on Fire
This text is an exploration of fire as a spiritual substance. Fire is such a strange and beautiful thing , it keeps us warm, it cooks our food, it also is transformed into the power of engines, the power of electricity, it’s light, has given us a place to tell stories and has been transformed to light up our screens; to show us films and power the internet. Fire holds within the power of storytelling, We sit around the campfires and imagine myths and talk of our hopes, our memories, our dreams.
When we talk around a fire, we make sense of the world often looking up into the stars. We open a place for a heart centered dialogue amongst humans. Fire is really at the crossroads between life and death. For something to burn. There needs to be something that is dry and no longer has life within it to be consumed.
In Critical path by Buckminster Fuller He writes about fire: Every child is born with comprehensive interests, asking the most comprehensively logical and relevant questions. Pointing to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What is fire?" I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log. The Earth revolves and the trees revolve as the radiation from the Sun's flame reaches the revolving planet Earth. By photosynthesis the green buds and leaves of the tree convert that Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules, which form into the bio-cells of the green, outer, cambium layer of the tree. The tree is a tetrahedron that makes a cone as it revolves. The tree's three tetrahedral roots spread out into the ground to anchor the tree and get water. Each year the new, outer-layer, green-tree cone revolves'ses'tums! and every year the tree grows its new tender-green, bio-cell cone layer just under the bark and over the accumulating cones of previous years. Each ring of the many rings of the saw-cut log is one year's Sun-energy impoundment. So the fire is the many-years-of-Sun-flame-winding now unwinding from the tree. When the log fire pop-sparks, it is letting go a very sunny day long ago, and doing so in a hurry." Conventionally educated grown-ups rarely know how to answer such questions. They're all too specialized.
Since very few adults know what fire is, simply fire needs three elements. It needs good oxygenation, so it needs oxygen and air flow. It needs an ignition. Spark needs something that generates that spark and it needs a fuel. Now sometimes getting the spark is difficult. Our ancestral humans had to rely on Flintstones but in modern society we have cheap access to plastic lighters. At the same time, we have to contemplate what the fuel sources are and how it's being used. When we ask about the life of these fuel sources, the wood, the gas, the petroleum we have to contemplate that we are transforming their stored memories and taking them into the earth’s atmosphere. The stories that these fuel source hold is being burned up. For example to stand in contemplation of what it means to burn fossil fuels.
Fire is something that we think we can control. But really, when we really contemplate the environmental crisis, we realize it's a crisis of fire, where we have lost control of its force and has run wild as people are unconscious of its impact.
We need to rebuild our relationship with fire and remember that it is a spiritual substance that gives the illusion of control. But this is egoic desire when we step outside of ego and stand in relationship and communion with fire and ask what ecosistemically it means to hold fire. Ultimately, we are holding the power of our star which holds in itself the power of our galaxy, so as we are enlightened to the secrets of the universe we also need to bear in mind that this cannot be at the cost of the existence of the more than human world.
What puts fire out is water, or to devoid it of air. To some respect it is the emotional capability to feel for our relationships and to stamp out the controlling nature of mind and reason. We can hold this force in balance in the dance between the world of water that holds the memories of everything that is dear to life on our precious planet and the fire, teaching us the secrets of the stars and the cosmos. So, the dance between fire and water is sacred dance we must honor
I believe that the more people understand the spiritual nature of fire, it’s beauty and the balance we must hold to honor our relationship to it, will give us a set of tools to develop as humanity moves forward in solving the crisis that is surpassing our planetary boundaries.
