How to Live with Fire and Not Get Burned
I keep seeing fire everywhere. Not actual fire. More exhortations to give myself over to fire as a means of transformation. One piece I came across talked about how prairie seeds need fire—to crack them open so they can get the moisture they need to grow.
Another talked about fire’s cleansing properties, how it clears away the dross and leaves behind gold.
I love fire. Watching a candle dance soothes me in a way little else can.
And I teach hot yoga, where temperatures can soar to 105 degrees. There’s something about my body meeting that challenge, something about pulling the sweat (and who knows what else) up and out of my skin. When I finish, I feel a powerful mix of worn out, proud, renewed.
But to paraphrase Russell Edson, fire is not always a nice guest. All we have to do is watch the news to know the truth of this.
It can be true in our individual lives as well.
I have been burned—as I am sure we all have—by other humans being human.
I’ve also been burned from the inside out with chemo and from the outside in with radiation.
And don’t even get me started about menopause—that capricious spawn of hell that possesses the bodies of women “of a certain age.”
Fire—like so many other things in life—can heal, hurt, transform, consume, create, destroy and so much more.
Which leaves me . . . exhausted. Why can’t anything be easy? One answer is because while we might be fierce and strong, we are also so very small in the scheme of things.
The forces beyond our control are legion.
Another possibility is that we humans make things hard for one another. This is how we end up feeling burned, so it feels safest to hide who we really are, because otherwise it hurts too much. We don our hard shells every damn day just to survive.
But what if we didn’t? What if we chose instead to live into two new words that I discovered this week: pukka and echt?
Pukka means being exactly as appears or as claimed.
Echt means true, genuine.
What if we are who we say we are? What if we are the real deal, the thing that shines, deep and true?
In this age of AI and filters and a 60-billion dollar anti-aging market, what if we become Real in the Velveteen Rabbit sense of the word—worn and frayed not from stress and strain but because we have loved and been loved so deeply, lived so widely, risked so radically?
We could get burned if we choose to live like this, especially because so many voices in the world are clamoring for us to hide in our safe, familiar shells.
But what if it is the very thing that sets us free? Free to be huge, because who dares to make us small? Free to be pukka. Echt. True. Genuine. Real.