The Ineffable Frequencies of Mutual Aid and Ecological Resilience

Mutual Aid as a Love Language for Collective Healing

Sensing vibration as communication in human and ecological systems after a wildfire.

In the tender aftermath of the wildfires that swept through California’s Pasadena, Altadena, and the Pacific Palisades, I wonder… What remains? Beyond ash and memory, beyond the charred skeletons and chimneys of homes, what quiet persistence speaks?

Perhaps it is this: two systems of care, intertwined yet separate, both humming with their own frequencies of resilience. Beneath our feet, the mycorrhizal networks continue their ancient conversations, while around us, kind souls reach toward each other in mutual aid. Both move through landscapes of loss, carrying what is precious: nutrients, resources, hope. From abundance to need.

This sonic meditation traces how vibrations travel through communities in moments of unraveling. How do we attune ourselves to the frequencies of care that persist when all else falls to ash? What might we learn from listening to these overlapping melodies of regeneration?

The Disruption | Wildfire as Frequency

Do you feel the sound? The relentless wail of sirens, the hungry roar of flames devouring memories? The terrible whistle of wind carrying embers to new terrain? These sounds broke into our lives with violent frequency, disrupting everything.

Inside trees in such moments, I learned that something remarkable happens. As the stress of heat builds, tiny air bubbles form and collapse within their vascular systems, creating ultrasonic emissions too high for human ears.

The trees scream, but we cannot hear them.

Yet amid this symphony of loss, today, walking around, citrus trees remain scorched but upright, their fruits suspended like small suns against the almost grayscale world. What harmony allows them to persist when so much else has surrendered? Might their deep mycorrhizal connections (those fungal threads weaving tree to tree beneath the soil) hold some wisdom about resilience that our human networks could echo?

What frequencies persist when all else burns? And how might we learn to

hear them?

Underwater Networks | From Blue to Black

Before the fire, the bodies of water-held sky: blue mirrors reflecting clouds and birds. The casual unhurried passage of days. Now they have transformed into dark collectors of ash, absorbing more, reflecting less. What wisdom is in this transformation?

When trees suffer extreme drought, their acoustic emissions change. The sound of their suffering becomes measurable as water pathways collapse. Likewise, our community’s sonic landscape has transformed, from the gentle ambient sounds of everyday life to the urgent frequencies of crisis and response.

These darkened pools hold our changed reality, yet beneath their surfaces, the essential nature of water remains unchanged. Does this mirror something in ourselves? How our outer circumstances may transform while something essential within continues, perhaps even deepens?

Listen deeply: What happens when reflection becomes absorption? What new depths might be revealed?

The Frequencies Below | Mycorrhizal Communication

Have you ever placed your hand against tree bark and wondered what gossip the trees will spill? Trees speak in languages beyond our hearing. Through intricate fungal networks that connect individual plants across forest ecosystems, they share not only nutrients and water but urgent messages about danger and change.

When a tree experiences the approaching heat of fire, it sends chemical signals through these fungal connections, allowing neighboring trees to prepare their defenses before the flames arrive. Information travels at frequencies that, while inaudible to us, resonate through entire forests.

What might change in us if we could hear the constant conversations beneath our feet? Would we walk differently upon the earth?

Mutual Aid Response | Human Frequency

The Frequencies Between Us: ‘Altadena Not For Sale’: these words started popping up like quiet affirmations throughout our wounded landscape. These signs pulse with a frequency of their own: resistance, yes, but also something more tender as well. They speak of belonging, of a refusal to commodify grief, of community as something sacred above all else.

Like the mycorrhizal fungi extending between root systems, these community signposts create pathways of care, signaling where resources flow, where shelter waits, where hands reach out to steady those who need it most. The hashtag itself, #AltadenaNotForSale, vibrates through digital space, connecting neighbors through invisible waves of electronic communion.

Is it not remarkable how quickly we reach for each other when systems fail? How the human impulse toward mutual aid emerges so naturally as recognition: your well-being and mine are intertwined.
What frequencies of community might be strong enough to resist the extractive signals of disaster capitalism? And how might we amplify them?

Resilient Frequencies | Fruit as Signal

Have you ever stood before a charred landscape and found your eyes drawn to what remains present and bright? These fruits hanging amid devastation transmit on frequencies both visual and symbolic. Their persistence offers a quiet testimony: life continues even here.

Their vibrant color cuts through ash and smoke like a heartbeat repeating: we remain, we remain, we remain. Is there not something palpable of ourselves reflected in this stubborn persistence? How we too hold our essential nature even when surrounded by loss?

These fruits are nourishing on multiple levels, as food certainly, but also as the essence of possibility. Like the chemical signals that trees send through mycorrhizal networks, the fruits communicate across the boundary between despair and hope, between ending and beginning.

When all familiar frequencies seem to fade, what signals might we learn to trust? What persistent messages might guide us toward renewal?

Before/After Landscape | Frequency Shift

The Changed Landscape as Frequency Spectrum

Our community from above, before and after, reveals patterns both lost and enduring. The streets remain, their grid a human frequency etched into the land, while homes appear and disappear like notes in an evolving composition. The mountains stand as they have always stood, their ancient ridges vibrating on timeframes we can barely comprehend.

Between the rapid pulse of human time and the slow resonance of geological time, another rhythm exists:

That of trees and their mycorrhizal networks, operating across decades and centuries. Each system transmits its own frequency of being, creating a complex harmony of resilience and vulnerability, permanence and change.

Have you felt how disorienting it is to stand in a familiar place made suddenly unfamiliar? This cognitive dissonance is itself a frequency: the sound of our mental maps being redrawn. Yet even in this rewiring, certain landmarks remain, certain connections hold.

What frequencies remain constant across changing landscapes? And what wisdom might be found in noticing both what shifts and what persists?

Communication Networks | Speculative Connections

Can Trees Repel Fire?

What if trees know more than we have yet to discover? I dream that trees emit signals specifically to repel fires. What if they communicate in ways both chemical and acoustic? Might the fruit trees of Altadena, with their abundance and distinctive aromatic compounds, create vibrational patterns that somehow influenced their fate?

This invitation to wonder arises from observation: so many trees surviving with fruit intact while structures nearby vanished into ash. Certainly, their mycorrhizal networks contributed to survival, channeling water and nutrients.

Still, I wonder. Just as we witnessed how human mutual aid networks create protective patterns around our vulnerable community, allowing resources, information, and care to flow toward those most in need.

What other frequencies of care might we just be beginning to perceive? And how might attunement to these subtle communications transform our understanding of both forests and communities?

Resonant Networks | Kommunal Praksis

In the stillness after the flames appear to have passed, we stand in continuation. The Eaton Canyon fires revealed parallel systems of resilience vibrating at different frequencies yet sharing common patterns:

The mycorrhizal networks beneath our feet, carrying chemical messages from tree to tree. The ecological persistence of bright fruit against gray ash

The human networks of mutual aid, carrying resources from person to person

Through each of these systems flows a current that might be called love, not in some abstract sense, but in the concrete practice of sustaining life. Whether through root systems or social media systems, through chemical signals or digital signals, these networks embody kommunal praksis: communal practice as frequencies of care moving between individuals to create collective resilience.

Different frequencies, same pattern: connecting, sharing, persisting.

Might we learn to listen to these resonant networks more deeply? To attune ourselves to their subtle harmonies even in times of grief or during relative peace? For it is in the practice of attention: to each other, to the more-than-human world, to the invisible connections between all living things, that we embrace life’s rhythms as they come.

In the supreme quiet after loss, listen closely to the resonant networks that sustain us all. What melodies of renewal do you hear?