When we talked about strength yesterday, I realized something about the fire I haven’t really spoken about before, something about my relationship to fire:  I feel a fire within me every day, one that keeps me moving and sometimes it feels like it can burn everything down around me—it feels uncontrollable at times, and I am fully aware of its power.  I feel like most days are an effort to keep the fire under control, keep it safe and contained.  This isn’t out of fear, it’s out of wanting to keep others comfortable with my heat, to make myself palatable so they can get close.  It’s me trying to control it.  The thing with fire is that it doesn’t want to be controlled, it can’t live in a cage as it will absolutely destroy anything that holds it back.  For all of its power, fire also has a few elements of fear: it burns quickly and brightly and the dark fears the light.  Darkness grows in the absence of light and fire in all its wildness doesn’t allow anything to shrink away—it shows the entire truth.  Just like it doesn’t take much to spark it and keep it going, it really doesn’t take much to put it out either.  Miss one key ingredient of the fuel or suffocate it with water or sand/dirt and it will fade away.  It’s a delicate being for something so powerful. 

It’s a complicated energy because for all of those days where it feels like I can burn everything around me, there are other times it feels like burning it all down would refresh the very being of my existence, like burning and destruction of what I know is exactly what I need to do.  See, fire can scorch the Earth, but it also feeds the nutrients back into the ground that will sustain and promote growth for life moving forward.  I’ve been trying to grow on damaged ground for a while and I feel the signs that I’ve only been playing on the edges of what I need to do to ignite the flame that creates the new life.  That spark, the one that I have allowed people to attempt to extinguish time and time again, the one that I have attempted to put out myself, does not go away.  Strength and power have nothing to do with dominion over others, it is about dominion and power over the path we choose to take for ourselves.  Those signs, those feelings aren’t meant to be ignored, the body tells us very clearly what we need, where we need to go.      

We spend so much time (or at least I have spent a lot of time) curating a vision of what we think we are supposed to look like even if we know it isn’t right for us, and that is the very cage for the fire we hold inside of us.  Sometimes we need to let that fire burn and do what is in its nature to bring light to the life we are meant to have or even clear the path for others.  I was afraid of hurting others, being alone in the bright, that the bright was too much, burning myself—and I could feel from others that they were afraid of the fire in me.  They were afraid the anger, the fire, the everything was out of control and too much.  The anger fuels the destruction to make way for the growth needed to sustain our very lives because, also at its core, fire is passion.  Creativity is passion and if we feel that burn inside of us, we are meant to let it ignite.  Life is born from the ash of what we burn down and it takes immense strength to take the match to the cultivated image of what we have grown and who we are.  But I’ve learned it is nothing to fear, it is something to embrace.  Fire is a magical, powerful element and we (I) can learn to harness that energy.  Intent with action makes that a controlled burn without stifling the spark of the dream or the course it is meant to follow.  Stop stifling the power.