The wildfires burning in the West have been all over the news lately, and at the very beginning of September, I visited the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. The week before my trip, my AP Biology class was learning about ecology. It turns out, my teacher told us, that wildfires are salubrious for the beautiful places out West. It keeps the forests healthy, it's normal; it strengthens the rest of the environment when an ecosystem is engulfed by fire. This cycle is good, and it's meant to happen in nature.

We stopped at a turnout to get a closer look at the mountains one day before going on a hike at Jenny Lake, and I was reading a sign that explained the nature of the park and what it does to maintain itself. I really only skimmed the sign, but a phrase struck me: "cycle of fire and regrowth." I stopped reading and looked at everything around me, the mountains and sage brush and blue sky, and I could have cried.

Right now I feel alright. My feet are on solid ground today. I'm writing this when I should be doing homework and I have a ton of makeup work due to going out of town, but I'd say I'm not being scorched by flames at the moment. I have a lot of insight now that I didn't have last year, and I know what to do and who to call on when things get bleary and I feel like a satellite orbiting my own life. I know the feeling I want to give to people, I know I want to bring a spark of something positive to every person I come in contact with. I'm starting to know what I want my life to look like, and I feel for the first time, in a very deep way, where my spirit is anchored. Right now, in the backyard of my life, the trees have verdant leaves and there is crispness to the climate. Something new is going to happen and the air is teasing me with that newness, that slight dip in temperature is touching my skin and making me feel tingly all the way to my feet. I am excited for what lies on the horizon and I feel big things happening in my future, something I never felt back when everything in life seemed to lie dormant, full of everything murky and myopic and nothing hopeful or pivotal. I wanted a change so badly. I wanted to bust out of where I was with violence and venom, and I’d be damned if one more thing so much as tried to hurt me.

Somewhere along in that fight I was having against myself, I got flashes of revelation. I was still swept up in flames, but I didn't see that the fire in my life was in fact the very pivot, the very deciding point in that season that I was grasping for like water to extinguish it all. I wanted so desperately to get over it all and get better, to be able to look back and cackle at every person and event that caused me pain. But resisting the fight, trying to put it out with all the wrong things like contempt and attitude only made it grow. Now I know that all that fire wasn't bad. It needed to grow. The thing I needed most was for that fire to full out rage, and for me to let it. It was a force of nature, it was necessary, and it was good. It still is.

A little less than a week shy of a month ago, I lost someone so deeply important to me, a friend and a mentor and a sister to me on every level except a biological one. For a week after her freak accident, the fire in my life consumed everything it even just barely touched. I didn't know which way was up, and in some moments, I still don't. But I learned so much when so much was consumed, when so much was taken away from me. By letting the flames singe everything in me during that week, I had to open myself up to something that ended up healing me. I had to look squarely in the eyes of death, something that has horrified me for my whole life, and tell it no. I had to refuse to let it diminish the spirit of a person I love with my whole heart. I had to learn to trust the God I believe in, and I had to accept the devastation. I had to look at what I was given in the twelve weeks I got to live out with my sister, my Julia. I had to thank the universe for that time with every fiber of my being. If I didn't dance during that uncertainty and numbness, the flames would have reduced me to ashes. I'm not saying that my feet weren't burned a little. I’d be lying if I told you I still don’t feel pain. But the fire made me better, enriched the soil in which my soul is planted, and helped me grow back stronger.

Going to see the Tetons in Wyoming on that trip with my dad and brothers wasn't easy for me either. For a long time, storms swept me up in my own household that I tried so hard to resist. I harbored pain and regret and bitterness and sadness toward the people that are closest to me, the ones that I share genes and blood and meals with. But I also harbored it in myself, and by pushing my problems to the back of my mind, by trying to contain the mess of the fire, it spilled over in a messier way than it would have if I had just let it be. It ravaged the best of me and left me hollow and brittle and full of ash and the color gray. And I used to think that getting on that plane and flying out to face fear and pain and uncertainty would only fuel the fire. I was petrified to get in the thick of the blaze. But now I know that by letting it burn, by getting inside of it and letting it change me, it has made me better. I know more, I feel more, and I am thankful that I felt so consumed at one point. I faced it, and it has freed me. The cycle of fire and regrowth has done what it will to me for now.

For now. This kind of fire, the kind of pain caused by conflagration is never over and never done. That's why it's called a cycle, that's why it's nature. And as much as we humans like to forget, as much as we like to cover it up with our iPhones and email addresses, we are also a part of nature. And though we can physically put out fires with a hose or extinguisher, we can't put out the flames that take away but also enrich many key parts in our lives. Pain is never fully gone, just like a national park will never not see a wildfire again. The lightning strikes and you can't change it, you just have to let it blaze for a while, like nothing in my power could make Julia better. Or someone will forget to put out their own campfire, they'll make their own mistake, but because it's in your life, it hurts you too. And it's a cycle, a force of the world that strengthens as much as, if not more than it weakens.

Smoke still hangs over my head sometimes, and on some days it’s thicker than others. Some days I miss Julia more than I can put together in any way I know how, not with words or feelings or memories. Some days, the pain echoes in me every moment of the day, deep and punctuated. The problems in my past are still here, although lessened, and sometimes I am still deeply hurt from it all. Hurt isn’t gone and it won’t ever be gone. But there is hope in that truth as well. It helps to be reminded.

I believe that when bad things happen, when an area of life is set ablaze and all we want is to contain it and put it away, we should look to the mountains and forest and trees. We should notice their cycle of fire and regrowth, fire and regrowth. We should accept things and let them change things inside of us, and we should let the fire refine us and make us better than when we went into it. We should look at Yellowstone and remember that something natural and beautiful is happening when a wildfire starts; something good is changing in the soil and atmosphere and the earth is regulating itself. I like to think that when natural disasters are thrown my way, it's God regulating me, showing me that I have to open myself up to something that can and will destroy me so that I see what is truly important, what life is really about, so I may grow and thrive like never before. It’s the cycle of fire and regrowth, regrowth always preceding the fire, regrowth always trumping what we think we've lost.

Each morning during my trip when I looked out my cabin's window, I saw smoke from Idaho fires creating a dreamy haze over the Tetons. When we drove up to Yellowstone, all of the trees that usually remind me of Christmas had been burned up by fire; they looked like huge toothpicks straight out of some bizarre Dr. Seuss book. The dead tree trunks weren't exactly pretty, and the smoke from Idaho obscured the details of the mountains, but for some reason, everything still maintained an air of majesty, a posture of valiant recovery. It is natural. Most of the trees were toothpicks together, and the Tetons still stood impossibly tall. Nothing looked like it had given up, because fires happen in nature, and although it's awful and no one likes to think of a Grizzly cub surrounded by flames, a comeback is being made. Those national parks will be healthy soon. You will be healthier once you face the fire, whatever it may be for you, once you let the flames lick your feet and legs and leave burn marks on your heart, reminding you of where you were and the beauty that has been brought about since. You can still thrive in the fire. In fact, I think it's better if you do. It’s the cycle of fire and regrowth.