Every Fire is the Same Size

A wise elder of the Seneca tribe once said, "Every fire is the same size it starts".

All of us have that fire within us.  But what makes it grow is so much more varied than simply fuel, heat, and oxygen.

Of course, there are some of us who literally and figuratively "play with matches". I remember being a kid, we'd go to the Oregon coast regularly, where we had a little rental cabin, now an eyesore of a condominium complex. I loved that area, the mysterious forests, the open shore, and those times when the fog rolled in, blurring the edges between safety and peril.  

On one particular trip, the beach was covered with driftwood, left by a storm, cast well up from the tide line, where it had dried out. My brother and I built a little bonfire to roast marshmallows and apparently set (according to Mom) "The entire beach on fire." It didn't get the press that the detonated, dead whale did, but after the fire department left, and the small blaze was put out, I think my matches were taken away.

That fire was always smoldering. Growing up in a small town, I couldn't WAIT to get out, to get away from a future that for most was the pulp and paper mills with life's ultimate goal, a bigger boat in the driveway. That fire lent itself to music, to motion, and eventually, as all budding hearts know, to that first love. But between us was that inevitable veil, woven of sunbeams and shadows, and I instinctively stepped back and away, so as not to catch it ablaze.

The years passed by in a blur, thousands of miles of charted and uncharted skies, bad airline food, and dispatchers who argued with you about whether the flight was safe to make; my one shining moment there, when I said "we're not launching, the thunderstorms are bad. . . look, the control tower just caught fire, we're going home". I then slammed the phone down in his ear, a joyful noise that anyone born in the last 30 years is SO missing out on. 

I have looked at more than one sky over the years, and adjusted my course, seeing something in the portent of the clouds that meant something as strong to me as God would be to a believer, filled with wonder, and more than a little afraid.  For I was just one lonely sinner, and my craft was held together by pre-war engineering, aged metal, and more relays than should be allowed by law.

There are short periods in our young lives that hold no fixed place in memory, but only as the recollection of emotion. We are so focused on the contemplation of something worth rejoicing in or suffering over that we barely notice the body breathing, the instinctive urge to run away, or, less instinctively, to fight the darkness, the shadows, and the silence. Days pass, the feelings fade, we have found that living through all such moments is a high and rare favor, a divine grace we have no true appreciation of until looking back on it many years later.

Those moments of recollection come when least expected, there we are faithful to the illusion of life's stage, waiting for either applause or the final curtain, when it happens. Wandering feet stumble upon the blackened remains of extinct fires, kicking up the pale, dark dust of cold ashes. Sometimes it's someone's words, it may be an old photo, or it may simply be the life that is a play of light and shadow. As Blackfoot Warrior Crowfoot once said, "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset".

In those moments, frames of the past come back, and just as suddenly, leave. The night, filled with the glittering confusion of stars, is stilled by a shadow, sounds cease, forms vanish, and the reality of the universe alone remains. I recall a flight over the Prime Meridian after stopping for fuel in Greenland. The Prime Meridian is the common zero for longitude and time reckoning throughout the globe. The one place where we are all at one point and the moment stands still, an infinite place where, for a second, time and motion are tethered to our aircraft like a careless rope.

 As we crossed over, I synchronized my watch with my copilot’s and attempted to capture that time, to somehow gather it to us. Only then does it hit all we have experienced aloft. Different languages and sights, smells, and sounds; the roar of a turbine engine, as it started with that artistic endeavor of curse words and meditation, the underlying scent of jet fuel, oily and dark, that hung in the mist on an early morning ramp. Yet such thoughts disappeared as the sound of the engines brought us back to our tasks; we're still at the Prime Meridian where there was precision and accord, spoken with the deep anesthetic hush of sameness. What was ahead was unknown, what was behind, we could never reclaim, outside only the glitter of stars pouring their light, ceaseless and proud, as time paused in the brief dark stillness of night.

My wings long since hung up, the fire within me has settled into a gentle, steady warmth, larger than the fire that it started with, but without the heat that can damage beyond what can be reclaimed.  I have traveled much, suffered a little, loved, and fought. I see the world for what it is: a place that contains both darkness and great light, both because it is inhabited by man. But without the darkness, though, we can't recognize the light.

We recently took down the remnants of the ramp built for our rescue dog, Lorelei, to access the motorized elevator my husband built for her to get in and out of our Mission Bungalow. The main portion of the assembly was carefully stored for future senior rescues. But the ramp, hastily treated when we redid it for her few, final days to lessen the incline, was rotting, and there was no saving it. I could picture her, tail wagging as she walked up it into the enclosed platform that would take her to the top of the steep stairs, and a sob broke from me as I took in that place where she had been so happy.

But I'd not trade that time, including the tears, for any amount of gold. As I write, I smile as I think of other things, a name that wakes up memories, a young woman writing in a journal by firelight, the small bonfire that glints like a jewel, the words scented with the smokey atmosphere of future regrets, the subtle perfume as the wind breathes through the trees, the advanced sentry of the dark forest that stands watch over the open water, She puts the journal down, as a line of surf thunders on what would otherwise be an empty beach, ignored between the hills and the sea.

There is no longer an ocean outside, but a Great Lake, the waters sleeping unseen, unstirring and mute.  As the subtle light from the east blooms in my window this morning, I simply pause and take a breath.  At that moment, my world centers, no thoughts of memories or regrets, just this single sunrise, a blazing act of special creation, disconnected from today and tomorrow. In this timeless moment that is the forerunner of sunrise and thunder, the world stills, but my heart remains a kindled bright spark.