I love fire. It is one of the things I miss most when I am in Holland: making fire on a daily base.

Fire is for candles, for cooking food, lighting cigarets. Fire is practical and useful. But once you have seen a house burning down or a forest fire, you see what fire can do. Fire is hungry, fire eats, looks for food, fire can destroy in a rapid and devastating way. It shows the demolishing energy of our world, that is there, next to love and beauty. We all have those powers living in us, destroy and nourish, and the destroy part is the one that scares us the most.

Last week a fire ceremony was held in our garden. Our friends from France were traveling with a medicine woman from the Andes. They came to visit and siting on our living room floor, the medicine woman made a ‘despacho’. An offer to mother earth. She put all of our heavy energy in there and lots of gifts for our planet. The Qero indians, to whom she belongs, believe that we carry a lot of heavy energy with us -our pain, grief, anger- and like personal hygiene, we should clean ourselves from this energy as well. The offer is made with dedication and symbolic objects into pure beauty.

It was around midnight when they lit the fire in the garden. All our neighbours asleep, wind still, almost silent. In the middle of the city we were the only ones there. The fire immediately so awake and strong. “Mother earth is hungry here” the medicine woman said. And I could feel she was. The flames so big, angry and warm. All was heated, warming every part of you, dissolving all the emotional cold that you store. We all just stood there, watching the flames take our old emotions and warming our bodies and thoughts.