Feel Thy Fire
“Feel Thy Fire” is part one of a new old story, The Semi-Dispassionate Observer:
A curation of provocative scopes and metaphor to challenge divisive paradigms and promote inner-peace.
Feel Thy Fire
(Waking in the Wakes of COVID19)
This pharmakon cup of political and social drama isn’t easy for any of us to stomach. And for many, suffering is compounded by the sense that our situation may never actually get any better.
Where do our anger and angst come from?
And for what plague is it, are we asking for a cure?
Many are familiar with the arduous plight of the pyrophyte, whose seeds are gifted life only once opened by fire. Though the metaphor may seem apt, simple acceptance finds the adopter ill-prepared for the suffering ahead. Some say it’s difficult to see the forest from the trees. Harder yet is seeing, mutatis mutandis, the fire from the flame. The serotinous cone of Pinus contorta can lay decades in lonely stillness disconnected from its source. Only a thin coat of armour and resin to guard the germ within. The vessel lays obscured but lacks not for potential, poised and ready for the right chemical trigger. Inevitably, The Fire will burn and clear the way, new life will stretch, dig deep, and take its turn to bridge earth and sky.
Hmm, this all sounds too fluffy, cliche, and way too comfortable. There’s too much forward and wishful-thinking, delusions of green being, and an utter dismission of the double-edged hell of sitting around and doing nothing important before roasting to an ashy death (which is all the cone will ever experience after a brief dependence till maturation).
Perhaps the problem with the pinecone metaphor is the lack of respect it affords The Fire. We like to think that hard times make us stronger, that we’ll be tougher next round. Sounds nice right? But the cone doesn’t get to look for a second chance, and the fire doesn’t give one. The cone exerts no mechanical or intellectual leverage in expressing to the fire that it is uncomfortable, that enough-is-enough, or that it is ready to move on or step away as we often do in avoidance, fixing, and killing the problems in our lives. The cone just waits, money in hand, as the fire tallies the bill: The cost, total annihilation of everyone and everything the cone has ever touched or known. The change: seeds on the ground, if lucky.
In the right here and right now of 2020, we bear the cone’s witness to The Fire. The intensity of the blaze is yet to be fully seen — the suffering and pain, the scarcity and shock — they will not be easy or comfortable even for those best situated to survive. The burns and the suffering are real, and the sacrifices made must be honoured in our memory. And regardless of agency, the scars of 2020 will live memorialized in our genes
Let’s take the wider view, this story is not new.
COVID19 isn’t even close to The Fire, rather just one small lick of flame.
The true Fire has been here a long time and we are just one small bit of the currency in play.
The problems of our world are clearly not products of a viral menace when viewed from altered optics. Corruption, greed, and self-serving leadership may be enticing labels to lay upon our proscription; yet even these are choicely named flares. No, the tinder on which The Fire took light are deeper and older still:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Generation by generation, sacrifices are being made in attempts to materialize an ideal peace by individuals governed by fear. Always hoping, each person hoping, that the time will be right, and perhaps the beautiful sacred seed of our democracy will grow. We may wishfully hope our cask of protective layers and idealistic resin is smelling the chemicals of our personal sacrifices so as to open in our time…But is that how this actually works?
In America, how many fires have actually cleared the land and made way for new life? How many examples of actualized ideals of peace and equity really exist?
1000 years from now, the ignorant, costly, and hollowing burns we feel every day of our toil will just be a footnote in some socio-political anthology. Seriously, multi-generational wars for equity and access to resources aren’t new. Couldn’t we just write the future backwards-observers’ footnote now?
“The United States of America, born of colonial rebellion, struggled since conception by an inability of the founding fathers to agree whether the tenets of liberty and equality were actually applicable to all peoples in each others’ regard. This dispute, follied from start, was first penned as “The Great Compromise.” An amazing feat of irony as the their purported novel ideals were sacrificed in their first means and actualized in none of the country’s ends.”
Such a laughable display may not actually receive such a gracious word count.
C’mon, we squandered 70 years of unprecedented economic and technological advantage to the point that when our health care workers needed special-shaped clothes, we instead fly fighter jets over the heads of disenfranchised voters who are lying hungry and dying in the street.
Dying — proclaiming democracy, even as some of the few worthy balloteers chose not — and those who do cast scream silent; strangled by systemic and statistical manipulators, fear driven, towards saving the status quo.
Does the constitution of the united states have the fortitude and wherewithal to not only survive but usher in some promised tree of life? The heads of history are snickering no. Considering this paper was adopted in an already “compromised” state, and now after a few poor decades of social policy and leadership, its governed people are in disorder and division, it’s not looking like we’re even going to make it back into the frying pan. But that’s okay, it’s not wrong, or defeatist, it’s not good or bad. Everything which must go will go. And this story of The Fire and humanities cone is much longer and older than us.
The fire has been burning a long time, longer than our last remembered ancestors can remember. And perhaps some reprieve and solace may come from accepting that it will burn further to the future than we will live.
The more attachment we hold for seeing after-fire trees, the more this life-as-cone is going to hurt.
How much do we know or remember of civilizations, crises, or great tragedies of the past? A relatively small number of us may think we know quite a lot, perhaps some even have beautiful anthologies neatly shelved in conscious minds. But in the cliff-notes of history what do we really know? Countless lives lost are appended to our mental knowings of here or there in that time, conflict, or place. Thankfully though, a living memory penetrating deeper than the mind breathes and pulses in us all. Our genotypical inheritance permeates our daily drives and caries the memories. The real game played out by cone and fire is happening in a place hidden from most of our minds which harbour the emotions of suffering and fear. May we please give pause, consideration, and appreciation to the depths of this deeper memory.
If history is our guide, we and even our children’s children, aren’t going to see the promised land of the greatest externally oriented thinkers, preachers, or prophets of this time or past. We must accept this not as defeatist and not even as cynical or negative. This is a reasonable observational presumption. Even the Code of Ur-Nammu, predating Hammurabi’s Code, which ruled the day 4000+ years ago purported itself a construct of “equity and truth” by which to adjudicate disputes across the land. Yet, justice hinged upon assumptions of gender inequity, the legitimacy of inter-generational slavery, and even legislated upon reproductive rights (Oh how far we’ve come).
In tracing the family tree of humanity, if some true tree of equinanimous justice and unity ultimately lays roots is frankly of no consequence to us as cones. There’s no need to take it personally, and it’s not any of our jobs to add cognitive load or feelings of failure and frustration to ourselves by becoming attached to that which all recorded history of humanity repetitively states as intention yet fails to do.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
~ Reinhold Niebuhr
At a super-macroscopic view, The Fire of eternity which continues to burn the cone holding the seeds of humanities’ promised lands is playing out at a level not often considered by many; yet perhaps, we can extrapolate fractal properties from this awareness to bring the existential flames of our time into better relation.
First, let us name a few of the flames on display in regards to COVID19: anger at others carelessness; politically triggered ideals; heartbreak from loss; fear for future lackings of security, and perhaps even angst from a sense of being unempowered.
Well, go ahead and pick any prophet or person of the present or the past. These feelings we feel are not new, they’re shared by most all and yet there is still some inclination of a promise-land and a vision of how things should and could be.
The existence of this other place in some other time is the fuel that the fire uses to burn us in a way that hurts. And if we think the answer is to keep adding fuel by thinking we can do it, that we can change it, that we can fight that good fight, and that those efforts will ensure it will get better, then the fire will never die. We may idealize ourselves as the hero in The Fire; but if we keep walking around in it with dillusion of making it better, then the pain and suffering will persist for as long as we shall live.
We need to learn from the macro lens and to see and accept the weakness and folly of this pattern in which we trap ourselves. To accept ourselves as yet another falling-short in a long history of trying-yet-failings is not at first comfortable, but it does ease the frustrations of searching for relief from an external environment that is never going to come and for creating an unnecessarily negative self-image. No deeds, or hoping, or planning will ever be enough to feel better if we keep feeding the feeling of being burned inside by resisting our nature and desire for something we create that is other than what is.
Living in this time of active activism, how could any of us dissociate with the outcomes, give up the need to fight, and accept that what is happening is normal or okay?
That’s a loaded question. But perhaps we can take a middle way in which we keep true to what for us feels right, yet disassociate with outcomes by accepting this situation through a larger view of the unfolding play.
We must accept the flame of our here and now as just a small part of a much bigger fire.
To accept and fully know the struggles and feeling of our time as those of the whole human face is perhaps one helpful key in coming to bring a greater sense of peace. By naming the desires we hold close and identifying them as the same as others held throughout history and letting those attachments go, we slowly release the chemical triggers our species’ sacred seed is waiting for.
Unity can only comes when the means match the ends, and peace without comes from peace within.
These words can be put in the context of any prophet and any promised land if applied with an inner looking lens — dig deep and be one with the here and now; peace will unfold when The Fire has had its fill.
Perhaps the plight of the Lodgepole Pine is an apt metaphor after all. In the bigger picture of the elements at play, we don’t have to be attached to the outcome of a process we’re not meant to see through. We can appreciate and respect the grandeur of the greater work and the part we play. And once we see The Fire from the outside looking in, perhaps we can feel the beauty of the flames.
“Feel Thy Fire” is part one of a new old story, The Semi-Dispassionate Observer:
A curation of provocative scopes and metaphor to challenge divisive paradigms and promote inner-peace.
May we all come home, where work is done and all are one
