“I call upon the powers of Coire Goirath, Cauldron of Warming & Incubation. Grant me stamina & strength to faithfully continue my practice…As a token of this inner fire, I vow to begin a discipline of fire-keeping, to gain confidence around a skill that I have always turned toward others to build & tend.”

When I swore my Druid’s Dedicant Oath, I made three vows to correspond to the medieval Irish Cauldrons of Poesy, which included the above words. That oath was sworn in April before an assembly of good ADF woman-folk, and my DP work was completed before summer’s arrival. I have made some good strides in keeping parts of my oath. Yet until last week I had not really commenced any work towards this promise of fire-keeping.

I have no problem lighting things on fire, really. I have a little iron cauldron for burning loose incense, a reliable practice of candle spell-work. I am no slouch around a cooking stove or our woodstove. Yet, even in the past as a high-priestess, coven-running more than a decade, I’ve relied on someone else to build sacred fires for me. (Hey, somebody had to keep the script, offerings, spell components all in order, not to mention keep an eye on all those pent-angling blades.) I also tend to work with people who really excel at fire-building, even pyrotechnics!, so its been easy to step back and let them take that lead.

Recently, I have given thought to the notion that fire-tending is the basis of all other ritual, certainly one of the oldest ritual acts. In my own mystical experiences I’ve encountered fire-spirits, dancing with them at rites, they happy to leap about to my rhythm, slithering amongst the coals like salamanders of occult description. Usually my methods of transformational magic are more slow-acting, like compost, cooking languidly, releasing energy over time.

I seek to initiate a practice of fire-keeping that is intuitively reliable and comfortable. When I was invited to participate in the fire-rite “Beacons in the Dark: a Global Anti-Fracking Convergence,” I took it as a summons for me to honor my oath. The goal of this convergence contained a weird contradiction of sorts, kindled with magical intent, yet in small groups across the globe, isolated from one another and invisible to any actual frackers. We would all be building a fire fueled by hydrocarbons to resist and to protest one of the worst kinds of fossil fuels extraction. As I mentioned my intent to my husband, he responded incredulously, “Are you really going to build a fire tonight?”

It’s here that I have to confess that I had another chthonic goal. Flammable brush about the yard had been accumulating in piles and in our fire-pit itself. This debris constituted a real obstacle for me mentally in commencing any real fire-tending practice. It creates for me neither the space nor the stuff for a beautiful puja, being stalks from perennials that had to be cut-down by necessity, blackened by August drought, stricken with that bane of northeast Ohio crops, powdery mildew. Fitting to build a beacon-fire to ward off the a climate-changing negative by burning away that which was laid waste by drought. And garden sanitation, this time-honored tradition in fire-tending seemed a good jumping-off point for a spiritual practice that employs purifying fire.

The dry summer had converted all of this plant material to neat, dry bundles of tinder. My goal was also to not use good woodstove wood, rather to use fuel-wood from stacks in the back of the yard that had sat too long. I raided the pile near the house for some wee decent kindling and gathered fallen oak sticks strewn about the yard. About this time my husband became interested in my efforts, especially since he noticed tinder was burning off so quickly that the kindling wasn’t catching flame. He did not make fun of me and my teepee of foraged kindling and mouldering firewood. Instead he was happy to join me, his forceful breath the bellows that brought spark from the tinder to the wood above.

At some point, as I watched the fire catch, I looked at all those stalks of perennials, bamboo, and brush that made the layers of my tinder and kindling. I thought about all the layers of primordial ooze sleeping between even more layers of shale that the frackers seek to crack into, and suddenly my qualms about the irony of burning to resist a more dangerous planetary burning seemed to melt away. As I sanctified my goal and connected with the spirit of that fire, it all made sense. I tended that fire well into the night, carefully feeding it and turning the rotting logs to dry out their deep inner damp, building up a glistening coal-bed and heaps of soft wood ash, ultimately an offering for my garden plants.

The warm, hospitable energy of a good fire is an irresistible draw. So of course, my daughter and grand-daughter arrived to bask in its glow, soon joined by my son as well as a bag of marshmallows. The heat of this good fire, with my careful attention, turned some pretty piss-poor firewood into a bake-oven of toasted marshmallow perfection. In less than two minutes, my three marshmallows turning simultaneously on a bamboo wand were transformed into caramelized delight. My husband remarked on what a good idea it had been to make a fire.

Not the sublime Agni puja that I will one day perform, but this was a hallowed fire that went from purifying to warding to cooking (Argh! Three functions!) through the course of its burn. It got me thinking about what my practice of sacred fire-tending will look like. It also got the space cleared out and ready for a better fire-ring, once I dig out all that mineral-rich soft ash. I posted a picture of my humble fire on the Facebook page for “Beacons in the Dark: a Global Anti-Fracking Convergence.” The ‘likes’ came in from places like Lancashire and Wolverhampton, UK, Trento. Italy and Columbus, Ohio. This was meaningful to me and made me felt connected to their own good efforts through my beacon-fire.