When I Dance Around The Fire...
My rituals consume me, not always, but mostly. It turns out that life’s inferno is amazingly strong and overwhelming. Through these ceremonial processes I become grounded and alive. It is like being reborn, a life after death, or a kind of freedom after enslavement to all of the world’s little demons.
Sometimes, I think about whether I choose them, or if they found me in this vast cosmic abyss. How did I become these rituals? Was it chance, circumstance, or chaos that led me here?
Was it in my celestial DNA, the raw ragging genes of my ancient animal ancestry?
Sometimes I retreat to the burrows below, the warm and safe place that I can only fit into, the one no other creature knows about, the place that allows inoculation from everyone else. This is how it feels when I am getting grounded.
When it happens I walk into the world alone. I smell the air and touch the cold night feeling of day. I take with me sight, cunning abilities, and child’s mind. Walking leads to finding, leads to spying, leads to whispers to myself in my own ear. In the woods, under the waves, on the winds crest; I feel this moment.
This is the instant of the attack before death. It is the knowledge of being watched and stalked, and somehow being okay with life’s predicament; that it does not last. Our days are less than we know.
We are all living on borrowed time.
Mortality is defined in this action, and the feeling of fear is washed away in my ritual. It is like being in a glass cage, or a box made of windows. The glass is thin, the frame weak, and the pleasurable sound of the whole thing cracking pulsates my heart. Standing, waiting, watching, and then shattering my mind into a thousand pieces, I begin to know that windows like these are meant to be broken. Glass is not meant to hold in such a wild creature. Here it feels good as an animal, for once.
My rituals seem to always confront death. Death deserves an honest reckoning.
Sometimes we deliver it to others, and sometimes we receive this unto our own. This is as honest, simple, and true of a man as I can be. I am a father, once a boy. I have both given and taken lives.
This is the life of a provider. This is the life of a gatherer. Humanity without society at its core. This is the dawn of the last 200,000 years of evolution.
My rituals pursue me, and I cannot seem to stop them.
This is dancing around the fire defined in slow motion. This is what happens when I leave your world for a time, and get lost in mine. It is nothing more than simple movements; verbs that beget a natural ballet. Here in the smoke I see my tradition, my potent humanity.
