I haven't worked directly with fire myself. Yet I have a relationship with it. Growing up in Chicago, the required annual museum trip to see relics of the Great Chicago Fire immobilized me with terror. At age 7 the plastic, melted dollies in the display case caused me dire, dream-haunting concern. We learned that plastics had been new at the time of that fire. The dolls that survived were not in good shape, and terribly disfigured. Instinctively animistic at 7, I felt great pain looking at the diorama that now housed their remains. Yet cities large and small bear the scars of "great fires". By my early 20s, I would move to Seattle, another city shaped by a catastrophic fire (though I never took the Underground tour that reveals more of it's fire-wounds).  

It was in my late 20s that I started exorcising various parts of my past, for whatever reasons, via a series of short stories and novellas that spasmodically worked through coming-of-age tales. There I found fire metaphors rampant in images, such as houses plagued by mysteriously re-igniting fires. There had actually been a brush with fire in my late teens, from which I walked away relatively unscathed. I had been staying at a house on and off with some rather unstable people. As if under a spell, I managed to leave one night right before one of them set the place ablaze; there had been no warning this was about to happen. Yet my instinct to evacuate then and there was eerily on-spot. It was a blaze that could be seen miles away and leveled that house.  

But the upside of fire associations includes my life-long fascination with candles and incense, which my mother allowed me to burn regularly at a young age (again, my magical 7th year!). Smudging and burning resin incense also became a part of my life. For some it may seem quite woo-woo (and evidence of too many years in new-agey Seattle), but it's something that helps me connect with the feel or energy of a place, as the smoke wafts through the rooms. It's a ritualistic practice that anchors me in my creative work, which pulsates around the way things feel, and what they have to tell me about themselves, if only I will listen. Clearing a space with incense helps me hear those stories, those sensations, and if I feel rather removed from myself, my work, or the rich interior landscape I have cultivated with the unseen world, then I know I am due for some frankincense, copal and myrrh.