Building Fire Breaks

Here in California we are thinking a lot about how to create fire breaks after several years of devastating fires. Big and small projects of people clearing anything that can be easy fuel for fires to spread, removing vegetation in places that can be taken down to bare soil where a fire might extinguish itself. In the drought years especially, it seemed impossible to imagine a space without dry burnable brush. But we are learning, even 6 inches of cleared ground can allow sparks to cool and stop smoldering.

This makes me think of an Irish word I learned, bánóg, which is a patch of ground leveled or compacted by years of dancing. I love how dancing itself makes the space open for dancing.

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance. – Scottish proverb

The act of gathering to dance, of feet pounding earth in rhythm with palms pounding drums, motion, emotion, all pouring from human bodies – creates space. On a bánóg, the cleared ground space and within humans, emotional space so that we can turn a creative mind to our thoughts and feelings.

Have you ever had the experience when you walk onto a dancefloor (or basketball court or paddle out into the waves) buzzing and full of emotion and story and frustration from the day and then you link yourself to the music and beat and move and sweat? You are probably not thinking about the specifics of your heightening emotions or their build up; you just know something is rising up and out through shuttering shoulders and soaring fingertips and soles striking the ground. It might even feel like you lose yourself in something larger, in movement itself. And then, spent, you walk off the floor to find your shoes and gather your keys as your breath is slowing and you realize the emotional intensity is just gone. You feel cleared. Space has opened and with it, new thoughts, maybe even new approaches to a problem.

I have had this experience with dance practice often. I credit the dancefloor and the 5 Rhythms’ wave as key to my clarity. So I immediately resonated and understood the Scottish Proverb “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.” We need to have these outlets. We need ways to move freely so that we can have freedom of vision before we take up swords and action. Without the dance, the body’s ability to express and release, we can get lost in anger and frustration. The arm needs to move - It can swing through the air with an open palm or it can clasp a weapon and strike at another. Each moves the energy, but one has more potential consequences than the other.

Emotions are energy. They can build up in our systems and that buildup is like dry tinder ready to catch fire. Everything can seem bigger and more intense, solutions seem limited, and words can get harsh. The emotions themselves are not a problem, but a buildup of old, dried out material around them can be.

Moving our bodies gives us that extra space for a fire break, a space to let emotional tinders fall without sparking a larger fire. Not trying to concrete over our entire emotional landscape y numbing out, but just clearing the dried brush that has built up. Some emotional content that is ready to go if we just give it room. Being frustrated about your time on hold is real but it doesn’t really need to travel with you throughout your next day. Being angry about someone disrespecting a boundary is valid and important but you can still benefit from giving some time to discharge before you formulate your response.

So much can fall on cleared ground and be held there without danger. A spark, a tear, a vengeful thought, a desperate impulse, a necessary no that is still forming, a tender yes that has not yet taken shape.

So we gather at our co-created bánógs, sacred open spaces we create together, and we move our bodies without words or declarations . I think of how for hundreds of years dance was a communal event including enough feet to compact the earth into a welcoming dance floor. People you worked alongside, traded with, argued with, grew old with, all there. And so that is in the proverb too, isn’t it – the sense that we need community gathering, in celebration and sadness, to help us to know when or how to fight.

If one can’t come together in rhythm with other moving vulnerable bodies, there may be missing pieces in how they see peaceful resolution or communal justice.

If one can’t flush with joyful ecstasy or look into another’s face wet with sweat and spontaneous tears and feel the connection of being a part of a diverse stream of life, moving, surging, bowing, how can one know what to take up arms to defend?

In any revolution there has to be the guidance of joy, and play, and expression of a range of feelings. Freedom of the body to move in its own way. The danger of turning things into black and white or expecting to only have one decisive emotion about something fraught is real and ongoing. Our internal and communal fire breaks need to be places where we can explore the dynamism of feeling and aliveness, contradiction and confusion, grace and the ungracious. An open space where we can spark and sparkle on solid ground.

We build fire breaks not to stop Fire or to blame Fire for burning but to protect what we hope to protect. And so we need love and joy and community connection to know what that is – what do we love enough to protect? And to recognize what detritus has built up around what is true for you and your heart? What is distracting and crowding out what is important?

How do you clear space for your emotions? How do you find clear space in the natural world? How about in community?

And what ember stays glowing red hot asking you to take a stand? Approach it from across the clearing. Sit with it. And ask, “What needs to change?”

Fire transforms.

Deep bows to the Fire.

For thousands of years our ancestors gathered in private places where they could be both sheltered and witnessed by the Wild, in particular by groves of trees that were known as sacred. A grove - a ring of trees with clear space between them, a holding space, a dreaming space, within the larger forest. Returning with reverence and community people gathered to reflect, share, pray and do ritual together. This beautiful ancestral memory gives roots to our sharing circles now.

Grove Circles are small groups with a dedicated guide who commit to journeying and exploring together. These Grove Circle gatherings are where you can process and enrich the explorations you are doing and hear each other’s love for and adventures with the animate world. These circles give us space for deeply personal reflections. Sharing will be council style - uninterrupted so you can allow your words to flow from the present moment.

Each circle will meet twice a month and be focused around a particular way of connecting with the Sacred Wild - EcoEmbodiment and Wholeness, Learning Seer Practices, or Dancing with the Creative Muse.

Reach out for more info or start the application here

Most of us have learned to be afraid of anger, both our own and others’. We have learned that stuffing our anger or spewing anger on others are our only options. We think anger equates meanness. We think it’s something to be avoided. But anger actually shows you what you deeply care about, and that it is both protective and necessary. You can learn how to befriend it in yourself and how to work with it. Join our guest and colleague from Center for Wild Spirituality as she shares about her work as a Sacred Rage facilitator and how you can find the medicine we all need in your own Sacred Rage.

Becky Traptow is a Therapeutic Bodyworker and Wild Mind Guide who uses body focused parts therapy (IFS and Wild Mind) as well as nature based practices and dreamwork to help people become more fully themselves. She brings with her 15 years of experience in nature-based wholing and healing practices with Animas Valley Institute, Internal Family Systems Therapy(IFS), Rosen Method Bodywork, Craniosacral Therapy, is a Certified Wild Mind Guide, Eco Spiritual Director with the Centre for Wild Spirituality, Dreamwork Guide and a student of Jungian Depth Psychology. She has also recently completed a facilitator training in Sacred Rage and looks forward to bringing this beautiful work to the world.