In preparation for our winter carbon party today, Jason wrote the following meditation:
We Kindle this Fire: A Winter Solstice
Meditation
We kindle this fire for gratitude. The wood we have gathered to burn is the
flesh of plants, our partners and providers on this earth. We gratefully acknowledge that we need them
more than they could ever need us. May
the placing of each branch into the flames be an act of thankfulness for the
sustenance we have received by way of their work this year, and a supplication
for the provision of our needs in the year to come. May we use well the energy they have
harvested from the Sun. We kindle this
fire for gratitude.
We kindle this fire for memory. We know that without fire, our species could
never have become what we are. To be
human is to burn wood; to use its power to change things to our advantage. We think of the long history of human life in
this place; all the fires that have burned here. We try to imagine what this place was like in
those ancient times and learn what we can from the little we know of the people
who inhabited this land then. We kindle
this fire for memory.
We kindle this fire for light. The trees and vines that made this wood lean
and climb towards it, and when they succeed in finding an opening to the sky, they
produce a leaf in that place to bask in the Sun’s rays, and take their
nourishment that way. Through the plants
and like the plants, we need light: to fully understand our world our eyes need
to see it reflecting off of our landscapes, and we need it striking our skin to
promote our health. Even in our
languages, light is truth and shadows are ignorance. In this shadow time of year, the light
leaping from this fire will be a comfort.
We kindle this fire for light.
We kindle this fire for warmth. As flames spring from the branches burning
here, we will eagerly hold our palms out to face them like leaves, absorbing a
small fraction of the heat released there.
This world is our home and we know no other, but it can be a cold place,
too. When the summer sunlight has waned,
and we are walking over the chilled and wet or frozen soil of winter, we need a
fire to gather around every so often.
May we, like branches in a fire, each warm the other and, once warmed,
respond with fresh warmth of our own, together producing and becoming something
more than we could have been alone. We
kindle this fire for warmth. 
We kindle this fire for life. As the smoke rises, we will be reminded that
life changes form; it is always being lost and destroyed, it is always being
reborn. The metabolic cycles coursing
between tree roots and these branches were interrupted by disease, or by tools
in our hands. As they laid in the heap
awaiting burning, fungi thrived by invading their interiors with hyphae and
unlocking their storehouse of energy.
Insects chewed their way through bark and wood, feasting and
growing. The thick layer of duff
generated by their activities is a rich haven for the roots of trees and all
the soil creatures. And now, through
burning, a portion of each branch will return to the air as carbon dioxide, and
plants all over the world will take and convert it to sugars and new fibers in
their tissues. The char that is left
will be used to enrich the soil—a stable place to store nutrients and habitat
for soil organisms. We kindle this fire
for life.
We kindle this fire for healing. In these times too many of us are neglecting
our connections to the soil, to the plants, to the Sun. Our willful ignorance has cost us so much;
has been so destructive. We hope that
this one small act of burning a char fire can be a part of a trend of
restoration. We know that humans, like
all life on earth, cannot live without benefitting from the misfortunes of
other creatures, and that no creature has more fully exploited this—has learned
better how to induce harm for its own benefit—than we. We acknowledge that we have gone too
far. And so we are attempting to put our
ingenuity to better use. May we learn to
be attentive to each opportunity as it passes by for the building of health and
the cultivation of vibrant life in our surroundings. May we learn to be agents of good
things. We kindle this fire for healing.
We kindle this fire for our descendants. Throughout their lives trees shed leaves and
branches and root fibers, and exude substances through their living roots to
nourish the soil community for their own benefit and for the benefit of their
offspring. Building on the richness they
inherited, they leave their place richer than they found it. We too live by the gifts of our ancestors to
us; gifts of resources and knowledge, skill and values that were a response to
their time and place. We have adapted
these for our time in this place, and we know our descendants must do the same,
accepting the gifts we pass to them and adding their own. With this fire we mark our desire to leave to
them a world that supports their thriving at least as well as it has ours, and
our willingness to work to make it so.
We kindle this fire for our descendants.
For gratitude, for memory, for light, for warmth, for
life, for healing, for our descendants, here and now, we kindle this fire.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We welcome the last day of fall tomorrow and the start of a new season the following day. It was good to spend this day with friends, young and old... We head to bed with that good, tired feeling!
No comments:
Post a Comment