Fire Returned to Heaven

A journal of spoken prayer and walking faith

→ Walk 1 · Ego Echoes and Fear of Insanity

---

I want to give a bit of context for what this series is and how it came to exist.

For a long time my life felt like one continuous state of intensity. I processed the world differently than most people around me. My mind ran fast, absorbed everything, made endless connections, but rarely found rest. That made the world feel magical, but also dangerous. There was always too much input, pain, and analysis.

Years ago I began a discipline of writing for one hour every day without stopping. No editing, no thinking, just pen moving on paper. That practice became a mirror through which I started to see what was actually happening in me. Trauma, fear, and habit shaped my reactions and my life.

After a year of that, everything around me began to break apart. Relationships, structures, belief systems, all of it collapsed at once. Old trauma surfaced, and for a while I felt close to losing myself completely.

During that time, the spiritual frameworks I had relied on, Buddhist, shamanic, non-dual, and the rest of the new age pantheon, stopped holding. They had offered language and peace before, but they couldn’t meet what I was facing. Around the same time I started reading the Bible for the first time. Slowly, and almost against my will, I turned toward Christ.

When things became unbearable I started walking. I went out alone, often by the lake near my home, and began speaking out loud, to stay connected, to hear my own thoughts, to find some anchor in the noise.

At first these were monologues, psychological self-reflections. But over time something changed. The voice I was speaking to no longer felt like an echo of myself. It felt heard. The walks became prayer.

For more than a year I kept recording these solitary conversations. I didn’t listen back until much later. When I finally did, I realised they traced a relationship forming between a man and God, recorded almost in real time. That’s what you’ll read here. The walks mark the long return from confusion to trust.

Each text in Fire Returned to Heaven is one of those recordings, transcribed and then carefully edited. I try to cut repetition, merge sentences, anonymize names and places, but to keep the emotional truth exactly as it was. These text are not be understood as essays or theology or teachings. They are snapshots of lived faith and raw experience.

The title comes from the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and was punished for it. For me, that fire is our free will and the self-centred mind, the part that believes it can exist without God. These walks felt like returning that fire and giving back the illusion of autonomy, letting intellect and will become instruments again, guided rather than ruling.

I’ll publish them roughly in the order they were recorded. They are part of a longer arc that is still unfolding. Other writings, older texts, essays, reflections, will also appear on this Substack, but the pieces marked Fire Returned to Heaven are solitary walks of spoken, conversational prayer.

If you’re new here, I suggest starting with the first walk and reading them chronologically.

These writings aren’t meant to convince anyone of anything. They document a dialogue between one human being and the divine. If they resonate, you’re welcome to walk with me for a while.

— Elior

---

→ Walk 1 · Ego Echoes and Fear of Insanity

Do you also sometimes go out
and just start walking
when things get a bit too much?

What do you experience
when you are alone in nature?

Leave a comment below to start a conversation!

If you enjoyed the read, leave a like.
It helps me know this format works.
And it makes me feel good.

You want to keep walking with me?
Subscribe to The Province of the Mind.

Elsewhere in The Province of the Mind:

---

---