I first encountered the expression in the writings of Colin Fletcher. According to Fletcher, “dreaming the fire” was a Swahili phrase he’d heard in Africa.
I took it to mean that state of almost transcendental meditation you often achieve when you’re sitting before a crackling blaze, looking not at the embers and flames, but deep into the worlds beyond, the interior land of soul and imagination.
Dreaming the fire…
How often have I sat beside a campfire on some northern shore, where loons called in the dusk and the moon came rolling up from behind the jackpines. Where the Milky Way was painted across the sky as a broad wash of uncountable points of light—so many stars that all you can do is gape and feel yourself shrink to the insignificance of a sand grain.
Sometimes it was the Northern Lights that came rising up, as they once did when Myladylove and I huddled before a roaring fire on a freezing November night at a camp on the south shore of Lake Superior. On this occasion the Lights were electric blue and indigo, with a wavering rim of turquoise. Awesome, truly, like a magical blue city just over there, across the big lake, beyond the shadows.
Dreaming the fire…
Tonight I sit before another fire, this one on the hearth inside the main room of my cozy stone cottage on a small southwestern-Ohio river. Outside, there’s snow on the ground and more on the way. The temperature is below zero—maybe well below, though I haven’t checked lately.
The only light inside comes from the cheery blaze. If I look upstream, through the glass, I can see the white trunks of sycamores leaning like thoughtful Druids over the black water.
There’s music on the stereo—some haunting old Celtic fiddle pieces that I love because they reach something within…but which I can’t play too often because, well, they reach something within.
I can play them tonight, though. Because tonight the world—my world—is pretty good. My heart is full. I have love and work and if I’m lucky—and blessed—a few more years to follow the northcountry two-tracks, to look for rising trout, to see hillsides spangled with trilliums, to amble a trail through smoky hills, to hear an old gobbler ring in the dawn. Books to read, music to hear, adventure to enjoy.
Or so I hope and pray as I sit here in the sweet darkness.
Dreaming the fire…
