Gonna Get Burned

Have you ever been burned?  I don’t mean literally, though we have probably all experienced that pain in some way in our lives—a sunburn that reddens and heats our shoulders or a blistering burn on our hand from cooking.  I mean figuratively.

“Love is the burning point of life… Love itself is pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive.”  –Joseph Campbell

We all probably know this pain, too.

In April, soon after the snow melted, we attempted to burn our little prairie area.  We had the water hose, shovels, wet burlap in buckets of water, and matches.  The first dried grasses in the flame of a match poofed up and were instantly gone.  It seemed dry enough, but as we progressed, there was still too much moisture in the ground and in the grass to get a consistent burn.

I used a pitchfork to ‘move’ the flame from one place to another, with Chris standing by with his shovel, but it just wasn’t going well.  When we were about to call it a day, a smoldering flame lit the tall, dried grass around one of the White Pine trees and whooshed up into the branches.  Chris beat it with a shovel as I got the water hose and doused it.  But there was damage done.  Some of the lower branches were scorched and burned at the tips.  Glad it wasn’t worse.  But as the days passed, more brown needles appeared.  The heat of the burn had rose up and damaged the needles farther up the tree.

I tried to reassure the man who loves trees and who had lovingly planted these pines as two-footers, that it would be okay.  But this poor tree looked worse by the day.

Meanwhile, as I was driving on the highway not far from our house, the stark blackness of a burn rose from the road up a hill to the edge of a woods.

Prescribed or controlled burns help manage weeds and invasive species, including woody plants like cedar and buckthorn.  Burns also restore nutrients to prairie plants and stimulate growth of deep-rooted grasses and native plants.

The charred ground was in stark contrast to the vivid green of new Spring leaves in the woods.

As the weeks passed, I noticed buds emerging from the tips of our White Pine, including most of the branches with browned needles.  New growth was springing forth from the damage!  I am optimistic, even as Chris is much more cautious about the long-term welfare of the tree.

One week after I photographed the blackened burn on the hillside, it has already begun to transform to Spring greenness.

“If you play with fire, you’re gonna get burned.”  Even with preparation, consideration, and care, we still damaged one of our young trees with fire.  The tree will have scars from the fleeting fire, but it will continue to grow.  Hopefully, someday, the scars won’t even be seen.  The rapid transformation of a prescribed burn on the hillside from black to green is like a ‘do-over’—getting rid of the old, undesirable, and invasive to make room for the new, beneficial, and native.

Joseph Campbell, mythologist and writer of the human experience, wrote about love as ‘the burning point of life.’  It encompasses so many aspects of love—the burning desire of young lovers, the fierceness of a mother protecting her child, the passion one has for a vocation or avocation, and the absolute heartbreak of a lost love.  Love ups the ante of us getting burned.  We love, we get burned, we have scars, and we keep on growing through the growing pains.  Maybe we are all ‘prescribed’ these burns in our lives to manage our egos, to keep offensive things from taking over our lives, and to restore goodness to our innate selves.  Campbell also wrote, “Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”  Love, pain, growth, and joy—when we know we’re truly alive.