For most of my life, I occasionally pretended toward a Fire Ceremony to sanctify the phenomenon of burning. Like many momentous things considered commonplace, fires were merely the consequence of pocketed match books, different by magnitudes. Becoming a volunteer Firefighter for several years reinforced my energetic hyperopia (the blurriness of close). My father had a trash barrel (stinky hot) and burned brush (woodsy disheveled) when we lived in Hawk’s Hollow. His burly arm panic, trying to smother a fire that the wind suddenly hustled up a hill of silky grass, is a 3D vignette in the library stacks of a Fourth Grader’s akasha. Competing, off-key sirens echoed their rush to the farm after Mom called the Burke volunteers. They quickly quenched the spread of blackness and a few even seemed to be smirking about it. Although told not to play with fire, it’s obvious to every kid, that’s exactly what countless adults truly enjoy doing. Even the farmer firemen.

Attending a Ceremonial Fire is something that few bother blinking at in our society of dominators. Bad asses spit into fire. Way more is occurring in the world, though, than the most anal auditors can ledger. Quantum computers aspire to capture, classify, collate, and control the immensity of life yet are doomed from their initial premise. The crucial mistake is two-fold. One, that everything seen can automatically be named and numbered. Misunderstanding the essential, the second error, cultivating a dispassionate stance, turns cancerous, refusing to consider the possibilities of a world that’s intensely personal.

I understand the necessity of objectivity. I don’t understand why nobody admits its blatant barriers. We fantasize about being a warhorse in canter. Instead, we’ve become jackasses with blinders. Massive elephants with frayed ropes around our ankles, we never think to snap ourselves off of the stake’s anchor. What breaks the baby elephant’s joy flagellates adults. Nobody trumpets long if you train them to shrug.

It is impossible, of course, for a moth to fly out of Flame(h). Except that it does (and did). Moth people symbolize sex and sex symbolizes intimacy. Young men are too eager to get to it. Elders are too lame to accomplish it. It isn’t really about any of that stuff. Just that Fire is alive.