If we all step up, with lighted candles in our hands, to a house-size pile of timber, touch it with those flames, and then step back away from the resulting blaze, it's too easy to look at the fires we still hold as individuals, compare them to the bonfire and say “That’s not my flame. My flame is small.”
Or, in reverse, if we all light our cold candles from a bonfire, no matter how many of us there are, the bonfire will never shrink.
It can be duplicated, cloned. It can be massed, moved. It can be given away without our ever losing any of it.
It’s all the same flame.
We are the fire and the spirit.
image credit Cindy Andrie via Creative Commons on Flickr