While at our friend´s Leonie and Martin in La Croix Valmer, we spent several hours this morning feeding a large fire, burning the underwood of the garrigue, branches of oak, cork and mimosa that had been cut on the land last week. Every spring, while the earth is still wet from the winter rains and not yet dried out by the summer sun and the mistral, the local authorities demanded a clearing of the land owners in order to prevent fires that regularly torch the mediterran during the summer.

While sweating away and feeding the fire, I reflected on the symbolic meaning of what we were doing. It occured to me that we might be performing a ritual that not only served a practical purpose but a symbolic one, as well. My sense is that this relatively small fire might -so to say-serve as a homeopathic dosage that redeems the fire energy symbolically from not having to explode in a larger catharsis during the summer. The sum (I first wrote: «the sun» !) of all the small fires might thus add up and alchemically «satisfy» the fire principle. Cosmos seems to work like that on all levels, individually and collectivly, in humans and in nature: once the archetypical principle has been fed to the degree where it is satiated, there is not more need for it to act out in destructive ways. As human beings -being gifted with the capacity to understand- we can take responsiblity in that way, both for ourselves and the world.