Author’s note: There are several ways to help the people, families and animals affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires. This is just one list to get you started, but please know that the needs are changing quickly by the day. If you need suggestions of specific ways to help or donate, please comment or reach out to me.
Wednesday, January 1st
In the past on the first day of the year, I have done 13-card tarot or oracle readings for myself: one card pulled for each month, with the thirteenth card representing a theme for the year as a whole. This year, I wasn’t sure if I would do one or not. I started thinking maybe it’s counterproductive to try and predict what a vibe of a new year would be before it’s even started. Maybe I should just forget the tarot reading this year… live the year out in real time and not worry about potential themes and messages from a tarot deck.1
For some reason, in the late afternoon, I changed my mind and decided to do a 13-card oracle reading using my “Archetypes”2 deck. Any time I do a reading for myself or anyone else, I pull the cards, read the meanings of each card, analyze and reflect, and then take a photo on my phone to have a visual for future reference. For this reading, by the time I got to the thirteenth card, I immediately shook my head and reshuffled the cards back into one deck. Knew I shouldn’t have done this, I thought.
I can’t remember now in the mad rush to wipe my memory of this reading what all 12 cards for each month were. But I remember the one I pulled last, the one that made me immediately reshuffle, the one meant to symbolize the year ahead:
“Apocalypsis.”
Tuesday, January 7th
The Pacific Palisades and Altadena are on fire. Earlier today when I came home from work around 5:45 p.m., I saw a brilliant burst of orange behind the trees and thought it must have been the end of a very vibrant sunset. (The smoke from fires can make sunsets more vibrant, cruelly enough.) But when I walked into my bedroom later at 9:30 p.m., I noticed the same brilliant orange bulb was still there, off in the distance. When I got on my tiptoes, I realized there were actually two large bulbs of orange – glowing ominously. Holy. Shit. I said out loud.
The Palisades are on fire and I can see it from my bedroom window in Central Los Angeles. I am sitting here writing this from my couch, terrified of what this same view might look like come tomorrow. It feels melodramatic maybe to be concerned about my own apartment when I’m in the center of the city away from nature, but it feels apocalyptic and it just keeps spreading. I am trying to hope for the best. I am scared for my friends and coworkers on the West side and in the Pasadena area. I know a few friends who had to evacuate but luckily, they appear to be okay.
Earlier this morning and afternoon, we tracked the Santa Ana winds. At a stoplight on my drive home, I noticed how the palm trees on Venice were perpetually bent to the left. We heard the winds shake our windows and saw them blow palm fronds around the streets and we thought that was bad. It was just the beginning.
It’s now almost midnight and none of the friends in LA I’m texting with can seem to get to bed, including me. All glued to the news or Twitter or LA County emergency website updates. Filling each other in on which areas are evacuating and if we think our areas will be safe and for how long. After debating whether or not to pack a bag (just in case), all of us eventually do.
I pack a duffle bag and a backpack with a week’s worth of toiletries and clothes while watching the news coverage of the fires devastating neighborhoods in Palisades, Sylmar, Pasadena – maybe even Sierra Madre, they’re forecasting. They’re saying the winds are so catastrophic (hurricane level) that their 100-mph gusts can carry embers across into other areas. It’s not just contained to brush or trees anymore. The firefighting aircraft can no longer fly in these conditions, so the fires spread and will continue to overnight. I glance out my bedroom window towards the Palisades fire blazing in the distance, but all I see by then is a large dark cloud of orange and gray.
“Apocolypsis” indicates a particularly painful time, one that unfolds when two disparate dynamics occur simultaneously, pulling the psyche in seemingly opposing directions. The first is a lifting of the veil. This means truths that have been kept in the dark are revealed, seen, and unearthed. No matter how relieving it is to witness them come into the light, an element of despair and grief follows. The second dynamic is the regeneration that comes from the wreckage of the revealed truth. The old narrative breaks, and a new story forms. Apocolypsis energy is similar to a forest fire's: devastation for the sake of regeneration.
–Kim Krans, “The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck and Guidebook”
My friend Emily, who I moved next door to last month, texts me that if anything drastic happens tomorrow, she will take the lead on the evacuation plans so that I can “sit back and relax.”
“My gift to you,” she says jokingly.
This is because tomorrow is my birthday. I turn 38.
Wednesday, January 8th
The winds died down after midnight… did they have mercy on us?
– from my journal around 1 a.m., January 8, 2025
I slept fitfully from 1 a.m. to 5:45 a.m. (No one who stays in LA during this time will sleep well from this point forward for at least a week, if not more. The threat of potential evacuation looms at all hours.)
I wake up to the sight and smell of thick dark gray smoke blowing over my neighborhood for a brief moment as the winds shift.
I meant to go back to bed at some point in the morning, but the news and texts from friends and family (both about my birthday and the fires) keep me up so I eventually give up on going back to bed by 10:30 a.m. I force myself to meditate and do my morning rituals as best I can. I know some friends who had to evacuate and others who are feeling like they will have to soon.
To distract myself, I put a new desk together for my bedroom. Now finally, I can type without a wobbly desk. Shortly after, I notice the warning color codes for the map of Los Angeles changed from pink to no color (no active warning) for my neighborhood and surrounding areas. I look back out my living room window and notice the sky looks clearer… normal, almost.
Around 5 p.m., a sweet and older man knocks on my door with a flower delivery – a lovely pink bouquet from my parents. He enthusiastically wishes me a happy birthday, and I thank him for making the trip over for this small delivery despite everything happening in the city. He tells me he lives in Burbank and lost power last night, but is now staying with friends. I tell him I hope he stays safe and gets his power back, and he says, “God bless you” many times and finally, “Have a wonderful birthday.”
Around 5:30 p.m., the sun sets over Los Angeles and from where I am on my couch, I can’t see smoke anymore and the palm trees aren’t bent as far to the side and the sky turns an ombre gradient of orange into blue.
At exactly 5:37 p.m., Emily texts me: “Have you seen the hills?” I reply: “I’m staring at them right now,” thinking she means the sunset and the clear sky I’m admiring. She then sends me a picture of a fire starting in the Hills and I run to my window and peer out to the right towards Runyon Canyon. The Hollywood Hills are on fire and I am watching it from my living room window, but I don’t have to stand on my tiptoes this time. I watch, stunned and frozen, as the fire spreads down the hill in a rapid line towards the street. Shortly thereafter, the evacuation updates come in for the area. When the zone line reaches Santa Monica Boulevard, a mile and a half away, Emily and I (with the help of friends and family) come up with a hurried plan. We went from not expecting to evacuate to evacuating within a half an hour.
In the hours that follow, the fire in the Hills (named the Sunset Fire) is contained while Emily and I drive to our friend Nia’s hotel room in Anaheim. Nia evacuated early and told us we could crash there if anything happened. We breathe a sigh of relief once we see the freeway exit signs for Anaheim. We were part of the mad rush of people fleeing the city in their cars and it feels amazing to be in a place that’s calm, suburban and normal. In the hotel room, we are delirious and panicky and laughing, but in that way you do when you know you should be having some other kind of reaction, but that reaction hasn’t quite reached your nervous system yet. We sit on the floor of the hotel room and share one slice of vanilla cake with vanilla icing and confetti sprinkles from the nearby Von’s for my birthday.
Thursday, January 9th
We sleep for maybe two hours before Emily and I head to the Orange County airport at 4 a.m. I am on my way to stay with my family in northern California and Emily is headed to a trip out of state a few days early. As I sit in the airport half-awake before the sun rises, I realize this could all be for nothing. What felt like an immediate threat just hours before is now essentially a non-issue for my area. The Sunset Fire was contained quickly, and the surrounding areas had their evacuation notices lifted a few hours later. This becomes a running thought on loop with no end in my mind for days: people actually lost their homes, people actually had to evacuate their neighborhoods, and I evacuated voluntarily at the first feeling of panic. Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes. But somehow I still feel sorry.
On the plane from Orange County to Oakland, I see the Palisades fire from above. From the aerial view, I only see towers of smoke set against the early morning sunlight, devastatingly slow and quiet from up in the air. When I nap on the plane for a few minutes and when I finally sleep later that night, I dream of fires. I dreamt that people camped up on Griffith Park in the trails all night with gallons of water, at the ready.
I have never lived in a city that’s on fire or a city that’s faced widespread devastation like this. I wonder how so many people have done it before. As a newer transplant who has not been physically affected by this tragedy, I question my place in writing about it at all. In the end, I decide that this is just how I am and how I process things. I am a writer and this is how I view the world around me: in images translated to words, in metaphors and similes and flowery, earnest sentences. Out of instinct and out of not knowing what else to do, I started a Google Doc titled “January 7th” and just started writing what was happening in real time and then continued it for the next few days.
The devastation that’s destroyed or is currently destroying so many people’s homes and uprooted their entire lives leaves a mark on me, just like it does every other person living in Los Angeles. Everyone I know here has the same dark cloud hanging over them, the same heaviness and tiredness, no matter what area they’re in or to what degree the fires affected their lives. To deny this is to avoid one’s feelings and to retreat back into an increasingly cynical, indifferent and antisocial society. Out of this unfathomable devastation has already arisen community – generous and uplifting community in a city that everyone always says is far too sprawling and shallow to ever be communal.
At some point on the plane ride, it hits me. I still don’t remember the other cards, but now I remember the card I pulled for January:
“The Mountain.”
Side note: I view readings as very much open to interpretation, to be used for general guidance and not set in stone or to be used as “fortune telling.” But often times, it does surprise me looking back how much the cards can resonate after events have unfolded.
The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck by Kim Krans
Colleen, Thanks for writing so lucidly about your experience with the fire. You were able to do something that many others were not able to do. You are spiritually attuned. Continue to share that gift. Aunt Jackie
Sending so much love, Colleen!! I process things through writing, too, and it's impressive you were able to recognize that in such an intense, scary situation and start documenting it...thanks so much for sharing this <3