13 Fires and Juneteenth

Not Turning Away: A Juneteenth Dharma Teaching for 13 Fires

Juneteenth marks a truth that took two and a half years to travel — freedom was declared on Jan 1, 1863, but not spoken aloud in Texas until June 19, 1865. That gap between truth and its telling is itself a teaching. Contemplative traditions have many names for the practice of staying present to what is real, even when it is unbearable. Today, on Juneteenth, our play 13 Fires in Longmont, and it carries that same teaching into the open air.

13 Fires, directed by a dear sangha member, takes its title from a 1956 house fire in Indianapolis that killed two toddlers — bringing the toll, as the city's Black newspaper reported then, to thirteen Black children dead from house fires in eighteen months. Landlords had ignored repair requests for weeks. Redlining had sealed off the capital to fix what was broken. The city called the neighborhood "blighted" even as a university and a redevelopment commission moved to take its land. Indiana Avenue — once a Black cultural mecca holding jazz legends, Madam C.J. Walker's empire, churches, and Black-owned everything — was erased not by integration's success, as the comfortable story goes, but by ethnic cleansing dressed as progress.

This is the truth dharma asks us not to turn from: that "progress" has a body count, that grief and erasure live inside our infrastructure, that the wound is structural, not only personal. To look at this directly — without bypassing into easy hope, without freezing into despair — is its own spiritual discipline. It is how we compost harm instead of burying it.

And yet Juneteenth was never only mourning. It is also jubilee. The Avenue's fires didn't extinguish its spirit — the culture that built it still burns in every performer, every audience member, every act of memory we refuse to abandon. Truth-telling and celebration are not opposites; they are the same gesture: the unflinching gaze, and the unbroken dance.

May we keep looking. May we keep celebrating. May the fires that tried to erase us become the fires that keep us warm.