The air is hard to breathe and our fellow countrymen are forced from their homes due to the threat of overwhelming destruction.
The skies are apocalyptic, the sun rising in the West; at other times there's no sign of the danger that lurks just a few miles away: the skies blue, and the trouble briefly forgotten. From my own experience, I can only be describing the fires that rage around us; but I could just as easily be describing a battle ground, save the dead and wounded.
I mean no offence by any of these observations. But as I retorted to one complaining about the smoke, "it's probably good for our souls."
And indeed it is, for all the terrible parts of it and the undeserved harm it does to our fellow citizens; civilization is a precious and precarious thing - how good of nature to show us what the world would be if it really was reduced to little more than an ash heap. And make no mistake, many popular philosophies lead exactly to this.
It is also good for our souls to be put through this trial in preparation for the Centennial of the Armistice that ended the First World War.
Just as all, regardless of belief, are praying for the rains to come and relieve our brave firefighters desperately keeping the flames at bay, so did all pray throughout those four brutal years for the bloody conflict to come to an end. That war took on the guise of a force of nature, swallowing everything it its path, regardless of stature or virtue.
Perhaps I'm being macabre.
But in a world where "reliving the past" is outsourced almost entirely to entertainment, being forced to commit a pilgrimage in our own time and space, no matter how brief, is far more valuable than many are willing to admit, as a true trial ought to be.
We often say "never again," and "lest we forget." But we're living it now: the deep anxiety of constant danger, checking the news for new developments on the front, the prayers offered at every church service, the ever growing number of evacuees and their tales of the unstoppable force that pushed them out, and the ceaseless vigil in all our hearts for those fighting, that they might never falter and be granted eternal strength. It is indeed total war of a certain kind.
We're obliged to continue in our steadfastness and generosity. The weather will turn and the fires abate - unlike the Great War, the main struggle really will be over by Christmas.
We'd do well to dwell on that: even forest fires are no match for the inferno man is capable of creating.
