The Gift of Being On Fire
The gift that fire is in my life is immense. Only recently have I begun to truly cherish my fire for the gift that it has always been. My fire has fuelled my immense hunger and curiosity about Life. It has allowed me to go down paths least travelled so that I might discover more of my Self. My fire has fuelled my passion, the depths of my feelings, my compassion for all that lives. It has fuelled my sensuality, my creativity, my expression of mySelf. My fire has always been my greatest ally, masked for the longest time under the judgement-full labels I gave it of anger, rage and outrage.
When I didn't know better, I judged those emotions. I felt they were 'wrong' for being present. I felt I was wrong. In our society, it isn't hard to find ourselves legitimate institutions that support the notion that fire expressing is wrong and must be suppressed, usually through mind and soul numbing drugs. In my life, that proved to be totally fucking useless.
What has become so obvious to me, in this moment, is that my fire is transformational. It is my greatest ally, my gift. It always lets me know if I'm on my right path, for myself. It has always let me know when my soul is hurting; yet instead of listening to it's message, I judged it, I tried to lock it down, to compress it, to compartmentalise it, to manage it, to make it smaller than it was. I tried, in effect, to lie to myself so that I can keep living the destructive conventional life I was living. That life almost killed me.
Today, I stand in such sweet relief knowing, I can be with my fire, fully engulfed by it, fully immersed in it, and it is mine. It is MINE! And I am safe in it's transformational presence. Not only am I no longer afraid of my own fire (power), I rejoice in it, no matter how it presents... and usually it's pretty intense!
When fire responses present in my body, all I have to do is give is space to move, give it air to fuel it so that it may take me in whichever way it must and allow the ecosystem of my being to transform! That's the absolute power of fire -- it is the element of transformation! It takes barren lands and it activates dormant seed and it provides nutrients for the Soil that I AM to embrace more life! It allows the ecosystem to evolve in unpredictable and unknown ways that eventually have the power to create entire old growth forests! It isn't lost on me that the land I choose to call my home in the midst of the Boreal forest has been created by wildfires... And now, the home that I call my body is finally ready to surrender to the transformational power of fire when it presents...
Fire as Metaphor
Fact is, fire moves inside of us just as it moves outside of us. As a metaphor, accepting the transformational power of fire led Indigenous Peoples to consciously use it to transform the land; on the other hand, European settlers denied the fire by suppressing it. The idea being that if we suppress it enough, we can pretend it doesn't exist and therefore cannot burn us. Fighting our fire has increased global temperatures to the point that humanity is taking itself out, literally, by virtue of overheating.
What's happening 'out there' is a mirrored reflection of what's happening 'in here'. First we suppressed our own internal fire, we micromanaged every aspect of our lives, we demonised certain thoughts and behaviours and kept them "in check" through violence and threats. We tried desperately to control:
how we lived (separate from and opposed to nature),
how we behaved (sex is a sin! sensuality is sexuality! don't masturbate but you can rape your wife -- until 1983!),
how we made choices for ourselves (power given to authority to make decisions on our behalf -- thank you, Leviathan!),
how we structured cultures around notions of being separate from God and entirely reliant on power structures external to us.
We controlled who people became, what they enjoyed, how they spend their free time, where they work, what they believe in. We told people they are a dime a dozen -- they don't matter. Simultaneously, we popularised that we are children of God...BUT, not all of us, just the chosen one (after all, there can only be one "right" religion...right?!). We created such massive internal pressures because we were told who we were and who we need to be that we became control freaks to everything external.
So we began violently drilling the earth (our Mother) with massive machines (our egos) to the point where her trembles became roars, and her roars are becoming wildfires that unapologetically burn everything in their way, claiming that which is Hers to begin with. There is no 'saving the Earth'. The earth is Gaia, and Gaia is intentional. In her timeline, humanity is but a mere nano-second. And the instant she realised we have become too steeped in our own stories of compression, we are no longer welcome on her body. Gaia has an ecosystem that thrives on collaboration; it thrives on communities building; it thrives on communication. Unfortunately, this version of the homo-sapiens evolution chose the path that it chose... and Gaia is choosing hers.
Quite frankly, I've come to a point where I don't judge or blame us (though I have my moments of deep intensity!). I get the destructive power of fire, undigested and metabolised, locked-down. I get how people choose habitually because that's all they know how to do. I get that in our timeline, the intergenerational suppression of fire has led to us immersing ourselves in it's destructive powers. Those are the elements of fire we have embraced... (violence, anger, war, control).
And that's what's killing us. Been there, done that, I didn't die. And I didn't die because there was so much more for me to discover about my life!
"Be pushed, or LEAP!"
In the most recent episode of sensing the roaring fire rising within me, I allowed it to flow. I invited it to become as massive as it needs to; to take me places where it need to. By the end of it, I was exhausted. I felt depleted. And by the end of the day, I knew something different about myself. I knew that in this latest clearing of the stagnant in my body, I've created space for new seeds to sprout. These seeds are those of the old-growth forest wisdom that my ancestors carried. They are the seeds of wisdom that I carry beneath the cultural conditioning that I simply cannot predict what they would be... and so my only invitation for myself is to allow what's there to become. There is such massive potential in this space! I can literally feel the clearing, the massive fields of space created within me for the evolution of these deeply rooted seeds to take hold and transform the ecosystem of my entire being! As Mandy Sandbach so beautifully puts it in her blog post, "Where I am headed, has not been discovered until the moment I arrive and this is the mystery of the EDGE."
I am ready.
I have been ready to truly welcome my fire my entire life. And now, here it is... in action. Thank you, Deborah Gleason and Naomi Irons for your invitations to explore my fire in Gaia centric language. That image of the transformation of the ecosystem that comes from wildfire passing through really opened up Space in me to welcome the fire, to immerse in it, to bask in its presence, to invite it in, to allow it to flow, to become it. ...and on the other side of that, I've come to discover, is immense freedom!