Fuzzy-deep thoughts from the middle of the night hover on the fringe of my memory. I’m sure this has happened to you: you wake up, go over the previous day’s obsessions, you try to recapture the gist of your dreams. Yesterday I was reading a book on wildfires. A few years ago, the Fort McMurray fire in northern Alberta displaced an entire community and burned almost fifteen thousand acres, taking out much of Canada’s boreal forest.
I’ve heard it said, natural disasters are nature’s way of correcting. According to John Vaillant, in his fascinating book Fire Weather, extensive fires that happen in the north every half century or so are a natural occurrence and necessary to rejuvenate the ecosystem. I was admiring how he compares yesterday’s oil industry to the change makers of today — the World Wide Web and technical advancement with AI intelligence. His extended metaphor on “how humans use resources…”, and like fire, “tend to consume whatever is available until it’s gone,” also blew me away. But I digress.
The memory of my late night musings is still out of reach. I suppose I was thinking of fire and creativity and allowing obsessions to burn out before starting fresh. Let them go up in smoke. Use the shapes made by sooty clouds as motivation and make something new. Would this nurture our creative lives?
When we’ve lost inspiration and apathy incinerates us, is it a natural occurrence? Maybe we need to poke through the embers. Maybe we need to gaze into the ashes and find meaning again, like reading tea leaves. We might discover only a wisp of structure in a few sketchy flakes, but enough to build on. And perhaps, like the wildfires of the boreal forest, this is necessary for our own personal ecosystems. And just maybe, if we can do this, it’s a sign that our time on the planet has purpose.
E. Pauline Johnson (10 March 1861 – 7 March 1913) wrote this wonderful poem about fire and beauty. It’s also about grief, a recent experience of mine.
Fire Flowers
by E. Pauline Johnson
And only where the forest fires have sped,
Scorching relentlessly the cool north lands,
A sweet wild flower lifts its purple head,
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed,
It hides the scars with almost human hands.
And only to the heart that knows of grief,
Of desolating fire, of human pain,
There comes some purifying sweet belief,
Some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief.
And life revives, and blossoms once again.
Comments
Thank you for these thoughts, Laurel.