Campfire on the Moon

If you've read my story, you've come across a line that probably sounds strange: "I'm not building a startup. I'm lighting a campfire on the moon and trusting that the right people will make the journey."

A few people have asked what that means. Honestly, I'm still figuring it out. But the more I pull at it, the more I find underneath.

The first fire

I joined the scouts when I was six. That's where I first sat around a real campfire — not a metaphor, an actual fire, in the woods, with other kids, dirt under our knees, smoke in our hair. I remember the warmth. The circle. How nobody needed to explain why we were all sitting there. Something ancient and simple that just worked.

I left the scouts around thirteen. Teenage years kicked in. School got serious. The masks started going on — one by one, layer by layer, until I couldn't remember what was underneath.

I didn't sit around a campfire again for almost twenty years.

The fire that came back

About a year and a half ago, we moved out of Berlin to a small village in Brandenburg. A tiny garden. New neighbors. Quiet roads. And a fire pit that came with the place.

In Brandenburg, when you cut your trees and bushes, you don't haul the greens to a disposal site — you burn them in your yard. It's a cultural ritual I'd never known. A neighbor asked if I could lend a hand. We lit a fire. And standing there, watching the flames with someone I barely knew, something I'd forgotten came flooding back.

Nobody was looking at their phones. Nobody was performing. We were just there. Present. Two humans around a fire, doing what humans have done for thousands of years.

Now I'm always the one asking: should we do a campfire? Does anyone have garden cuttings? My friends laugh about it — they probably think I just really like campfires. But writing this, I'm realizing it's bigger than it looks: I'm reconnecting with something I lost at the exact age I started pretending.

The fire that I am

Here's what I've started to realize — and it took me embarrassingly long, given that I've been carrying this energy my whole life without seeing it:

I don't just love campfires. I am one.

People who know me well have said it in different ways. My manual of me — a document I wrote to help colleagues understand how I work — literally ends with the words "a touch of campfire energy, even in the middle of the week." I wrote that before I understood what it meant.

A campfire draws people in without demanding anything. Nobody has to be asked to sit down — they just come. It warms everyone in the circle equally — not just one person, not just the important ones. The warmth costs the fire nothing. It's just there.

It makes people honest. At a fire you say things you'd never say in daylight. The night, the glow, the circle — something about it makes the masks slip. I say the thing nobody else will say, and somehow it doesn't land as confrontation. It lands as relief. The room exhales. And then other people start saying what they've been holding too.

And it's alive. Unpredictable. It crackles, jumps, dances. Not the sterile neon lamp. Something real and untameable that people love precisely because they can't quite control it.

But it needs tending, not hustle. Throw too much in at once, you kill it. Sustainable burning, not flaring up and turning to ash.

What happens when you get close

People invite me in because of the fire. "You're so different. So fresh. So authentic." They love the warmth. They love the energy. They love that I say the things everyone is thinking but nobody will say.

And then I come closer. And when you sit by a fire, you warm up. And when you warm up, you start taking off layers. The jacket comes off. The sleeves get rolled up. You open up. It's not a decision — it's what bodies do when they feel safe enough.

That's exactly what happens when people spend time around me. The warmth, the honesty, the aliveness — it melts something. The professional armor softens. People start saying real things. The masks come off — mine first, then theirs.

And most of the time, that's beautiful. That's the whole point.

But not every room is built for that. Some people wanted the glow but not what the glow reveals. They try to contain it. Close the windows. Turn the fire down. Keep the room controlled. And when you enclose a fire — when you take away its air — it dims. It chokes. You risk losing it forever.

That's what happens to me in spaces that can't hold it. My light dims. My energy drops. My body knows before my mind does. It's not rejection — it's physics. A campfire doesn't burn in a closed office. It needs air. It needs freedom.

And here's the thing I've come to believe: the layers were never the natural state. We put them on because at some point we stopped warming each other. The fire went out — in our families, in our schools, in our workplaces, in the way we built our whole world. So we layered up. Armor. Performance. Professionalism. Politeness. All of it insulation against a cold we stopped questioning.

But when the fire is real — when someone actually shows up with warmth and doesn't ask for anything in return — the layers start to feel heavy. Unnecessary. Like wearing a winter coat indoors. You might fight it. You might resist. That's normal. That's the body protecting what it learned to protect.

The moon

A campfire on the moon is physically impossible. No atmosphere. No oxygen. Fire can't burn there. And that's exactly the point.

I bring warmth to places where it "doesn't belong." Boardrooms. Strategy sessions. Professional contexts where emotions are treated as inefficiency. I light the fire anyway. Or maybe: precisely because.

In recent years, something started happening. Whenever I was deep in a phase of working on haelp — or whatever the iteration was called back then — the moon would wake me up. Three or four in the morning. I'd get up, look out into the sky, and just — be there. Journal. Sort my thoughts. My truest, clearest self showing up in the silence, because there was finally space.

A campfire on the moon burns brightest when it's darkest. At three in the morning. When everyone else is asleep. That's not insomnia. That's where I'm most alive.

And from up there — from the moon — the fire would be visible from Earth. A small, warm, impossible glow that you couldn't miss if you happened to look up. Visible to everyone. But reachable only by those who actually make the journey.

Lost and found

Here's what I'm only now starting to see, and it's almost too neat to be true:

I lost the fire at thirteen — the exact age when the operating system switched from being to performing. When the masks went on. When I stopped sitting around campfires and started reading rooms instead.

And I found it again about a year and a half ago — in a garden in Brandenburg, standing next to a neighbor I barely knew, at the exact moment in my life when I started looking inward for the first time.

But I'm not the only one who lost something.

My dad used to shake my hand when I came to visit. Like I was a stranger at the door. He couldn't look me in the eyes, couldn't say anything warm. That was just how he was — or how he'd learned to be. A carpenter in a small village in the south of Germany, layers thick as oak.

I didn't push. I didn't argue. I just kept showing up the way I show up. And slowly, something shifted. He started looking at me. Then hugging me. Then calling — video calls, from a man who swore the digital world wasn't his. This year, we're flying to Ireland together. We've never done anything like that before. It wouldn't have been possible before.

That's what the fire does. Not by force. By patience. What's on the other side of the layers isn't emptiness — it's each other.

The campfire isn't a brand I invented. It's something I lived, lost, and came back to. And it turns out — when you find your fire again, other people start finding theirs too. Maybe that's why the image feels so true — it's not a metaphor. It's a memory that finally caught up with me.