The fire burns in the places we have left overgrown, the untended brush like kindling in our heart path, ready to be cleared and ripe for the spark.

We’ve gotten used to the brush cover, our ego like small forest creatures hiding and burrowing beneath it, forging tunnels within it so we don’t have to be seen, nesting in the thickness, mistaking smallness for freedom in our quest to keep moving.

Underneath all that, it feels like darkness in the daytime. Sometimes we need the shade, and our eyes adjust to the darkness and we settle into it, and the light becomes too much…or the effort to reach the light becomes too much…and suddenly the darkness feels safer. In the shade we meet the shadow, lured into the familiar coolness of its den and its density, surrendering to soul sleep that feels like relief.

But the fire burns in the places we have left overgrown.  It is not gentle. It is not slow. It does not try to talk us out of our hiding places with promises of safety or ease. It is our reckoning, because we have stayed too long in the places we no longer fit. We have burrowed deeply into the tangle, and we are here for more than that.

We may be terrified. We may feel death on our backs as we flee, screaming and blistering and shaking. But we emerge, and we see clearly across the scorched earth what we could not see before. We rise- tired, grieving, hurting- but we rise.

And we remember that just like the charred soil and ash will nourish and grow new life, our scorched earth too is really the beginning of our rebirth… and fire the friend that forced us to let go.