First fires, or wild fires, follow a regime, comprising the types of fuel being burnt, landscape, weather conditions.

When Humans harnessed fire – creating second fires – they identified two ways in which they could organise regimes: fire fields and fire lines.

Fields were places in which animals and plants could be hunted and harvested.

Lines are the paths fires travel.

Aboriginal people in Australia have used fire as a “farming” tool, benefitting animals, vegetation, and themselves.  A fire would burn out a forest otherwise impenetrable to kangaroos; the kangaroos would flourish on the new shoots which now could emerge through the forest floor; the kangaroos then became food for the fire-farmers.

Not only did these farmers use fire in order to live, they also deeply respected their environment – they still do: ‘Far from an act of violence, the practice is a model of sustainability.’*

We live in a deeply significant period of Human history for our world and all its occupants.  Our emerging futures require us to connect to each other, to our future Self, and to our world – a world we have detached ourselves from.

‘A house can become a little self-enclosed world.  Sheltered there, we learn to forget the wild, magnificent universe in which we live.’**

Some still believe our species can set fire to the world however we wish and there won’t be consequences.  We have built our “little houses,” bubbles in which we declare of the environmental challenges: “It’s not our problem.”

Those who will lead us into the future will not only describe how really things are – our fields of fire.

They will not only lead us along a fire-line from the present into a future (discerning what we need to lose, keep, and create to make the journey).

They will primarily imagine better futures and help us discover creative lines of fire from these futures to the present.^

Humans are seekers of truth, of the way people and things really are.  We know we could not survive, never mind thrive, without truth.  And there is more truth than we know.

If we’re to create the kind of fires which respect and care for the environments we find ourselves in (I’m thinking of all environments, including the natural environments we’ve been thinking about – family, work, friends) then we must continue to search out truth.

Including the truth only our imaginations explore, the truth which does not exist yet but which we can create.

We are makers of fire.

(*From Stephen Pyne’s Fire.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.  Last night, I could hardly sleep because of the ferocity of the wind – inside the wind couldn’t reach me, but I’d left some large flat pieces of furniture outside for disposal and had images of these being caught by the wind and causing all kinds of damage – fortunately, I’d anchored them down well.  Not far away, bridges and rail-lines had been closed by the wind.  The world is wilder than we can often control.)
(^^Extracted from Alex McManus’s triad of leadership in Makers of Fire.)
(The cartoon is not yet complete; feel free to download and include the colours of your imagination.)