Something there is that loves a fire.
Something which is in us that never stops enjoying that familiar yet eerily primordial dance of flames. We sit and watch sometimes all night long.
Our eyes transfixed by the ever-changing patterns of light and layers of colour glowing and rolling over each other, mixing and fusing and leaping up restlessly into the darkness. We are drawn mysteriously near to this activity, this resplendent presence of ‘burning’ - watching the most basic of the four elements transforming everything that it touches.
The orange coals nestled deep within the fire glow and heave and give off pulses of shimmering radiance. The wood crackles and moves and submits to the very glorious activity of becoming nothing.
And yet
Something of that same strange attraction to fire is also kindled in me by a dry stone wall.
As I stand gazing at a dry sone wall I am drawn into that same dancing of shapes and reflect over and over again at every seemingly perfect fit
Something new is found in every crack, every inspired combination of shapes, every mysterious crevice
Am I gazing at another kind of dance? Have the elemental forces just come together in a different way?
I take delight in seeing the similarities. I see the wall within the fire - the ashlar within the ashes. The stones in the wall give off sparks of inspiration and the fire chars and checks the burning wood in endlessly new patterns. These apparitions within the flames are to me, glowing walls - walls without darkness..
