Grounded by Fire
feeling small in the grand scheme of things
I don’t sit around enough campfires. I haven’t sat around a campfire in a long time.
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From the end of middle school all the way through high school, I always knew how my summer would go. I had a schedule. I had plans. I always felt a little smug that I didn’t have to just figure out what I was going to do with days. Which feels kind of silly now. And, it was not all of my days. It was a few weeks of days. A few weeks of camp.
For millennials, camp is The Parent Trap (1998). It’s all Lindsay Lohan and secret handshakes and pranks and dumping full buckets of chocolate syrup on the heads of camp leadership for a full summer. And at the end of camp, if you’re lucky, you get to fly away to London or run through the vineyards of Napa while trying to figure out how to get rid of a potential stepmother. (Honestly, I’m on Meredith Blake’s side now.) Camp Walden is the image that pops into people’s heads when you say, “I went to camp.”
West coast camp and east coast camp are a bit different, most notably in duration. As far as I can tell, east coast camps last six weeks, eight, the whole summer. East coast camp gives parents/guardians a lot longer break than west coast camp. West coast camps are a week, maybe two. For me, it was one of the best weeks of the year.
Actually, I went to two camps. First came Stage Door to the Future (you read that right), a two-week long theatre day camp at Eastern Washington University. I’d bike there in the mornings, live in theatre bliss for eight hours, and bike home in the evening. Since it was a day camp, and by definition, involved no nighttimes, there were no campfires. But, one year, they let us use real live fencing swords (capped at the end). Sure, we were learning stage combat technique, but we were still 14 year olds with swords. That is it’s own, different, kind of fire. Although, I don’t remember any injuries so go us!
The second camp was a sleepaway camp. Run by Presbyterians, situated on Davis Lake in Washington, Camp Spalding was one of my happy places. Even though I haven’t been in many years, the memory of the location, the environment, remains one of my happy places. I started going when I was still in elementary school. Then one year, I had a really bad experience with the cabin of girls I was with so I took a bit of a break. I was mostly waiting to get to my camp of choice—MADD Camp (Music Art Drama Dance Camp). There are plenty of stories from camp but that’s for another day. Since I started with campfires, I’ll get back to the campfires—evening campfire was so important to me.
As far as I can remember, we didn’t sit in front of an actual fire until the last night of camp. Every other evening, we all converged on the lodge for regular Christian camp stuff (singing, etc.). Often, we’d end by being sent out into the night to find a quiet place to reflect, journal, stare at the stars, whatever. That, to me, is the very essence of a campfire—giving yourself the opportunity to learn about yourself in a different light.
Usually, there was at least one more campfire built into my summer plans. My family would spend a week at the Oregon Coast which would, inevitably, include at least one beach campfire. Before you ask, yes, I’m a person who likes to burn their marshmallows, eat the burned layer, and then do it all over again. We always did these campfires at night, the tempestuous Pacific Ocean waves background noise to the crackling of the store-bought, quick burning logs. Family vacation means family time, of course, but beach campfire really meant family time. I loved it but I’ll also be upfront in saying that I wasn’t always there. Staring at the flames as hard as I like to do would often cause me to retreat to the recesses of my mind. I’m not sure I could tell you what I was thinking about then, what questions I was asking myself. But I do know, I was always looking for answers in the embers.
Occasionally, we’d spend the 4th of July in Montana. If we were at my paternal grandparents’ house, we’d set off fireworks on the road just up a little embankment from their house. Not far at all. If we were at my maternal grandma’s house, Grandma Mocky, we’d also set off fireworks, usually on the concrete patio at the back. Sometimes, we’d drive out to the airfield to watch the bigger fireworks over the plains. Fireworks are just explosions when all is said-and-done, but they have an inherent fire element too. And, when we were on the plains, the fire element was the possibility of fire. The plains in the summer are dry, fireworks have sparks, a fire truck was always on call. Fire, in this case, was a dangerous element. The danger was highlighted by the beauty of colorful exploding light. I’m not really a lover of fireworks, but I’m a lover of this juxtaposition.
If I’m feeling disconnected from myself, I usually need to engage with something that makes me feel small in the grand scheme of things. It could be sitting in a large cathedral or walking through a huge museum with an overwhelming amount of art created by an innumerable amount of people or it could be standing outside blanketed by a sky full of stars. These things are a portal to another plane, one where the foundational explorations live. It’s existential activities for existential disconnection. Sometimes, it works wonders. Sometimes, I need another element.
In my mind, campfires happen at night. They can happen at any time of day, of course. I know that. But I’m what you might call an “indoor cat.” I like my time inside, maybe too much. That means, I’m not usually doing activities that would require a campfire at any other time of day. I’m not often camping…ever…at all. Which means I’m not needing to make a fire in the morning for coffee and eggs (unless you count turning on my gas range to heat water for matcha). For me, a campfire is an activity that happens in the dark. It’s an illumination device. It’s a grounding element.
I could be accused of being too existential. At times. If you said that to me, I would not be offended. But I would think about it a lot. So, there is a danger in activities that make me feel small (in the grand scheme of things). These activities might bring me back to myself in some way but they can also leave me feeling untethered to everything else. That’s just trading a disconnection for a disconnection. That’s where something like a campfire comes in. It’s of the real world. It throws off heat and light. When you’re near it, you physically feel its effects. It brings me back to the right here and the right now. Because, you have to be here to start it. To experience it. You have to be here to put it out at the end of the night. Fire is enchanting but there are real consequences if you don’t interact with it properly. And those consequences will affect more than just you—which, in and of itself, is another grounding element, another way to feel small in the grand scheme of things.
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What is it about fire that’s so fascinating for so many people? Is it because it’s a primitive thing? There was fire before there was basically everything that makes up our modern world. Fire was necessary for the very basic level of survival. There’s not a lot of room to be existential when your only focus really is water, food, shelter, warmth. We’re all trying to survive now too, that doesn’t change, but it’s different. There is time to be existential. Some days, it feels required because it’s not supposed to be just ‘survive,’ it’s supposed to be ‘thrive.’
Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking about campfires so much recently. It’s hard to feel grounded when your attention is being pulled in so many different directions by the sheer amount of things happening and the sheer amount of information we’re being fed on a daily basis. Additionally, the career I’m pursuing, the work I want to be doing, feels kind of floaty in nature. It’s not work that necessarily has tangible results—no ROI percentages to add to resumes, no computer code to show to anyone. The work feels a bit more spiritual in nature, not only for myself but for clients. Life feels that way too, like it needs a bit more spiritual connection in it. Maybe, I’ve been thinking about fire as a grounding element so much not because I feel disconnected from myself but because we all feel disconnected from each other.
I do think you need all of it. The spiritual, the existential, the survival basics, the grounding elements. It all works together. When you don’t have one of them, something will feel like it’s not working.
Look for me crouched in the dirt, just outside a pit enclosed by rocks, with a quick burning log and a match. Look for me staring into flames, fostering a connection with a natural element. Look for me covered in marshmallow, laughing about all the ways I’m sticking to myself.
That’s where I’ll be looking too.
This one is definitely very on the nose and I don’t care.
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