Fire
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Excerpted from Poetry of Life, my 4th book of poetry, available on Amazon. The book is divided into four sections: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is the intro to the Fire section.
Fire comes and goes, flares up in an instant and dies down into embers, ignites suns and streaks across the universe as light. Fire rises in you as passion and drives you, sometimes at its whim, sometimes to your own destruction, and sometimes with dogged determination toward your dreams. It is the passion in love, the urge to procreate in life, and the drive to impact on and make a difference in the world.
Fire uses earth and air to create light and heat. It has the power to create or destroy, to bond or to break, to clean or to clutter. It is a dangerous power, which is why it was considered a gift from the gods that commanded respect because fire gave humans these god-like powers to create and destroy. When controlled, it illuminates the night, warms rooms and hearts, turns raw food into fine cuisine, and wards off enemies and evil spirits. When out of control, it burns bridges, destroys homes, obliterates forests, and devastates lives. It can be used for good to power cities or for evil to decimate those same cities.
But even more to the point, it brought humans closer to the gods because a flame symbolizes consciousness and the act of human awakening. Ideally, this is an awakening into divinity, but can also be an awakening into power, which can serve selfish ends and be abused. The flame symbolizes the spirit within you, your unique energy, the essential essence that is you. When you harness this power, you harness yourself. You must then choose how your light will shine, for whom it will shine, and to what end.
