In one of my plant medicine retreats, I met a woman whose home burnt down when she was a little girl. Her entire world gone up in smoke, in a virtual instant. I only know, somewhat peripherally, what such a sudden loss feels like. We talked about how anyone starts over when everything has been burnt to ash. When the only sentence you can believe was that nothing would come back. I can relate to that.
The universe has a way of hiding all the wisdom you ever needed, until you are ready. And it is only after you have yourself been burnt to ashes – perhaps over and over again – that you can learn what the ashes have to teach you. So it was that I was reminded of this in Colorado, where a lightning fire had taken forty thousand acres of lodgepole pine from green to black.
The fire takes everything of course but soon after, the fireweed arrives, slopes upon slopes of magenta flowers, almost as tall as a human. Fireweed is ‘chamaenerion angustifolium’, sometimes called fire’s honeymoon: it shows up fast and showy, and within a few years the returning trees shade it out and it waits for the next burn.
Pretty soon, however, the ashen ground turns green with lodgepole seedlings. The seedlings were retained until something in the environment triggered them, in something called ‘serotiny’. Lodgepole cones are sealed with a resin which can sit closed on the branch for decades, packed with viable seed, waiting, waiting, waiting for the heat. Not just a hot summer. Actual fire. Only sustained fire – over a hundred degrees – melts the resin. The tree’s whole reproductive strategy assumes its world will burn, and death will bring forth new life.
Some things don’t come back. Loved ones who die don’t come back, some relationships don’t come back, and sometimes disease takes away things never to return it. No amount of heat pops that cone open. But some things in you come up within the season, bright and a little garish, and step aside once their work is done. Other things stay sealed for years, maybe your whole life, waiting on heat you can’t schedule, you didn’t want… but perhaps needed.
Many wisdom traditions will tell you that earth is a school of learning. All of life is suffering. Burning. Nobody gets to skip the burn. Not the tree, not the woman whose house burned down, not me. But some of us open under exactly the heat we were dreading. So when you stand at a cross-roads in life, with layer upon layer being melted away in the scorching heat, remember serotiny.