There’s a place inside me that doesn’t speak in sentences. It speaks in symbols. In weather. In animals that appear at the exact moment I need them. In colors that arrive like messages I didn’t know I was waiting for. I used to think healing meant going back to who I was before the fire. Before the loss. Before the collapse. But I don’t live there anymore. I live in the strange, holy aftermath— where grief doesn’t disappear… it transforms. The Purple Phoenix Collective was born from that realization: that nothing inside us is wasted. Not the shaking hands. Not the rage that had nowhere to go. Not the tenderness that felt too dangerous to hold. Everything becomes material. Everything becomes myth. And maybe healing isn’t becoming “normal” again… Maybe it’s learning how to listen when your pain starts speaking in metaphor So I stay here now. In the in-between. Where the ash still remembers fire… and the fire is learning how to become wings.