MAKE FIRE

Climate Change Essays (2)

Many of the people I've come to love dearly have been very simple folk.  Deeply thoughtful and hearts full with exuberant glee, they've welcomed me into their immense lives.  I often recall something my Gramma would say when I was little. “Ho’thrah’duh’wah Mericana? Who are these Americans?” she would ask. For such a simple question these words have a way to ask and inquire about so much.  Certainly, more deeply than this translation possibly conveys. However, what is required for understanding is the repetition of this question until a number of meanings can begin to be grasped. That’s why Gramma asked again and again, and over time I’ve come to recognize this form of acknowledgement among my language-linked people.  

We’ve come to recognize that understanding doesn’t come because someone provides an answer.  Understanding requires time.  Time is something everyone has, however, very few ever truly learn how to spend their time so that understanding can be fully comprehended.  A precept I’ve been given is to slow down when I truly want to experience clarity.  Slow down means exactly that.  Take steps carefully, slowly and resist assumptions my thinking mind will make.

A way that I’ve learned to slow down is to make a fire.  Maybe it’s because during most of my early life, I watched gramma’s and grampa’s make early morning fires.  Or maybe it’s because fire is so amazingly fascinating to a little boy.  Over the years, what I now call, “loneliness of the early morning firemaker,” is truly a way, a discipline to come to know the morning.  The morning beginning in darkness and coming alive into day.  What is it like to see how the light breaks upon the world, morning after morning throughout the seasons?

Fire making by itself isn’t a difficult task, once simple steps like make sure to keep your strike anywhere matches dry have been acquired through practice.  Purists will object that unless one learns to make fire by friction using gathered materials or striking special stones together or flint and steel to make sparks to ignite a flame, a person doesn’t really know how to make fire. As true as this might be, the task here is learning to slow down.  Maybe over time or with focused effort a person can gain these other primitive disciplines. 

I enjoy the fact that matches are a man-made modern invention.  Matches are significant accessories for learning to slow down.  Take a careful look at a match and remember: before man invented a way to put fire on the end of a little stick, all people had to learn at least one of the other ways to spark a flame that starts a fire.  (Well maybe the wealthy were always able to pay someone to start their fires?)

Today, almost everyone worldwide has lost this crucial relationship to Fire. Of course, Fire is one of the essential life elements, as well as Air, Water and Earth.  And now, Lost Man wanders in search of an identity.  Is it “a looking for a being-sense,” that the wandering is really all about?  I wonder? I can see how a self-less being quickly begins to act according to its own consciousness, can you?  It’s why my Gramma asked her question, “Ho’thrah’duh’wah Mericana? Who are these Americans?”  She’d learned to recognize a being without self.  

Whenever I hear the prophet-poet, Bob Dylan, sing, “Strike another match, go start anew”, I laugh and wonder who his gramma might be?

Can you see it?  Strike another match?  Every time a new fire is being made in the dark morning, another match is lit and I get to start all over again!

However, Firekeeping is altogether a different pursuit and has more in common with Climate Change, as a resilient action in times of drought. Whoops, have to save that one for another sharing in the slow story.

Credit: Artwork by Jesse Raine Littlebird, courtesy of the artist.