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Searching for the Campfire
holding on to the humanity
Conversations drifted through my house recently. Quite normal, really. Remembrances of years gone by, things that parents and grandparents did .. remembered from childhood. Like the ladies or couples who met each week to sit around playing cards, chain smoke cigarettes. Or at Mah Jong. Or gathered at the bar after work. Or at bowling. Or any manner of activity where the group was small and conversations danced and rambled.
And as these recollections wafted through our talking - here and now - I suddenly realized that in however many ways which situations and the modern world allows .. we elegant simple creatures perpetuate an action carried out through millenia in innumerable lived lives and straight forward needs, by ancestors. To 'be'. Together.
A time, a place, at any pace of sharing .. just to be together .. conversing about experiences, plans, and deeds. It used to be just the night fire, gathered around in the warmth of a small secure light, after the efforts and travails of the day. To talk, laugh, muse .. and learn. Wrap the day into a soft maybe-leathered pouch or decorated packet of ideas, all the while as the fire warmed and the flames crackled and bellies were filled and muscles eased from the long day's efforts.
I think there is a deep part of our collective memory that needs to be together from time to time just to revel in the getting through it all. Any random activity will do, as long as we hear and speak, banter and gaze into someone else's eyes. Cadences can vary, topics - any. Familiar, new, fanciful or dire. They're just the frame. To be together is the glow of the soul.
We all search for that deep important and warming campfire to be around from time to time. It satisfies us. Makes the world sensible and fine even in the middle of chaos. The wildness captured in the dancing flames, where we can be on the outside of the wildness, valuing it measure by measure in the flickering lights. Giving a sense of proportion to things and events. Words. Considered. Shared.
Not a day goes by which doesn't want for a campfire of some sort to settle round, make sense of the world, renewed by the personal humanity we can so easily see in the eyes and warm glowed presense of companions.
June , 2000
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