Catching Fire

CATCHING FIRE

The prompt given at our last meeting was "Catching Fire". Of all of the prompts so far this one seemed to be the hardest one to complete. I tried at least two threads of thought which led nowhere where I was comfortable. It was those two creative dead ends that resulted in:

An errant spark from a discarded cigarette, from a barbecue or because the sun’s heat and light that just happened to be refracted through a piece of glass. Add a breeze favourable to the dynamics of combustion and “whoosh”.

A square inch, a square foot, a square yard, an acre or square miles. The unchecked flames will have no boundaries to their incinerating progress apart from those made by nature or, our manmade and sometimes futile interventions.

In the wake of the flames there is always destruction.

Blackened gorse branches and trees defiantly interrupt the horizon with their filigreed silhouettes. They take the shapes of symbols from languages ancient and modern, relatively that is. Egyptian hieroglyphics and their stylised imagery, written Arabic sounds curved like scimitars and Pitman’s shorthand with its dots, dashes and slashes. It doesn’t matter what the language is, fire has always come before when they were first spoken and when they were first written. And when all of these languages are forgotten fire will always come after them.

There is one thing common to all fires in the wildernesses of the world that lies within the scorched branches and under the earth.

Here in the New Forest, while the blackened gorse bushes and the scorched earth are cooling, the ponies will arrive. Where they sheltered from the rain and the sun they now eat the nutrient rich charcoal of the gorse bushes. And soon after the ponies have made their first visit to the scene of the fire, green shoots of new life start to emerge bringing with them the hope, the promise and the expectation of vibrant renewal.

In the wake of the flames there is always life.

ooooOOOOOooooo

The warm up prompt at this evening;s meeting was to write down as many words as possible beginning with the letter "G" in about three or four minutes.

UNDER

The next prompt was to write as freely as possible anything that came to mind from hearing the word "under". It was a sort of exercise when writing to imagine writing as if you were speaking and trying to offload as much as possible with as few breaths as possible. This will explain why the punctuation in the following piece is absolute rubbish.

What do you mean under Surely under is relative to each of us as under is where to you where it may not be for me. Savvie as Jack Sparrow would say when he surfaced from Davey Jones's Locker but if you're a human being under is a sort of entrapment a tomb a place of death. So if you were a fish who to us is under the surface of water is their under really above the water? A place of entrapment a tomb a place of death. You see what is under or even over are purely relative concepts and if Jack Sparrow expounded in this he would finish his discourse with "savvie"? And if we said "no savvie" he would patiently run through his philosophy again and again and f we still didn't understand he would tell us that the problem is not the problem but we are the problem because we don't under stand the problem which would warrant another "savvie"

ooooOOOOOooooo

The prompt for the next session is "Walls and Bridges".