Fire
I see fire in the pattern of my life. Not a warming, comforting fire, but the kind that consumes, leaving only ashes where connection was once possible. Like when I burned deadfall on our "hobby farm" ten years ago, I’ve watched pieces of my life drift away in smoke and flame. Yet it isn’t just about things left behind but some scorched relationships I've left in my wake. I’ve spent my life perfecting the art of endings. A relationship falters? Burn the bridge. Workplace disputes? Burn the bridge. Friendships fizzle or lovers leave? Burn. My instinct is to sever ties decisively and completely. Yet, the ashes stick with me, drifting uninvited into quiet moments, grief and regret smudging even the cleanest slates.
I 've burned through situations the way I race to finish books. I'm always thinking about the next page or the next leap forward. But in my haste to move on, I don't stop to appreciate what the current moment offers. If I feel the threat of rejection or betrayal, I strike the match myself. It's better to turn away—to torch what we’ve built before someone else does and leave me standing in the embers. If it’s protective, it still feels hollow. Understanding and acknowledging the attachment injury is also hollow - I must need a myth for meaning.
And fire as a symbol is undeniable. It has its own life, seared into my conscious image of burning deadfall. The heat, the pop of dry wood collapsing, and that smell—not just of smoke, but of finality. I remember the sheep then, too. Killed by coyotes, it burned atop those sputtering flames. That memory lingers. Beyond the metaphor, it’s visceral, raw. And maybe that’s why it comes to mind when I think about the pattern repeating through the years.
Fittingly, the fire leaves ashes, fragile and gray, in its wake. I think of The Jeweler in that haunting song by This Mortal Coil, polishing old coins with ashes. The act feels tender, oddly reverent. But the contrast is heavy—I didn’t polish or preserve. I incinerated what once mattered, and those coins, those connections, aren’t set aside and cherished despite their scars. They are obliterated. And yet, there’s beauty in the ashes too, or perhaps the faintest hope of it. The jeweler knows their use. I’m still fumbling through trying to understand mine.
This brings me to Lee Miller, who both fascinates and frustrates me. Her constant reinvention reflects my own spirit. However, while her life had threads of continuity and connections that served as lifelines across the decades, my connections are usually severed. Friends remained in her orbit, and lovers like Man Ray and her husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman and engineer (her father was an engineer, reflecting a pattern). Yet, for me, people seem to slip through my fingers the moment a chapter ends. When I compare my experiences to Lee's it's hard to see those lost connections. How would it have been to carry the past as something alive rather than reduced to ashes.
My pattern invokes an emotional echo. Grief sits there, filling the void left behind. The emptiness seeps into the corners of my life, making me wonder what exactly I guard against. Intimacy? Memory? Loss? Guilt or shame?
I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and its cadence of losses, escalating from small misplacements to massive grief. I see myself too clearly in those lines. The art of losing moves me further and further into its perfection, though nothing about it feels like mastery. It’s a surrender. To sever these ties, these chapters feel like a constant bargain—not losing so much as avoiding further loss. As she writes:
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
But I also know it’s deeper. There’s a shadow in this dynamic from wounds I haven’t fully accessed or addressed. Maybe it’s rejection avoided or control reclaimed in the chaos of loss. Some days, breaking apart a connection feels like freedom. Other days, it only magnifies the void.
There is no tidy end to this story etched in fire and smoke. No moral to stitch it together neatly. Is it failure and self-preservation intertwined, or grief wrapped in fleeting relief? At least I know it has the smell of ashes and seared flesh filling an empty sky. It lingers, like firelight fading.
Hope
After writing this, I recalled Robert A. Johnson invoking ashes in his writings on transformation and researched a bit. The ego must first face and even “burn away” in the conflagration of its own shadow (the parts of ourselves we deny or reject), so that the Self—what Jung called the archetype of wholeness—can emerge renewed.
Johnson emphasizes that this “total transformation” isn’t an everyday event but rather the destiny of the primordial man. He echoes Nietzsche via Jung’s Zarathustra seminars:
“How couldst thou become new if thou havest not first become ashes!”
And in discussing alchemical imagery, Johnson points to the phoenix myth as the emblem of true psychological change. In discussing alchemical imagery, Johnson points to the phoenix myth as the emblem of true psychological change where old identifications are sacrificed so that a more integrated psyche can arise.
