Fire Manifesto

Please, allow me, if I can muster myself to it, to break every rule I’ve learned about starting a piece of writing: to show rather than tell, to use as few words as necessary, to forgo the preamble for the hook. For each of the many times in my life I’ve been encouraged to compose a manifesto, I thank the one who so nudged me, but know, this isn’t that. I am weeping and have wept all year. You are, and you are weeping in our heart. This is a plea. Responsible for this is the constant and overwhelming simultaneous experience of equal parts ecstasy and despair that I experience looking at each thing in the world. I am this thing behind my eyes. And what, all this? Beautiful. Horrifying. The artifacts that sit around my room, on store shelves, on the streets, the streets themselves. All things first imagined and then given Being by our hands and speech. Computers rendered from rock, sand, oil, ore. Everything we have created is holy because it has undergone the ceremony of actually existing. But we can create anything. Anything.

It is self-evident that we must all die and that this is nothing to fear. That it will be easy when it comes and that there is no place such as hell, no place such as heaven. It is self-evident from what we have already done that we can do anything we dream. That this is no exaggeration. We have everything we need. We have 100,000 times more than we could ever need. And with much less, with nothing, still, we could do anything, have anything, be anything. Anything we can dream. We are utterly free and infinitely powerful.

I look with these juxtaposed emotions upon my family. To be one in the same organism, all of us are grandmother. The sacrality of that closeness. A womb inside a womb inside a womb. Life-giving gorgeous. And the horror, that our time and our world has propagandized my blood into fearing away their love. I’ve seen the power to love in the hearts of all my kin. And I’ve watched them sheath it, shying, coughing back into the same conversations. Which light beer tastes better? A promise, that they are prepared to shoot anyone who steals from them. A story about being inconvenienced. Holiday after holiday after holiday. Tree crew after tree crew after tree crew. Old man after old man after old man. “I’d shoot anyone who x.” Twisted, twisted, twisted, abused your love into such disdain that you feel as though the only real thing left in your power is attack. That the only thing that can make you whole is for someone else to be less. Coward oneself into imagining the darkest reality possible. What could we have been in nature? How could my uncles have laughed joyfully and healthily together, what healer could my father have become, what if my brother and I and all of our friends were unbruised by the authoritarian lie? If when anyone said, that’s just the way the world is, they were referring to the drinkability of the water and the clarity of the stars?

I don’t speak of all people the same. We are 99.9. They are .1. Those with nothing and those with millions upon millions are we. When we unite, it is over. In moments, it ends. It is magic. When these illusions are dispelled, all is transformed in seconds. There is a fire. My plea to you is to look into this fire. The flame of a candle. The roar of a hearth. What is fire? Why is fire called one of the four elements? It is a reaction. It transforms. I have been saying aloud that anything can be either a true medicine or a distraction. More, anything can be anything. Panacea or placebo or poison. Theater. What makes this difference? What is the difference between free will and a fatalistic cosmos? Spirit? Mind? Nous? Fire. In one instant you can bring this fire into your eyes. There is a roaring fire. Unquenchable. My head, my hands, my shoulders are on fire and I weep. Please. Take some. It is spread with the eyes. It is spread with patience. It is spread with a careful word.

Open the sealed box at the bottom of your heart and responsibly, carefully, look at each thing and weep. For yourself or for someone else. Until it is empty. Let everything you take for granted, each thing you believe about the world, fade away. Let go of everything. And thus receive everything.

At our gravest hour yet! The difference is in fire. If you still don’t see it, try to change some little thing inside yourself.