Fire

2012 marks the beginning of a Fire year in Dagara Cosmology.

The following is an excerpt from The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Malidoma Some

Fire is the original element of origin, the one that was present at the beginning. Its primal nature is combustion, warmth, vision, and feeling. Its position in the wheel is the south, the underworld, and its color is red. It is the state to which everything eventually returns, the state of the ancestors coming from the underworld below us. Fire opens the doorway to the Spirit World and allows our psyche to commune with other life present, past, and future. Fire is like a connecting rod, an open channel. In fact, fire is our psyche, the spirit part of us that knows what has always been. It is our ability to act, emote, and intuit. A person on fire is craving a connection. In this person, fire is translated as restlessness, a great deal of emotion, and strong dream experience.

If a person or culture forgets its crucial relationship with other worlds, that is, with the ancestors, a fire is ignited that becomes a destructive force in society. When that happens, a person or a culture suddenly perceives almost everything in terms of fire. Fire becomes equated with power, speed, hierarchy, and value. All this is symptomatic of a culture in combustion. When one's culture is burning, it is impossible to sit still and keep focused. Like a ball of fire moving at high speed, a culture on fire is fascinated with speed. This speed shows up as horsepower on the surface, but deep within it is orchestrated by combustion. The burning within is symptomatic of some kind of crisis that drives people to remain endlessly "on fire."

From an indigenous point of view, Westerners are sacrificing much to fires that rage out of control. Just as fire consumes everything in its path, so consumers in the West sacrifice the life of Spirit for an endless pursuit of material goods. Material consumption does not provide care for the soul. It is as if misaligned inner fire is encouraged and supported in modern culture, something necessary to boost production and consumption. When adequately programmed through advertising and the media, people want to accumulate items because such items are regarded as an opportunity for fulfillment. Driven by an internal fire that cannot be quenched, the modern consumer is like a greyhound racing for fulfillment. The goal becomes not so much to reach a destination as to stay in your lane and keep running. When this inner fire is not connected to its source, it drives people to race endlessly after things that do not matter.

To begin making their peace with fire, Westerners must notice the common symptoms of fire in their milieu. In the modern world, being out of alignment with fire translates into pollution of one sort or another. It is as if to be civilized, one must infect the air, leak oil into the waters, and seek to move faster today than we did yesterday. Once we understand this as symptomatic of a state of disconnection, then it becomes possible to seek reconnection and reconciliation with the past. Changing our intentions from consumption, as an out-of-control fire, to connection, like a fire that warms and soothes, will bring fire in Western culture under control to a very great extent.

The piece that really hit home for me today is the following: Just as fire consumes everything in its path, so consumers in the West sacrifice the life of Spirit for an endless pursuit of material goods. Material consumption does not provide care for the soul. It is as if misaligned inner fire is encouraged and supported in modern culture, something necessary to boost production and consumption.