Firelight

A "first" offering.

Firelight: a First Offering

When I awakened this morning, all things had become forever and irrevocably changed. I had known somehow there was something coming before I closed my eyes on the world last night, so at first I only brushed it aside, as easily as a tornadic, silt-laden whirlwind drives off an insignificant bit of goose-down. I had not known, at my waking moment, there was no point or purpose in even trying to push aside that which has sprouted from the core of a sometimes-tortured soul. Or that today was to be the day.

At the point of my rising, there was no part of my physiology that was chilled, despite the frigid arctic clipper that has settled into my valley. When I stepped coatless into the wind and the blue-white freeze to feed my wild birds, the cold was not unexpected or unwelcome. Nor did it generate an internal chill in the short time it took me to put out seed for the expectant flocks that come each day. But something was already about to happen. The thing I thought I had brushed aside, though invisible to my sight, lay thick between my thoughts and the intense January cold. The birds fled in a burst when I stepped through the door, and I moved quickly to fill the feeders, knowing that something was still very different. From my doorstep I peered backward to see if the birds would be quick to return. Dozens had already lit on the perches. Unthinking, I turned my body toward them as my breath billowed before my eyes, and its moisture raced to join the greater mass of clouds in the heavens. Alive!

I wanted to ask why it mattered. What I did know had changed did not seem to me a good thing.

“Fuffff” the wind replied, brusquely. “I've come to stay!”

I quickly shook my head. I'd heard nothing at all. I generate the words; the words do not generate themselves. Or at least, I didn't think they did. I had not heard a voice, not even in my mind. It simply wasn't there.

“You will not deny me life, for I have always been...alive!”

Startled, I had to take a step back. It served no purpose, to be sure. Try taking a step back from your own consciousness, unassisted by any form of meditation, or drug, or alcohol. I felt each arm with my hands to make sure I wasn't dreaming. I was not. But then, a form and a face appeared against the whitened background, and despite genuine glistening particles of wind-driven snow swirling around it, the image was plainly a fabrication of my mind. Surely the words I'd perceived had been, too. Nevertheless, denying what I'd just seen and heard was not possible. For the first time in my day, I felt gladdened and saddened at once. Perhaps, finally, my mind was preparing to leave me.

It was very cold outside. Stunned and slightly shaken, I brushed it off again. It was a harder thing to do this time. I turned slowly and re-entered the artificially-generated warmth of my kitchen.

But something was still different, there was something quite definite, so far intangible. Although I knew it, I couldn't allow myself to dwell on just what it was. There had been a distinct pleasant scent to the icy air outside, and the warmer air in the kitchen, thankfully, had its own good scent. Ordinarily I wouldn't have noticed, and in retrospect, I should have known why I noticed it this time. But at that point, I did not. I busied myself with the tasks of the day.

I bent and picked up the pets' water bowl and emptied it, scouring out the inside with a paper towel. But when I turned on the cold-water tap to refill it, nothing came. Here was decidedly an emergency. I'd not had a frozen pipe for more than a decade, but as the hot water was still running, that meant it was just that, a pipe so cold it had frozen solid. If it had also split, I was in for a big job and maybe even a rotten day. I'd thought I had taken care of that issue long ago.

My basement isn't really a basement, it's a cellar. I'm not ashamed to admit it. The house is well over a hundred years old, as proven by a man's pencil-scrawl that appeared on the hard whitecoat of the horsehair-plastered living room wall, when I first steamed the many layers of wallpaper from it. The date he noted was October of 1897. The man who was about to paper the wall for the first time said so, and for as long as the house stands in my possession, his note will proclaim it. Of course I left it there, as obviously others have done before me. As I walked past the place where he'd written that note while on my way to check the plumbing for damage, I thought about it. The urgency of the short trip did not diminish a new cognizance of all things in my surroundings, and I marveled at the sensation.

The news did appear to be good. I knew where the water line came closest to the ancient foundation log before rising to the kitchen sink, and there was no water running down there. Still, there was no way to be sure that the pipe hadn't split until after it was thawed. It couldn't be reached, over the thick, protruding stone foundation wall to pour warm water over the joint. This would take a heat gun, perhaps a light bulb. The only place I had the first item was nearly a hundred yards away in my workshop, but a heat gun would work more quickly. The fire in my blackened workshop woodstove was overdue for checking anyway. This time I put on a coat and hat and headed for the shop.

The fire in my woodstove was all but out, and I didn't have time to fool with it. It's dangerous, but I'm an old hand at it. I quickly poured kerosene from a five-gallon container into an old steel can and flipped the liquid onto the remaining firewood, applying a lighter immediately after. The burst singed the hair on the back of my hand, as always. Then I added wood, adjusted the draft, brushed the back of my hand, grabbed my heat gun, and left.

The water soon flowed, and my trip into the nearby small town afterward was uneventful. Overall, it may have been an ordinary day, aside from a new awareness that can't be denied, overlooked or surgically expunged. Who the hell am I kidding? There has been nothing ordinary about it. It isn't just a new awareness. It is a massive change, a basic and fundamental metamorphose extraordinaire. Every person I saw on the street looked different, this day. In days past, before I sat down to write I often paced about as an idea developed, but this time, I was choked with emotion before I began. Full, deep breaths were not possible; for as I paced, each breath was forced out in preparation for the next. Chills that had been absent in the strong cold this morning now manifested themselves thoroughly, moving unimpeded from chest to back to arms and ending in temporary numbness, as I tried without success to force back tears. I was finally fully aware that a great and deeply needed change had arrived.

I had become jaded. I had disavowed the existence of good people. The human condition had brought a great weight to bear upon my best efforts at creativity. When you write, you draw from what you know and what you feel, not simply from the things you are able to imagine. And if your worldview is not positive, then how could be your output?

I've grown to hate television, something I once enjoyed. After some time with notes taped to the screen of the television set that's next to my computer monitor, I finally had the TV portion of my cable disconnected. Even now, I'll have no use for it; I have no interest in industry's lame attempts to create a better automobile, a new drug with fifty admitted nasty side-effects, or the latest fashions. If I want to see the news, it's online. If that even matters.

And then, there's the sex. It's everywhere, and it's so obviously overstated. When you're alone and you plan to stay that way, how could it help to have it constantly blazing across the screen? I needed to make it stop. I had to make it go away. I turned it off.

But I didn't just discover the depth of the change as I prepared to write. Something else did it. It was earlier.

Toward the waning hour of daylight, I returned to my shop to attend the fire. The water supply is plumbed in there, too, and I can't afford to have the pipes freeze there any more than I could inside my home. But this time, the fire was not out. It was burning merrily and well--the orange-red flames kissing the rolled steel of the woodstove. No wonder in years past I'd often settled before it for hours. The warmth from the blaze warmed me as I knelt for a better look. The golden glow of its vibrant combustion cast flickering shadows on nearby objects. Some of the words of Thoreau returned to me, but I recalled only a paraphrase. It was something about firewood warming you twice; so I looked it up.

“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice — once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.” Walden

Remembrances of hundreds, no, thousands of hours spent cutting and gathering firewood flashed through my memory, followed by distant recollections of happier times.

But in reality, the happy times were far too few and might easily be offset by those that were not. Enough said about that. Life can be and is difficult, I suspect, for everyone. I've agonized at times over some I've known who chose to end it, such was the degree of difficulty they faced. I wondered, as I looked into the dancing firelight, has anyone ever lived who never thought about doing the same?

And of course, it solves nothing. If the objective is to cause great pain and suffering for those who remain, it does accomplish that. For one who truly loves life as I do, the price is far too high. My imagination shot me into the sky in an effort to grasp how high it actually is. I fell again, crashing and burning like a plummeting space capsule that had lost its chute.

The beauty of the wood fire I was viewing was far beyond my ordinary expectations. The power of the many emotions I was experiencing was far too great to be considered normal, whatever that may be. And yet, it was not too much. And at long last, it hit me.

Firelight is the essence of humanity. Without it, our species would have had no chance to survive. The love of it, the need for it is deeply ingrained in the genome of everyone, in every living heart. We keep candles, often in profusion and without any apparent need for them. And yet we do need them. Because we need that bit of fire. Electric candles can never suffice, no matter how realistic they are engineered to be. I'm struggling a bit now, for as the perfect light flees very quickly from the photographer, the emotion of the moment may flee from the writer. At the time of my realization, I felt as though I could write a thousand pages about firelight, how fire has enabled humankind to evolve and to succeed, in so very many ways. And although I'd almost like to try telling you about it, the firelight really wasn't the source of the revelation. It merely caused it.

For just as fire cannot exist in a vacuum, neither can any of us. We may well give it our best shot. I know I did. But it doesn't work, and it will never work. If you're alone for a long time, the effects will overcome you, as surely as the trials of life overcame those who left this life too soon. But what if you've lost your love for people, as I had? What if each day becomes a little dimmer, as my days were becoming? What happens when the breaths you take are progressively shallower, as mine had been? When you have to struggle to rise with the coming of each new day with both your body and your heart aching, as I did?

The answer will never be the same for any two people. I dream that the changes wrought in me, without necessarily my complete approval, are permanent. I believe that dreaming is like breathing, and I've said this to someone just recently: when dreaming stops, life is over.

By now, the reader might have guessed that I've found someone. It isn't so. No, if I had anything to do with it, then as usual, I did it my way and I screwed it up. I didn't even meet someone. There was someone I've known for a while. Someone whose heart was also aching. Someone. you know who you are, because I've looked directly into your beautiful eyes, and I've told you. I've held you close, and I've thanked you, just for being you. Summer day.

Throughout most of what I've written before, I've been cautious to conceal and to protect the things I believe, even though what we believe makes us who we are. I've always been far more interested in having readers than in allowing people to know who I am. But if I conceal it this time, I can't finish this piece. I'll damn well decide whether to publish it later.

This piece is “a first offering,” because my writing will never, ever be the same. Now, far more than ever, eating, sleeping, and everything else that goes with existence are all on hold if I'm writing. A certain chained monster has at last broken its tether, and it's coming. No need to get out of the way. It won't hurt you, unless, of course, you happen to be a despot of some sort. Of any sort, whether you happen to be sitting in governance over the people, my people, of which everyone alive is; or within your own home. In either case, or if a despot at any level in between, may you die in deepest agony. I pray that my monster may eat you alive.

Some time ago, while in actual prayer, I asked our Creator for something. (Yes, I can believe in a god and also embrace the honest reality of evolution.) My request was for help; help to become the best writer I could ever possibly be. I've dreamed that eventually, I might develop the ability to write in ways that no one has ever written. Whether or not I could ever realize that dream, there have long been things in the way of my best, and the greatest of those were my attitudes toward people. You were appreciated, yet scorned. You were loved, yet hated. I was on the fence, being torn by twisted barbs on rusted strands of taut wire.

No longer.

Today, I could have watched the ads or the programs that are designed to titillate our sexualities with reasonable aplomb. I'm back. I've been reminded, and I can both see and understand the reasons for human love again. It wasn't necessary to partake, or even to imagine. It was only necessary to love. If I ache, it is for those among us who have not recently felt the things I have felt. I know how quickly they can fade. In my case, I had forced myself to forget such things ever existed. If I had not forgotten, I never would have believed it was even remotely possible that I might experience such feelings anew. I thought so much had been so utterly destroyed by pain, surely there was no way I could ever feel that way again.

I was so, so wrong. It was never as ridiculously intense as this has been. Never in my life had my heart been so full. If there is any tragedy to what has happened, it is that the person I fell in love with may have been the single one I had always sought but had never met--until recently. One in ten billion, with fewer than eight billion people on the planet. And it's too late. I have nothing left to offer.

It was necessary to let it go.

One might ask, “Was your experience really an answer to prayer, then?”

Trust me. It was. Absolutely.

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