in the season of Beltan
What is your relationship with fire?
It can be a tricky element. My relationship with it is ambivalent, at best.
Yet fire has made us the species we are. There’s a theory that the discovery and subsequent ability to cook our food to extract more of its energy led to the rapid development of the human brain.
We love fire in winter to gather around, cosy up with story and comfort food.
We love it in spring and summer, meeting around outdoor fires, sharing food and conversation, sitting together into the night as the stars glow with ancient fires far above the glowing embers.
We love fire as candlelight, dawn-light, sunset light. We love it as starlight blazing more brightly the deeper the darkness of the sky.
Fire calls us to gather.
But fire can be danger.
Fire and anger can lodge together.
It can be searing destruction consuming a forest at devastating speed.
Fire can be fever sweeping though a body. In mid January, when I had the fiercest inflammatory lupus flare to date, a herbal friend told me to let the flare pass through me. In one sense, there was no other choice, but she was right — to reach for medications to suppress the flare, especially the skin eruptions, would risk rebound inflammation. Putting out fire with gasoline.
Or fire can be alchemy —
Things changed or purified — what survives, a new story.
We’re in the season of Beltan (a French spelling; in Breton, Kala Mae, the calends of May). Last of the three Celtic festivals of Spring, on the cusp of Summer — the warmest and most celebratory of the three. A time for welcoming the growing light. Of moving into the fire element.
Traditionally Beltane was the time of hand-fastings — the couple jumped over fire as part of the ritual. On the other side of the fire everything was changed.
Fire and light go hand in hand. Our world is lit by a seething ball of fire that becomes life giving light only because we are exactly the right distance from it. Destructive up close, illuminating with the right perspective.
Fevers and inflammation can function like this too. Inflammation is fire as intelligence, an activation of a response with purpose. When it’s working for us, fire is warmth, mobilisation and defence. The problem is rarely that inflammation is ignited, but it comes when there is a failure of resolution.
Inflammation happens when the body decides something matters. Initially, inflammation is a state of readiness, not injury. But there’s a tipping point when inflammation doesn’t resolve. Leaving the body with heat without movement, pain without repair, repeated flares from small triggers, exhaustion…
Acute inflammation, such as fever, can be a friend — and alchemical fire. Chronic inflammation is a signal that has gone unanswered. It does not alchemise, but becomes stagnation, dryness, nervous system overdrive… Chronic inflammation is a conversation caught in a repetitive loop.
As in our bodies, so in the wider animate world.
In many ecosystems, fire is not an intruder but a rhythm. Fire clears undergrowth, opens cones sealed by resin, returns minerals to soil. Some seeds will not germinate without fire. Let the flare pass through, as my friend told me. Let it do its work and leave.
But the fires we see now — in Canada, California, Australia… are not part of a cycle. Are not acute. They are fed by chronic drought, by heat that cannot dissipate, by decades of suppression that allowed fuel to accumulate, by landscapes pushed beyond their capacity to recover. These fires do not move with and through the forest but against it. They do not clear, they consume.
A body that is pushed too far. An ecosystem that is burnt out.
When heat has nowhere to go, when movement is blocked, when the conditions for cooling, repair, and rest are absent, fire becomes indiscriminate. It rages.
Chronic inflammation in a body, mega-fire in a forest: both are symptoms of overwhelm. And the signals multiply when no one listens. The message grows louder, not clearer.
Beltan is a time to gather, a time to kindle love, to kindle fires that are warmth and light, alchemy and the possibility of a new story.
How are you arriving to this season of fire and change?
Does the fire element fill you with light and hope or does it speak of anger or danger, a mixture or something else entirely?
Where do you feel fire in your body? Where is helpful? Where is it raging unchecked?
What, if anything, would you like to alchemise to become new?
What glows so brightly for you that it leaves traces in your life?
Make a list — memories, values you live by, objects that dazzle you (for personal, aesthetic or any reason at all), places, people (those that have inspired you, loved ones, perhaps even those who slightly or more than slightly overwhelm you with their dazzle and glow…)
Where in the darkness does the light shine brightly?
Alchemical gatherings are a way of working with me with minimal commitment and maximum accessibility. Four 2-hour workshops, 12 Calmly by Candlelight gatherings and a 12-day course with a final gathering for just £25/€28/$30 for the year.
The next Calmly by Candlelight gathering is on May 16, 8 pm UK time, 9 pm in France (Time buddy is a great place to find your time)
This offering began as my paid subscriber benefits on Substack, but as I move my work to a quieter, calmer space I’ll be hosting them via Mighty Networks which will also give you a safe forum space to share work and for other related discussions, as well as links to the zoom events and an events diary.
If you have not worked with me previously on any course that has a Mighty Networks forum — use this link
If you have worked with me previously on any course that has a Mighty Networks forum — use this link