We share our brief existence on this planet with some of the longest-living beings. Their lives offer us a wisdom and a metaphor about resilience and personal growth, in the face of the challenges that life throws our way.
Reviving Ancient Wisdom
For thousands of years, the native tribes of the Sierra Nevada in the United States tended their forests and lands in alliance with fire, a practice that the colonisers treated as a primitive rite, so much so that in 1850 it was outlawed by law.
It involved “small, controlled bonfires (…) to promote the health of vegetation and the animals that provide food, clothing, ceremonial items and more for the tribes,” explains Ron W. Goode, president of the North Fork Mono Tribe.
Today, the forest canopy is twice as dense, a danger that helps explain why fires have been so deadly of late in California.
The controlled fire made a partial return in 1968, when the national parks introduced this practice to reduce the risk of wildfires, burning infested trees and the dry leaves from the forest floor, for example.
In fact, many plant species need fire to grow healthily and rid themselves of pests. Moreover, this process allows the soil to retain enough water for the trees, as well as for the smaller shrubs, while the ashes act as a fertiliser for the ground.
The Methuselah Trees
How, then, is fire an ally of life? The longest‑living trees offer us this understanding.
There are three native types of redwoods on the West Coast of the United States. The most famous is the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), the tallest conifer in the world, capable of surpassing 115 metres in height, 22 metres taller than the Statue of Liberty.
This species can live up to 1,800 years. However, the Methuselah of the trees is its cousin, the Sequoiadendron giganteum, which does not reach beyond about 105 metres in height but is longer‑lived.
The oldest specimen lived 3,200 years. It is a tree that germinated around 1375 BCE and died a few centuries ago.
The Life of the Trees
The sequoias are slow and patient witnesses to human history, and they flourished in abundance until the conquerors arrived to threaten their survival.
The logging provoked a resistance movement in 1970s California, with activists who occupied the trees to prevent them from being felled. In this mission, Julia “Butterfly” Hill began as a seven‑year‑old, and fourteen years later, on 10 December 1997, she climbed the millennial redwood Luna, 1,500 years old, to prevent its being felled by The Pacific Lumber Company.
It wasn’t a few days up there. To save Luna, she had to spend 738 days, 55 metres above the ground in a tiny 3.2 square metre space.
On 19 December 1999 she achieved her triumph, when, alongside fellow activists, they managed to raise USD 50,000—a price for Luna’s wood—along with about 12,000 square metres of surrounding area.
The Lifegiving Fire
Ancient, controlled fires are completed in cycles of thirty years: there is a minimum of three fires within ten years, and just one during the following twenty years.
To the sequoias, this limited fire gives them life; they need it as much as water, sunlight, and mineral-rich soil. They literally rise again from the ashes, just as the most resilient humans do.
The fire is necessary to clean the forest of less resistant trees, as well as to allow more light to reach the saplings. It also helps the cones, which can remain on branches for up to twenty years, to dry, fall, and release their seeds, giving rise to new life.
This process reminds us a little of human inception: a spark of zinc is released in the mature ovum when the sperm fertilises it.
The lesson of fire and trees for human life is this: sometimes we need to rise anew from our own ashes, clear our vital ground to sprout again, and unleash all the creativity we carry within.
As the sequoias do with their cones, we often store dreams and plans for decades until a life‑changing shake awakens the seeds, lets them fall to fertile ground, freeing space to create new life.
An Exercise to Rise from the Fire
1. Take stock of the parts or aspects of your life that have turned to ashes and which of the still-surviving ones should feed the bonfire.
2. Hand over to the fire —symbolically— those things you no longer need, whether large or small, to free up a new space for growth. Carry out a farewell ritual in this process.
3. Find a way to express what must be born in your fertile ground: write, draw, dance, sing… Capture how the forest of your future will look.
4. After this invocation, meditate to visualise how the saplings wake beneath the ashes that will shape your future. Celebrate your resilience and your creativity.
