Today is a memorial service in New York, in honor of Craig Arnold, a man I never knew.  Why then do I want to honor him? 

I think it is because he brushed my soul from afar.  Craig was a poet and a pilgrim who was lost last summer hiking on a volcanic island in Japan.  He wrote in his blog, The Volcano Pilgrim:  "...thinking of Pompeii and Vesuvius, of cities and civilazations laid low by disaster, of the utter indifference of geology to humanity.  The Volcano Pilgrim has dedicated the last three years to the belief that one need not shrink from the sublime.  Nay, rather, one may seek it out, with a pack on your back and a stick in your hand, liberal applications of sunblock and when necessary a gas mask over your face.  He recognizes that chasing this particular dragon may not strike some people as entirely healthy or balanced behavior, but the nature of that imbalance is one of the things he hopes in the course of the journey to  understand." 

This is a journey I am following as well, in my own quest to feel the earth's power to transform and to heal, as well as to create and to destroy.  I don't claim to understand what draws me to this particular form of fire, but I know that it gives me energy and passion.  As the earth reveals its heart-blood lava, I am transfixed and transformed.  I acknowledge a higher power, one that is indifferent to humanity and yet is the very earth that nourishes and sustains our existence.  I will spend this day remembering a soul mate I have never met.