Campfires

Campfires

If there’s a single restorative practice that I had to recommend to you, it would be this, without hesitation. Because sitting around a campfire with your tribe is the original human restorative practice, and it connects us back to the deepest wellspring of our shared humanity. It unites self, others, and nature. With whom do we make a campfire, other than our tribe? Where do we make a campfire, other than in nature? It is elemental—fire. And what do we do around the campfire? We sing, we dance, we make music, we tell stories. We tend to the babies. We stay warm. We watch the flames dancing. This is the origin of the human story, in a universal cultural form. One hundred thousand generations ago (humanity has been here for two million years), at whatever point we began becoming what we now know as human, we began to carry the living spark of the fire with us, from camp to camp (a bright ember wrapped in wet leaves) and when we stopped next, the village was established around the fire. The campfire is the center of the village, the physical location around which the tribe assembles, in a circle. In the primordial dawning of human time, the warmth and the light of the fire became a guardianship against roaming predators. It is part of our origin story.

The sparks rising against the ink-dark night bejeweled with stars, the scree of insects, the sounds of laughter. These are sounds that call us back to our ancestral home, our proper place in the cosmos.