The Arc of Fire, and 'Emotional Kintsugi'

In Ireland, we say that story is medicine. Our indigenous oral traditions do not treat story as unburdening, but as offering – something to be contemplated, carried, turned over in the heart. A story is not just one person’s tale but a reflection in which we may all recognise ourselves. I share this one in that way, as part of a lineage of medicine stories, told in symbol and metaphor, where the inner life and outer world move in step with one another.

From Bealtaine onwards, the land here in the Alps was straining. The entry point into summer brought not ease but extremes – weeks of monsoon rain followed by weeks of searing drought, then back again, the season pivoting restlessly between the two. Rivers swelled to bursting, then shrank to bare stone. Food sources grew scarce, and the creatures of the valley wandered uneasy. Even the wild fruit trees showed their distress, bleeding resin from their trunks as though their bones had cracked.

I was not apart from this. My own body, too, bore its fracture. Both hands were injured, and one of my eyes wounded, leaving me unable to work as I once had. The strain in the land was mirrored in me – expansion, contraction, a breaking under forces too extreme to contain. What could not be tended outside me echoed inside. Body and land alike became vessels marked with fracture.

Summer belongs to fire, and to the Parent archetype – the Nurturer, the inner mother and father. This season was a firewalk, and at times it felt as though I had been placed directly into a kiln. The air was hot, dry, searing. The land baked and split open. And I too felt baked from the inside out, pressed into the furnace not to be destroyed but to be transformed. Many of us know these seasons when life presses us into the heat – when cracks appear, when what seemed solid begins to split. The story of one fracture is never only one – it is part of a larger pattern of breaking and remaking.

As a result of these injuries, what would have been another busy summer of doing became, instead, an internal firewalk. The fire stripped away my ability to keep moving outward, and offered instead an initiation into silence, stillness, and the hard discipline of non-doing. It was not easy. Yet in that furnace of non-doing, something in me began to be remade.

Kintsugi, too, begins in fire. Clay is broken in the kiln before it can ever be mended with gold. My own firewalk was like that – body, psyche, and pattern exposed to heat until the fault lines became visible. I saw the brittleness of my Nurturer within, the ways I had abandoned myself in perpetual busyness, tending others while leaving my own vessel empty. The old mantle of “the one who can manage” was burned away. Helplessness humbled me. The fractures were not only in bone, but in identity, in pattern, in belonging. Each destructive pattern that surfaced was a crack in the psyche, asking to be sealed with gold – solar gold, the Sun’s metal and summer’s medicine – to stop the bleeding and restore the vessel.

The firewalk was more than physical. It was mythological, symbolic, ecological. There was the psychological nosedive in self-worth, the ache of being unable to tend the land or keep pace with planting, gathering, caring. There was the archetypal reckoning with the Parent, and the recognition that many of us train others to see us as invulnerable. And there was the ecological reality that the earth itself was straining under extremes. Together they formed an initiation – a crossing of many thresholds at once.

In Irish story, the Raven often circles such thresholds – a companion to the Morrígan, a messenger of endings and beginnings. All through the summer I saw ravens playing with eagles, wheeling and calling, reminding me that fracture is part of initiation, that return never looks like departure. At Lúnasa, the Raven’s presence became unmistakable. That morning a single feather lay in the centre of the path outside our gate. Two days later, another appeared just inside the gate. It felt like a marking – a crossing acknowledged. Lúnasa holds the first fruits of harvest and the waning of summer’s fire. The feathers seemed to say: step forward. The firewalk is over.

Now the wheel has turned. The fire of summer has given way to the waters of autumn, and with them comes the Enchantress archetype – the one who teaches replenishment, renewal, self-soothing, rehydration after long thirst. If summer was the kiln, autumn is the river. If summer cracked the vessel, autumn fills those lines with water as well as gold. The Enchantress does not demand output; the invitation is to yield. Water softens what has grown rigid, pours fluid back into what has been dried to the marrow.

This is the season of what I like to refer to as emotional kintsugi. If summer sealed fractures with fire-gold, autumn mends them with water – with tears, with womb-waters, with the lymph and blood that carry life quietly within us. It is the well after drought, the stream after kiln-heat, the steady rain that quenches and restores. Water does not only soothe – it blesses, it consecrates.

Emotional kintsugi is the practice of letting that blessing flow into the broken places – soothing, replenishing, renewing, sanctifying what was once fractured. It reminds us that fragility is not failure. It is how light and gold, water and healing, enter us.

The hero/heroine’s cycle comes full circle here. The ordinary world gave way to fracture. The threshold was crossed into fire. The ordeal seared body, psyche, archetype, and land. The Raven marked the passage at Lúnasa. And now comes the return – marked, humbled, but carrying medicine.

To live as a vessel is to be cracked again and again, and to be sealed again and again with gold and with water.

This autumn, as the waters rise and the year bends towards its close, I remember: we are not asked to be flawless. We are asked to be vessels of story, vessels of resilience, vessels of love, grace and compassion, vessels of kinship with land and season. Vessels of human-ness. When the fractures come – as they always will – we are invited into the alchemy of kintsugi.

That is the promise of emotional kintsugi: that what is broken is not discarded, but honoured, made more intricate, more beautiful, more true. And it is not one story alone – it is a shared work. For just as land and body strain together, so too can they be restored together – gold in the cracks, water in the marrow, blessing in the fracture, consecration in the flow.

So I offer this story not as conclusion, but as reflection.

Where are the fractures in your own life, in your community, in the land beneath your feet? How might they be sealed with gold, blessed with water, consecrated through care?

These are questions we can carry together – vessels among vessels, each of us marked, each of us more beautiful for the lines that hold our light.

This reflection is part of 'Sanctuary of the Waters: Where Beauty Comes to Rest' , my Autumn / Water Element 2025 newsletter. The full letter will be shared shortly – you are warmly invited to join here.