The Medicine of Wildfire: Edition II, 2021

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 fearfully barricades itself 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 some of the worst West Coast Wildfires, loss of property, and in the midst of a 5th year of being within miles of a massive burn - watching, waiting, smoked out... I have become a reluctant and at times resentful student of the Medicine of Wildfire. I remember each burn vividly. I am not alone in this, and my losses are 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? This devastation?

It brings us to determine what, exactly, is being devastated. Our sense of security, for one. Our excuses, for two. It lays bare every space in which we are willing to be a martyr and a victim and make choices to please others for the paltry prize of occasional approval instead of standing up for our precious selves and choosing according to our own needs and values. It shows us all that we cling to out of fear. It destroys our constructed identities and leaves us just as the Earth-bound animals we are.

Fire burns away our illusions, our deceptions, our ignorance, our complacency. 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. It brings us to a point of decision on how we ourselves will move forward once everything extraneous is removed.

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. The Earth is not punishing, imbalanced, or broken in any way. She is greater than our species, and she takes care of her own existence in a constant pursuit of Life, at any cost. Sometimes we are simply in the way, and this year I am learning to honor the forests as their own entity with their own prerogative instead of simply seeing this as a "devastation". To whom? Wildfire is a chance to engage in the deep and laborious magic of calling ourselves Home, and the even deeper magic of realizing that the Earth is our Home and we are not the only ones who live here.