Ritualized Nowing

I love a good burn. Fire is a goto element for me. The inside my home variety of burn is a candle. Sometimes a tea-light that burns 4-5 hours. Sometimes a larger jar candle that I can also burn for short periods or extend to 3 consecutive days. The outside my home variety of fire is most often a backyard chiminea. It’s great to sit in the dusk of a day that moves to night. I love to stare into a fire.

I love to sit by a fire for fun in company with others. Beers. Hotdogs. Smores. I also love to sit by, and tend a fire for ritual. Releases and lettings go. Animating of wishes and intentions. It is not at all uncommon for me to create a ritual — write a few things on paper and then take it to the fire. It’s all part of an achemized life to me — welcoming the straw to gold transition that is our human lives of inner connected with outer.

I love the way that I’m hearing of Fire & Water participants going to the fire. This after recent retreat communal tending of an outdoor fire for 48 consecutive hours — that did it’s alchemizing. There’s Nicole Frederickson’s story of Release, bringing old notebooks to the fire. I love her commitment to clarity. There’s another participant’s sharing of burning bills and old papers. Again, in release. These are simple rituals that anyone can do, and that I think of as so much more than ridding of materials. These fire moments are a way of ritualizing now — ritualized nowing — so as to invite even more attentiveness to present moment awareness and present moment vibration.

I love the way that fire, and a good burn, invites my inner being to be in relationship with mystery and mystical. I love the way that fire, a good burn, adds ritual to release. And I love the way that fire, a good burn, invokes a keen sense of right here, right now. How that relationship with fire can invite potency of the moment to guide the way. Without needing to think it all into being.

I love the way that so often when I feel rushed, hurried, worried, trapped, bullied, stressed into the myriad of contemporary life patterns that fire, a good burn, suspends time, opens way to the deeper moments of being with silence and stillness. I love the way that fire marks a moment of profound invitation — ritualized nowing — that then changes who I am in the regular day to day acts of living.