The desert teaches you what you can carry, and what you have to leave behind. Took me years to realize that applied off the sand too. The flood takes more than it seems at first. Months later, you're still finding things that were washed away, things you didn't even know you needed until they were gone. But you also find space, clean and empty, for roots to go deeper than before. The forest fire doesn't just burn the undergrowth. It bakes the soil hard. It takes years for anything new to push through that crust, and even then, it's never quite the same forest. You learn to love the scrub brush that survives, the way it bends in the wind without breaking.