Oak Lessons

Splitting some sections of new oak today, out of long habit wielding maul and wedge without too much thought: not hurrying to get the job done, just hitting the wedge a couple of times and pausing, listening for the tiny sounds that are oak's language of compromise, then hitting a couple times more, pausing again, actions my body and mind have learned to do without me... It surprised me enough to ask myself: When had I learned that? 

How had I acquired the ability to dialog with oak? I had often been in a hurry during the early firewood years, so I had to learn that oak yields slowly and at the price of effort, which is the nature of things in general, oak responding perhaps a little more fairly and intelligently than other materials. So I guess by force of habitual listening I learned when to move and when to wait, so as not to do twice the work for half the result. It doesn't pay to be pushy; oak isn't dumb just because it talks in whispers. 

Being wild, oak is also pretty wily, and has its quirks. If you insist on your way, oak will make you wait, one way or another. If in your interactions with that wood grain you try to hurry, in time you'll get angry and lose, because if there’s one thing oak knows, it's duration. If you're angry splitting oak, you're beside the point.

Then some time later comes the big oak lesson: your mind knows more than you do.

Firelight flickers
so you can't read -
then it tells your stories

WOODEN HORSES

Out in the blustery dawn loading up on firewood to restock the holder beside the cold morning stove, using the work to get the bodyheat. Eyeing the oak first of course, as I have all these winter days, the old reliable winter fireheart with its hard and long-burning golden flame, taken straight from the sun.

Oak is our best flame for the heart of winter, heats every nook and cranny of this mountain house, but now that I’m warm so quickly out in the morning, it seemed to me that we’ve passed the heart of winter - though it may return for a passing shove or two of its icy shoulders - so out of habit I was eyeing the big firepower of oak I have out there, turning that gold they get when they’re ready to give back the sun, but then I catch a glimpse of the other stacks, the lighter fiery ones of cherry wood, with that flamey red they dry to, that glows in the morning light and in the stove burns so happily, so friendly flickery...

It’s hard to describe without getting too cute, but cherry is the perfect wood for blustery days because it’s warm in other ways than heat, like a grandma serving cookies and cocoa in front of the fire; it gives back a spritely, cheery kind of flame, long-embered but not strong, not the let’s-get-to-work kind of deep-tempered, hard-edged fire that oak brings to the room when there’s ice on the windows, oak like iron, the workhorse of firewood, the Percheron of flame, its big muscles hauling us all across winters of ice...

After a decade or two with a woodstove on a mountainside with a wide supply of wild windblown wood you get to be kind of a firewood gourmet, it’s like wine or coffee in its way, with body, bouquet, hints of this and that quality, each kind of wood, indeed each tree, having its own character that it’s best to know as best you can, and as I scanned the stacks something spoke to me from inside like the urgevoice that says “Boy, a cup of coffee sure would hit the spot right now,” or “A bit of Puligny-Montrachet would really go good with this meal,” as the conjurevision of the topic shows itself the mind’s eye and that’s what I saw, some cherry wood burning in the stove just minutes from now, with the sky turning the same color outside and the chill wind blowing by, rattling the bamboo, all souled by the cherry flame and the wine color of the dawning sun, it would just all fit together better than it would with oak, I thought, and it did, what can I say, I’ve tried in these awkwords.

Anyway, as to cherry, brighten just one letter and it's cheery...

MORE LIGHT

...like all living things a fire is a river of need, a kind of conversation, a dialog of light with darkness, like the fire in the sky and in a leaf. The heart itself is a flame, ablaze at the sight of itself in another eye; we carry all this like a sky in ourselves, and so when we come to tend a fire, we find that delight of meeting an old friend. Just stir this bit here and the fire flares up, fuel once starved for air now fed, from ember to flame, setting new thoughts alight.

Tending a fire is the whole soul's delight, much like tending to life itself; in return the fire shares more than light and warmth, if we listen to its ancient tongue, for it speaks a language that lived far before and lives yet within us: This is the way you should tend yourself; this is the way you should tend others and your world. The fire is that of us outside ourselves. We recognize this naturally, as we do in the light of stars.

When we gaze into a fire's light we gaze into a shifting mystic mirror, upon vast and untold secrets of ourselves. What we find there we feel to our depths, but cannot say.

From the PLM archives, January 2003

MORE LIGHT

...like all living things a fire is a river of need, a kind of conversation, a dialog of light with darkness, like the fire in the sky and in a leaf. The heart itself is a flame, ablaze at the sight of itself in another eye; we carry all this like a sky in ourselves, and so when we come to tend a fire, we find that delight of meeting an old friend. Just stir this bit here and the fire flares up, fuel once starved for air now fed, from ember to flame, setting new thoughts alight.

Tending a fire is the whole soul's delight, much like tending to life itself; in return the fire shares more than light and warmth, if we listen to its ancient tongue, for it speaks a language that lived far before and lives yet within us: This is the way you should tend yourself; this is the way you should tend others and your world. The fire is that of us outside ourselves.

We recognize this tacitly, as we do in the light of stars. When we gaze into a fire's light we gaze into a mystic mirror, upon vast and untold secrets of ourselves. What we find there we feel to our depths, but cannot say.