Fire. The workings, the nature, the qualities, the meaning of fire has been appearing in several disparate aspects of my life of late – in the element of fire in the Celtic spring rituals; in books I’ve been reading – Raynor Winn’s Landlines where she finds the peatlands of Scotland scorched and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing where fire is both threatening and freeing; in the fireflies of summer nights and the firecrackers and fireworks of the 4th of July; even as a clue in a game my family was playing; and most ubiquitous of all – the smoke from distant Canadian wildfires. So persistent and ubiquitous a theme begs pondering. It first appeared in the Rewilding course I’ve been taking this year, as the sacred element of spring in the Celtic wheel of the year. That surprised me. I associate summer, not spring, with fire. But in the Celtic wheel spring is the time of new beginnings, of the sunrise – the element of fire in the sacred direction of east, of the fires of passion and creativity, and the fires of the celebration of Beltane – May Day, as well as fire associated with the Christian commemoration of Pentecost forty days after Easter.
As I was studying the meanings of fire, fires burning in Canada were smothering the Northeast of the US in smoke, with New York City registering as having the most polluted air of any city on earth. As the smoke reached as far south as Washington, D.C., it seemed that for the first time, people in seats of power in the market, the media, and government thought more seriously about climate change. Ecotheologian Mary DeJong asks, what happens when there is too much fire? We are seeing this now. As the earth heats up, fire it seems will become a persistent aspect of spring and summer in the north where it hadn’t rained for weeks.
I’ve thought often of something Janine Benyus wrote in her book, Biomimicry: “For my money, the discovery of fire, as ballyhooed as it was, was vastly overrated. Fire was fine for a while – it kept us warm and cooked our meat. The problem is, we’ve never gone beyond fire. . . . It hasn’t brought us one inch closer to living sustainably. Instead, torching old fuels has led to rising carbon dioxide levels; calving Antarctica icebergs, swelling ocean levels, and the hottest decade on record” (61). Surely we need to find other ways to power our lives that do not involve fire, or we shall burn ourselves into oblivion.
DeJong recalls the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, and for his crime was condemned to eternal torture – bound to a rock where an eagle would daily consume his liver which would grow back each night. She says that his act ignited the spark of human autonomy, the deepest longing of humans – to seek the divine spark, to attempt to become divine. At the end of The Rebel, Albert Camus’s reckoning with the forces that ignited Nazism, Stalinism, and totalitarianism, Camus wrote of “the men of Europe,” “ . . . they deified themselves and their misfortunes began; these gods have had their eyes put out” (305). It seems we have done that with fire – with the burning of ancient plant life – fossil fuels, assuming ourselves gods, as if we could keep burning without thought, without consequence, or without care of the consequences when the gods of profit burn brighter than care for each other and the earth; living in the delusion and the folly of assuming that fire is within our control. But as DeJong notes, fire has a life of its own. It defies boundaries and will consume everything in its path. And so with presumption of divinity, our misfortunes began — our eyes put out, acting as though we ourselves are fire, blindly consuming and destroying everything in our path.
But this, as De Jong notes, is just the shadow side of fire. Fire can also be inviting, welcoming, warming. It is the hearth – the centerpiece of home. In the game we were playing, “Wavelength,” “fire in a fireplace” was the clue given for something midway between ordinary and extraordinary, tending a bit more toward extraordinary. We debated the ordinariness and extraordinariness of fire for some time, for it is a bit of both. In the way we humans light fires for cooking, warmth, and ambience, fire contained within a fireplace is quite an ordinary thing; but fire is also quite extraordinary in the dance of the flames, in the way it transforms the energy contained in the wood into heat and light, in the way it can mesmerize. I think of all the times of sitting around campfires, singing, telling stories, all of us sharing in the glow and warmth. The fire brings us together, gives us a feeling of protection, of harmony, of communion. We no longer feel alone. Just a single candle lit in the dark can produce the same effect. Fire is quite extraordinary in this regard.
When the hearings about the proposed construction of Line 3 in Minnesota began, one of my tasks was regularly to bring wood, food, and supplies to the woman keeping the sacred fire going. The sacred fire -- fire as prayer, as ceremony to prevent the construction of the pipelines that would bring more fossil fuels to be burned from the tar sands of Alberta to the oil refineries in Superior, Wisconsin. Fire as profit for the destruction of the earth; fire as prayer for protection of the earth.
Among the Anishinaabe, the indigenous peoples on whose land I dwell, this is the time of the Seventh Fire. During this time, the light-skinned race will need to choose between two paths. The one path is green and lush; the other black and charred. If we choose the right path, the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and final fire of peace, love, and harmony. What path will we choose? Will we heed Camus’s wisdom when he wrote, “The only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man [sic], to refuse to be a god. . . . the earth remains our first and our last love. . . . It is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies” (306). Will we mature in time?
As the fires continue to rage across North America, I hear commentators say that we must learn to adapt to this being the new normal – develop indoor air purifying systems, learn to live indoors -- as if the only beings affected by these fires are wealthy humans who live off plastic food, filtered water, and purified air. Rather, it seems the lesson of the fires is that if we are to adapt it will need to be to living without fossil fuels, to consuming less, to living simply so that all may live.
During our recent brief time away with our son, his wife, and 3-month-old son in the northern woodlands of Michigan, our days were punctuated by times we were forced inside due to the thickness of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires. The day after the smoke cleared and we were once again able to go outside, as the sun came out and shone on the clear waters, I rocked my grandson in the old hammock by the lake, singing the lines from John Denver’s “Sunshine On My Shoulders” – “If I had a day that I could give you, I’d give to you, a day just like today.” I was teary thinking of his future if we continue on this way. May we learn the lesson of fire and choose the right path -- to live so that every day of the years ahead may be a day with air as clear as that day.
Sources
Benyus, Janine M. 1997. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: William Morrow.
Camus, Albert. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. With a foreword by Sir Herbert Read. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage.
DeJong, Mary. “Wild Spring: Your Seasonal Journey.” Rewilding. Waymarkers.
Gyasi, Yaa. 2016. Homegoing. New York: Vintage.
Winn, Raynor. 2022. Landlines. UK: Penguin Michael Joseph.