9/12/10 - Email to Friends after the Fire

Dear Friends,
Our house did burn down in the 4 Mile Canyon Fire.  Thank you all for your tremendous outpouring of love and support.  That so many people are thinking of us is heartwarming and uplifting.  The loss of ordinary material things, even our beautiful home and garden, is small in comparison to knowing so many goodhearted people fill our world.  As very independent people, we are learning the blessing of simply receiving from others.

We need for nothing on a day to day basis.  The response from the Boulder community has been beyond anything we could expect - free food in restaurants, free clothing (stylish too!), discounts on almost everything.  Friends are there when we need them and our insurance agent is a gem (plug for Safeco).  We hope to move into a fully furnished, insurance paid, comfortable house next Tuesday.  It has a small garden and I have had offers of plants and space in other gardens to keep me from missing mine.

There is a lot to do.  We are working on the insurance inventory of everything we owned; I said only last week that we had too much stuff!  This is a great lesson in "involuntary simplicity" - so little of what we own is absolutely essential.  The core values of spiritual practice, family, friends and community stand out starkly when uncluttered from extraneous stuff and unnecessary hassles.  This is the beginning of another strenuous  and challenging life adventure.

We hope to get into the mountains to see what remains of our home next week.  Then we  start the real work.

Please keep sending emails but know that we cannot always respond.  Feel free to forward this to people not on our lists.
With love and gratitude,
Roland Evans

The Missing Years

It is a number of years since I wrote the last post.  Life has moved on and hopefully, I have move on with it. 

We lost our home and all our belongings to the Four Mile Fire in September 2010.  In June 2012, we moved back into a partially finished brand new house.  It is almost perfect: energy-efficient, beautiful to look at and comfortable to live in (http://www.escapehouse.us).

The fire and its aftermath taught me a lot about myself, about what is important and about the process of reconstituting a life.  Most of all I learned a little about the nature of time, how it flows onward regardless of our needs and wishes, how we are every minute closer to our end point in this world.

I will try and share some of those experiences so they are not lost forever in that vast river of time.