The Witchtower Magazine

 

Stepping onto the street, a British summer is blaring out of cheesy car radios, through wound-down windows, across mirrored reflections of elbows and sunglasses. In the park, people are basking, animal-natured, half-naked, watching the clouds and enjoying the sensation of grass against their skin. Like a great eye, that bright blazing ball is spilling forth into the dark bowels of the universe; burning hard in ceaseless explosions.

The sun might be seen as a primary source of fire. As one of the four classical elements, it is a life giving force; a parent of our being. A few words of a Philip Larkin poem come into my head: Unclosing like a hand / You give forever. As a deity, a force of nature, the sun is a spectacular benefactor of humanity and all living forms.

A quiet fire-less vigil held from sunset to sunrise is a powerful means of realising that solar connection. The patience required for the wait seems to be a useful reminder of our passivity and dependence. We cannot rush the sun, nor can we hold it back. Sun and moon forge on at their own pace. We can simply sit, breathing in the dawn air, with freezing fingers and toes as the colours begin to wash in. One by one, the street lights flicker off and the quiet landscape turns from black to blue to green. Something in nature lifts upward and outward. Each tiny leaf and flower perks up and claims their territory; no longer hiding their edges in the darkness.

Fire, in its brightness, exposes what we try to keep hidden, and as such it is an element associated with courage and expression. It might be seen as an inversion of wintry north, demanding the externalization of our introspective selves. In the darkness, one is just darkness, but light gives life to form and feature. We cannot hide. So the challenge of fire is of exhibition, while the leaping flames speak of a passion that overcomes self-consciousness.

In the popular imagination, fire quite commonly holds these kinds of associations: In a favourite book, Jack Kerouac exclaims: "The only people for me are the mad ones….. the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars". I think of my heroes and heroines… fighters, activists, writers… those who seem to hold a perpetual flame at the core of their being. They are reminders that fire speaks of action, energy and the manifestation of ideas thrown into motion.

The passion is also the kind that radiates forth from desire and love-making, like the heat of wild abandon and sexuality that we celebrate at Beltane. But whereas at Beltane we wear masks which allow us to lose our inhibitions, Midsummer challenges us to burn the masks in the flames and to consciously step into the bright lights. Not only does it require strength, but also enormous honesty.