Fire is an intimate force. Whereas light is very heartening, it remains quite superficial. It touches only the surface of things. ...Fire, on the other hand, has the power to penetrate to the very essence of substance. Fire can go to the heart of the matter.
Ultimately, I think gardening speaks to a deep-seated desire to experience the real, the essential, the astonishingly possible. To garden is gradually to give up control, to fall literally to one's knees and come into closer and closer contact with the tremendous and often bewildering beauty of the world. Nothing, you find, is at all what you thought it was. Dirt is not dirt, but a teeming mass of microorganisms that turns death back into life.