On fire

So, I admit I held out on you a bit... when I said that we were going on a family vacation I failed to mention that we were loading four kids and six adults on an international flight to Costa Rica for twelve days. It was fabulous, and there were many many things to contemplate, but I want to share what I learned about fire while I was there.


Our first stop was the Arenal volcano in the northern part of the country. It's amazing. The volcano is active, spouting clouds of vapor every few hours, and occasionally throwing out lava. I never really spend much time thinking about fire, it's not one of my primary elements (I'm a water/earth girl if you were wondering). So I took the opportunity to really think about fire while at the volcano. I wrote a little about it that I wanted to share. It's not earth-shattering, it's all what you would imagine, but this was the first time I really felt it. So here goes...


Fire: I don't spend much time thinking about fire, despite using it in the form of a candle on my altar. I've always thought of it as transformative, of course, but I see it now as a truly creative force. It is active, certainly, and a bit spontaneous, as it seems that there are no hard and fast rules that can hold fire's spirit. Thus there's a danger element there, something that frightens me just a little. Fire can be warm and comforting, soothing, and just as easily, it can burn. In the same way that it can cook food, fire can char and destroy it. On a more physical note, heat drives the circulation of the world's oceans, forces molten rock out of the ground, causes air to move. Fire is about motion, transformation, action, purpose, spontaneity, passion, doing, and pressure. It is masculine, and lends itself to polarity of energies.

Photo credits: I did take the first picture, but not the second. The nighttime picture with lava was part of a CD we got after we did a zipline tour. We did see some lava, but it rained that afternoon cooling it before night, so I never did get a picture.