What are your first associations with fire?

I’m part of a women’s circle co-led by creativity author Anna Lovind. We’re exploring, among other things, the cycle of the seasons and the Celtic wheel of the year. 

The month of May begins with Beltane, a festival of fire, to welcome the peak of spring and the beginning of summer.  

So it’s got me thinking about the ways fire energy is connected to creativity.

My first association with fire energy is anger. 

Anger can be a powerful catalyst for creativity. Frustration at the status quo can fuel entrepreneurs to birth trailblazing innovations that burn down the old to make way for the new. A process Schumpeter called creative destruction.

Anger at injustice has sparked ideas that have inspired millions through the voices of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Greta Thunberg to name just a few. 

But we also experience fire energy when we’re bursting with passion and enthusiasm. 

I recently noticed I have a ceiling on how much enthusiasm I allow myself to express. When a conversation turns to a topic that ignites a passion of mine, at first I can let the fire flare up and it feels like freedom and flow. Aliveness coursing through my veins. But at a certain moment, when the fire that begins in my belly is about to reach my shoulders, it’s as if I’ve tripped a failsafe wire and the whole thing gets shut down. Like a bucket of water extinguishing a campfire. 

I’m sure this wasn’t always the case. My 2-year-old daughter, like all small children, has no limitations on her expressions of ebullience. It is such a joy to watch her whole body light up when we approach the special big slide she loves, when we blow dandelion seeds together or when we visit the little lambs at the local farm.

I’m not sure where my “ceiling” comes from. Perhaps the first time I got really excited about something random and another kid said, “It’s not that special.” Perhaps when I reached that age of starting to care what others think. When I started trying (and failing) to be “cool” - the very word suggesting an absence of fire. Perhaps it was reinforced by subtle signals in academic and work environments that exuberance is incompatible with professionalism.

But the beauty of somatic work is that I don’t need to know where it comes from to start to work with it. Bringing embodied awareness to this “ceiling” I noticed it is a living thing, not the metallic sheet I had presumed it to be. This is good news. I can have a relationship with a living thing. I can get curious and experiment gently with small stretch movements and see what response I get back. 

During our circle session we were led through an embodiment practice. A question arose. How might I allow fire to exist above the “ceiling”? The response came in an image of tiny tea lights appearing all along my arms, then across my shoulders, and finally forming a crown of candles on my head. 

As we came out of the meditative state the facilitator invited us to look around our environment and see if we noticed anything that felt connected to the experience we had. Turning to look out the window, my eyes alighted on our neighbor’s beautiful apple tree in bloom. 

I sensed a parallel. The energy of a blossom is up and out and unfolding, like a fire. Yet a blossom is contained, like a candle flame. And like the flame, the blossom will wither and die when it is no longer fed.

I'm not sure what it means, but I'm left with an image of myself as a tree full of tiny fire blossoms and I like it.

So as we enter this season of Fire, how does fire show up in your creative life? Could you harness the fuel of your anger to overcome inertia or creative blocks? Could you experiment with expressing more enthusiasm for small things?

Or perhaps you may want to join me in a short qi gong practice to simply make more space for fire energy in your body and see what happens...