The same thing is true in the Western Mountains I visited two years ago. We walked through an area devastated by fire only a few years previously, one that had thrown local residents into panic. The fire, in fact, had done some damage, but the forest had grown back quickly. It is our nature to panic at fires. Rightly so, perhaps.
Fire is something to be afraid of.
It spreads quickly out of control. But there is one thing we think fire is that it is not. Fire is not permanent. It is not permanent in the life of our forests, and it is not permanent in our spiritual lives, either. Some of our Greek ancestors knew this, as they contemplated the legend of the Phoenix, that great mythological bird which rises to greatness out of ashes.