Thankfulness

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

(pg. 27, "A Native Hill")

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

IMG_3536.JPG

Coals

My good friend Mike says, “tending your fire is like tending yourself”. I think he’s right. A glowing bed of coals is the heart of the fire. It is where the heat comes from but those coals have to be fed or they go out. As I’ve been reflecting on the solo fires from this past weekend and the brave women who went out into the forest to take the journey into the night I’ve been thinking a lot about why the solo fire is such an important part of my life and why like Sit Spot I want to share it with others.  Tending a fire is sometimes work and almost always worth it to me.  We need it both for survival and as a great teacher of presence.  The more I practice tending the fire and spending time with it the more I get out of it.  (Very much like sit spot.) The harder I work at tending my fire well the fewer toxic thoughts run through my mind.  The more I watch it the better I understand how to feed it.  A near perfect metaphor for living.  Staying up all night with a fire in this way for the first time reaches into the depths of determination we each carry with us.  We have to keep it alive.  We have to keep ourselves alive by feeding it, watching it, tending it.  Sometimes we doze off, sometimes we put on wood that's too rotten and it creates a lot of smoke.  Sometimes, you have to feed it constantly to keep it alive and sometimes it goes out.  No matter what the night comes.  With a Solo Fire you walk the edge of light and learn about life.  This is why we do the Solo Fire.

IMG_3156.JPG