The Fire

sparks and embers

Maybe there isn’t that much distance between us and our cave and forest-dwelling ancestors. What is it about a fire? 🔥

If it's going to happen, it starts young and continues for the duration of our lives, the love of a fire that is. But, not just any fire, a fire born of the people and places upon which the flames reflect and dance.

There’s a fire, and there’s a fire. If you know, you know. One can imagine a fire could be thought of us a universal symbol of … I’m not sure, but something important. Something seems unearthly about the way those flames can dance and twist in all their brilliant glory on a dark night, or the dusk as the sun slips behind the trees. Your momma told you not to stare, but stare you do.

I suppose something about our humanness causes us to draw close to the fire on a dark night; it’s as if it holds the power of life itself, comfort maybe, a portal to another world, or our time seems to slow down. You don’t need to say much across the fire; the fire does the talking.

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Fires change.

The fire also changes, like life, as it and we grow old.

When you’re young, and so is the fire, there are starts and stops, a bit of sputtering, but eventually things roar to life, although not without a fair share of smoke and tears in the years. Up and up the sparks go, to who knows where. I’m unsure if the process of starting a fire is the best part or just the simple partaking.

So many fires.

Oh, the number of campfires that have shared the best and worst of life through the years. Makes you wonder if a piece of you, and the others, gets left or trapped in those fires. Since I was a young boy on the limestone banks of the river, fire has been an essential part of life. It gives light, heat, comfort, and attracts all sorts of people and bugs. I’m not sure which is worse.

There are big fires, like the ones in the old oak grove that would light up everything within a hundred-yard radius on the darkest of nights. The heat of your face would burn the skin, assuring you would take the memory of that fire to the grave. Uncles, cousins, siblings, all milling around like some great, strange ritual on the prairie.

Other fires are more intimate.

I’ve been blessed enough to sit across from other glowing faces an innumerable number of times. It never gets old. I’m not sure which one is true. Is it just the appearance of a face in the fire that changes, or does that person change too? I happen to think that the person changes as well.

An outer shell is usually burnt off in front of the fire. Guards are let down, and a person becomes more primal. The words flow like the flames, crackling and going places they normally wouldnt.

The end of the fire always comes, much like life. It hangs on till the bitter end don’t it?

Eventually, the light fades, the wood runs out, the flames slowly and almost imperceptibly die away until all of a sudden you realize the darkness has crept in unnoticed and shoved the fire back into the embers it came from.

You sit there, in silence, inspecting those glowing coals, wondering where time and life went. Eventually, the night and life must be rolled up like a scroll and put away. But the smell stays with us doesn it? In more ways than one.

“Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”