3:50am March 15, 2014

Also, I was afraid of fire.

I thought that fire meant the kind of constant rage I used to live with.

But my friend says now that the kind of anger problem I have is what happens when fire is misdirected.

I told her how much it helped when she told me that fire is passion, and that my passion for goodness would be my route to connecting with my fire.

And she told me that she’d known I was afraid of fire, and was reading some stuff that made her realize that this was the best way to frame it to make me less afraid.

And it’s not like the fire isn’t there all along. We all have it, it takes different shapes, but none of us are without it. We’re just connected and disconnected to it in various ways, good and bad.

And some of us are afraid of it.

But I’m not sure I’d have survived if I hadn’t stopped being afraid of it. If I hadn’t learned that fire is life, fire is vitality, fire is what courses through your entire body when everything is going right, fire is the sun that gives us life and warmth, we can’t live without it, none of us.

In a redwood forest, fire is what makes the trees burst out of the ground, rocket towards the sky, and make even more of themselves on their own branches to rocket towards the sky with them. Fire is what comes from the sky and gives life to all the plants, which give life to everything that lives from the plants. Beneath the ocean, fire is what comes from beneath the earth through volcanic vents to allow life to flourish in the depths.

We can’t have life without fire.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that I was so happy when I felt, six years ago, as if I’d become abruptly disconnected from what I thought of, back then, as my fire. And if I’d stayed disconnected in that specific, physical way, then it would have eventually killed me. And I had to reconnect with my fire on an emotional and spiritual level at the same time that I was finally receiving treatment for the disease that would have killed me. I don’t know if those two things were connected or not. But they certainly happened at the same time.

My friend says that a lot of people make a mistake when they use the symbolism of earth, water, air, and fire. They treat them as if they are four separate things that just happen to go alongside each other. When in reality, they are more like the length, width, and height of a cube. You can’t talk about them except in connection with each other, because they are really all elements of one thing, and life can’t happen, people can’t happen, without all four.

I didn’t want to identify with air or fire. I wanted to say that I was water and earth, and some other part of me was air and fire, some part of me I didn’t like very much. But in reality, I was never separated. I’d only become convinced, by circumstances too convoluted to describe here, to believe that I was separated in this way.

I’d also been fed a false sense of what air was, what fire was. I thought air was that feeling I got when I tried to do intellectual work that was too hard for me. I thought it was the feeling of always climbing and falling down and climbing and falling down. I thought it was that feeling of being dizzy and losing my bearings and getting lost in the world of words. And I thought fire was endless pain and rage. And I thought that since most people knew me through my words, through my pain, and through my rage, then this false idea people got of me was the same as the air and fire part of me. I didn’t want any part of it.

But air at its best is something you don’t feel at all, because it’s your mind doing what your mind does best, and when your mind is at its best it’s not straining for things out of reach. And fire at its best is passion, vitality, and life. They’re not at all like I imagined them.

And when all four of these things are working the way they intended, and I’m connected to them properly? Then I get a feeling throughout my body that I’ve never felt in my life. Imagine looking at a photograph, and then watching it fade into a high-definition, high-saturation version of itself. Now imagine that as a physical, tactile sensation taking place in every part of your body at once. That’s what it feels like when everything is working and nothing is being screwed up by anything inside or outside of you.

And I was beginning to become less afraid of air, as I realized how much I needed it to recover from delirium. But I’d never have known that wholeness, if I’d stayed afraid of fire too. And I’m not sure I’d have survived, either.