The Forrest Fire Is a Forest Fire

Becoming the Purification

I was reading some threads on the Forrest Fire and wrote this thought:

The Forrest Fire is a forest fire and forest fires are never about a single tree. The fire is not the forest. Its power to consume is complete. Its power to restore is also. In a good forest fire all the choking under brush is burnt away and the trees that remain can grow stronger. When we feel the fire within us and without us we are cazimi and we have become the purification the fire demands.

The elements have no morality. Fire included, and its important when we are looking at things elementally to understand how the elements interact with each other. What kinds of human behavior are signified by different elements? Words, and communication, and speech, and writing are of the element of air. The impact of air on fire is to strengthen it, to increase it, to feed it with oxygen, and to make it grow bigger.

When we’re talking about fire in its most pure elemental sense, when it is in a cardinal expression of its form, it’s dealing with bringing life and invigorating and growing things, the fire of life, the energy that comes into the initiation of things. When we’re dealing with a solid state of fire, a solid modality of fire, the fixed modality, we are talking about the fire that sustains light, the life functioning force, in a way that allows us to see and recognize the different life patterns that exist. The life pattern of being human is sustained by the solid fire element of being human. The state of being a plant or an animal, and living, and having a continuity of the expression of that living organism, that living being, is the solid state of fire.

The mutable expression of fire is in the consumption. It is the funeral pyre, upon which the phoenix both surrenders into its cremation and erupts in its later re-emergence, its reincarnation, the re-expression of the phoenix. So this fire, this mutable, double bodied expression of fire, is both the expression of aliveness and continuity and the expression of destruction and disolution.

The more air, the more words, the more air element that comes to the fire, the stronger and hotter it becomes and the more mutable the fire is. It is that searing, nuclear fusion level of heat that the flame brings when it is completly fanned with the air element. Right now, not only do we have Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini, we have Venus in Libra. The quality of air is expansive, and it is all consuming in its state of purification. The hotter that fire becomes, the more purifying it becomes.

When it’s cardinal, the impact of fire is growth. In its solid state, the impact of fire is sustainment. In its mutable modality fire is transformative, we are in a state of the utmost mutability of fire right now.

The mutable fire sign is Sagittarius, and Sagittarian fire is the fire which, when it consumes, results in wisdom. This is non-partisan wisdom. This is non-binary wisdom. It is a type of wisdom that doesn’t have any morality. All factors, all components of the fuel, all things that are fuel to the fire, can be transformed from their base material into the white-hot wisdom.

We see this happening right now across the world, in many areas of life. We see this happening politically, in the ways the different countries are interacting with each other. We see this happening culturally, inside the cultural context of an individual country. We see it here inside the United States. We see it taking place in China. We see it taking place in Russia. So this is the internal expression of the transformation that’s taking place. Words are really being used to fuel and change and transform the way that fire is expressed, and to impact its strength and its growth. We see it where UN experts are warning of large-scale atrocity risk in Sudan, and where the attacks on non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur have drawn genocide accusations. We see it in what a United Nations commission reported in June 2026 about the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza, a finding that is itself contested and politically live. We see it in Myanmar, where the Rohingya genocide is still counted among the ongoing crises.

We see it even in our families. We might see it in our communities and in our nieghborhoods, but we might see it in our homes. We might see the words that we’re speaking to each other fanning the fire. Now this fire doesn’t have to be conflict. Conflict can be an expression of fire, but the fire element itself, and especially the mutable fire, is consuming. Conflict may be an expression, or the beginning, of that white hot fire element, but in its ultimate result the mutable fire expression is transformative.

And we see it within ourselves. In our own heads and in our own minds and our thoughts, the words that are taking place in our heads are feeding and fueling the fire within us each individually. We read the words on the screen and on the page. We hear things, the news on the radio, people talking to us. This causes internal words to create more cyclonic expression. We then speak words out loud, but in between the process of ingesting the air element of words through our sight and through our ears, we process that in our minds, and we have internal speak, internal dialouge of words that are going around and around in our head. These words are the element of air within us, inside of us, and it is fueling the fire of transformation within each of us individually.

If the words are air, and the air is what feeds the fire, then we have some choice in what we breathe into it. This is where the idea of metta becomes so important, loving-kindness, the wishing of well-being toward yourself first and then outward toward everybody else. It is not softness and it is not a way of putting the fire out. It is a choice about which air we hand to the flame, in what we say out loud and in the words running around in our own heads when nobody is listening.

As we see Venus and Uranus and Pluto in the sky, filling the element of air right now, the element of air is magnified. It is expanded, and it is brought together through a Venusian fluidity of ease, of expression, that creates the wind circling more and more and greater and greater until finally the fire within us sears away the impurities.

There’s that saying from Dune, the one about fear being the killer of the mind, and about letting it pass through you, and what is left when it has gone. I always have to go back and try to find that quote.

The Litany Against Fear

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

In that context, the fear was the air element, and the process of letting it burn through is the fire. It fans the flames, and then the fire consumes and transforms, that is what I was trying to connect here.

The process of searing those impurities away and transforming into wisdom can be disruptive. There’s no doubt about it. There is no doubt about it. We cannot get to the other side without going through.

Though how we go through it matters about as much as the fact that we have to go through it at all. Karuna is the word for compassion, and what it points at is a turning toward suffering instead of away from it, which is not sentiment, since it asks for honest seeing first, and the honest seeing is the uncomfortable part. We do not get to care about what is burning if we will not look at what is burning.

There’s a lot going on in the world and in our comunities. We see it. We see the real impact of our words being brought out into the world in the form of violence, both emotional violence and verbal violence, but also physical violence that is resulting in the death of individuals who are being killed as an individual, singled out.

We’re also seeing it impact entire populations in the form of genocide. And I’m not using that word bombastically. I’m using it to really talk about the efforts that are being taken to eliminate certain human gene pools. That’s what genocide is about, removing specific genetic traits. That’s what we see taking place around the world. We see it in many, many, many parts of the world, this idea that we need to purify the gene pool. It is in the zeitgeist for many people, tragically, who think that by eliminating some sort of gene from the gene pool they are purifying things, when in fact the only way that you can purify genetic strands is through the proliferation of genetic material in a greater and greater expression of diversity.

It is the diversity of genetic material that creates the purity of the survival, and it cannot happen through the destruction and elimination of genes. So these eugenic type people that feel like they can arrive at some sort of genetic purity through the elimination of life are deeply mistaken on how the very process of life itself propagates its ability to invigorate consciousness on a wider and wider scale.

That widening is worth being glad about, and mudita is the name for that gladness, the sympathetic joy you feel at somebody else’s flourishing instead of the accounting you run against your own. It is the opposite motion entirely from purifying by elimination. And when we feel the fire, within us and without us, upekkha is what lets us stay balanced and centered in the middle of it, which is what being cazimi actually is, sitting in the heart of the fire and not being burnt by it.

None of it is a way out of the fire. It is what we are doing while we are inside it, and it is how we might become the purification the fire demands rather than more fuel handed to the flame. In a good forest fire it is the choking under brush that burns, and the trees rooted deep enough to stand in that heat are still there when it passes, and they come back stronger. That is the part I keep coming back to, the forest afterward, and how much of it comes down to what air we are feeding the fire and how we choose to stand in it.