When the fire returns

Winter is a time of quiet fire. Flame of the hearth, stove warming soup, candles in the dark. In places with four seasons, winter brings the year's last sighs — the year being a slinking body of time that lives in accordance with its own rhythms. If it’s true that music is the decoration of time, then the change of the seasons — of colours, tastes, textures, shapes — is time as music. Change becomes synonymous with song, expression, and in winter, time’s song attunes to silence; a total end and an absolute beginning. 

Ritual is often a communal appreciation of change and so, in winter, ritual becomes a group-penned love letter to the melodies of silence. For almost all winter rituals, the world calls on fire. Guatemala burns away the Devil in early December. Then, candles are lit for Kwanzaa and for Hanukkah. Solstice heralds the longest night, after which, Buddhist temples burn talismans in January for cleansing and luck. Sadeh comes next, 100 days before spring, when fires are lit to assist the return of the Sun. At last, Lunar New Year arrives, announced by fireworks lit to scare malicious spirits. 

Like time, fire knows how to move in a circle. When a circle begins to move, it expands into a spiral, a looping cycle, moving via expulsion and embrace. No other force transmutes matter so absolutely. Solid turns to ash, liquid turns to air, something turns into nothing, and nothing turns into something new. If earth builds, water flows, and air energises, fire feeds. It is Agni, digestive fire, a metabolic force. It is both the being sustained and the act of eating, both the food and the action that food enables. It is give and take, creation through annihilation, all of which constitute renewal and a radically different reality. 

This alchemy, joyful, mournful, is mirrored in winter. Soil restructures while worms sleep and trees transform their starchy body parts into sweet nourishment. It’s no wonder that, depending on the astrological system, winter is home to the seasons of Scorpio and Capricorn. Scorpio holds grief in its palms (or jaws, or boughs…) creating space for summer’s death to ferment into compost. Capricorn builds on grief, tends to it, and lays the groundwork for the garden of the year ahead. In the Celtic calendar, December into January is the month of the Birch. Shimmering, peeling Birch is often the first to grow back after wildfire. The first to insist on life after death.

In a time of increased wildfire — and in a world that sees fire as something to be controlled, domesticated, or exploited — how can we create the conditions for the return of healthy fire?

As a messenger working between earthly and heavenly realms, transferring joss offerings to ancestors and oblations to Vedic gods, it’s in wildfire that fire turns its attention back to earth to speak against the tyranny of colonial logic. First Nations people have known for millennia that fire is a force that must be respected. In the tropics, where winter is a thing known but not a place felt, fire has appeared as the spirits of volcanoes — as a power that feeds islands and takes countless lives. A fickle God to appease, fire does not operate on a human time scale, nor for a human sense of morality. It does what it wants simply because it lives to want. And so, to create the conditions for healthy fire, we must create the conditions for healthy relations. For healthy want. 

We begin by remembering that fire is a gift that came to us courtesy of divine tricksters, deities, and ordinary animals. Colonial cosmology, predicated on extractivism and the litany of “common sense,” works by disenchanting the world. If something is considered inert or unfeeling it can easily be flattened into an object bought and sold. This goes from everything and anyone, from wood to cattle to human people. Colonialism becomes the wildfire that takes without giving, enlivened by the erasure of provenance and multispecies interdependence. Reenchanting the world, and thus making a place free, might then start with the recognition of the wisdom within myth and the mundane but nonetheless magical worlds of other “species.” 

From IKaggen to Grandmother Spider, Crocodile to Rabbit to Maui, stolen from under the wing of an ostrich, hidden in a stalk of fennel. Myth teaches us that fire is the sacred sharing and that fire is not only venerated destroyer, but divine collaborator. Look at how this echoes within the wisdoms of pyrogenic flowers, like the rabbit orchids and the gymea lilies, who bloom after fire. Or the pyrophilic insects, like the fire beetles, who flock to wildfire sites to lay their eggs in the scorched remains of trees. Smaller still, there are countless microbes, fungal spores, and viral strains who scatter and spread on flamed winds. And then closer to how humans use fire, birds known as “firehawks” carry lit branches from fires to new sites in order to flush out prey — a phenomenon only recently observed by Western scientists but long known by Aborginal peoples. 

So in these first few tender weeks of the Solar New Year, I invite you to think about how balance comes from respect, and how respect comes from interdependence. Like the inseparable nature of the water and fire cycles, or the tessellated structures of fish scales and roof tiles, strong structures require us to honour our connections. Rhythms of capitalism will undoubtedly push us far beyond the rhythms of our bodies, but it’s in the remembrance of this – in the building of connections – that the fire can return. 

炎炎炎炎炎