Beneath the pines: wildfires, wild souls, archetypes and forces of creation and renewal
The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled.
Many of the threads that weave throughout this thought-wandering were influenced by conversations with Telma G. Laurentino. She and Sofia Batalha will be holding a workshop together called Mythic Monster Ecology as part of The Emergence Network’s Becoming Monster convening. Their workshop seeks to co-draw cartographies for the possibility of belonging to biodiversity and monstrosity by weaving the mythologies brought by participants with the studies of mythological and historical patterns of ecosystemic violence.
As we walk through a stand of pine, my partner softly signals to me to be still and silent.
He’s alert and listening. He whispers that he hears something – a crunching, cracking, popping. “I think something is following us”, he says.
I prick my ears. I attune to place.
Initially, we assume the noise is coming from the undergrowth, but we quickly realise that it’s in the canopy. But we see nothing out of the ordinary.
We creep gently, our heads tilted up, befuddled.
Time feels sticky in our confusion. We are disoriented by noise coming from multiple places. Then my partner turns to me and, in hushed tones, asks, “Is it the pine cones opening?”
We stare up quietly and observe. Indeed, it seems to be. Attentively, we try to catch sight of them bursting into bloom, but they evade us. By the time the sound reaches our ears, the deed is already done.
We linger amid the phenomenon for a while longer, remaining still and silent, listening to the chorus of crunching, cracking, popping sounds. We glance knowingly at one another, smirking and smug to be experiencing this magical event.
Not quite ready to leave, but knowing that we need to get back to our desks (sigh), we walk on and soon pass another stand of pine. There’s crunching, cracking, popping here too. This stand towers over the roadside, and strewn on the asphalt are perfectly formed pine cones.
I pick one up. I look up at the tree who dropped it. I feel that I’m granted permission to take and cherish it. And I do.
It feels quite vanilla, but pine is my favourite tree species. There’s something about them that feels comforting and even familiar. I’ve contemplated this before and wondered if it symbolises an ancestral connection to pine trees: perhaps they featured heavily in the lives of my ancestors; perhaps from the distant past, we already know each other, the pines and me.
In the times that my partner and I fantasise about our future, I often say that I imagine a small life in a small house beneath pines.
When I moved to Portugal, I clocked 1) the wild native pines clinging on in small enclaves, and 2) the severe lack of old-growth forest. Yes, there are trees, but swathes of Eucalyptus plantations are not forests; they are monocultures.
My homeland is heavily degraded. But here, I really feel that the land is hurting. It feels lonely somehow, like it has been spiritually abandoned. (When I think about this now, I realise that maybe this feeling is because, in the UK, I am exposed to “love letters” to the land from poets, artists, writers, photographers and many more; in Portugal, I don’t have this exposure, but perhaps they do exist.)
When I find those enclaves, I feel a sense of home. And in those moments, I hope that those places don’t feel so lonely, that they feel me there and our belonging together, even if it is fleeting.
I have to assume that it is the hot weather that is inviting these pine cones to burst open and spill their seeds in synchrony. A quick bit of research suggests I’m right. But I also read that it’s not just heat but also fire. Many pine-dominant ecosystems are dependent on fire to thrive.
I ponder this as the sky hangs hazily and the mid-afternoon sun blazes red, obscured by the smoke of forest fires. Not so far away, flames rage, and firefighters try to tame and control them.
I wonder if these stands of trees here have “got wind” of the news. I wonder if their kin have sent messages to tell them that it is time to disperse their seeds. I wonder if these trees have heeded the smoke signals in unison, perhaps even in honour of kin they’ve lost and in hopes to repopulate, if not there then here.
In these times of interwoven crises, forest fires have become an emblem of end times. Oversimplified narratives create binary thinking that depicts fire as bad. Fire becomes a villain in our story. It is the monster lurking in the shadows until it strikes with all its might. We fight it, tame it, control it, vanquish it, force it back.
I don’t mean to fangirl Ursula K. Le Guin, but I love her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”. In it, she challenges story structures that reinforce modernity’s narratives (my words, not hers). She does away with the “hero’s journey” and reductive archetypes, story linearity and structures defined by conflict and conquest that perpetuate narratives of dominance and violence. I’m a strong advocate for such interrogations: not only examining the narratives that hold us but also the ways we organise and structure them.
Because if there is a hero, then there is likely a villain. Beings are reduced to characters, and characters are oversimplified to fit archetypes.
What if we released fire from the archetype of villain? What if we released ourselves from experiencing the world through modernity’s frame and narrative structures? How would our understandings of reality change? How would our experiences of the world be reshaped?
These are questions that I am actively holding as I explore my work with story and narrative design as regenerative practice. As always, there are more questions than answers. But I think that this may be the point: that we must constantly be questioning, reflecting, inquiring as practice, because there is never certainty, only ongoing process.
I concede that fire can be a destructive and devastating force – I would never want to diminish the pain and loss that people have experienced by failing to recognise this.
But naturally, fire is also a regenerating force. It is a revitalising and enriching force that’s vital to fire ecologies and maintains their ecosystem health and resilience.
Cultures around the world recognise fire as the driver of cycles of creation and destruction; it symbolises vitality, renewal, purification and transformation. I contemplate this in terms of the regenerative movement. I think about it in reference to my own practice; in tending narrative ecologies, what is the allegorical fire, the force of renewal and transformation?
I think about the term “wildfire” and realise that it isn’t fire that is vilified so much as wildfire. Modernity doesn’t like wild things. It likes everything tamed and controlled and under the authority of humans. In the places where wildness is permitted, it’s only because humans allow it, and the more-than-human world should remember that we’ve granted them this privilege (satire).
I wonder about this aversion to wildness. It’s not new. Many narratives that vilify the wild live in fairy tales and old stories. Beyond the fact that wildness doesn’t fit into the industrial paradigm, is this aversion rooted, perhaps at least in part, in the suppression of the wildness in ourselves?
There were centuries of persecution of wild women and queer folk who were burned to death. Someone once asked me, albeit rhetorically, “What do you think that does to a people? Does anyone get out unscathed?”
Let’s define “wild” as an “untamed, authentic existence that resists control or domestication”. When you murder the people who hold the folk magic, ancestral wisdom and traditional knowledge and who resist giving this up, not only are these wild souls extinguished, but the ones who are left behind are given a clear signal: heed to domestication under the control of the dominant power or die.
And here we find ourselves, controlled and domesticated, farmed for our labour and part of the pyramid scheme of capitalism.
I found myself thinking the other day how odd it is that where you are born determines the economic ideology you must follow. Of course, the same is true of many things. The ovarian lottery (as I’ve heard it called, but I’m unsure if I like this terminology) determines pretty much everything for us. I cannot decide not to live under capitalism. And because of this – among other reasons – I will never be truly wild.
Whether wildness is what I strive for is a separate topic. But just like wildfire, I often feel like I want to wreak havoc and burn shit, to create renewal and fresh vitality. There is the feeling of being tamed and domesticated. I often feel penned into a life that doesn’t make sense to a wild soul.
In many ways, I connect to fire’s fiery force. I am a Sagittarius. I am Pita. I am the year of the dragon (although, the Earth Dragon). I’ve been described as fiery, both as a compliment and an insult. I’m lured to its flickering, dancing, ethereal presence. Almost undoubtedly, I would have been one of those wild souls set ablaze had I lived a few centuries ago.
We have a sacred connection to fire: we humans have coevolved with it. In many ways, it is because of fire that we are what we are. Yet, as with so many things, we’ve exploited our relationship with it.
In many ways, we’ve welcomed the wildfires experienced today in Portugal; we’ve created the perfect conditions for them to rage and rip through landscapes with all their destructive force. Ecologies are influenced to create dry and flammable environments on which the fire feasts: oily Eucalyptus, thirsty non-native trees that dry out the land, industrial agriculture, ditched and drained waterways. (There is also politics involved, which I daren’t go into as I’m not knowledgeable enough, but the wildfires are said to be often intentionally started by those wanting to clear protected land so it can be converted to plantation, which can be legally done when there’s no longer anything on that land to protect.)
Rather than recognise the complexity, it is easier to simplify the narrative: fire is the villain. I’ve read that since the 1970s, Portugal has officially been trying to integrate fire management practices of controlled burns to support fire ecosystems and to manage wildfire risk, but the public pushback has been heavy, which I assume is because the story sits so heavily that it’s been mythologised.
So, as I trail off and finish this post, I welcome you to contemplate the beings that have been mythologised and how the myth itself may be a cage of oversimplification and often persecution. Who lives inside that cage? The wolf. The flood. The tiger. The forest. The rains. The other. The wild.
That gifted pine cone now sits proudly on what is starting to resemble an altar next to a jar of sea shells, a peacock feather, a vase of dried wild carrot heads, another of dried grasses and small poppy heads, a twig covered in beard lichen, and a collection of tree seeds. (I told you I’d be a prime candidate for being burned at the stake.)
As strange ecologies take over my home, I question if my bringing them indoors is another symptom of the control and domestication that modernity seeks. But then I flip it and think that it is likely me trying to feel more wild among these wild kin.
This is a thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquiries arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world and sources of inspiration). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. I write from my own perspective, framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside, and now lives on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. Learn more here.
Recommendation
In each Substack, I want to share «something» that has nourished me, shaped me and/or has become tangled up in my way of seeing and being in the world.
I was recently sent this beautiful, immersive digital experience created by Marshmallow Laser Feast and featured on Emergence Magazine’s website. Here’s their description:
”We belong to the biosphere—a beautifully complex system that connects us to everything. With each breath we take, a rhythmic interchange that keeps the forest—and us—alive, unfolds in an eternal cycle of reciprocity. Yet our senses don’t usually perceive the myriad ways we are part of the wider world. We invite you to delve into an immersive experience that visualizes the hidden cycle of respiration that connects us with the Amazon rainforest, and feel into the exchange between trees, mycelial networks, and the wider living world through the rhythm of your own breath.”