Justine Huxley writes about experiencing a Fire Vigil with Angharad Wynne as part of our recent Land Stewards retreat in collaboration with Animate Earth, and how it led to an experience of how our ancestors were embedded in a wild world where everything was sacred and alive.
“Human beings have sat around fires for a very, very long time. Perhaps as long as a million years,” Angharad tells us. “By connecting with the fire, you can make a connection with the ancestors”. Besides these words, she gives us very few instructions for the vigil - just to tend the flames, keep the fire alight for an hour, one by one through the night. I sign up for the 4am shift as I normally wake at that time to meditate and pray for the Earth. The fireplace is small and made of stone, located in a large, cavernous room on the ground floor of the Mill House. The sound of the mill race is a loud, constant rush of water on the far side of the walls at the other end of the hall. The windows open on to the dark of the moonless night, trees forming indistinct shapes in the gloom. I can just make out the majestic willow tree I noticed earlier today, and the tumbling river on the other side of the bridge. I hug the woman who held the previous shift as she leaves. The recently adopted feral kitten, Atticus, is stretched out on the rug with a blissful expression on his little black and white face. He rolls over and climbs onto my lap as I kneel down, purring like an engine. His eyes glitter briefly in the red light before closing again as he curls up.
What to do now? I stretch forward and add another log to the blaze from the large pile on my right. And watch the flames dance, thinking about some of the more memorable fires I’ve sat with in my lifetime. In a farmers hut high up in the Italian-Swiss Alps. In the Rajastan desert with camels. In a cottage in South Wales at the beginning of a decade-long romance. Learning to make sparks with a metal instrument from a survival kit. In a tiny shepherd's hut in the Carpathian mountains, watching the stars. With friends, lovers, strangers and alone with the night. I watch the flames, as humans always have. Letting my thoughts go where they will, in that familiar fire-induced state of reverie. My mind goes to the ancestors and I visualise the open fire my grandmother had in her council house in Lancashire. Generation by generation, I go backwards, imagining what kinds of people in my genetic line, had sat around what kinds of fires, and in what circumstances. My grasp of history is poor, with enormous gaps. I see Victorian servants, Jacobean fireplaces, Irish monasteries, Scottish halls, medieval alchemists with their burners, Viking encampments and Hebridean crofts in an order that probably makes no sense. Eventually, I see those who first captured fire, the old women of the tribe carrying the embers in clay bundles, before they knew how to use flint.
An owl hoots outside. I lift Atticus up gently and place him back on his rug. I’m grateful he doesn’t protest. I add another fragrant pine log, and re-position myself on the upright chair wrapping myself in a shawl, closing my eyes. A sliver of orange flickering light still penetrates my eyelids. Towards the end of my hour a feeling comes. New. Unexpected. Hard to wrap words around. Something is inside my body, like a taste or a tremor or a memory. Subtle, but unmistakeable. After a while I realise. This is a tiny reflection of how the early humans felt when there was no word for “nature”, no word for “wild” and no word for “spirituality”. It was all just instinctual. It was all just us. It was all just how it was. I’m woven into a world of complete aliveness. I feel my body denser. The darkness of the trees and the moonless night and the owls closer. A flesh-bound, immediate wholeness. A sense of being embedded, without knowledge of the word embedded, without knowledge of the state of wholeness. I know words will not capture this, but I’m so grateful to have been gifted this taste. I try to lock the experience into my body, not to lose it.
Then the door creaks open and a shadowy figure approaches. Time to hand over my shift. I smile and climb the staircase to my room, slightly shaken. In the morning I meditate again, and feel the same awareness, but multiplied, collective rather than individual. And I notice the absence of something - the place of inner light modern-day-me usually goes to in prayer - reached with a higher consciousness. I notice that place doesn’t exist. How odd! There is nowhere to turn towards. There is only this state of embodied, wild, non-separation.
We gather in silence around the fire before we sing in the dawn, with simple improvised sounding. The harmonised and clashing tones stir my heart. Afterwards I head outside. The lawn and trees are shrouded in mist. The raindrops are making endless intersecting concentric circles on the surface of the river. I put my hood up and stare for a long time. The wood is full of strange shapes, eyes and ears. The tall yew and the coppiced hazel watch me. I hear the cry of a distant seagull. My mind is blank and wordless. There is both belonging and otherness. Then a voice inside me says, “We too are made of this: fire, wildness, memory, wordless worship; Earth, and the smell of our kin. We too, are made of this.”
From a retreat for land stewards, led by Kincentric Leadership in collaboration with Animate Earth, with thanks to Angharad Wynne for the overnight fire vigil.
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