It was the early 1990s, and my parents took us to Yellowstone National Park. Just a few years earlier, in 1988, massive fires had torn through the park—more than a million acres devoured in flame. I didn’t fully grasp the scale of it then, but I remember driving through those miles of charred trees, their trunks like matchsticks blackened at the tip. No leaves. No birds. Just silence and skeletal limbs clawing at the sky.
It didn’t feel dead exactly, but it didn’t feel alive either. It was like driving through memory—through a story the land itself was still trying to remember. I didn’t know the word for awe at that age. But that’s what I felt. Not awe at grandeur or beauty—but awe at survival. At the fact that anything remained at all.
That trip returned to me in a wave when I first saw Lee Krasner’s Charred Landscape. The painting doesn’t depict fire in a literal sense, but it carries fire in its bones. It’s an abstract work—furious, fragmented, refusing order. Black slashes dominate the canvas, layered over smoky whites and earthy browns, like soil after a burn. There is no center to hold the gaze, no sky to suggest calm. It’s the wreckage of something, not the moment of destruction but the stubborn, unflinching after. And that, I think, is what drew me in.
Krasner painted Charred Landscape in 1960, four years after the death of her husband, Jackson Pollock. Their relationship had been both electrifying and ruinous. He was a genius, yes—but a chaotic one. He drank heavily, raged violently, and left a trail of emotional wreckage behind him. He died driving drunk, with another woman beside him. When the art world mourned Pollock, they mythologized the tragedy. But for Krasner, grief was not myth. It was house keys and empty rooms. It was silence. And, eventually, a blank canvas.
She once said, “I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock.” But it is in this after that her voice grows fullest. Charred Landscape doesn’t beg for interpretation. It demands presence. It’s not about Pollock, exactly. It’s about what’s left when the fire has passed, and a woman finds herself standing in the soot, brush in hand, still breathing.
It wasn’t until my own life caught fire that I began to truly understand this kind of painting. My divorce wasn’t sudden, like a crash. It was slow—cracking foundation, a quiet undoing, the kind of unraveling you don’t even realize is happening until you’re left staring at the floor wondering what just collapsed. And in the stillness that followed, I felt many things: grief, yes—but also something that surprised me.
Relief.
Not because the marriage had meant nothing, but because its weight had become unbearable. Because I had been disappearing beneath it. And when it was gone, something inside me could breathe again. It was disorienting to feel loss and lightness at the same time. How do you mourn someone and also feel free from them? How do you hold sadness and clarity in the same hand?
Therapists call this ambiguous grief—a kind of mourning that doesn’t fit into neat stages or clean closure. According to Dr. Pauline Boss, “It is not about resolution. It is about learning to live with the tension of loss and presence.” That tension hums through Krasner’s canvas. She wasn’t painting sorrow or tribute. She was composting.
That’s where Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching has been so meaningful to me. In his essay Roses and Garbage, he writes: “If you are a good organic gardener, you see that it is possible to transform the garbage into roses. You do not throw away your garbage.” At first, that line puzzled me. Why would I want to keep the garbage? Why would I want to carry the rot, the failure?
But then I saw it differently. He wasn’t saying to treasure the pain. He was saying: don’t waste it. Feed it back into the soil of your life. Let it break down. Let it nourish something. Even grief, even betrayal, even loneliness—these are the compost that beauty grows from. The rose exists because the garbage does.
And so I began to create again. Small things, at first. A sketch. A journal entry. A poem scratched in the margins of my planner. I started tending my roses—not just as decoration, but as ritual. I saw them not just as flowers, but as evidence. Proof that something fragrant could grow from what was once thorny and bitter. Not in spite of the fire, but because of it.
Art therapy calls this externalization—the act of moving the internal world into the external one. “The canvas becomes a container,” writes art therapist Cathy Malchiodi, “a holding space for the feelings we cannot name.” That’s what Charred Landscape is. A container. A vessel. Not for closure, but for transformation. Krasner didn’t wait for her grief to be tidy. She painted through it—angrily, beautifully, honestly.
And now, so do I. Not with the same mastery, perhaps, but with the same impulse. I don’t need it to be good. I just need it to be mine. Because art doesn’t have to be a masterpiece to be medicine.
The last time I returned to Yellowstone, I was older. I drove through those same forests. But they were different now. The blackened trees were still there—leaning and hollow, memory made visible—but around them had sprung up dense green undergrowth, wildflowers, new pine. Not a return to what was, but the arrival of something else. Something born from the fire, not despite it.
And maybe that’s what healing looks like.
Not a restoration.
But a regeneration.
A landscape that remembers what burned.
And grows anyway.