“Set Your Life On Fire...”

How I Burned Down My Own Art Barn (Even with the Best of Intentions)

Four years ago this past week, my art barn caught fire and nearly burned to the ground...

The nearly part is important, and I'll get to that.

For four years, whenever people asked what happened, I gave them the answer the fire department and I both settled on at the time: “It was probably too many things plugged into one aging circuit”.

It was a reasonable theory, and it was also wrong.

I’m 99% sure I now know what happened, and I think I’ve known for a while.
The truth is simpler (and sillier) and a quite a bit harder to say out loud and share:

It was ME.

I started the fire. Not on purpose, of course, but it was started with my own two (well-meaning) hands.

Here’s the whole story (finally!)...

The Evidence (In My Defense):

I’ll lay out ALL of the evidence I have, here, because, in my defense, every single decision I made that day seemed so… innocent...

Exhibit A: A beeswax wick ball. Purchased as an eco-friendly and healthier option than ye ole butane lighters. It’s sustainable and the kind of thing I like to buy to be healthier and gentler on the earth, AND it’s supposed to just… be better. (RIGHT?!) I was not burning garbage in a barrel like a common menace.
I thought I was being intentional and smart with my choice of ignition.

Exhibit B: The resins brought back from Sedona. They were beautiful and spiritually enriching, and I’d carried them home SO GENTLY from red-rock country in my carry on. These were the sorts of resins and incense that do not instantly burn but require a SUSTAINED FLAME to release their aromatic gifts.

Exhibit C: My (unmedicated) ADHD brain, hereby named as an un-indicted, unconscious, co-conspirator. It has requested a plea deal, and I’ve granted it, because we are certainly stuck with each other...

Exhibit D: Through absolutely no fault of her own. my mom, arrived home from church (at exactly the the time she typically arrived home); this was the key moment of distraction that pulled me out of the barn, away from the lighting of aromatics, and back into the house.

So, to summarize: There was (VERY likely) a sustainable flame, burning through a ball of fuel (that was quickly and absent-mindedly, sat down on my desk—like a basic Bic… Left behind to burn, uninterrupted), and it was suddenly, also, unsupervised by a painfully, imperfect human + brain that had already shifted gears from its Sunday-morning creations and wandered off to help with lunch.

You can do the math from there (the barn certainly did)…

The Hand-written Banner

This is one thing that still makes me laugh (more and more every year, thankfully).

A year or so (at least) before the fire, I’d hand-lettered a banner on a long scroll of paper and hung it up in the rafters. It was a Rumi quote: Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

I hung it DIRECTLY above what would later be identified by investigators (ME) as the point of origin.

I write creative briefs for a living, and I like to think that I help people say what they mean and mean what they say. HOWEVER, I did not stop to consider that the universe might be a sort of literal-minded junior designer—the kind that doesn’t ask any clarifying, follow-up questions; the kind that reads your hand-lettered strategy doc in the rafters and says “Got it, boss!” and executes the brief. AND on deadline, from deep in the heart of a hot, Texas summer.

The universe (clearly) has a sense of humor.

What Actually Burned…

I think ALL of my joking (yes, finally! THE COMEDY!!) about this personal tragedy only works if the loss underneath it is real… And it was and still is.

The fire did NOT, unfortunately, take the barn to the ground.

The universe is dramatic but (seemingly) not super thorough. My art barn burned JUST enough to erase it. So, instead of a single, cauterizing loss, I was lucky enough to get a longer version of healing and letting go.

It wasn’t just a single terrible day but a year full of them: filled with demolition-based cardio, sweating and sorting through the heart-wrenching remains; trip after trip to the dump with my truck bed and a borrowed trailer behind it, filled.

My studio, a sacred space and making-place, was reduced to a project I dismantled with my own hands, one heavy, ashy load at a time. I suppose, demolition is also a sort of creation.

And that labor was all-consuming. Physically, for SURE. But emotionally and spiritually too; in ways I couldn’t have seen before.

It took away my writing and my voice, for a time.

If you’ve ever wondered about why I didn’t write much in 2022 and 2023, that’s the answer! Nobody’s drafting creative writing essays while shoveling out the remains of their studio. And it took a real bite out of my business, too—during a time when Covid was already taking its own bite.

Some years the process of becoming is just too loud and too physical to narrate (or invoice) in real time.

What Refused to Burn…

But here’s the part I LOVE to share, and it’s the reason this very essay exists.

Some things survived.

Not every thing, of course…

Most of what I hauled off to the dump was really and truly COOKED. It was gone, and I made peace with that, load by load.

But there were some things that were sitting immediately beside other things that burned to dust, and those things simply… Did. NOT. Burn.

Most of my journals. Decades of them. Hand-written notes from my heart; school-assigned doodles; love letters to myself and to others.

Scorched at the edges, smoke-marked, and mostly intact.

My grandmother’s Bible was burned, but not destroyed.

Newspapers my dad saved from the important days of my early life (including the day I was born) were mostly gone, but not entirely.

I don’t fully know what to make of that. Some of it feels like a miracle. Or a message. Or both! Something to be teased and raised from the ashes. Phoenixes of prose and poetry. Tattered treasures found amidst so much loss.

What I DO know is that they survived twice: once through fire, and once through me. Through every discarding pass where I let go of more and kept less. What remains has been curated by flame and by grief, and it feels sacred precisely because it made it through both.

(Full disclosure: right now, those remaining, sacred, survivors live on my mom’s poor, ashy screened-in porch. In what I can only describe as a liminal sorting space where I just… finally… lost steam. And four years later, I am still (literally!) cleaning it up, one page at a time. That’s not a metaphor…. Okay, actually, that IS a metaphor. And it’s a REAL, lingering pain in the butt.)

What the Creative Brief Actually Asked Me For…

Four years out, I can finally read that banner the way the universe apparently did.

Set your life on fire. Done! (PERHAPS, a bit more literally than I’d have scoped it for this project, but still… Okay. It’s done.).

Seek those who fan your flames. That’s the part I’ve spent four years executing and expanding on…

Because here are some of the gifts I received from it all: I’ve rebuilt my practice from scratch. NOT the physical barn, but the creative PRACTICE. Bent Barn stopped being a literal place and became a way of working. I started teaching other designers. I built Wild Creating, a community of creative people who are, literally, the ones who fan my flames. I picked up the guitar I’d deferred for years. And I began assembling twenty-one years of my own writing into the memoir it was always becoming. It’s a project that was born in those scorched journals on the porch. The one they have (apparently) been waiting for.

None of that was the plan. All of it was the brief.

The barn burned down and the name survived. Bent, but still standing. Which is about as on-brand as loss gets around here. (Turns out I build brands that endure, and I’ve stress-tested my own.)

Case Closed (Sentencing Pending)

So, here we are four years later, and here’s the confession in full:

I set the fire.

With a sustainable, spiritually enriched, artisanal flame, in an act of aggressive self-improvement, and directly underneath a hand-lettered prophecy in the heat of a Texas summer.

Here’s the truest thing I can tell you about why I’m (finally!) confessing now, instead of four years ago or just… Never. You can’t forgive yourself if you never take responsibility for your actions—intentional or not. I’ve spent four years learning to laugh at the ridiculous reason for this loss. I’m still learning to forgive myself. I know I meant well. The evidence file is FULL of how well I meant.

Maybe, per usual, the humor is further along than the forgiveness.

I figure, admitting it ALL, out loud, here, in front of y’all, is how the pardon process might FINALLY begin.

I’m doing my time in community service, anyway. Teaching. Building. Writing it all down, as it happens.

Happy Burnt Barn-versary to me. 🔥 Here’s to finally letting go and building on…

P.S. If this essay sounds like your kind of thing: deeper, more expansive personal stories about creativity, identity, and the messy, beautiful process of becoming, that’s what the paid tier of Unfolding is for. It’s where I write and share the stuff I can’t write or share anywhere else.