Fire as Teacher

Fire as Teacher

You can imagine that ancestrally humans spent a good deal of time staring into the fireplace. Imagine winter, before electric lights, before furnaces. In our bones, we know a good deal of what it is to gather around the fire. From the ancestral hearth at the center of the village, to the fireplace tended in our huts in winter, the human relationship with fire is ancestrally defining of us. And yet, many modern people don't have this intimacy with fire.

You can imagine that, if you were sitting by the fire on a winter's night, or a summer's night, you might find yourself staring into it. You might enter a fugue state, a dream-like state. You might be mesmerized by its patterns. You might ask it a question, or discover it was asking you a question. If it is possible to have a relationship with fire, to experience a kind of kinship with an element, what would happen if you regarded fire as a possible teacher?

What would it whisper or shout at you?

This fire, the inaugural fire at our hearth in Northern California, was built ceremonially on the winter solstice, the longest night/shortest day of the year. It was begun at the precise moment (1:47 pm on the winter solstice) when the earth was geometrically farthest from the sun in its orbit for the year. The fire took about an hour to kindle. At a certain point, when it was in full vibrancy, we took out a camera, and did our best to witness it, in a sort of homage to the way film-maker Nic Askew talks about witnessing another human. Will the fire speak to you? Will you speak to it? Let's find out.