The Pandemic is a Portal

FIRE
Someone told me that this place was a peat bog, though it doesn’t seem like one. The ground is firm, not
moist. There is no moss to be seen. The area is crowded with blueberry bushes — escapees from nearby
farms. There are tall shore pines sticking out of the bush, and the ground is covered in pink and purple
heather, and labrador tea. I am on the traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, at a berry picking spot
that is common knowledge in the queer community. I think of this as a queer place in opposition to its designation
by the Canadian state as Department of Defense land.
Faggoty, hard, soft, sticky, berry-infused sex has happened on this land. The berries seem to be infused with
the spicy taste of labrador tea, the soft colours of heather. Some might ask for permission before harvesting
from this territory, some might gather in ways that are mindful of how their actions affect the ecological relationships
that exist in this place. Many do not think about this, and initially I didn’t either. In some ways
this text is a reflection of my ongoing learning process.
2017 and 2018 are years of intense wildfire in the Pacific Northwest. Mornings are suffused with an eerie sunset
light due to the smoke that blocks out the sky, as if the day is perpetually ending instead of just begun.
Smoke covers the ocean in a disconcerting fog. It envelops us so that we can’t tell where we are or which way
we should go. There also is a massive fire at the bog, sparked by a human encampment. It is especially hard
to put out as it spreads underground into the dry peat. The burning pockets form dangerous pits that collapse
beneath your step.
Just before the fire, I happen to pick a small container of berries from the bog. The berries sit in my freezer
for maybe too long a time until I get sick and am too weak to do much. I decide to make jam out of the
berries and labrador tea from this place that I think is lost. The process requires all my energy. I sterilize jars
and dig out the berries, hoping that they’re still okay. Since labrador tea can be intense in large quantities, I
bind the leaves into small bundles so that they can infuse into the concoction without getting too mixed in.
By the end I am too tired to screw the caps on the jars. Working at this slower, concentrated pace makes me
sit with the smell and the feel of the plants. It makes me want to return to the bog.
I can’t remember large portions of the time that I was in treatment. Visiting this special place, I remember a
feeling like being radioactive and lying on the ground and the ground likewise radiating into me. The earthhot
body-feel pulses hot all over, sun bright, sky blue. Sometimes I go alone, sometimes with a friend. These
visits blur, but in them I feel growth and shifts in the season. The blueberry bushes are burnt into skeletal
stands of charcoal. The branches scratch pictures onto Ari’s sky-blue jean jacket and my aquamarine silk
shirt as we brush past them. New growth is already shooting up from the centre of these black tentacular
creatures. True to its name, fireweed pops up everywhere, as it does after disturbances like fire. There are
two kinds of fireweed here. I watch them grow from sprouts to tall flowers as the weeks, then months, pass.
In Chinese cosmology, the elements are not solid and fixed as they are in the Platonic model, but instead are
forces of change that influence one another. Fire, sometimes called the Clinging, moves upward and corresponds
to the heart / mind. It is fed by wood and returns to earth as ashes. In the I Ching, I see the trigram
for fire as two bolts of energy that cling to, or are fed by, the nurturing energy of the earth. Within the hexagram
for Grace, the fire trigram’s central yielding line is described as an ornament to be “used sparingly and
only in little things,” which “comes between the strong lines and makes them beautiful.” [1] In this framework,
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