Fires

Each night at SpiritFire, we offer a different focus – a map, of sorts – as an offering to those who would like to engage as a community at the fire.

Below you’ll find descriptions of the 2012 fires.

 

Wednesday: Pathways

Each year we begin our gathering with this traditional dialogue between the four pathways of the SpiritFire Circles: Music, Motion, Voice, Seva – and connect them with the Mysteries.  This ritual dialogue helps all of us to connect with each other in a common understanding of the unique container of SpiritFire, and strengthen our trust and common intent by extending our statements of honoring, promising, and requesting between one pathway and the others.  Most of us usually find ways to engage in all the pathways throughout an evening or the gathering, but we invite you to choose one that calls to you in particular this year, come to the evening pathway meetings after opening circle, and help create our first fire lighting ritual!

 

Thursday: Origins

SpiritFire is not a brand new modality.  Perhaps we have our unique signature of the pathway model, our own look from our beautiful art, or a new way of approaching our fires each year.  However, we can easily see that many cultures and traditions have served as the Sources of our songs, instruments, rhythms, dances, art, and ritual actions as the foundation for our Pathways.  Tonight is our opportunity to honor and recognize the many traditions that have informed and blessed our circle over the past 10 years.  What traditions and practices have informed your life?  How have they allowed you to gift the circle, contributing to the diversity and beauty that combine to form this beautiful, unique container?

 

Friday: Gratitude

Here we are, in the circle for yet another fire circle at yet another SpiritFire.  We’ve been dancing, chanting, and playing, priming ourselves for transformation and manifestation.  But let us take a moment to breathe and think… and reflect.  Before moving forward from this point, let us look behind and see the gifts that have brought us to this point.  What are you grateful for?  Recognizing this can be a challenge.  The gifts we have been given may be in clear sight … or they may be hidden from us behind veils of personal history.  Let us use this night to name what we see or to penetrate beyond the veils and honor our experiences along the pathways that have brought here, to this fire, on this night.

 

Saturday: Manifestation

As we gather together around the fire for one more night before leaving our sanctuary on the mountain, we look forward to the world we live in through the rest of the year. What do we take with us? How does our time at the Fire change our lives beyond the circle? How will we take the energy, intention and magic found in the flames, the shadows, the sounds and the silences, the footprints left on the ground and the eyes and hearts that meet ours with us forward from this night? How will we work to create the experience of mystery and sacredness in our everyday lives and how will we translate our dreams into action and manifestation?

 

Wednesday: Pathways

Tonight our traditional Pathways ritual opens our first fire, invoking and honoring the core of SpiritFire’s circle: Music, Motion, Voice, and Seva, opening the first fire of 2013.

Thursday: Bring It

Tonight we come together to shine and share the light of our most full, robust, and whole selves.  Tonight we acknowledge and invite all of the truth and raw beauty within each of us.  Not limited by ideas of ‘right’ or ‘best’, we instead step forward with authenticity.  Coming out from behind our inhibitions against fully be-ing, we weave brighter the fire of ourselves and of our community.  Before you come to the circle, we ask you to meditate on your gifts: what makes you unique?  What aspect or quality do you want to reveal?  Are you willing to trust, to open up a bit, and share your light with each other tonight?  Are you ready to shine?

Friday: Envisioning

Each of us has a path we envision ourselves on – or perhaps are looking to find out more about what that path might be.   Tonight we invite you to use the rhythm, chant, movement and mystery of the fire to dive deeper into what it is you truly want to manifest, and to find ways to voice and enact it.  The “Fire of Transformation” workshop will lead this fire lighting ritual.

Saturday: The Web

Tonight we celebrate and make offerings of gratitude to the web of those who support us in our journeys:  our communities, families, ancestors, guides and spirits – those we could not walk our pathways without.  Consider these guiding lights tonight – and during the day, feel free to create a symbolic representation of/for them within the sand rangoli.