The Festival of Fire

In late spring, we make dozens of bonfires in a specific area of the woods, a different area each year.  This event is in some ways similar to the First People’s practice of setting fires to clean dead wood and some of the understory from the forest floor.  In perpetually damp woodlands like ours, these sort of fires do not harm larger live trees and, in fact, they increase the fertility of the soil, one goal of the First People, who grew crops of corn, beans and squash in forest clearings that had been burned over.  Our practice, of course, is not to set an uncontrolled fire but to build many separate fires close together.  When these are ignited as twilight is deepening, the effect of a world on fire is achieved.