The Day Fires and The Power of Prayer
The Day Fires and The Power of Prayer
By Karen Tate
Forest Dream
My entire life I dreamed of being able to have a home in a beautiful wooded area. I admired the homes in the Big Bear area and the many rustic-looking homes on many of our vacation trips among the forests and mountains, but I never imagined I’d have one of my own. I believed I was probably going to be an apartment dweller my entire life, but I secretly held on to the dream.
Believe in Roy
Then circumstances changed, as if by magic. We were driving home from a vacation in the Grand Canyon, taking Route 66 back toward California, all the while mesmerized by these signs of land for sale. Or I should say, my husband, Roy, was getting hooked on these carrots being dangled before the drivers on this lonely highway going through Arizona. By the time we had reached Kingman, he convinced me to “just look” at what was for sale. Well, you’ve probably guessed the next twist of this tale. Within a few hours we were the proud owners of 40 acres of land covered with juniper trees. Roy was sure this property was going to turn into a good investment. I was not so sure, but I tried to have a little faith in his intuition.
Pine Mountain Club
Good thing that I did. Within a year we got an offer letter and the buyer wanted our 40 acres and was willing to double what we paid for the property. We sold! Now we had to avoid capital gains taxes so we started looking at property in California and Washington. After a near miss purchasing property in northern California, we stumbled onto Pine Mountain Club. A friend was selling real estate and suggested we come up and take a look.
So Beautiful
Never in my wildest dreams did I believe there was anywhere in California so beautiful and so affordable. I was looking for a lot, but I soon realized we could actually afford a house! We looked for weeks and just as I was about to give up, on our final day, I found our new home. I loved the street name – Nesthorn. It made me think of a cozy nest and a cornucopia of abundance. That was in 2005. We were weekenders mostly. Never going up in the winter, but on weekends we enjoyed what Roy dubbed “our fortress of solitude” where we actually saw a large assortment of “critters” – which was a real treat for us city-dwellers living in our concrete jungle Monday through Friday. I referred to it as our “mountain sanctuary,” where our retirement home was tucked in the safe embrace of Mother Mountain. There was something very special about how the place felt to me. It was peaceful, beautiful, and serene – almost spiritual, perhaps even protected? It made sense to me it was on sacred Chumash land, which brings me to the Day Fires and the power of prayer.
A Foundation
Scholars, ancestors and spiritual leaders over thousands of years have helped us lay a foundation for belief in the Sacred Feminine, alongside the Divine Masculine, by whatever names you call Mother and Father, God and Goddess or Asherah. If you’ve ever attended a Unitarian Universalist service, you’ve probably heard devotees of the Sacred Feminine call the feminine face of God Mary, Guadalupe, Kwan Yin, Sekhmet, Isis, Shekinah, White Buffalo Woman, Inanna, Lillith, Kali, Gaia or Brigid, to mention just a few of her 10,000 names. Followers of the Divine Masculine might call out to Jesus, Allah, Odin, Thoth, Yahweh, Buddha, Jehovah, Elohim, Ahura Mazda, Great Spirit, Father Sky, or Tian, to name a few of God’s names. No matter how you address your beloved deity, sometimes it is difficult to have faith, even if one is cloaked within a religion with hundreds or thousands of years of dogma and doctrine to call upon in times of need. Being on a path less tried or common in today’s world, might even be more difficult and not always easy. One thing is certain, candid discussions about the existence of God/dess, the nature of science, or the effectiveness of prayer and ritual cause members of all faiths to sometimes question their core beliefs. Then sometimes something happens that answers our questions and nourishes our faith if we are just paying attention.
Wildfires
The summer of 2006, California was plagued with wildfires. One called the Day Fire began on Labor Day, September 4, 2006, and by October 1, estimates say cost $70.3 million in damage. At the peak of the fire, 4,600 active firefighters fought the wildfire that blazed for weeks destroying thousands of acres of land including precious national forests, wildlife, and nests of endangered condors were in peril. For weeks, hundreds of firefighters were struggling against strong winds and rugged terrain in remote areas that made containing the fire almost impossible. Soon the fire was leaving remote areas and was beginning to threaten populated areas, including our home, in Pine Mountain Club, on sacred Native American lands.
Coming Close
When the fire was about four miles outside our small town and firefighters did not seem to be able to curtail the blaze, an evacuation of the town’s inhabitants became mandatory. That’s when I decided to take another kind of action to try to lend the firefighters support. I called on everyone I knew to pray and lend their energy and focus their wills toward stopping the blaze. Each person in our diverse group could do that in whatever way felt most powerful to them. Some went into deep meditation and visualized rain and moisture entering the area. Some called upon Jesus or the ancient God of weather, Zeus. Several women called upon the lion-headed Egyptian Goddess, Sekhmet, Daughter of the Sun God, Ra, believed to be the Goddess of Fire, to control the blaze and protect the town, the forest and all its creatures. It’s been many years now, but I remember some visualized an enormous Sekhmet towering over the flames, with the town and the surrounding area in harms- way of the fire encased in a protective bubble. The prayer group visualized the firemen growing enormous in size, more powerful than the walls of destructive fire they were up against, with their huge and powerful water hoses saturating the flames.
Six Hours
As hard as this might be to believe, after weeks of aggressive forward movement, about 6 hours into the prayer working, the flames seemed thwarted, and the fire stopped moving forward. In the next few days the fire was completely extinguished near Pine Mountain Club after burning out of control in the surrounding area for weeks. Some of us sustained the prayer for a few more days. Clouds formed, the winds eased and there was even rain. Yes, rain, in a time of the year when rain rarely falls. Yes, this all could have been a coincidence. Yes, the fire might have suddenly ceased it’s charge forward without the prayer. But I am glad I did not have to find out. I truly believe the power of our prayer, and perhaps prayer of others we knew nothing about, made a difference.
Affecting Change
Our thoughts and will affecting change was the focus of the popular documentary/movie, What the Bleep Do We Know? The basic premise of the movie is we now have scientific proof that our will, the power of our thoughts, in conjunction with the powers of the universe, can affect the outcome of our life. In a sense, we often get what we expect, flavored by universal input. That gives us quite a lot of power if we believe these ideas and employ tenacity and focus toward a goal. This becomes doubly powerful when used in ritual when we are accessing our Deep and Divine selves. During these times, Talking Self should relinquish control and just hold on and enjoy the ride!
We Can Make It Happen
It seems almost every day we learn what some might loosely call magic and science are meeting and overlapping, with the distinction between the two becoming more and more blurred and vague. Studies have shown people in the hospital have better outcomes when people pray for them. Do the prayers affect the doctor’s performance or our body’s ability to heal? Did our prayers to stop the Day Fires really have any affect? It certainly seems possible. We believe and trust that with proper techniques of relaxation, concentration, visualization and projection of our will, and of course, enlisting the grace of our God/dess, or the energies of the cosmos, we can make things happen. Now it seems there is not just anecdotal evidence, but scientific evidence as proof.
The Intangible
At times I still find myself in a battle between my left brain and my right brain, my analytical versus my intuitive self. Foremost analytical, I am slow to trust intuition and feelings, so for my own good God/dess or my Divine Self, speaks to me in the language I am less likely to brush aside. More and more I find myself listening to Her voice and the universal forces watching over me. As we explore what it means to be human and the mysteries of the cosmos, I believe the distinction between prayer, alternative spiritual practices and science hardly matters. We are moving into the barely chartered territory of the intangible. We know we use only a small portion of our brain and everything cannot be scientifically measured and proven beyond a doubt, and that is perfectly okay with me. Having lived through so many experiences such as the Day Fires, faith, prayer and trust is becoming easier.
