Start a Fire II

If you want to start a fire, it’s fairly simple.  You need dead things.  Dead, dry things.  Lifeless tree limbs.  Dead leafs.  Dried out.  Without life. Withered.  Things that are only good for this one thing: to be thrown into the fire.  Fire consumes what is dead and turns it over to life.

Really.

Wood ash contains potassium, calcium, and magnesium, all essential for plant health.  Life.  Life needs what is readily available in ash.  Fire makes ash.  Rot decays trees naturally, releasing some benefits.  But only after 50-100+ years.  Controlled burns do the same; making all those nutrients available today. 

Almost immediately.  But of course, the big question is: can we really control fire?  There is always the chance that our “controlled” burn becomes uncontrollable.  Watching a fire over-power our human constraints is terrifying.   

Fire, once freed from our controls, burns without quenching.  As long as there is fuel and oxygen, a fire will not stop.  It will keep burning and burning.  Only once it has desolated everything - turned everything to ash and used all the fuel, will it finally, slowly, die out.

In the wake of huge wild fires is such devastation.  Everything is gone.  Turned to ash.  Everything.  What had provided shelter to become our homes, what had given meaning and shaped our values, is returned to its primtive state in the dust.  All is lost.     

But remember: the matter is not destroyed, but changed into a different substance.

In fire, water and carbon dioxide is released into the air.  The once solid substances change into vapor and invisible gases.  The only remains are delicate paper-like ash. 

Things that burn up quickly and easily are seen as just that: things good for the fire.  Things that endure and are purified, outlast the fire.  They exist after the blaze - after the immense heat of the flame.  And this surviving nature is what we call gold.  Pure eternal.    

How do we start this sort of purifying fire?

You can not start a fire with gold.  Or silver.  Or other precious metals.  You need dead things.  Unreconciled things.  Branches that fell off.  That no longer grow.  Kindling for the fragile spark.   Only dead things are good at starting fires.

And dead things may only be good for that purpose, but that does give them a purpose.  So let them dry out.  Let them decay naturally.  Loose their liveliness.  Gain their fire-readiness.  Their chance to be redeemed.  To be burned.  To make fire, dead things are required.

So gather your dead.  The things that didn’t make it.  The cutting room floor scraps.  The closets full of broken dreams, false starts, and unrealized hopes.  Bring it all.  In those fails is the very dross we need to tinder up the very fire you are trying to start.  Don’t give up.

Strike that match.