The Evolution of Fire
Contemplative, lyrical, and bracingly honest, The Evolution of Fire plumbs the depths of ancestral knowledge and personal experience, illuminating how we adapt in response to crisis and how our ability to change provides hope for the future.
“I nearly forget how nothing comes from nothing, how energy cannot be destroyed, how what came before still radiates transformed inside the body of what happens next.”
Evolution is arguably the most fundamental quality of life on Earth—animals, plants, even our own bodies exist as they do because of the ways we respond to crises. In this luminous collection of essays, Angela Pelster tempers humanity’s ancient capacity for evolution against her own tipping points and impossible decisions, probing the tension between the simultaneous fear and freedom that accompany transformation.
To find the root of her being—the knowledge and instincts nested in her body—she time-travels between present day, her upbringing in Alberta, 1940s Holland, Paleozoic Earth, and the tumultuous years she and her young child weathered together. “We carry our ancestors in our bodies,” she reasons, which grants us a certain immortality: in Earth’s endless continuity, we remain part of those who come after us.
Confronting our individual and collective adaptations in response to the crises we’ve survived, The Evolution of Fire contemplates who we are now and what we might still become.
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Angela Pelster
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