The Medicine of Wildfire // Embracing the Elements

The Medicine of Wildfire

From the Human Perspective

Domesticated fire is the key to our species’ evolution. With it we lit the darkness of the night, cooked our food to maximize nutrient availability, and kept ourselves warm against extreme cold. A domesticated fire speaks a story of warmth, hearth, and is a place we naturally gather for medicine of the heart – stories, cooking, feasting, lovemaking, celebration, dance, music. Domesticated fire is the medicine of security and comfort needed to let a heart unfold over time. Wildfire is a medicine of the heart in a much different way. It is the medicine of sudden growth – it heals the overly sheltered heart, the heart that turns fearfully inward to a degree that creates an inability to love with full, wild, attention. It levels landscapes full of dead and dying matter in order to make way for the new. Its medicine appears as great destruction, and indeed, for many beings, it is. Wildfire leaves a wake of nourished soil and open spaces to give way to new forms that were not able to exist before. As beings who have forgotten how to live with wildfire, we have domesticated ourselves to the point of utter obliviousness in regards to the needs of the land, and thus we are experiencing this medicine in a way that feels forced upon us.

How do we cope with such rampant destruction? I see it bending our backs with weariness, I hear it in voices once full and powerful made small and quiet by uncertainty and fear. The medicine of Wildfire – is this a joke? How can you say such a thing when so much suffering is at hand?

After four straight years of evacuations from West Coast Wildfires, I have become a reluctant and at times resentful student of the Medicine of Wildfire. I remember each burn vividly. The 2017 Santa Rosa Fire, ripping down the hills in the middle of the night. I saw the flames cresting the next ridge over as I fled my home, and those same hills black and drear when I returned 3 weeks later. Close, but not quite. Whew. The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise. Hearing the words “I lost everything” again and again as weary faces trekked through the house I was evacuated in. Seeing the burn line right up the fence of the land I was working. The firefighters saved the farm, just barely. 2019 was just a small fire in Alaska, a mile away as the crow flies. Quickly put out, it was a reprieve from the devastation of the last two years. This year I spent a week evacuated late August from a fire in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and after a brief escape from the smoke, have been outside farming in it ever since. It feels like choking on air sometimes, and I hate it. But where can I go? Now this past week, after several near escapes, the fires have finally caught up with me, and this most recent fire in Santa Rosa has destroyed the closest thing I have to a home. My trailer was there on the East side of Santa Rosa, and now it is gone. I don’t live there now, but it became a repository for all my domestic delights for that elusive day that I would have a real home of my own. My clothes, my dishes, my books. Oh, my precious book collection. Gone. It also held the awkward sentimentals from my past life, the classic items a divorced woman just doesn’t quite know what to do with. My wedding dress. My album of photos from that day. The guest book my loved ones adorned with well wishes. The memories of times passed with people I love dearly but hardly, if ever, speak to anymore. In the wake of painful separation, and the years of transition that have followed, the trailer was a little slice of mine. Now it is gone, a useless pile of charred rubble. I am not alone in my loss, and it is small in comparison to many others. Black craters exist where beautiful homes once stood. People are suddenly cast into homelessness. Others watch the places that mark special moments in their lives disappear, one after the other. What is the purpose of all this loss?

I believe that pain is an opening into greater and deeper love. If we are willing to face the grief, confusion, and anger that follows loss, a poignant and unshakeable richness of raw beauty and personal power await us. The Medicine of Fire is relentless, harsh, devastating, powerful, awe-inspiring, and utterly inescapable.

What, exactly, is devastated? Our sense security. Fire burns away our illusions, our deceptions, our ignorance, our excuses. It destroys all that we gathered, domesticated, and named as necessary. It rages on until we are forced to admit that, actually, very little is necessary. It is still a medicine of the heart, for it swells us up with us gratefulness for the people we love and cherish. It restores our faith in the collective society as we watch strangers help each other, watch people who would normally never allow each other into their emotional depths share intimate moments of tender comfort and connection. It covers us in smoke so we are forced to stop our lives and sit with ourselves -- perhaps for the first time in a very long while.

Fire is life. Fire is the wildness that births Life. Fire is Chaos. The more we repress it, the more it rages. It is the medicine of reckoning. Not as punishment, but as natural process. We see the error of our collective ways. We understand the intricacies of personal loss, including our less than graceful ways of coping with it. We are forced, by nature of Wildfire, to dive into the Underworld of our fears and cross to the other side in order to find a deep well of Life Force within us. We learn to honor our inner fires as they burn raw and fierce, and we experience wild emotions that require space. Why did we make ourselves so small and placid? We engage in treating ourselves tenderly as we deal with the weariness of burnout -- the silence that follows great energetic expenditure. When did we stop being gentle with our precious selves? We must not only grieve our losses, but we must make sense of how we came to value that which was lost in the first place. What did our possessions represent? How can we, then, cease to export our values and personal power into the things around us, and reclaim them within ourselves? What did that person who died mean to us? How can we honor that which we love in another by finding the very same qualities in ourselves and expressing them? How can we not delude ourselves into thinking that somehow, we have “arrived”, and nothing will be uncomfortable anymore? Can we give up the false story that Arrival even exists? Our grief teaches us how to feel. Our sudden escapes teach us how to fight. Our loss teaches us what we truly value. Our anxiety teaches us how to integrate order into chaos. Our fear teaches us to hold our own minds. Our devastation opens us up to receiving love from another. Our displacement teaches us how to be at home, wherever we are.

This is the Medicine of Fire – a chance to see clearly the core of what we truly are shine out, bright and fierce, for it is all we have left. A chance to move forward dedicated to deeply nourishing the tender growth that comes out of the scorched landscapes of the self and the Earth. A chance to acknowledge and honor raw power, to accept it as a part of ourselves, a part of our world, and to fear it no more. A chance to move forward and rebuild without the weight of that which we once were. A chance to allow the land to nourish itself with the ash, to consider things from a perspective other than our own. A chance to engage in the deep and laborious magic of calling ourselves Home.

In Love,

Susan Marie