A Relative from Forever: First Fire of the Season

The season turns, and the hearthfire returns.

Welcoming an elder back into the home. The first fire is also an ancient fire. Perhaps a first deity, our first altar. A relative from forever. Powerful, mysterious, enchanting.

The first flamelets gobble their forest meal, growing into their own wild choreography. Something sparks up inside me. The scent of smoke awakens something older than words.

The morning chill gradually recedes in fire’s gift of warmth. And soon, its low rumble becomes the soundtrack of the season.

I think of all the fires: our digestive fires (our guts cooking other body-forms to nourish us), our emotional fires, communal fires, passionate fires, creative fires. And the cosmic fire (our sibling star fueling the whole shebang)…

And our spiritual fire. I remember a searing line from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

“I love all the things there are, and of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one; and that’s why I go from life to life…”

(From “This Is Where We Live,” in Extravagaria (1958), translated by Alastair Reid)

May we remember to tend what tends us. To feed what feeds us. To offer gratitude before asking for warmth. To practice Earth Intimacies with the beings and elements who make our lives possible.

To participate in that great

ceremony of dirt and deep time
continuously giving birth

(From Becoming Beautiful Barbarians)

Even a hearthfire is a reunion of ancient kin: Earth’s wood as meal; Air lending breath; Fire tapdancing transformation; Water escaping from the logs in a hiss; the whole gathering crackling into song.

Later in Neruda’s poem, a plea: Help us to be more of the earth each day!

Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

Return, return, return.