@loretosocorro
If there is an element that really makes us think about transformation and purification, it is fire with its power to create and destroy. The fire that lived in the king star, in the force of lightning and in the lava of volcanoes.
How many times have we celebrated the achievement of possessing it by tying it to a torch or making it imprisoned in a bonfire, but fire is a wild animal and when it wants it rebels powerful.
We learned to tame it to protect us and warm us at night in the open. And when the stews were cooked with wood and time, we allowed them to enter our houses. Ember, heat and flames in the chimneys. Gas ranges, oil lamp wicks and dimly lit candles. We learned to launch fireworks into the air and fill our sky with colors to celebrate parties like San Juan.
I recently bought a lamp that had the same effect as the bonfires, but I lacked the heat, the sound and that hypnotic moment of not being able to stop following the dance of the flames with my eyes.
The bonfires in the San Juan festivities are a distant memory. Permits are necessary to keep the island safe, although there was a time when fire, even having a life of its own, was kept under control and accompanied the human desires for purification, vitality and fertility of the land and its inhabitants.
Will this rite be as forgotten as Prokofiev's comic opera? We are not far from enjoying it only on video screens, enclosed in red jade tablets, hieroglyphs with the word fire in missing languages, paintings in museums or stories of what it was like to sit around a small fire and gaze at the stars.
