Into the Fire - Up in Flames

Mess with fire and you end up getting burned

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Fire is one of the most useful, and disastrous, tools that humanity has come across. It is such a powerful force that when Prometheus stole it from the gods, enabling man to grow and thrive in ways that the gods feared, he was eternally punished for it. While the tale of Prometheus is myth, the history of humanity echoes the same story. Discovering fire enabled early man to cook their meat and boil their water, which increased our survival by killing diseases and bacteria. In a way, fire is not unlike the apple from the story of Adam and Eve. Once we got it, our knowledge grew, as did our capacity for evil.

A large portion of depictions of hell imagine it as a fiery landscape. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is predicted to end in fire (but not without first ending in ice). Even the popular video game series, Dark Souls, is obsessed with the Age of Fire, a cycle of life and death and rebirth and undeath perpetuated by an undying flame. The cycle is not unlike the life and death of the mythical phoenix, which cannot be envisioned without its famous fire.

Ending in Ice Would Suffice

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When the people around me are asked, “How are you afraid of dying?”, more often than not, they say drowning. But, as one might imagine from my previous poetry collection, In the Deluge, I have a rather comforting view of water. For me, the most horrible way to die that I can imagine is by fire. It encompasses not only the same threat as drowning—suffocating, albeit by smoke instead of water—but also the complete decimation of your body. Burnt hair, sizzling skin, melting organs, ashen bones. If the fire is hot enough, there might not even be a trace of you left when it’s over.

But what might be even worse, though, is surviving a fire. When my father was in the ICU for 45 days, his room was next to a full-body burn victim’s. I spent many, many days there at my father’s side while the burn victim in the other room screamed every moment he was awake. I could not imagine the pain he was going through. It was a nightmare made manifest; one that that man was living through. His suffering did nothing to dissuade me from my biggest fear. If anything, it intensified it.

And yet, fire is life. Our little blue planet is illuminated by a ball of fire nearly 93 million miles away. It burns at an unfathomably hot 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). The intense heat easily turns iron into a gas. However, without the sun, the Earth would be a cold and barren rock devoid of any life at all.

On a smaller scale, the flames we create nurture our lives as well. When the winter grows too cold, we light fires to keep us warm. We burn coal to make electricity to heat our homes. We create mini, fiery explosions in motors to power our cars and trains and keep our modern lives moving.

For the last ten years or so, I have heated my house with a wood stove. Maintaining a fire in your home is a balancing act of respect and control. It’s like babysitting a toddler who can burn down everything you love if you look away from it for a moment. You can never forget the fire. You can’t make any mistakes or you risk everything you treasure being destroyed. You have to know the way some woods react to the flames, you have to ensure the fire has enough air so it doesn’t blow smoke into the house to suffocate you (but not too much air that it causes a fire to ignite inside the chimney!). You have to be careful of what you have around the stove in case of free-flying sparks. Patience is key, as every time you start a fire or add more wood, you need to wait and make sure that the fire is under control and burning steadily before you walk away.

"A Hint of a Spark" - (C) Grigori Press, K. Surls 2025

Like a moth to the flame

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Having a fire to keep you warm is one of the most satisfying comforts. A very popular party in the Midwest is to “have a bonfire.” Oftentimes, no one intends to cook on the bonfire, aside from maybe some s'mores. The real purpose of the bonfire is to just watch the flames burn together. Like cavemen, we gather around it. I find myself lost in the glowing coals as the fire burns down. Sometimes, I imagine them looking like bright, glowing orange flowers. Those burning flowers are among some of the most beautiful sights I have seen. It’s no wonder that, when I was very young, I reached my hand into a pile of burning coals and ended up with quite a burn.

But sometimes the heat can be pleasant. Passion, yearning, a love burning so bright and so hot as to leave you melting at someone’s feet. A feeling that warms not just your body but your soul. One can imagine a soul on fire, or a heart on fire, and yet not being broiled by the flames—until the heat gets too much, until it turns on us.

I’ve had my fair share of burnings in a metaphorical sense, too. I am curious and trusting by nature, hoping that the world will treat me in the same amicable way I treat it. More often than not, though, I get burned. People I thought I could trust turning against me. People I loved betraying my tender heart. What an apt metaphor it is, being “burned”. The emotional wounds left behind feel as real as physical ones, branding you so that you’ll always remember the pain.

Don’t let the fire go out!

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We ourselves are little flames, stoked by our desires and quenched by our failures. Our internal fires illuminate the path forward, fighting back the darkness around us, fighting back the shadows creeping into us. Keeping that inspiration, motivation, fire, whatever you want to call it, alive can be hard. Everything seems to want to blow out that spark. But you mustn’t let it. Fuel the fire. You are the fire.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is attributed to the Greek philosopher, Plutarch: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled" [On Listening]. Though paraphrased, it encompasses a philosophy I have of my own:  we should always stay curious; we should seek out knowledge to fuel our minds. (I wonder if that is why Amazon chose to name their device that connects millions of minds to millions of books the Kindle?).

There are days I imagine my mind is a fire being kindled by my insatiable thirst for knowledge. Other days, I imagine, in the flames, there is an animated square yellow sponge running around in a panic as everything burns to the ground.

If Eve risked everything to take a bite of the apple, and Prometheus sacrificed himself to share the flames, then maybe these are things we should treat as precious, and hold onto them with all we have.

~Dana Lockhart