Burnout Part Two

The Burn

Burnout Part Two

Photo by Rob Griffin on Unsplash

I stumbled away numb.
Skin buzzing.
A three second memory.
Words turned to ants on the page.
Words turned to ghosts on my tongue.

And tired, oh so tired.
Nothing to be done. 

What ever was burning, 
I let it burn. 
A slow cool sacred burn 
licking at the dead and dying 
twigs of my identity,
crawling inside the dry hallowed trunks of my career.
A smoldering cancer to consume the roots from the inside.

It took months. No, years
for these cracked and evacuated monuments, to succumb
one by one.

I'm not even sure I heard them fall.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

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Notes:

The spirituality of Burnout and cool sacred burns

I once asked a dear mentor of mine about the spirituality of burnout. I was grasping at anything. I knew the term: A metaphor for running out of fuel, my ‘productive’ fire has ‘gone out’. I knew the consensus understanding that Medicine is still calling Adjustment Disorder, or my fav: “an over active sympathetic nervous system” and none of it seemed the least bit encouraging .

I figured that spirituality must have something to say about something this devastating.

My mentor lowered his head and in his softly spoken way almost whispered

“I’m wondering about what needs to burn”

I could think of a few things to start with but I won’t elaborate.

I remembered the burn-offs we used to do on the farm. A practice of late winter early spring managed fires to clean up the ‘rubbish’ (the dry grass and dead trees) to bring on a bit of feed for cattle and reduce the fuel load before bushfire season.

Those kinds of burn-offs were a quick simple safety practice with a few positive spin offs. The one that fascinated me was how Dad would dig around the old dead tree stumps and then shovel burning coals around and into the hollow of the stump and pile sticks on top. The stump would burn like a little camp fire for a while and the inside of the hollow would catch alight. The next morning he would get an old sheet of tin, put it over the stump and weigh it down with rocks. The inside of the stump would be glowing like an oven and the fire would smolder away slowly for days or weeks, depending on the size of the stump, burning it way down into the roots. No more stump.

This ‘burn off’ became a powerful metaphor and expanded by including the ancient indigenous practice of ‘cool sacred burns’ or cultural burning. As I understand it this practice has been the cornerstone of ecological, cultural and spiritual health in Australia for at least 40,000 to 60,000 years. This involved using slow, low-intensity fires often in a patchwork mosaic, allowing animals to escape, encouraging the rapid regeneration of native plants,, reducing weeds, and uncontrolled fires. The rapid regrowth attracted food species back for hunting.

Indigenous cultures all over the world have used similar cool burning practices and there is good evidence that the loss of these practices is one of the primary reasons we have such incredible violent uncontrolled fire storms now.

This metaphor for burnout gave me a narrative that validated what happens when systems fail to care for their human resource as sacred.

It gave me a narrative for a sacred path of regeneration.

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Photo by Don Ricardo on Unsplash

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