From the Fire

Words come from the fire. Old men in Old days sitting before the roasting pig chanting syllables into the smoke. He sought to keep the spirits away, or near, as was his belief.

His descendants began to name things. To name a thing is to have power over that thing, many systems of belief say. We named each other, and the parts of the world. We named the sky, and the lightning, and our children.

From these words came places. Places we had never seen and might see only after our deaths. Sky realms and underground, in the waters and on the breezes. And the world grew under our words.

And now we name the dark places we all know. The hardness inside, and the subtle tortures we inflict. All of these things have names, and the words we use become more than they were.

What once were nameless chants on the savanna now encompass us. The stories we tell have become what and who we are. Religion, politics, science, education, all of these things attempt to describe what we know to be, and what we hope or fear may happen.

To write these stories, one must know the world. Not in its entirety, but in its details. We must see the light and the darkness, the pain and the joy, that come from every place and every time. They loved their children on the savanna, and made stories to teach the ways of the world.

We love our children now, and tell them what stories we believe reflect the world. We write new stories, hoping to find even more in them. More about ourselves and more about everyone else.

Stories are one of the few universal things. We tell stories out of instinct, out of that desire to show who we are, and to understand it ourselves.

I write to know. To understand. To become. There are no other reasons.