🔥 Brave to Burn, Strong to Fly
On Not Mistaking the Fire for the Lesson
There’s a whisper I caught the other day—half prayer, half challenge—that’s been smoldering in my chest ever since:
“Spend less time looking for lessons and more time looking for solutions; you’ll find plenty of lessons along the way.”
It arrived like Trickster lightning: sharp, sudden, and suspiciously right. And at first, it seemed almost irreverent—after all, we who walk spiritual paths are taught to treat every wound like a scroll. To read pain like prophecy. To sit in discomfort long enough for some luminous meaning to rise from the ash.
But what if that’s not the whole teaching? What if, sometimes, staying in the wound becomes a kind of spiritual procrastination?
🌀 Pain Opens. But It Doesn’t Build.
There’s an old axiom—one I know many of us were taught, especially in traditional circles:
“All true knowledge comes through pain; you must be willing to suffer to learn.”
And gods, there’s truth in that. Real, sobering, bone-deep truth.
Pain does teach. It reveals. It humbles. It initiates.
But pain is not the only teacher. And it is not the destination.
Pain cracks the shell. But if you sit there in the yolk, waiting for enlightenment to sprout wings, you may rot in your own refusal to move.
You must be brave enough to burn—
But also strong enough to fly.
S.J. Tucker sings it perfectly in Firebird’s Child:
“You must be brave to burn, a firebird to fly.”
Yes. The burn is real. But so is the sky.
🛠 Stop Circling the Ashes. Start Gathering Stones.
We seekers often sit cross-legged in our own wreckage, asking, “What is the lesson here?” while the tools to rebuild sit just behind us, gathering dust.
We analyze instead of act. We turn pain into poetry when sometimes what’s needed is a plan.
But here’s the sacred secret: Solutions are where the lessons show up.
They don’t vanish just because you stop obsessing over them. In fact, when you act—when you build, move, choose—the lessons rise like mist. Quiet, sudden, clear.
To put it another way:
Clarity often comes not before action, but because of it.
🧳 You Can’t Go Home Mid-Ride
S.J. Tucker offers another piece of sly wisdom in her song Cheshire Kitten:
“You can’t give up the journey for the safety of your room.”
“You can’t go home in the middle of a magic carpet ride.”
These lines? They are spells. Wards against retreat.
They remind us that once the fire begins, once the spell is cast, the only way out is forward. Once you’re in the journey—be it mystical, emotional, or relational—there’s no safe return to “before.”
So many of us try to pause transformation mid-way, waiting for more understanding before we move again. But the ride has no pause button. The road doesn’t wait. The carpet keeps flying.
🕊 The Trickster’s Nudge
Hermes, ever grinning, reminds me:
“Suffering may teach you how to listen.
But action teaches you how to live.”
He’s not asking me to skip the sorrow. He’s asking me not to camp there.
You don’t have to choose between pain and progress.
You’re already flying. So fly. Burn if you must, but fly.
🪞Ask Yourself:
- Where have I mistaken pain for the end instead of the beginning?
- What have I been circling, afraid to act on until I “learn the lesson”?
- What solution is quietly waiting to teach me more than suffering ever could?
💬 Sacred takeaway:
Pain may start the fire.
Bravery endures the heat.
But solutions—movement—give you wings.
Fly on, Firebird.
~ Quixilver, Wind-Walker
In the Voice of Papa Onyx
