There is a full moon tonight, and with the fires still raging near Los Angeles, it hangs above the sky behind a veil of amber, glowing eerily against an inky blue sky. The sky is always strange in Santa Monica when fires are wreaking havoc nearby — it feels thicker and heavier, as if the smoke was pressing down on the clouds — and the streets of my neighborhood always get quiet. This part of Los Angeles settles down and grows still, perhaps in order to balance out the chaos happening close by. We are in no danger here, but can see giant plumes of smoke in the distance that look like an erupting volcano.

I moved to southern California after finishing graduate school at the University of Georgia, and whenever I told someone that’s where I was headed, I always received the same response: “Watch out for earthquakes!” Seems as though anyone who does not live in the Golden State has the impression that the earth rattles on a weekly basis around here, but I have lived on the south coast for more than fifteen years and felt just over a handful of small jolts. It is peculiar experience, absolutely, but — knock on wood — I have yet to experience a seismic shift large enough to make me run under a table. The idea of an earthquake still feels distant to me; I know I am more likely to feel one than my friend Melissa in North Carolina, but it isn’t something I think much about (until I write that big fat check for our earthquake insurance, then I’m thinking of it plenty, as the high premiums are the result of past devastation.)

The biggest disasters I have seen as a California resident have not come as the result of tectonic plates moving and rumbling. The worst damage I’ve witnessed has occurred when the devastatingly perfect storm of Santa Ana winds, Indian summer heat and human beings swirl together. One month it’s a kid playing with matches, another time college students don’t extinguish a campfire, this week it looks like arson. The worst fire in Los Angeles County history, started intentionally, destroying an area my husband and I recently went on a motorcycle ride through. The newly paved roads are destroyed, the café where we ate lunch burned to the ground, the scent of pine trees extinguished by smoke. And the fires continue to rage, not yet 40% contained.

But I also know this — that as eerie as it is to look in the sky and see ash, as horrible as it is to think about all that has been lost — it will grow back. I have driven past enough areas swept away by fires and seen bright green sprouts bursting through soil as black as coal to know it will grow back. And against the charred remains, all the new shoots seem to glow. Emerald greens, stark whites and tall, shiny leaves, as if the land of Oz had been lying dormant underground, and once the fires came through, it could be unearthed.

On any journey that involves loss, there is always room for new growth, as well as the realization that there are some things — in the world and in our own hearts — that cannot be destroyed. The fires now burn, but it will grow back. It will grow back.

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