It takes time for a garden to grow, and it may be years before you taste the first avocado or apple from your tree. Planting a garden or fruit trees requires patience and dedication. Your garden or tree changes slowly from day to day, you may hardly notice. In time it becomes clear how big and strong the branches have become. Birds arrive and life begins to flourish. Patience pays off.

This month we’re reflecting on eight years of Harbin’s growth since the Valley Fire destroyed 95% of our structures including hotel buildings, conference centers and the temple, leaving little behind. In the years since, Harbin Hot Springs and many of the surrounding areas have been steadily rebuilding. Like a garden, rebuilding requires patience, love, and dedication. Progress isn’t always apparent from day to day. Yet when we look back, we’re reminded just how far we’ve come.

Harbin’s original historic retreat was built over generations and rebuilding certainly takes time. As beloved people, animals, and lands experience disasters around the world, it’s a call for each of us to offer our deepest compassion, love, and patience to all beings. Perhaps Harbin’s milestones may offer hope and even a bit of comfort that healing and recovery is possible and can happen over time.

We’ve put together a selection of photos showing some of the milestones we’ve made over the past eight years since the Valley Fire of 2015 destroyed 95% of Harbin’s structures. It’s hard to show in photos the intensive cleanup and repairs to Harbin’s infrastructure that took place on roads, bridges, water lines, electrical and phone lines during the year after the fire. Pictures hardly express the dedicated expertise of so many highly skilled engineers, architects construction teams, and artisans that are making Harbin’s rebuilding possible.

View the Photo Collection Here.