Making Fire

So it's been about a year since I've posted anything here, but it's not because we stopped working!

For many months, the Fire Craft crew has been trying to make fire, using pyrite, quartz and a very special fungus called tinder fungus. I did this myself years ago, so I decided to just point people in the right direction and let everyone figure things out on their own. That's the typical approach in transmitting the Crafts, and in any case it worked out well because often I needed to take care of my daughter when everyone came over.

So, last year late summer they went to the woods to find fungus. They found both false tinder fungus (fomes fomentarius) and true tinder fungus, aka chaga.

They bought some pyrite at different rock stores in town, and prepped the fungus.

And then over the winter, they tried their hand at banging the rocks together to make sparks and get them to alight on the fungus.

Click click click, over and over, came the sound from the garage where they were working. Click click click went the stricken stones, interrupted every so often by excited shouts and peals of laughter. Click click click. Click click click. Lots of sparks, but the fire never came. And they kept at it, trying different things to get that spark to land on the fungus and stay there, smoldering.

Meanwhile, while they did this, I played the "Cemetery Game" with my daughter. The game consisted of the inhabitants of the dollhouse dying one by one every morning, and being taken over to the sandbox "cemetery" to be buried. And repeat. Relentlessly. What started out as kind of funny soon became slightly creepy as more and more dolls failed to wake up in the morning. Every single one, without mercy. Tiny babies, older siblings, parents too.

I realized my daughter was trying to integrate this thing called death that she'd been hearing about. So for a number of Craft sessions she insisted that we play this game, that we keep at it, over and over. And we did. Everyone dying, everyone getting buried. Total dolly decimation.

And all the while, click click click, click click click, over and over from the garage...


And as one does, I couldn't help but connect the two things. The click click click of the stones, the attempt to make fire, recreating what our ancestors did hundreds of thousands of years ago (and they kept at it and kept at it and kept at it, because it never worked, but they knew they were close, and they just had to figure it out) -- all of that was connected in my mind to a similar sort of click click click I could see going on in my daughter, as she tried with countless burials, to figure out this thing of "not waking up ever again". Sparks from the iron pyrite in the garage; sparks of a different nature in this little person before me.

Click click click - you keep trying, keep trying and at some point, things fit together, the spark catches. And then... illumination!

 

Imagine the sparks produced in our ancestors when they finally learned to make fire. And when someone died, had their spark simply gone out? Was there a way to ever get it re-lit? Or could the spark still bein there somewhere, smoldering in the dark?

Well, it was one of those moments that can arise when working in the Crafts, because the Crafts are poetic works that lends themselves to allusions and connections. If you put your head on a certain way.

But back to our fire story: a few sessions ago everyone decided to leave the fungus aside and try working with charcloth, a more "known" variable than the fungus that never seemed to catch.

And lo, the charcloth worked - the spark caught! 

And as always seems to be the case, once the fiery floodgates had been opened, one by one, everyone managed to do it over the next few weeks.

And last week we even got the tinder fungus to alight. The trick was to prepare its surface to be more receptive to catching a spark.

I'm not sure what sparks were lit in everyone's brains throughout this process, but no one seems to be able to do this work without getting deeply inspired, and everyone glowed when they finally made fire. It's just how it is.

> Next up: metal casting.