Like a Dragon with Matches
On the winter that wasn't in the Year of the Fire Horse
Long distance runner, what you standin there for? Get up, get out, get out of the door
I could not say which was the best or my favorite show. But for more than a decade I made a point to go see the Grateful Dead. Recently, when Bobby Weir - their rhythm guitarist, singer and last of the front-men passed my network of friends from that period and since, lit up.
For me and many of my friends those years were consequential. And the decades since when Phil, before he passed, and Bobby along with Mickey and Billy - and millions of fans - kept it going, embody longevity of mission.
There’s a band out on the highway. They’re high stepping into town It’s a rainbow full of sound. It’s fireworks, calliopes and clowns. Everybody’s dancing
I was no doubt inclined to follow this path once I found it, but finding it shaped my relationships and influences my worldview still. I’m honored to have been a part of this very American phenomena.
But this essay did not start there, “on the bus,” as fun and impactful as all that was. It did not even start with long-ago memories not always called up, that are somehow also new and freshly relevant. This essay started with heat and with a different essay that remains in the draft folder.
As the temperatures climb to 60 degrees again today, and the Gunnison Basin’s snowpack – at 54% yesterday – continues to shrink, the fears of exceptional drought, broad agricultural loss and catastrophic wildfire become acute.
This essay began with a winter that wasn’t.
The draft essay was for Imbolc. This is the cross-quarter mark, half-way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. That essay considers the I Ching hexagram “Approach,” which is affiliated with that moment on the calendar. The Imbolc essay reflects on the freeze and thaw normal this time of year, a tentative back and forth. Being ready for spring when it comes, although not so ready as to forget it is winter.
But the year has started with heat and with the sense of things charging forward towards a very different and uncertain future. Like there is no winter quarter to split.
It is hot, and too dry and relentlessly sunny. How soon the buds and blossoms push forth is a critical matter for the orchardists and others here. Too soon is usually disastrous.
And no moisture, dry soils, in spring is a serious problem. When the irrigation water will run dry is already a conversation - in February. This is our climate reality.
Caution is appropriate but hesitancy is not. Inaction at this moment - imagining the status quo will just carry us forward - brings, perhaps, the greater peril.
You’re playin cold music on the barroom floor. Drowned in your laughter and dead to the core
Things are not OK. Disruptive change is upon us. It is not appropriate to this moment to remain unengaged or unaware.
But this essay is not about the Dead nor Imbolc. It is not about climate change.
This essay welcomes the Year of the Fire Horse which, on the lunisolar Chinese calendar, begins February 17, 2026.
This convergence occurs once every 60 years when the Horse sign combines with the Fire element. It represents upheaval, and carries both the promise of widescale transformation and the peril of destructive consumption.
The Fire Horse symbolizes intense passion, dynamic change, rapid progress, and bold action, combining the Horse's independence with Fire's transformative energy, representing a time of breakthrough innovation, courage, and potentially disruptive but significant transformation in personal lives and society.
So, if there were a hexagram to consider for the Year of the Fire Horse perhaps it is Hexagram 56 - 旅 Lǚ - composed of the fire symbol above mountain.
This hexagram is also called “The Wanderer” and it may represent fire as a beacon - both as warning and guide. The sojourner travels through the lines of the hexagram facing both possibility for breakthrough and the peril of becoming wayward and lost.
The force of fire always carries reward and risk: the possibility for renewal and innovation the threat of consumptive destruction.
There is a dragon with matches who is loose on the town. Takes a whole pail of water to cool him down.
The time we are in is to embrace the passion and renewal of fire, arriving with the power of the horse: disruptive yes, but purposeful with strength for distance.
The Wanderer hexagram counsels on the need to move forward. At times we may only measure progress in steps, but we are advised to keep moving with purpose. Sometimes we are ‘the stranger,’ so are called to act with both urgency and with care.
Almost ablaze still you don’t feel the heat. Takes all you got just to stay on the beat.
The lesson of the draft Imbolc essay remains. In the uncertainty of this liminal state we cannot get ahead of nor to forget what is required of us now.
The lesson for this moment is to meet change and uncertainty headlong - not as a sprinter but as the long-distance runner. In a “slow-motion dash” of sorts.
This challenge is to embrace the upheaval enveloping us now and to not flame out, to approach 2026 with transformative force and the enduring spirit of the Fire Horse.
Because this moment is not only a lesson, but also a test that we cannot ignore.
If the game is lost then we're all the same
No one left to place or take the blame
And we will leave this place an empty stone on that shinin' ball we used to call our home