fire, ascetics and vulnerability

over the last few days my body burned with a restless fever. finally i visited a doctor and she said it was viral flu. once the meds began to take care of the physical healing i tried to listen to the silence of the scorching fever. i remembered two dreams.

i am about 3 years old. i am in a room in my birth home. its on fire. i rush out and run from room to room. the whole house is burning and i find nobody else there. i begin crying and look out of the window. i see an ascetic standing there and watching. he looks straight at me. i know in that moment that he has set this fire. i reach out with my hands, call out to be saved but he turns around and walks away.

the lost, frightened, helpless child. the raging fire consuming everything. the ascetic, cool, distant, detached, but also the fire-setter. each one an intrinsic part of my inner foundation. so much tension and energy in the dream. fascinating inner relationships between the three elements - constantly creating new experiences.

fire has always been strong within me. its shown up in rebellion, quick hot anger, damaging conflict and self-annihitation. since i was young i have known and lived its destructive side. its creative, life breathing aspects i learnt slowly as i matured. my warrior self.

detachment is one lesson of the ascetic. learned even more slowly. walking away from burning fires, from small helpless children. walking away is a process i needed to integrate. the ascetic led me to meditation and connected me to my owl self. that self that can see into the darkness of others souls because it has deeply lived in those shadows. 

the helpless child lost in the fires - set by the self or others. the pain and vulnerability of that child was the hardest to  really assimilate. but finding the strength to show my weaknesses and cry in public was the biggest gift i gave myself.

every time i visit this dream and try to move it to completion i find a different path. my favourite is this one - the child cries and cries and cries and the moisture vaporised by the fire creates clouds that pour down putting out the fires and carry the child away in the flood of rain, carry the child upwards to the ascetics mountain retreat where they sit around a fire and reflect. same three elements but with a more peaceful relationship reached through the child's vulnerability. the three really are interchangeable, melding and differentiating but the same composite self.  

the second fire and ascetic dream came to me six months after i had been doing karate. 

i am naked, walking a curvy line down towards a flowing river. on my left are women karatekas doing sanchin. on my right a raging fire with male ascetics chanting and performing a death ritual. 

when i drew the image i saw the curvy line i walked created a yin-yang symbol. the duality of the one. wave and particle, ascetic and warrior, masculine and feminine, stillness and movement, spirit and body. the naked, unshielded self walking the thin line between. 

conflict and fire in my life had led me to meditation. meditation had then guided me to karate. the dream pointed to finding one within the other. but in those initial years the passion for new found karate consumed me and i let the meditative self go and then lost it even more when i came here.

in singapore the helpless child energy was strong and i moved further from the fire and the ascetic. towards the end of last year i re-discovered the fire of the warrior. lately i began meditating again as the yearning to re-connect to my ascetic grew. and when i asked for guidance the first message was 'work on yourself. there is much to be done there.' and so i started. the de-cluttering.

today i sense that the fire-setter ascetic is burning the homes of my self again. destroying the ego? creating the emptiness from which life can begin anew?