin. This is the landscape we have created, and it cannot be undone. But grief is not an end, it is a beginning. It is the raw material of transformation, the fertile ground in which new possibilities can take root.

We must learn from the Trickster, who reminds us that life thrives not in competition but in cooperation. Fires, floods, and storms will always be part of the earth’s cycles. But our relationship to them can change. We can stop building in places that are meant to burn or flood. We can create systems that honor the land’s rhythms rather than fighting against them. We can move from a mindset of separation to one of connection, from “every man for himself” to “all of us together.”