peace please!
stoking the right fires
Last week, and for the next few weeks, we are tuning into the elements of the natural world in order to help us cope with (and possibly thrive through) the challenging era we are living in.
Last week we attended to the element of earth. This week, we are working with fire.
To be honest, the world feels extra fiery these days; so I wasn’t looking forward to working with the element of fire. I wasn’t sure there would be any “good” time to call in the essence of fire. It was bringing up a lot of war-energy for me and I wasn’t sure where and when I wanted to guide us into communion with this element.
However, once I started tuning into fire, especially as a transmuter in the guise of sunlight, candle light, warmth and power; I remembered there are conscious, skillful ways to connect with this essential elemental.
Sometimes we need to fight fire with fire. But, maybe not in the way we first think.
I’m about to touch on “politics” now, if you are feeling tender and need to skip, just jump your eyes down to the horses silhouetted in the sun below. If you can handle some deep thoughts, please keep reading; this is the most fiery my public writing ever gets...
As I write this, mid-October 2024, we all know by the way our hearts’ ache, that fire (in weaponized form) is a major component of war. The genocide in Gaza is over a year old. Many more than half of the people who have been killed are women and children. The atrocities of war have been livestreamed and co-opted for profit by corporations and politicians. Every time there is an explosion in Gaza, the whole world pays on the ecological level, a financial level and the spiritual/emotional level. Everyone I know wants the U.S. to enact an arms embargo, get all hostages returned home, be a force for peace and stop the madness. There are also warring hot-zones in Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. No one I know wants more war in the world and yet, lately, there is a hopelessness creeping into even my typically optimistic heart.
If no one wants war, and the world powers keep wars going for their particular benefit - look at the record-shattering profits of companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Gruman, etc. and their connection to your favorite investment group (Blackrock, Vanguard) and politicians - it feels like we’ll never have the power to get what most people want – which is peace.
It really makes a person, even a person who has a lot of privilege like me, wonder how will we ever get the powers that be to follow the will of the people?
The answer to this question cannot be arrived at if we deny ourselves the ability to consciously work with the element of fire and all the power it holds.
Also, here in mid-October 2024, we in the U.S. have an election coming up that asks us to choose between a quick jump into brazen fascism (that is saying the quiet part out loud with Project 2025 - a document straight out of a Margaret Atwood novel), or supporting the current administration who is currently sending money and weapons to far-away places to enact proxy wars while doing obscenely little to protect the rights of women despite its woman presidential nominee.
Additionally, we the people have been unwitting, sitting ducks for the bot-driven political technology/information wars** that have completely destroyed any sense of a shared reality (while consistently profiting technology corporations, nefarious shadowy political entities and media corporations).
Complement that fact with the truth that presidential elections in the U.S. are essentially a puppet show to distract us from the corporate oligarchy, distract us from good we might actually band together to accomplish and capture our attention and terror for corporate profits. Again, how will we ever get the powers that be to serve the common good?
There is no way without tapping into the essence of fire.
Which brings us to the beautiful blue-green planet that gives us everything we know. I know the earth will remain long after humans are gone, but we do seem to have a weird kind of death wish going for our ability to enjoy a planet habitable to life as we know it. Every time a bomb goes off, that hurts the natural systems of earth. Every time we split a people from their ancestral land, the earth pays. Instead of giving them human names (Helene, Milton), every hurricane should be named BP, Exxon, Chevron and Shell; these expensive, catastrophic disasters are caused directly by corporate greed, so we should call them by their right names.
Which brings me to the aspect of the fire element I want to redirect our attention towards… passion.
Right now, it feels like we are jack-o-lanterns, but the candle flame inside us has sputtered and gone out. This is the hopelessness that points us each day towards distraction, dissociation, and despair; even the most imaginative of us unable to picture how to create peace and plenty for all.
We need to stoke our own inner fires right now, so we can do what needs to be done AND… bring warmth and light to those around us.
Which brings me to the great and generous sun. For all the praise I lavish on earth for nourishing us, nothing would grow here without sunlight. For all the praise I give to water for how it cleans us until we are clear, sunlight is a mighty transformer of energy as well. For all the praise I give to air, for metaphorically representing what and how we think, sunshine and sunrises give us the spark of hope that is often necessary to generate new ideas and visions for the future.
Just like all the elements, fire energy can be called on in service of destruction or creation.
There are many ways, big and small, we can connect safely to the element of fire.
Fire allows us to cook a meal for someone.
Fire lets us do candle magic.
Fire inspires our creativity and helps us passionately say what is worth saying.
Fire brings us back to gather around the hearth.
Fire in our belly shows us what we might create next or what we are now willing to stand up for.
Just like last week, when we were focused on earth, maybe even reading the names of some of the fire-themed meditations in the image above will stoke your imagination of your best way into a deeper relationship with the element of fire. Or, maybe inspire you to meditate and come into true connection with the wisdom and power of fire’s elemental energies.
Like I said at the beginning of this post - I was initially concerned about how to weave the element of fire into our consciousness skillfully in this overly-firery era, but then I meditated with the fire element and it said, “Say your piece, use the flame atop your own candle wick to light another, which will light another and so on. Capitalize on fire energy to get done what must be done and say what must be said. Finally, transform all of that work into dedicating the week into one where you stoke the fires to bring warmth, light and transformation to all who you come into contact with - including yourself!”
That’s some very good advice.
And, just like last week, I am not asking you to connect with the element of fire as I have, or endeavor to receive a similar message to the one that came to me. I am asking you to tune into this elemental power and find out how best to wield it for yourself and all that you love in the days and weeks to come.
Stay tuned for next week when we will dip into the elemental consciousness of water.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. Full disclosure for all of us in the U.S. - even though I wish we didn’t still have the electoral college and the two-party system, I do think it is energetically important for the collective to vote (especially on that down-ballot). If anyone cares, I will be voting for Harris, although I disagree with her platform in key areas, in an effort to stave off the Project 2025-ification of America.
"Somehow, the changing of consciousness is deemed to be threatening to the state. Now, why is that? Is the state somehow playing a shell game, that would be exposed, if people were to actually open their eyes? In what way does the expansion of consciousness threaten industrial democracies? I believe we need real answers to this."
- Terence McKenna
“The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy über alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and driving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming."
- Tom Robbins
**“I believe people can be deprogrammed from false ideologies and assumptions — we could see a snowball become an avalanche in the other direction. For this to happen, people must be shown, patiently and step by step, how they got trapped in delusional beliefs. Deep down, nobody wants to be a patsy or a stooge of a malevolent Fascist regime. That won’t feel good about this error in the long term, just as many people in the UK now deeply regret their vote for Brexit.
At this point, it feels a bit like trying to talk suicidal people down from a ledge. But in many cases people finally do decide not to jump. Let’s hope this is the case in our situation.
Most Americans don’t realize they have been subject to an intensive, very skillful campaign of information warfare coming from Russia, with the support of Right Wing billionaires in the US, conducted over the last decade. Russian maestros in psychological tactics call this, “Russian political technology.”
I believe, if many confused, deceived, Trump-tending Americans realize how their worldview was cunningly manipulated using these techniques, they can snap out of the trance. Alas, the Russian attack on the American psyche gets intensified by Right Wing media, including Fox New and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, which employs similar hypnotic and brain-dulling techniques in their repetitive broadcasts. Billions of dollars of “Dark Money” have also been used to attack Democratic candidates in local races, due to the despicable Citizens United decision.
The term “political technology” was coined by Russian political consultants and analysts during the 1990s, in the context of post-Soviet Russia. One of the key figures associated with the development of political technology in Russia is Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin-connected political strategist. Pavlovsky played a central role in shaping the electoral and political tactics that would come to be described under this term.
"Political technology" refers to the systematic use of media manipulation, disinformation, phony grassroots movements, bot armies, and other deceptive tactics to shape political outcomes in ways favorable to Putin and the Kremlin. Pavlovsky and other consultants used these techniques to subvert elections, create diversionary spectacles, and manipulate public opinion. Another significant figure in this field is Vladislav Surkov, often referred to as the "gray cardinal" of the Kremlin, who further developed these tactics into a system of "managed democracy.” Surkov has said: “The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition... it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.”
In This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev tracks Russia’s approach to information warfare since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Political technology seeks to create an ambience where there can be no shared truth or coherence: All information is weaponized. As we will see, this is what the Republicans have done, taking their communication strategy from the Kremlin’s skillful mind control tactics, with a little Goebbels (“the big lie”) thrown in. This is how they got people to lose sight of their real interests (for instance, not wanting deeper tax cuts for the wealthy and an erosion of environmental protections and social services) while becoming increasingly hypnotized and deluded.
Pomerantsev writes: “The notion of information war … replaces hypocrisy not with something better but with a world in which there are no values. In this vision all information becomes, as it is for military thinkers, merely a means to undermine an enemy, a tool to … disrupt, delay, confuse, subvert. There is no room for arguments; ideals are in and of themselves irrelevant.”
“The gist of the discussion, which I have heard echoed in other talks and conversations at the many congresses I have attended over the years, is that in previous eras the human imagination was much more attuned to the mythical dimensions of Nature, to the perennial stories and characters through which Gaia dreams the world into existence. This archetypal homeland, shared by all the tribes of Creation, has provided a bandwidth of mutual intelligibility, a lingua franca, a commons of communication. A large faction of humanity has since left this commons, broken the agreement of respectful relationships, and left behind the “talking stick,” the heartfelt way to connect to others.
We moderns have created our own imaginal space. It is a skull-enclosed kingdom that plays the movie of our egoic projections, and the “rush world” we’ve created. We’ve got the electronic media buzzing and flashing through our heads, broadcasting the normalcy of a busy, busy hive mind in pursuit of purchased rewards in an advertised reality. We become saturated, overloaded, with these manipulated sounds and images, to the point where they block out and corrode access to the ancestral stratums of our humanity.”
- Reality Sandwich
"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours."
- Ayn Rand
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
- Adrienne Rich
BASHO
Each poem is a tiny door,
or better still,
a window.
Light as a snowflake,
slippery as a whale,
poised as a candle,
silent as an orchid.
We've walked a long way together.
Somewhere ahead of us
a horse whinnies,
a crow calls,
a beetle's becoming a firefly.
The horse and the crow are a poem.
The firefly lights our way.
- David Young
“The fire and the rose are one.”
- T.S. Eliot
Wonderful insights during a time we so need to be reminded of our power. Love your meditations, they have changed my life and I use them each day, sometimes multiple times
As a spiritual fire bug person who loves making the fire when there is a wood stove to be lit or a camp fire to be built, I love Lighter (62 in the Streamers Garden) meditation. It's so fun!!