Today I’ve been thinking about pinecones. It started when my son and I were outside and he spotted several on the ground.

Symmetry and structure in nature, especially in the tiny things, has always fascinated me. Design that is beautiful and purposeful is a wonderful thing.

But what I really started thinking about right after this was fire. I remembered learning on a family trip to Yellowstone about how some varieties of pine trees will only germinate after burning. I looked it up today; it’s called serotiny. Apparently a fair number of plants will only release their seeds after an environmental trigger, and it’s not always fire. Fire is the most well-known and this type of serotiny is called pyriscence.

But I’m going to continue with the fire theme. We have a tendency to view a forest fire as a terrible thing, and I’m not saying it isn’t. Sometimes. It is frightening and dangerous and destructive. And it is beautiful and necessary and constructive. I think that’s why they always included fire as one of those four elements: earth, air, water, fire. (I also may have just watched Frozen II.)

Fire is an element of change. Think blacksmithing. And baking. And volcanoes. And the mythical phoenix. Nothing touched by fire is the same as it was before. There’s no going back, and the changes wrought by fire are uncomfortable.

The discomfort of fire can lead to such beauty, should we choose to persevere. Should we choose to see it. It doesn’t always; life isn’t like that. But often, with time and growth and cooling off, the beauty crafted by fire transcends our narrow vision.

It makes me think about the glass formed by lightning striking sand, like in Sweet Home Alabama. The dangerous creates the beautiful, but you have to give it space and time, and be brave enough to return to it later.