a l l t h i n g s b u r n

Charcoal is formed through incomplete combustion. The air is starved of oxygen, through close quarters and high heat. This can occur naturally or by force; what matters is that all water and volatile compounds are released, risen, invisible to us except through flame. What’s left behind is nearly pure carbon. Charcoal is matter unmade, life in its earliest form. 

How have you learned to be undone?

Some things burn just because they can, and some things are long overdue. I’ve had more of the second; I had to stand on the blackened ground a thousand times over before I started to learn not to hold so tight, that its exhausting to live with hands clutched. That less is destroyed if I let things burn when they need to.

It takes a lifetime to face the flame with open arms.

Charcoal isn’t the fire; it’s the moment after. Whatever you were building, chasing, or becoming is gone. There is humility in remembering you can be destroyed like that. And there’s a mania in realizing that once again, you’re still standing. There you find yourself, suspended in the empty space, called to move forward in surrender. To choose to say yes, again, to a world where everything can burn.

So we learn to be undone. We learn to love the space between, the call to do it again. We learn to watch and trust the ground and its stubborn path to life; all things burn, but even the charred land itself is temporary. 

There is no return to what you were. It’s just a layer now; it will turn itself over to the subconscious, the soil more fertile than it was. But in this moment everything is quiet. All things are ash and you are flesh. Your breath catches. Your blood flows. 

What we make is impermanent. As are we and the places we live, forever shifting; here we are in grief and awe.

Booking for All Things Burn is now closed. Thank you ♡