If there’s one thing I’ve always found magical, it’s a fire. Preferably a crackling campfire of medium size in a clearing in the wilderness. A fire has simple pleasures. It gives you light, and a place to sit around and talk, and best of all it provides warmth. But if you look long enough, there’s always more than that.

Sometimes if it’s a quiet night, and I feel particularly in the mood, I’ll just sit in a mostly dark room and watch a candle burn. There’s a certain otherworldliness that comes with a fire. A small flame on a candle can be oddly hypnotizing. I can sit and watch the flame for hours and think of nothing in particular. And it just sways back and forth, not really doing anything in particular either. Fires like that represent a carefree mind. Minding its own business and not doing anything in particular. And sometimes it just intensifies what you’re already thinking of. It can build up happiness, bring out sorrow, or simply keep a calm. A small, flickering flame that know’s what you’re going through, and knows that’s okay.

But my favorite kind of fire is the one I mentioned before. A nice sized fire, burning in the center of a clearing, where you can sit just close enough to feel its warmth, but far enough to appreciate it without smoke in your eyes. With this kind of fire, it does what it’s smaller does, but in a stronger, more intense way. A good fire almost kindles the emotion within you to come out. A good fire can spontaneously start songs or stories, and the fire begins to dance. It can make people think deeply inside themselves and cry, and the fire listens quietly and comforts them. Or it can simply start small talk or just a deep quiet, and the fire just fills the silence.

In quiets like these, I like to think about the fire itself. I listen to its crackling and watch how its flame flicker’s. I’ll look up and see the embers floating up above the fire into the sky and going out. I watch as they glow and then one by one go out. It gets me thinking philosophically. I think that ashes to ashes sounds like a really bleak phrase, until you put fire in between. I see fire as the flame kindled in all life, and it’s interesting to think about people being brought forth from the ashes of the fire, and to at the end of their life return to those ashes again. The force of life never stops.

We all come from the goddess

And to her we shall return

Like a drop of rain

Flowing to the ocean