Inner Fire

In the pit of the stomach
there is a fire
through which I process the world.

Sometimes it is a fire that warms me
like hot buttered toast and sweet hot tea
on a cold, damp evening.
On those days, the view from my window
seems cosy if bleak.
I can rock myself to comfort in this fire.

Other days the fire is a nasty hissing creature
like oil meeting water on a hot stove.
It scalds me rudely and
leaves my life half-charred, half-cooked.
I retreat hastily on such days
and the thought of crawling into bed until the storm passes
is appealing.

If I don’t stoke the fire with care and mindfulness,
however, it has a way of subsiding within me.
The embers twinkle, sometimes evoking the flames they were
and sometimes evoking the dust they would be.
As the fire dies within me, there is no feeling left.
I feel no anger, no grief, no sorrow, no frustration.
No life within. Almost no fire, either.

The fire consumes me too, as it will someday.
The inferno rises slowly but steadily,
its flames consuming, first a little,
then more, then more, then even more,
then all. There is only fire.
Like a comet, my spirit rises
and I move like a spreading fire in its shadow.
Neither fire nor I know limits.

But the best fire of all, my Mother,
is your sacral fire, from which I arose,
in which I dwell and to which I will return.
This fire is the route through which I,
sacrificer, may give my life to you.
It is this fire of life and spirit
to which I give myself today.