Dancing in Fire

The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.
-Nikos Kazantzakis

My mother’s first child died in an apartment fire. Mom was 17. The baby boy was less than a year old. Everything was lost, including the family dog. My grandma, mom, and uncle survived.

The fire made the newspaper but was never spoken of again. Maybe because there were too many traumas already. The best anyone could do was live from day to day.

Visions: I was five when the burnt blob first appeared before my eyes, usually when I was awake. Each time it appeared, I was transfixed as I watched the blackened, red-torn, painful shape transform into a super-soft, glowing energy. The last time I saw it was in high school. I remember I was taking a shower.

It wasn’t until later in high school, when I asked Mom about what to do with my desire to have sex with my boyfriend, that she shared her story about having a baby that died in a fire. Consequences?

I’ve never been afraid of fire on the elemental level. If anything, I embrace it. I was ordained on Pentecost, the day in the church year that celebrates the Spirit coming to the people in tongues like flames of fire. We sang the words, “We come from the fire all of us the fire, We come from the fire, turn the world around.”

That being said, that trauma is passed on epigenetically. My life is not just my own. I navigate the waters of fire victims in landscapes beyond ordinary consciousness. The result of the apartment fire left horrific impacts on me and my mother’s descendants. And, trauma is not the only thing that gets passed on. If the burnt blob is a cellular message from my deceased brother, then trauma is not the last word. Something Greater is.

God is not cool water to be drunk for refreshment. God is fire. You must not only walk on this fire, you must dance. And when you have learned to dance on this fire it becomes cool water, but until you learn to dance—my Lord, what struggle, what agony.” —Nikos Kazanzakis

Decades later, when my daughter was young, we walked across the volcanic crust overlaying the lava on the Big Island of Hawaii; it felt familiar and utterly sacred. Everything in me bowed to Goddess Pele.

To honor my mother’s unprocessed grief, I offered a lei to the ocean near Lahaina. One month later, Lahaina burned.

We are in a time of Fire. My nervous system feels the impact of burnout. Mother Earth overheats. And, I call on the soft, glowing energy that emerges no matter what.

Prayers for all fire victims, including creatures and plants, the media, the wilds, the blame throwers, the exhausted families, those helping, and all who forget that Fire is real.

And prayers for all of us who are always recovering from the fires of history. May we keep dancing.

Love, Cynthia