-Notes from 2025 Wildland Firefighter Mindfulness Retreat

They came because they grieved a loved one, friend, or fellow wildland firefighter lost to accident or suicide. They came because they grieved the loss of love. They came because they grieved lost time with family members, especially growing children and ailing family members, while on assignment. And they grieved for the earth in a thousand ways.

They came from everywhere: Oregon, Idaho, the Southwest, the Midwest, and Alaska--the latter in most notable numbers. The Alaska Fire Service is embracing mindfulness as valuable skills training for their wildland firefighters. In increasing numbers, fire management agencies are paying travel and training expenses for their employees to attend mindfulness retreats that can last a week or more. They are much more than that, incorporating meditation, breathwork, and straight up bold group therapy to armor these young people for their careers ahead.

It is encouraging to see that someone in a position of authority is beginning to believe in this work. This practice will bolster firefighters’ ability to shoulder the increasing stress of suppression, prescribed fire and fuels management working on landscapes that grow more volatile by the day within an atmosphere that grows increasingly turbulent with more heat, lightning and vorticity.

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center (Dec 28 – Jan 3)

Run by the San Francisco Zen Center, Tassajara Hot Springs is at the end of a crazy mountain road leading to a steep, long 3500-foot descent in five miles by dirt road into the bottom of a ravine on the east-facing dry side of the Coast Range of California. On the other side of the Ventana Wilderness the Big Sur Coast hangs precariously above the Pacific Ocean, and in between sits a landscape that has tied wildland firefighters and the Zen Buddhist monks of Tassajara together on fires over the decades.

Shunryū Suzuki Roshi, a Zen master from Japan, founded and opened Tassajara on July 3, 1967. Fires have burned in the dry wildland fuels on the slopes above this juncture of drainages since the beginning of time, yet the valley is so deep and shaded that ancient sycamore trees, hundreds of years old, line the creek bottom, untouched by the many fires that have burned around them over the centuries. Tassajara Creek flows past these sentinels, tumbling into deep pools and coursing over granite stones until it reaches the sulfuric hot springs at the monastery. We would get to know one of these stones better in the week ahead.

The Marble Cone Fire in 1977 was an epic event, still spoken of in hushed tones by the firefighters that were there. It burned 177,866 acres, making it one of the largest wildfires in California at the time, although nowadays it no longer ranks in the top twenty. On that fire 5,700 firefighters cut 160 miles through the steep, brushy ravines. Sue Husari, one of the first female hotshots, fired six miles of that line that is credited with saving Tassajara. She was one of the volunteers at the retreat and was instrumental in originally approaching the San Francisco Zen community, which now has graciously offered the use of their facilities as a gift to the wildland community each year over the past four years. I had known Sue when she was the Western Regional FMO for the National Park Service during my time in Yosemite. She was the first to recommend this retreat to me at a dear friend’s retirement party over a year ago.

The 21st Century has seen fires around Tassajara and around the country that have exploded in size and severity, due in large part to climate change. The Basin Complex grew to 162,818 acres in 2008, burning most of the Ventana Wilderness. State and federal officials spent more than $120 million to fight that fire, making it the most expensive fire in California history up to that point. Cutting off the access to Tassajara, a small group of monks stayed to protect the monastery, inspiring the book Fire Monks. In 2016 my old hotshot crew, the Alpine Hotshots, spent time in this valley while assigned to the Soberanes Fire. They, too, were inspired by the monastery residents, their practice, and the location. Though miles away, the 2016 Soberanes Fire would take the life of a dozer operator and end up being the most expensive wildfire ever fought in the U.S. for reasons exposed by FUSEE. Of course this record has been exceeded in the eight years since Soberanes as suppression costs in the billions of dollars have been incurred on California fires, and we may find losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars once the ashes cool in L.A. This is the climate reality. It will get worse until there are enough recently burned areas that the fires become self-limiting in size. This is nature’s way.

The young people we are sending into the maelstrom are increasingly exposed to the trauma of death and destruction, poor pay, time away from their loved ones, and a fickle public eager to assign blame. The more one owns, usually, the more entitled one feels to protection. In this era that surpasses the Gilded Age in its economic inequality, we see private firefighting crews and equipment hired by insurers offering high-end policies to protect the homes of their wealthy policymakers, while the rest burn. The agencies assigned the responsibility to protect the masses are overwhelmed, understaffed, and filled with people nearly broken by the ordeal. Asked always to be strong, it was a privilege and honor to bear witness to their suffering at this retreat. There was no weakness, just a deep need to be vulnerable and be heard by one’s peers.

The facilitators were trained grief and trauma therapists, some of whom were also ordained Buddhist teachers. They led large and small group work with an openheartedness and kindness that brings tears to my eyes, even now. Most of the students were in their early to mid-career in their twenties and early thirties. I was older, a retiree, who made it out alive, but am no role model. I learned that I limit myself with negative self-talk like that last sentence. In the latter years in my work I was an organizational leader, a fire management officer. With no wife and no children, the young firefighters I worked with were my family. To this day I want to help them, offer them help and guidance, to the point where it may be acting as a distraction from helping and taking care of myself. This is my family. These are my people and I love them all.

As for the river stone, it was a massive 500-lb rock that the monks had selected for placement next to the Suzuki Roshi memorial on a shelf a couple hundred feet in elevation up a couple of switchbacks. This was to be a memorial for Sojun Mel Weitsman, another leader within the San Francisco Zen community that had deep ties to Tassajara. The trail was steep and narrow. If the boulder fell off the trail at any point, it would have been a serious hazard and we would have had a Sisyphus situation on our hands. The rock was strapped to a board, while other longer boards were used as a portable racetrack. Using tow straps wrapped around the rock and a long rope like one you might use in a tug-of-war, a dozen or more firefighters were pulling, some were pushing, some moved the boards ahead to the next pitch. It was a half day of work practice, and it was such a lovely example of what is so special about fire folks. They are task oriented. They love, maybe even crave the belongingness of being part of a team, part of something larger than themselves, and I miss it so much. They are the helpers, and they seek to serve…to serve the public, to serve the earth, to serve the mountains, the streams and the sacred groves. There was plenty of time for soaking in the hot springs, meditation, New Year’s Eve with the resident practitioners in the Zendo ringing in the new year, and an invitation to grieve and feel sorrow, but the work practice left me feeling like I had worked with no better team of people than my time in Yosemite. And if you know me at all, you know what that means to me.

 It wasn’t all work and tears at Tassajara. There were songs around the campfire, there were clumsy breaches of form and silence committed by novices in the zendo that brought smiles, and there were stories. I heard stories all around me about shared experiences on today’s fires, often on the same patches of dirt as yesterday’s fires…the fires of my time, as it was so for the previous generation of firefighters. All tied to the land through their respective dances with one another around the fires of their generation. And today’s fires are becoming bigger and more destructive than anything previously recorded, certainly since we began our error of hubris that all fires can and should be controlled at all times.

As I drove away from Tassajara, I pretty much went back to my old habits. Here again, my instinct is to rattle off a litany of “my bad habits,” but I stopped. Good on me! This is the now of my writing this, and I’m listening to music instead of news. I’m learning something, but Tassajara alone wasn’t enough. I teared up a few times there, mostly in sympathetic response to others’ pain, but a process of self-reflection had been initiated. As if a rusty bolt had been discovered in my heart that needed freeing. Too much effort might have broken the nut and ripped the bolt off. Tassajara was the shot of WD-40 to loosen things, the following week allowed for the gentle removal of the loosened nut with no damage to the bolt.

Great Vow Zen Monastery (Jan 14 – Jan 19)

After the New Year on the brink of an oligarchic takeover of our government was the perfect time to do the 2nd wildland firefighter retreat in a matter of three weeks. It was a mental health checkup that I believe may change my life starting now with a new breath.

The Great Vow Zen Monastery sits on a hill looking across the Columbia River into Washington State across river bottomlands. A beautiful hilly forest land with trails sat behind a repurposed grade school that had a delightful 1970’s architecture and vibe. They had a wood-floored gym, classrooms converted to provide lodging for residents and visitors, the central zendo, cafeteria, and work spaces all connected, and they had marimbas. Many marimbas. There were dozens of different sized hand-built marimbas. The Monastery residents fielded a JV and Varsity Marimba Band in the gym.

The residents of nearby Clatskanie didn’t know what to think of the newcomers when the facility opened in 2002. Since then, the monastery’s marimba band on the back of a flatbed has won so many awards at the local 4th of July Parade that they are deferring the award to others. They won over the locals. Such is the way of openheartedness, it would seem.

Great Vow Zen Monastery was founded in 2002 by the Zen Community of Oregon (ZCO). The monastery's name comes from the "Great Vow" of Jizo Bodhisattva, who vowed to help all suffering beings. Somehow, Jizo’s willingness to endure the flames of hell to rescue suffering children has made Jizo the protecting saint for firefighters. Short in stature but happy in nature, they sprang up like mushrooms in the forest behind the monastery, especially in the famous Jizo Garden, a memorial garden for people who have died. Our group hung a flag there at the somber end of our time there.

We would meet each day in the central visitor area in the “70’s circle” or you could just call it the “container,” if you want to use therapist-speak. It was a sunken, perfectly circular three-tiered depression in the middle of the room that made a little theater-in-the-round with grade school legroom sizing. Like at Tassajara, the intent was to truly bond with others. My difficulty with names was particularly troublesome for me, as I was supposedly a student facilitator during this gig, meeting with the professional facilitation team each evening to review the day, tending especially to anyone needing a higher level of attention and care.

Lee Lesser was the only facilitator at both Tassajara and Great Vow. At each event there were three facilitators, and they were top flight. All of them worked at these retreats for little to nothing because they felt the cause was just and important. Lee studied and taught with Charlotte Selver, an original Esalen pioneer and the founder of Sensory Awareness in the United States. She’s also the co-founder of the nonprofit Veteran’s PATH, which shares mindfulness and meditation practice with returning veterans. In our conversations I heard her expressing feelings about grief for the earth and a passion to do something meaningful as part of the climate struggle. There were a surprising number of participants expressing grief for aspects of the natural world.

I nearly lost it when one young woman from British Columbia, who had praised FUSEE in an earlier session, belted out a movement song that was sung behind the blockade of a B.C. timber sale. It was getting harder to hold back the tears.

Seasons are longer, firefighters must bear witness to more destruction, and aside from the stresses that have always accompanied this work, I sensed something else. It was something visceral, like a deeper sadness for what the future may hold, rather than the ebullience of youthful optimism. Losses will continue to mount in the years ahead. Not just economic losses, but lives lost to line-of-duty deaths, death by diseases of despair, families shattered, and all this is mirrored and magnified in the natural world. The loss of clean water, old growth, habitat fragmentation, and species extinction also induce trauma and grief for many.

President’s Note: FUSEE was a co-sponsor of the Great Vow Event. I want to start by saying how impressed I was with the work of FUSEE staffers, Helena Virga and Emily Kostuch. They both did a terrific job organizing and supporting this event, and their contributions were acknowledged by everyone there.

In addition, I can say that with great pride and hope that we can help sponsor similar events in the future. Rising out of the old growth forest conservation movement of the late 1980’s, FUSEE’s focus early on was promotion of ecological fire management. In other words, we promoted wildland fire policies, mostly on Federal lands, that recruited and preserved old growth, or otherwise benefited fire-adapted landscapes. Today, we are turning more toward the people of wildland fire. Not forgetting the precepts of fire ecology and a commitment to all species, it’s important to reflect on the safety and ethical bits of FUSEE's mission. We have nailed the ecology aspect, including an expose' of the ecological costs of conventional fire suppression, but more recent world events have focused the mind.

FUSEE will never turn its back on its founders’ commitment to doing the right thing for the land, like our recent work with the scuttled National Old-Growth Amendment and ongoing Northwest Forest Plan Amendment. As wildfires have grown, so has FUSEE grown with a larger, more diverse Board of Directors and staff. Today we are ready to stand with all wildland firefighters, especially women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC firefighters, all of which are a part of the FireGeneration Collaborative. Giving these young, diverse voices a boost is also consistent with FUSEE’s pivot toward climate justice and underscoring the connection of climate to larger and deadlier wildfires.

Our organization supports Indigenous fire practitioners in their work as well as the work of all who make it their business to dance with the flames, no matter their employer. This includes wildland firefighter pay and retention issues, particularly for those firefighters that yearn to be land stewards for both public and private land. While a more clear practice may be found when working on ancestral lands, FUSEE supports all place-based kinships involving fire. These may be anything from a deep commitment to an agency mission to the personal rootedness to land and community derived from a few prescribed fire volunteer experiences. It is our position that all of us can find community and connection with the land through fire.

The young people attending these two retreats are the climate heroes of our time, but not because of their mission to protect people’s possessions. It’s through their efforts that we improve air quality and limit the worst of carbon emissions. It is also by their hands that we return good fire to the landscape in the sacred relationship between humans and fire. All of this takes a toll on wildland firefighters and their families, so it is my hope that FUSEE can sponsor more of these non-traditional retreats on mindfulness, dealing with grief and trauma, writing and working with fire in art, and a host of other possibilities. I just want to thank the facilitators and participants of both retreats for letting me sit with them and hear their stories and songs. I was deeply moved.