Fires Season : Come Reap

Fire season

Fire is fine

Fire is fierce

Complete, divine

Fire is the voice of angels and the wake of demons

Breathe this fire

Burn burn

Burn it all down

Burn it all down

What persists is what shall remain

Holocaust earth

Holocaust this body

Holocaust these angels

But what priests shall remain

What persists shall remain

Fire dance fire dance

Burn it all down

Proof is in the proofing

Throw it in the kiln

Forge again

Forge again

Hold me down

Purge with flame

It worked before

Let’s do it again

Don’t look away

Don’t look away

Le the untested fall away

Let the weakened crumble, or burn

Or rumble into harsh new life

Bring the strife

No more waiting

No more credit

No more escaping

Steel and fire and moon and time it is time it is time

Slay the summer king

Soon time for harvesting

 

 

 

August is the traditional month of fire. Letting go, burning away what you don’t need

August, for many is the traditional time of purging fires. Of high summer sacrifices of self and surrounds, while seeking solutions. Traditionally this would in many pre-industrial societies signify the formal end of summer and the beginning of the harvest.

To me in particular. August has it’s won fiery associations

 30 years ago, this month in an act of tremendous defiance, anger, confusion, desperation, inspiration, gasoline and flame, I put myself in the hospital for a month, my best friend in the Lou Sterrett Correctional Facility and covered over 40% of my body in third degree burns.    I life a life amazingly free of complication from this.  I was lucky. I spent some time at the beginning comatose from shock; at the end I was in physical therapy for two years afterward.  I still bear scars from this – skin grafts were necessary on one arm and both legs; I had many surgeries during and after my hospital stay. I had a Physical therapist who violently ripped my desiccated knee ligaments a year later requiring emergency surgery.

I would not change it for the world.

I learned things from that that I would not have learned any other way.   Fire is a most effective teacher. You never mistake the lesson. Most often you only get the one.   IN my life I have had many such teachers.  I have learned many things the hardest way.   Those of us who go to the forge, again and again, either die, break, or come out of it with a special wisdom.  It may ultimately kill us to express that wisdom, but it must be shared.  

If you’re going to be Prometheus or Lucifer  you may as well steal the fire for humanity, since you’re going to be ripped apart for your trouble, anyway.   If time is a wheel then fire is what welds the ends together, and that fire is the kiln of irretrievable change.  I stand at the close of many circles and the beginning of many new ones.   So too, I’m sure, do many of you.

This fire season, Choose what to keep, and what to cast aside into the fire, choose now – but carefully.

And walk forth unburdened unto an uncertain future where anything is possible

Terrifying? Yes. It is freedom.

 Come Reap