The Fueling of Fire: Spaciousness

The following are my notes from my presentation on The Element of Fire: the last in the series of the four elements on Learning to Listen with co-leader, Helen Cepero.

The Element of Fire is associated with the direction of South and with the season of summer. Not surprising perhaps since summer is associated with the attributes of Fire—heat and light. Like the other elements of Water, Air and Earth, this element takes on both creative and destructive faces—heat that can warm and save, heat that can burn and destroy. Fire is associated with Earth in that the core of our planet is fire, glimpsed at times through the eruption of a volcano. Fire at the core. Fire beneath our feet now. Fire is associated with water in that water can put out fire. Yet the other element of Air is necessary for a fire to burn. Although there are so many ways we could apply the element of Fire to the art of Listening, we have chosen to explore how Fire and the Spaces Between are related to Listening. Spaciousness. Fire.
It was this poem by Judy Brown that opened up this aspect of Fire to us.

Fire

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely as a pail of water.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned to pile on logs,
then we come to see how
it is fuel, and the absence of fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

(Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner, editors, Teaching With Fire: Poetry that sustains the Courage to Teach, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, p. 89)

We have recognized early on that here at the Listening Post it is the space itself that fuels welcome, hospitality, safety and sanity. It sets the stage for the fire of the longing and yearning and anger and passion of the stories we often hear in this space, like the spaces between logs on a fire give the air the fire needs to burn. But listening can occur wherever the space is set for it. It can be ‘knee to knee’ space, yet there is a setting aside of a space that becomes sacred ground.
Another aspect of spaciousness related to listening is the spaciousness of silence. Listening implies silence on the part of the listener. And the quality of the silence resounds. It is not a silence of resentment, of judgment of restraint, or of withdrawal. The silence needed for listening is a silence of fullness—a space that fuels the conversation from the soul. Perhaps you’ve ‘heard’ this silence. That pregnant pause after a spectacular performance. The silence of the wilderness where there is not a sound and yet the air rings with it. The silence when words cannot express the extremes of love or sorrow. Only silence, that kind of space can fill it.
Yet silence is often something we are uncomfortable with. We fill in the spaces in conversation. T.V’s leave hardly a nanosecond for it.

“A fire grows simply because the space is there, with opening in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way.”


I began to appreciate silence from nature—the stillness of the spreading fields in Iowa, especially at sunrise and sunset, a silence that wrapped me up and held me. I learned it again in Alaska, also by the landscape and the majesty of mountains, but also from the Alaska Native peoples. They modeled listening in a way I could not at first comprehend. There was a spaciousness of time that I had not experienced. I remember that in an evening of a village gathering, where storytelling went on and on way into the middle of the night, I was restless. But one of the elders said as another person was still telling their story hour after hour, “ We listen all the way to the very end.” I have never forgotten that wisdom, and the way they knew this listening was healing, the purifying fire, the cleansing fire.

In an ensuing discussion, one of the participants remembered she'd just spent some time with her daughter cutting out snowflakes. "It was the spaces that made the snowflakes take shape, that created the snowflake." Others recognized how the poem applied to their own relationships--letting there be space, laying on a log lightly from time to time.