Burning Bright

There’s a certain therapeutic magic in watching flames dance across lumber in my fire pit. I’ve made a habit of creating woodpiles on my property over the years. Mostly, I like to split wood, and it’s a good excuse to work out and be doubly productive. Win-win. My wife bought us a fancy smokeless firepit for our back deck, and it’s glorious.

I spent a few days over the last week just sitting and staring into the fiery abyss. This form of entertainment has likely calmed the weary nerves of many overthinkers in my genetic lineage. There’s just something about it. Fire is the purest form of art, and it’s mesmerizing. My anxiety melts away with the chill that surrounds me as I huddle closer to the blaze. This is a medicine I’ve needed.

Sitting in the cold forces me to clear my mind. I go back to a primal state of mind, relegating me to fuel gathering for warmth. Fighting the frigid wind was my only pressing task. With armloads of moldering wood, I ambled up the steep stairs leading to my deck. The tracks from ash borer beetles are still showing their deathly handiwork under the bark. This makes me think about how a beetle smaller than my pinky nail and its ravenous larval phase could kill a green ash tree that was over eighty feet tall in one season. Now, those trees barely exist around us. There aren’t any more in my yard.

I think about how that little invasive pest found a niche and exploited it. This could be a tale of woe on the one hand, at least from the tree’s perspective. A cautionary tale about not letting the little things get to you because they’ll compound, steal your life-giving juices, and ultimately cause a withering death.

But from the beetle’s perspective, it could be a story of conquest over insurmountable odds. A foreigner in a foreign land who finds a job he was perfectly suited for and then takes down a giant with hard work and persistence. I guess it’s all in who you ask whether this story is a tragedy or one of triumph. Personally, I’m just glad this wood is dry and burns hot.

Mostly, though, I’m not thinking about anything. I’m just staring into the fire. It captivates me, and as violent as the flames are to the wood, it’s peaceful for me to watch. Each ember smolders to ash that will later fertilize my garden and the plants in my yard. The irony strikes me that the ashes of former trees will strengthen those that remain.

The elements they sequestered for centuries distilled down to the base chemicals like calcium carbonate, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. This makes great fertilizer. The cycle repeats. The trees grow taller, the beetles get hungry, the trees get weak and die, and I cut the tree, split the logs, and build a fire. A cycle as old as time.

My brain never truly stops thinking. But at least while I watch flames lick against the stainless-steel borders of our firepit, the thoughts are relegated to the life cycles of organisms within reach. I’m focused solely on problems I can solve immediately. The only current stressor is the cold, and I can fix that by adding more wood to the fire. There’s a value there. Stress melts away the longer I lose myself in the flames. In this moment, though, the fire blazes on, and my efforts have coalesced into a peaceful warmth. This may become my new winter routine.