Through the Fires- Again
Could the flowers show us how to survive differently this time?
I ask the flowers how they respond to a world on fire—something they have seen countless times over the eons.
When the world burns too hot, or when our lives and our desires feel like they are too much, too insistent, or out of control—it can be difficult to trust what is happening. Our desires, our dreams, like fires, can sometimes be wild, unpredictable, and impossible to understand. Maybe wildfires erupt out of the raw desire of the Earth. When our desires, or the lives we are caught up in, become all-consuming, and feel like they are spreading uncontrollably, how do we navigate them? What does it take to evolve to survive a fire?
Some of my own ancestors survived a terrifying life-changing fire when their whole town was burned to the ground in the Civil War. One unbelievable night in Sutton, West Virginia, my third great-grandparents —who several years before had already lost six of the fourteen children they gave birth to—watched their tavern burn to the ground. Heartbroken, they died the following winter. Their two oldest sons who were in the oil and gas business, were fighting for the Union, while their younger sons fought for the Confederacy because of their loyalty to Stonewall Jackson. Families, a whole town, and our whole state were divided, and nothing was ever the same again.
Yet no one in my family ever talked about these stories. Instead, I have found keepsakes from where my great-grandmother started the county chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy to uphold her father’s honor. Misguided honor that valued silence and a sugar-coated, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all” version of the past. Their terror must have been so large and the fire so hot that it incinerated not just their tavern, but their stories too. I knew I needed those ancestral stories to survive my own firestorms, but I didn’t have their hard-earned wisdom to guide me. Would our country be so divided today if our parents and grandparents had kept these stories alive? We need the wisdom born long before our living memories, the heart wisdom, not just the facts in the history books.
Many flowers carry stories in their seed of how to survive fire. Not only do flowers eat and transform the fire of the sun into food, but many flowering plants have also adapted to thrive in climates where wildfires burn regularly. there are many species of “fire flowers” whose seeds must feel the heat of fire before they germinate. Their seeds can lay dormant for up to a hundred years waiting for a fire to cross their path, signaling them to open and sprout in the fresh, burned-clean dirt. These seeds are memory-keepers, holding the stories and the genetic knowledge of how to live and evolve in the extremes of the Earth’s climate.
Fire tolerant flowers do not just survive but thrive in the disturbed areas that a fire has left behind. Less competition, and freshly released nutrients from the ash are some of the rewards. In fact, this ability to take advantage of fire disturbed areas was a key component of the success story of the earliest flowering plants over a hundred million years ago.
After a fire, many of these “fire-flowers” that have been dormant for decades or more, will burst into bloom in mass, in amazing displays of color, blanketing charred landscapes. They are answering the devastation of the wildfire with a fiery passion of their own, bursting forth from the dirt in a riot of color, trumpeting a new cycle of life with almost unbelievable beauty.
Purple coneflower, or echinacea—a prairie native now found most everywhere—thrives when they live in an area that burns every few years, because the fire prompts them to produce more flowers and therefore more seed. Known for being a strong plant, they grow even stronger when they survive a fire. I have grown purple coneflowers in my garden for years, but I would love to see the resilience of a large stand in the wild that has thrived after a fire.
I like to call on their strength when I need a strong shoulder to lean on. On a particularly tough day, they said to me, “My strength is your strength. Stand tall with belief in your own resilience. You are part of this Earth that will always abide. Let any fears you hold become merely doors for you to step through. The memories held in my seeds will lead you forward.”
Amazingly, it is also fire that has preserved the oldest flowers, the earliest angiosperms yet discovered. After decades of looking for the origins of flowering plants in rock fossils, paleobotanists Else Marie Friis and Bruce Tiffany tried something new, and began sifting through charcoal residues. They found angiosperms that were much older than any flower fossils found before. It is hard to comprehend how these oldest of flowers have been preserved by something as destructive as fire.
Ben Crair says, in his article The Fossil Flowers that Rewrote the History of Life, “Wildfires will normally burn plants to ash, but where oxygen is limited, perhaps in a tree trunk, or beneath the litter of the forest floor, it also has the power to preserve. Heat vaporizes the moisture in the plant issue and may leave behind a black carbon skeleton, which can survive in geological strata for tens of millions of years.”
These early flowers found in charcoal are tiny, usually only one millimeter or less in size. When their images are enlarged so they can easily be seen, an unmistakable flower is visible, like it was recently alive. Fire is the ultimate ephemeral—not lasting, rapidly changing shape—and yet, it is able to capture the essence of an ancient flower and preserve it for eons in the form of charcoal to allow us to peer deeply into the past. Charcoal can become in this way another memory-keeper just as the seeds are, helping us imagine our possible futures by seeing our past.
The early flowering plants learned to adapt, reproducing more quickly than their predecessors—the conifers, cycads, and ginkgoes—due to their short life cycle. This not only helped them take root and dominate the newly disturbed environments, but also fueled more rapid genetic change, allowing them to develop more efficient photosynthesis, transpiration, and growth. The world they lived in was considered a “high-fire world”—from one hundred seventy-five million to sixty-six million years ago—and long after as well. For many of these eons, oxygen levels were higher than today, it was generally much warmer, and there was lots of vegetation to fuel the fires. For us, living in a world so full of uncontrolled fire is unimaginable, yet without that period, the flowering plants may not have survived. In his book, Burning Planet, Andrew C. Scott wrote, “Fire and evolution of flowering plants go hand in hand.”
In our culture we are conditioned to think of wildfires, as terribly destructive, something we want to avoid at all costs. We talk about “the fires of hell” as our worst possible punishment. When I have come across recently burned tracts of land, I have often broken down in tears for what was lost. We do everything we can now to prevent wildfires from happening, even though we know they are necessary to ecological balance. Interrupting the natural fire cycles of the planet is one way we have thrown the whole Earth out of balance.
Our sun is a huge fireball that provides the energy to generate life on our planet. The flowers eat the fire of the sun, and we learned to use the power of fire in a less direct way at least a million years ago—one of the most important steps in our human evolution. With fire, we began to cook our food, and a much greater variety of plants became digestible, nutritious, and tasty for us. Fire kept us warm. It can even be said that fire domesticated us. We live in a symbiotic relationship with fire more than we realize in our days of electric heat. Our fires now are often unseen. We tend to forget how critical fire is to our daily life—and even more, to our own evolution.
Flames are the most intense kind of fire. The slower fires of rust and oxidation; decay and decomposition; are also types of fires, breaking down what has been built up. Fire burns away what is no longer needed—burns away resistance, and resistance to change. When the status quo has been preserved for too long—when things get stagnant, when new life and new opportunities are needed—fire goes to work, either slowly as decomposition, or fast with flames. New real estate is opened for something new to grow, and the flower seeds are standing by, ready to root into the opportunity.
What does it mean to survive a fire and be burned clean? To be reduced to charcoal and burned down to one’s essential elements? Fire is terrifying but knowing that it also generates new life helps us live with its cycles. The fire-follower flowers want to share their stories, their memories—the DNA in their seeds—with us. Their stories of how fire allowed them to flourish at their very beginnings, all those eons ago, are ones we may need to know ourselves when faced with an unknown future.
If flowers can heal the land after a fire, can they also heal broken, burned, and divided families, especially ones that have buried their own stories? The amount of grief carried in the living memories of my great-grandparents after the Civil War must have been soul crushing, and that grief became imbedded in the DNA of their descendants after the buried stories were long forgotten. If my family had told the stories—the hard stories of the betrayals, the quest for honor, the need to survive, the heartbreak of destruction and loss, the horror of the fires, the divisions that could not be mended—that hard earned wisdom might have helped build stronger families with deeper roots and more cohesive communities.
Fires leave behind stories that must be told, composted, and metabolized. In the same way the flowers’ roots draw up and metabolize minerals from deep in the earth, they can also metabolize the collective grief of the land. They will gladly metabolize our sorrows as well, when we ask them to, when we offer it to them, and it is vitally important that we do. The flowers know how to heal both the land and our bodies, how to move beyond the grief, how to metabolize it and use it as food for new life.
Sitting with the purple coneflower in full bloom as I ponder these stories, they say to me, “When the old ways of being no longer work, gather the wisdom of all who have come before deep into your heart. Let go of all you think you know and open your heart to listen. Unlock the ancient memories. Trust the wisdom of All That Is and know that you are held. The way forward is beyond your wildest dreams.”
We need every bit of the wisdom held by the flowers, our ancestors, the animals, and the land, when the way forward in front of us is unknown. We need ways of gathering their broader wisdom into our hearts that are simple and yet profoundly able to shift our perception. Then will we have the resources we need to begin to trust we are being led to a home where our roots will once again grow deep and flourish.
What wisdom/ what writing/ what art/ is helping you navigate the fires and rapid changes of your world today?
In
’s recent post Against Hope, Let us plant our faith instead in the darkness, she says,“My primary problem with hope is that it limits us to imagining only one possible scenario or unfolding, the one we are “hoping” for. Hope focuses our eyes, and the prodigious powers of our imaginations, on a singular outcome that we think might make us feel better. I hope nothing bad happens. I hope the good guys win. I shut my eyes and I hope it all works out.
Right now I think we need to put hope in a basket in the back of the closet and start opening our eyes and using our imaginations.”
If we try and see the world through the heart and wisdom of the flowers’ experience perhaps we can dream new ways of navigating our futures that no longer just repeat the same outcomes. May it be so.
Wow! I am struck by the horror of losing so many children, then one's house and place of business, then succumbing to death in the cold. I know that most think of the war being about slavery, but that was actually secondary. Only 1 in 6 men owned slaves in the south, so most didn't need to defend that way of life. They were indignant about the taxes being assessed by the north without their approval. The Civil War was so terrible for all involved. As a Southerner, I have a couple of horrifying Civil War tales of ancestors that are painful, too. It's a gruesome history of our past.
I was so moved by the stories of your ancestors, woven with the stories of fire flowers, and how fires bring not only grief and loss, but also opportunity. I love this guidance from the purple coneflower: "Stand tall with belief in your own resilience. You are part of this Earth that will always abide. Let any fears you hold become merely doors for you to step through."