The Campfire

What is it about the campfire that transfixes the eyes and hearts of men? What power lies locked in those smoldering embers that draws and opens the soul? We sit in the day’s waning hours bound to it by a force more powerful than a desire for heat. We are bound to a sort of community of flame. In a world of illumination what power does this conflagration still hold on us?

The only comparison is the pull that television and other visual media have on us. How many of us have watched with perverse interest at the way the eyes of a child are drawn to the flashing images on the screen? How many of us, if we were honest, would confess to feeling that same pull ourselves? How many conversations have been derailed; how many conflicts begun because our attention leaned into its siren song? Visual media often draws us into isolation because our minds cannot forebear to alight on anything else. The flames however speak to us in a different language. Like the tongues of fire in the book of Acts they speak in a way that we can understand and comprehend translating themselves into the deepest questions of our heart. In the light of the campfire deep recesses are unlocked and the secret murmurs of the heart are heard. Far from the frame-a-second barrage from television and movies, the fire works not to suspend but to engage the mind.

So what of the campfire? Why does this chemical reaction of spark and wood and oxygen have such a similar pull; a similar allure? Perhaps we hearken back to an earlier age when the fire brought forth certainty; the assurance of food and safety and warmth. We hear the stirrings of the forest around us. We hear the creatures prowling about on the fringes, yet within the circle there is peace. Within the circle there is comfort. Perhaps the circle of light into which we are drawn echoes the security we desire for our souls. Perhaps we long for the divine intervention as on Sinai. In those flickering flames we draw near to hear, as Moses did, the voice of God.

Far from isolation, however, the fire draws us instead together into a community bound by flame. How many conversations have begun between the crackle and snap of combustion? As the permutation of wood into ash, the tongue itself is loosed. Even the staunchest isolationist has found himself saying things and feeling less alone. The awkwardness that plagues many of us is consumed in that circle; perhaps consumed as the very trees we burn, transformed into a climate of tolerance. Even the walls we have erected within our hearts and minds seem melted by the heat of that fire; dissolved by the slow, unpredictable dance of the flames in the night.

I cannot help but wonder whether we would not be better served by setting more sparks to flame; by sitting down beside the fire at dusk. The answer rings clear in my heart. The answer contains less screen time and more time spent within the circle. There are lessons to be learned, it would seem, as we are drawn closer to the simmering embers. Irrational as these musing seem, there is a mysterious truth to the mingling of tongues of flame and branches; life from death; form to formless; ashes to ashes. We have much to learn if we only would clear the space; to light the fire.