Fire

This is a story that has no discernible beginning. But it begins in fire.

My mind is amazing and unique, in a similar way that David’s dog, Milo, has an amazing and unique mind. And so, all of these minds have become ordinary and entirely common. Peculiar. The improbability that I exist springs to mind and I might dismiss it, but for the recollections.

It should not surprise you that the universe - call it reality, if you wish - enters into my mind, and then in the night, thoughts flame into existence as did the flickers of flames that sprang to life in a field near Pomona Lake where moments before there had been nothing but dry grass. Over and over I saw it happen that day in front of my unbelieving eyes, the head of a shovel, black against a blacker black, snuffing out flames the color, nearly, of the very sun. And then, at some measurable distance across a space of sere grasses and beginning green, another flame, ex nihilo.

Now, of course, I have a modern mind and I do not mean that there exist spirits in fire. Physics should be sufficient. So I must, perhaps, be something of a fool to even speak of these things in this way.

But this is what I know. In the day just past, I, and two friends, mounted a red chariot pulled by many strong horses and we drove to a place as mundane and unique on the face of the earth as you might imagine. We then futzed with other machines, with tools and water tanks, and after our preparations, we ramped screaming mechanical beasts over dry fields. Tom fired pile after pile of cut and dried honey locust wood with a roaring propane torch.

And following that, each one in its own blaze, a fire as ordinary and unique as all the rest burned fierce and hot - orange, growing, tinged with black smoke, swirling, roaring, reaching high into a perfect blue sky like an animal, a spirit, a tongue, licking at an inverted bowl a color so blue it was nearly blinding.

My senses, my very mind, took all this in, hour after hour. My gloved hands on the handle of my shovel, scraping earth and fire, the wind, a variable breeze, blowing across my ears on occasion like a sound check - but only when I noticed. My mind was alive. My body moved, repeating motions.

And then at the end of the day, we sat on a tailgate. I drank ice water. David dug at the earth to retrieve the bulbs of an early wild lily with the blade of his shovel that had recently seen fire.

And a few questions that have been asked as long as there have been human minds were asked and insufficiently answered.

We drove home. The sun, a glowing red ball of flame, settled on the horizon to our left as we sped along the highway. And then the earth tilted and day became night.

And so it is my experience that somehow some of these questions will fire up in the dry grass of my mind in the darkness. The answers elude me, but somehow, my mind senses that something means something.

Do I use words like a shovel, beating, cutting at the thoughts that spring to life, not with only a mind but some spirit of its own? These are the blunt and occasionally effective tools that I have at hand.

Billions of years ago there was fire. I believe that. And in the possible distant future, I assume there will be ice.

But yesterday was a day I walked in a breathing world, filling my mind with recollections.

And now, what appeared to be irrevocably in the past, fires again.

Perhaps I make too much of this. We burned brush. Tom and David and I ate and drank. Milo collected cockleburs. We humans talked. We had looked into fire.

Some mystery burns.