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HEART AND FLAME

The depth and intensity of relation between heart and flame-- the heart with its flickers, its towering flames, its warmth of friendship and fires of love, its embers, its sparks-- who can say we and fire are not siblings of one family?

That relation is kindled anew for me each winter morning when I arise from a warm bed to a cold house and return in humility to the hearth, the heart of the home, and there proceed to rekindle the fire that has burned for so long, much as one builds and nurtures other essential relations.

Soon there is a bright warming flame growing, in a kinship I acknowledge at once by drawing near and raising my hands to the glow, watching it grow with the appreciation that attends all nurturing brightness, that needs from me only a nourishing now and again as I do for myself, and before too long the entire air is warm once more and thus the entire house, every room where the door is open, and life can resume its course in all fullness.

How long we all have been such friends with fire, how far we have come together, we ourselves getting thus far all thanks to the warmth and brightness of the flame that has tended and lighted our way, and how much of what we call our own brightness and warmth and passion we have derived from our millennia of kindling fire and staring into its depths as if into the eyes of god... Such thoughts stared into the flames in the morning before sunrise soon take me back to before there was thinking...