TOWERS OF GOLD

                                                                        (from unposted archives)

Out here in the cold March wind of an evening, Siberia swirling its icy cape over the land for another try at winter, I'm pulling tree debris off of just-planted lettuce, shoulders hunched beneath a dull, steely sky-- Tarps torn off the firewood, icicle wind poking here and there through my indoor wear-- this was going to be just a fast outing for quick windblast fixes I could see were needed from a glance out the window, where it was toasty warm.

Once outside, though, at each turn I spotted other things that needed doing before dark - and oh yeah: get more firewood, since I’m out here... Then, clenched in the frigid grip of this time-wrestle, battling once more in the old cosmic arena that life can become in a moment’s darkening, I feel the first sliver of that deep silver loneliness so familiar to one who has lived this far... every such one knows it by heart, that wintry desert deep in the inner times of being. In later life, icy wind and solitude give it a new heft...

At earlier ages, that mood would soon pass, change to a heartfilling vibrancy dipped straight from the well of youth, once again lifting me to joy in natural buoyancy, back in an easygoing companionable world well-stocked with tomorrows-- but now, living closer to the nearing edge of life I’m ever more aware of my narrowing future, of a time when no more is-- of past either, no going back to that laughing, vital crowd, even now all living into their own old ages or too early gone-- soon we will all be far from now...

Then from all the way ago comes an unbidden warmth that lifts me, eases my hunkered mood, transforms this verge into joy that glows like towers of gold--  There are always treasures to be found, along the line of being...

I clear the downed wood, doubleweight the tarps, close the gate and head back toward the warmth, bearing armfuls of firewood amid towers of gold.

AXE

For decades, it has been your partner in the enterprise. Like you, it has its scars. After you've split a day's worth of fuel for next winter-- this winter's fuel is long ready-- you clean yourself up for the evening and though you wipe the axe clear, maybe sharpen it for tomorrow, it still bears the marks of plunges into the hard grains of oak, hickory, ironwood, as you do, but visibly. There is a price, after all; you can see it in the iron, feel it in the bone.

SPLITTING STUMP

It looked so lonely, sitting there, my old friend, worn companion of so many labors, uncomplaining bearer of all those years of strenuous effort that we'd shared.

Nonetheless it had held up well, the old camphorwood splitting stump, from what I could see of it through the car window, just the top of it sticking up through the conquering weeds in the rain as we pulled into the drive. It was a lifetime away from me now... 

At that moment the inanimate stump seemed like an old friend, I knew it so well. It was where I'd sweated and sworn, busted my jeans, got hit by a wedge, dodged the axe, wore out years of muscle and bone, rolled the stump under the plum tree in Spring, to work in the shade...

I knew it would wait there forever, that gnarly old trunk, it would wait through sun and rain, through winters, and I'd never be coming back to swing that heavy axe, watch the fragrant woodpile grow-- imagine feeling heartache over a splitting stump.

You feel the true values at the pinpoints of life.

Firewood -
acts all innocent 

knows where your toes are

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.

ON CONTENTMENT   -  archives

Nothing like gazing upon your own well-stacked cords of firewood turning golden in the evening sun to get you feeling contented, and then in that contentment set you to thinking about contentment itself and how it arises, where it goes and what it is exactly, what is it made of, is it part of you or is it more like a shaft of sunlight warming a patch of earth? Firewood, another form of light, serves in so many ways...

That thought always leads to a line from the Tao Te Ching that glows with the light of the truth that cannot be pinned down, that shimmers in the mind’s eye: "There is no disaster greater than not being content."

Being content? Mere contentment? What does contentment have to do with disaster? Lao Tzu knew, and passes along the intimation, that contentment is the beginning of all that is worthy, it is the seed and germ of every happiness, its absence accordingly the tiny breach that ruptures into every disaster, the pinhole in the dam, the lost horseshoe nail. Contentment is all the rest: pride in the way of one's life and the fruit of it, whether one is shepherd or chieftain, a fact that hasn't changed since back in the tribal days when miracles were everywhere, and no museums yet needed to remind us of what is gone.

Contentment is the core of all that truly matters. It is the root of passion, the heights of honesty, the beating heart of every joy, the embrace of a family. There is no self in contentment; it is other-centered. The self-centered, in contrast, is perturbed, discordant, writhes with discontent and seeks release at every turn (insert the 'seven cardinal sins' here, for starters).

And where there is no contentment, deception is essential, falsehood is opportune, theft is advantageous, and enmity is natural. No one knew this better than the Chinese of Lao Tzu's time, who had seen it all for millennia, from battle and rapine to disease and famine, and knew well the silent, dry seed of the whirlwind that springs from the ash of contentment...

SOMETHING THERE IS, FOR SURE Although the phrasing makes it pretty awkward to do so, I have to agree 100% with Robert Frost that definitely Something there is that doesn't love a wall, which Something in my case, in addition to RF's groundswells, includes hurricanes, wild pigs and earthquakes, though I know R was after a refined, esoteric entity better suited to a New Englandy kind of poetry. But hey, since I'm on the subject and not being the least bit poetic, let's not limit this to stone walls, shall we, there is more to the phenomenon than that. Like any stone handler, I have basic stone wall permanency problems, but I have the same trouble with stacks of firewood. And so do you, if you've ever stacked a bunch of big oddsized chunks of it; tougher than building a sentence in Finnegan's Wake. Soon after which you find out that yes, Something there is alright, and it doesn't love a stack of firewood any less than it doesn't love a stone wall. No need to even mention stacks of money. Yes, here we humans are, all this time - thousands of millennia so far - trying to stack up something of our own that will last, preferably years - even centuries for a stone wall - but a mere year or two for a stack of firewood-- is that too much to ask? Whatever that unidentifiable entity Frost is hinting at, it sure as hell doesn't listen. It's not a matter just of gravity, which is a strictly bureaucratic form of energy; there's Something more impish to it, being the antithesis of entropy, yet persistently selective in its anarchy. I got rerouted onto this rant because this year not one stack of firewood, not two stacks of firewood, but three stacks of firewood (one stack twice, so far) have been toppled by wild pigs or hurricanes, and the year ain't over yet, though it's leaning in that direction. Earth, time and gravity have friends.

AMAZING GRACE

Yesterday I was out in the hot afternoon sun sweating trying to split a thick section of oak that had, right to its core, an old broken branch that locked the trunk together like a thick iron bolt and rendered the grain perverse to wedge, axe, muscle and the finest curses that can roil from the tongue of man, until at last the lock of the grain surrendered with amazing grace (how sweet the sound) and the halves fell open to reveal a miraculous record of over half a century of infinitesimal effort to counterbalance wind and gravity, seasons and the scars of living.

This one big scar in particular had been woven back to integrity by broad swathes of decades, each weaving recorded in tiny golden waves of fibergrain that swerved and swirled, intertwisted and ultratorqued until the memory of that broken branch was webbed into the past as firmly as with woven steel and with a grace beyond human ability, that now, in the light of the sun, was time itself, in lacings of ivory and gold.

I could only marvel as I squatted there, seeing it shine in the light that was its maker: what craft, what wisdom, what staunch flexibility!

If only I could be as true in all my moments...

SEEDS INTO THE WORLD

We had the traditional turning to Spring a few days ago, Echo doing the soybean-tossing ritual late at night; therefore we think of it as Spring already... So there I was, out in the late Spring afternoon today, thick curtains of snow in the way far north, that's yukiguni (snow country) up there, where it looks like it's still winter, but here it's perfect chill Spring weather for splitting firewood, and so I do. I have a new camphorwood splitting stump, which the landscaper down below left for me by the roadside. He left two of them. Perfect they are: sleek, heavy, fragrant, immune to decay...

The pauses are splendid too, I stop and rest the axe on the sawdusty ground, look up and see a blueing sky, the sun touching all with gold every now and then, and between me and the sky the lacework of the old chestnut tree, its limbs bare but for a few stubborn dun leaves and a last dozen or so spiky husks, now wide open as though shouting to the sky "I did it! I did it! I sent my seeds off into the world! To become big trees! I did it!" And right they are. Emptynesters know that feeling.

Working near the garden, thoughts of seeds naturally germinate into ambitions... Gonna try some tromboncino this year - heard the stems are too tough for the weevils to poke into... and some radicchio too (up here on the mountain? gotta try it!) and a zuke variety not so dependent on insect pollination, more like ad hoc immaculate conception; sounds interesting too. And some different kinds of basil in the new herb bed; more seeds waft on the mindwind...

The sky is getting bluer as I work, even as it gets colder, the split oak stacking up until the barrow is full, then it's wheeled over a ways and added to the cord-to-be, all those woody triangles a richening shade of pale gold, wooden ingots of wealth in the blue of the sky; then suddenly there are, all over the place - what must be - yes, they are: big fat flakes of snow, plopping straight down through the still air onto the split wood, the axes and me, the ground all around turning white, where in heaven did they all come from? It’s blue up there! Winter again!?

Not for the whole rest of the day, I hope.

SPACE, TIME AND FIREWOOD

Folks who don't heat with firewood can't really appreciate all that goes into that bit of sunshine in your winter wood stove, they might think maybe it's easy just because it's free (at least mostly free, the way I do it), but there are other burdens that come with the erratic supply of gleaned firewood such as I use. There's really no need to mention here the sectioning and hauling and splitting and hauling and stacking and hauling and burning and hauling and hauling and hauling, but I already did so it's too late.

Take 2: Say you've got four or five cords of firewood crowding out there in various locations around your house, wood from various periods of time in the past couple years, some of it stoveready, some not, but you've run out of stacking space and have just been given access to a whole new multicord bunch of bigwood to be split and stacked so it will dry by the time you need it two or three winters from now, so you've got to put it somewhere but you can't stack new green wood on top of fully or nearly ready wood, so you've got to walk around, analyze your stacks, ponder the weather and your wood supply, juggling disparate concepts sort of like Einstein used to do with various other aspects of the universe while wandering his theoretical woodlot.

With these sylvan symbols as well, like Albert you've got to somehow bend time and space by combining a couple of nearly ready pieces of embodied light, i.e., photons+alpha = wood, into one taller stack, thereby clearing a place for the new incoming atomic structures. Then when winter comes, in the heart of your stove you unleash the energy of those atoms in the welcome form of heat while freeing up some space outside, thereby establishing a direct link between time, space and firewood, but right now you have to match the mix of new and old.

Fortunately, last year you began to denote all this data in numerical symbols on the end face of one piece of wood at the top of each stack, but unfortunately as the universe would have it the newest wood always seeks the top of the stack, so to get at the older wood you have to go to the bottom, by for example turning the whole stack over, which is cosmically impractical (Albert, working in complete abstraction, had it easier in this regard), and practicality is what we're talking about here, so this approach needs work. Al's work led to atomic fissioning and nuclear power, which here in Japan has a bigly negative historic reputation but is still used in winter to power electric heaters, blu-rays, plasma tvs and game consoles, among other things.

This is a universe, after all.

THE WIND AND I: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH FIREWOOD

Hah. Figured I'd finally beaten the wind on this baby. The wind and I have always had a relationship problem, especially the autumn wind, the worst of the Aeolian clan vis-a-vis keeping the damn tarps on the damn ready-to-burn firewood dammit, those gusts and I not seeing eye-to-eye on this human continuity thing.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the needs of the wind, how it has to fulfill its basic mandate of leveling everything as fully and quickly as possible, there are mountains to be flattened and oceans to be shoved around, an endless list of worldwide tasks that must be done, yaggeda yaggeda, but counterposed against this are buildings and other pro tem human artifacts with precious values of their own, such as my humble stack of tarped firewood that must be protected from the elemental assignments to wet everything down, blow it away, reduce it to fungus fodder or whatever-- so I and the wind, among other of my natural relations, are always in each other's faces.

It was therefore with a smirk of satisfaction, I must say - after recovering the wind-tossed tarp from the bamboo forest behind my fresh new facecord of first-class firewood for what I guess must be the xumpteenth time in the last few years - that I came up with the idea of tying some strong traditional cord to the grommets of one tarp corner, threading it through the stack of firewood itself, then tying it taut to the grommets on the opposite corner. Hah. Bite on that, windhead.

That should do it, I thought in that hubris for which humans are famed (which also sets us apart from the animals, though unlike sinning, speaking, toolmaking, blushing etc., it is seldom mentioned in that connection). That night, the wind knowing full well what was afoot, firewood tarpwise, did its damndest to rip that tarp off there. And when I went out in the morning to gloat, that activity was out of the question. The wind had blown strongly enough to cause the tarp and its loopy rope to actually lift and topple that portion of the woodpile! Crafty! Plus more muttery labor for yours truly. Our battle had reached new heights. So then I countered with a newer and even craftier approach, on which I may be reporting any day now.

But my real reason for writing all this was the treat I was afforded while all this redoing was going on, because you know how beautiful mountainsides and all their trees can be when they set their minds to it in the peak of autumn color? Well there was that, and on top of that there was a big, thick, glorious arc of light's components rainbowing from the top of the mountain down to the lake, and through that bow of many colors the leaves of all the trees were enhanced beyond the reach of speech...

I had to stop every once in a while (beauty will do that, thank heaven), amidst my irritation and hubristically driven efforts, to admit to myself that the beauty all around was so much more important than my meager doings, so much more nourishing and truthful than anything an angry or prideful person could ever come up with in a million years if we ever get that far, the way we're going, tarpwise.

So as a result of this experience I've grown a bit more in emotional terms, learned a few things about deeper personal issues, and am on a friendlier basis with the wind now for sure; it's a good wind, but no way it can get that damn tarp off this damn time dammit.

INTERESTING TIMES

Some of the trees up here been playing havoc with our way of life, and folks 'round these parts won't stand for it, nosir.

For example there's the big chunk of incipient firewood from the gargantuoak a few hundred meters above here whose monstrous branch was lowverhanging the road and was cut down a couple of months ago before it could crush somebody, its superbulk then being rolled over the roadside edge into the bamboo and down toward the stream before the cutters knew that I was a firewood type person and would want it, so later I found out it was ok for me to take it away, but now I'll have to stand on that steep slope as if beside a nervous elephant and chainsaw the mass into half-meter segments weighing about 300 k each that I'll have to stay out of the way of, then have to split and quarter in situ so as to render them liftable to the road above. Love those kinds of tasks...

After that I can tackle the big oak on a transverse road thereabove that the recent hurricane blew over onto some power wires, causing a multihour blackout up there until the power company cut it down in big sections and shoved it into the woods where it now belongs to me but I won't get to that for a week or two beyond the first cache, though whats the hurry, since no way will it ever be dry in time to use this winter, even with the impossible miracle of constant sunlight during the rainy season plus the worst of global warming. It's warmth for the winter of 2012-13, if we're still here then, given the ongoing govern/mental revelations of Fukushima, but even so I'm going to try to leave the split wood out in the sunniest, breeziest place...

Then I'll have Azuma-san fell those three big crowdy oaks that our upmountain neighbor girded because they need the sunlight on their house, so when that's done I should have enough firewood to last until the world economy has successfully collapsed and everyone has gotten used to bottom line frugality so we can hopefully move on to essential changes.

We do live in interesting times, do we not...

FLAME RECIPE

In late autumn and through the winter I maintain a big stack of firewood (about half a cord) out on the deck by the door nearest the woodstove. Fire demand from mid-December to mid-February is pretty much full flame ahead.

As winter fades, though, the maintained pile dwindles, and by this time of year there are days when we need no fire at all, the sun does a fine job, especially with no leaves on the trees, so there's little woodstack replenishment going on (there are lots of other things to do like soil prep! pruning! raingutters! lettuce! potatoes!), with just enough wood at stoveside for maybe an evening.

But the other morning before dawn, after a few warm days I found myself plunging out into a sudden blizzard to get some firewood for the day; I'd be in the office, but Echo would be teaching yoga so there had to be a fast but long-burning fire that would quickly get hot and then stay hot. For kindling we have a big tin-lined hibachi box next to the stove that we stock with pine cones, autumnal cedar branch windfall and chopped up woodscrap, so starting was no problem, but for a fast first burn I'd need a mix of various woods and sizes, some small split cherry would do, plus a bit of narrow locust and cluster of beech limbs, this thin bit of oak would give it some heart, plus a good piece of camphor to put atop the stove, nice yoga spice...

Out there in the snowy silence I found myself doing the same sort of thing I do when planning to cook: I was gathering a bit of this and that of flame and heat, of this duration and that intensity, to fit the duration/heat/frequency needs of morning, afternoon and evening, and was doing it without thinking about it, it was perfectly natural to be out there among all those kinds of wood, selecting for certain qualities-- nice ring they give off in the snowsilence too, as you stack them on your arm...

So I wandered around the various firewood stacks for a few minutes gathering the right mix for a fast-hot, room-warming morning fire that with a nice piece of ironwood as the long-lasting firecore would segue smoothly into a deep, warm and steady yoga fire that needed no stoking, then some cherry logs to add for the afternoon fire, plus some large chunks of gold-- i.e., hard dry oak, to carry the fire into dinner and on through the night. Took about 15 minutes to carefully select those armfuls of only the finest ingredients to meet the precise requirements of my Endless Flame Recipe for a certain day in March.

Guide Michelin, eat your heart out.

WOODPECKERS AND KNOW-IT-ALLS

Another snowed-in day, watching my naive garden get buried, imagining my winter spinach patiently pressing its green face against the pale window of deepening snow. As for the rest, the flakey wind has had a ball with my varied anti-wind and -snow ploys. Next year I am smarter.

A couple of times a day I plunge into the storm and get some firewood at one of the stacks. This morning I uncovered one stack of 2-year-old cherry wood, split from a large trunk; the layered slabs looked to my hungry eyes like huge fillets of sun-dried wild salmon lying there, waiting to be taken in and roasted over a cherrywood fire.

That wood burns like a dream fuel: no smoke, hot, long-lasting embers. Brought armfuls back to the house to burn, some oak and beech to mix in and temper the fire, save the wood we have stacked in the rack on the deck by the door until the snow gets too deep for easy passage, at which point we start using the rackwood, a couple of week’s worth. If it snows beyond that, I’m into some serious shoveling and arm transport, but I’m ready. When you live up here, big weather is the university and the gym.

As it is for that guy out there in the whitestorm, the great spotted woodpecker, a juvenile male with his red belly, fresh and antsy even out there in a fierce blizzard, pecking hunger at one trunk of the cherry tree, the living and healthy (as far as I can tell) cherry tree, pecking like the king of beetle larvae is partying inside. Round and round he goes, pecking like mad, pausing now and then to listen: does he know what he’s doing, pecking where I’ve never seen another woodpecker peck, he’s just a teen after all, and this his first winter, he’s working really hard for lunch and nothing to show for it so far, in the 20 minutes I’ve been watching, first from the deck with arms full of wood and squinty-eyed from the blowing snow, then from the big kitchen window with the binoculars.

Sometimes it’s hard to see him for the streaks of snow across the air, as the white rush slides over the mountain from Siberia and down toward the lowlands, for a change just like the weatherman said it would... All the birds out there must be having a hard time finding meals now, even the nanten berries are gone... Every once in a while the youngster out there with the red crown stops and looks upward, turning his head and listening... how can he hear another bugsound elsewhere in that storm, with the wind rattling the naked branches, the snowclumps falling to the ground? He bounces slowly around the trunk, a natural dancer, fully dedicated to whatever may come, in mountain air now filled with diamond dust at a brief gaze from the sun...

Now time for my own lunch...

***

Epilog: The next morning I went out in the snowfall to see what he’d been up to hammering away in ignorance at a healthy tree like that, just a teen after all, and had one of those experiences that know-it-alls always have sooner or later, kind of a nature-knowledge karma (now hitting us all big time), in this case that a woodpecker of any age, in just one look and listen, can tell more than I ever could about the overall condition of a standing tree and whether it's worth pecking at for a beetle larva, which to be fair is not one of my personal priorities, which I guess gives him a useful edge… He’d been hammering away right at the perimeter of where that trunk was beginning to rot… Another job for me, come late winter…

MAJESTY

Now and then we get into deep rhythms that are more of the world than ourselves, rhythms of breath and time, of heartbeat and task, of that goal we must reach using hands, legs, feet, eyes, whatever we can bring to bear, and by the time we've gone that deeply the who of the action is mostly an absent participant-- like me of whatever name out there in yesterday's clear winter dusk-- a body following its breath around, assemblage of hands, legs, feet, eyes, heartbeat, powering a wheelbarrow amidst stacks of firewood here and there,with a task to complete before dark by over-and-over loading the barrow with firewood and getting it by whatever means up onto the deck and thence into the house beside the stove to warm the coming winter night, for which process the nameless fellow has over time developed a rhythmic system and so disappears into the systemic rhythm, minimindedly lifts the wood from the wheelbarrow, hefts it up onto the deck, carries the first load into the house, stacks it beside the stove, emerges empty-armed for the next load and stops awestruck, reclaimed at sight of the vast rosy herd of sunfired buffalo clouds wandering by overhead, grazing the blue prairie of evening sky on hoofs of silver, drifting slowly southward, no hurry, what's hurry, what's time, what's a heartbeat, how much can it hold? Firewood can wait, warmth can be later-- the darkness is coming in majesty, and I have eyes.

BLESSED

Blessed it is, on a day as clear as a baby's eyes to be out here working with oak trees, following their nature, their noble nature, right down to the ground-- the very heft and scent of integrity, the sound of tiny flames when the sections split into two, four, eight and more; then when they're stacked like pieces of cloudy gold how rich they look, how precious a mark of one's labor, rising there in the drying sun-- warmly it tells of winter comfort, tomorrows given to other things, balm for the aching muscles, then at day's end to come inside and there is food...

SPACE, TIME AND FIREWOOD

Folks who don't heat with firewood can't really appreciate all that goes into that bit of sunshine set loose in your woodstove, you think maybe its easy just because it's free (at least, the way I do it), but there are other burdens that come with the generally erratic supply of gleaned firewood such as I use. There's really no need to mention here the sectioning and hauling and splitting and hauling and stacking and hauling and burning and hauling and hauling and hauling, but I already did so it's too late.

Take 2: Say you've got four or five cords of firewood crowding out there in various locations around your house (as I do at the moment), wood from various periods of time in the past few years, some of it stoveready and some not, but in any case you've run out of stacking space and have just been given access to a whole new multicord bunch of bigwood to be split and stacked so it will be dry by the time you need to use it two or three winters from now, so you've got to put it somewhere on your land but you can't stack new green wood on top of fully ready or nearly ready wood are you crazy, so you've got to walk around, analyze your stacks and ponder your wood supply and various durations, juggling disparate concepts sort of like Einstein used to do with arrangements of numbers and symbols while wandering his theoretical woodlot, the space-time continuum at Princeton.

With these sylvan symbols as well, like Albert you've got to somehow bend time and space by combining a number (x) of similarly nearly ready pieces of embodied energy (E), i.e., photons+alpha as wood (W), into one or more taller stacks (S), thereby clearing a place for the new mass (m) of incoming atomic structures; then when winter comes, you unleash the power of those atoms inside your stove in the form of radiating heat (H) and so free up some space outside, thereby establishing a direct link between time, space and firewood, not to mention the speed of light (c), which can be squared if you want, but right now you have to match the mix of wood new and old.

Fortunately, last year you began to denote all the relevant data in numerical symbols on the end face of one piece of wood at the top of a stack, but unfortunately the newest wood is always on the top of the stack, so to get at the older wood you have to go to the bottom by for example turning the whole stack over, which is not practical (working in complete abstraction, Albert had it easier in this regard), and practicality is what we're talking about, so this approach needs work. Al's work led to atomic fissioning and nuclear power, which here in Japan has a bigly negative historic reputation but is now used in winter to power electric heaters, blu-rays and videogame consoles, among vast quantities of other things.

This is a universe, after all.

SUN MUSIC

Out in the colding late afternoon air, the mood of snow looming on the shoulders of the mountains, I’m loading up another wheelbarrow with firewood so we’ll have some nice warm nights, my work filling the air with the ringing music of well-dried sunlight.

That golden orb up there does have a direct connection with music as played on a marimba, a crude one, much like the first one ever made-- in this firewoody fashion, I suspect, the different lengths and thicknesses of the wood making a basic kind of music to the ear that has to do with heat, the music of solid sunlight, it’s a song about warmth and contentment (they go hand in hand), with lyrics about being beside a warm stove. (Whose fuel you had a part in creating!)

Which reminds me of my discovery in re the difficulty I’ve always had in describing the basic pleasure of a wood stove, saying to centrally and otherly heated folks that a wood heater is the most wonderful warmth to stand next to, its not like standing before any other heater-- electric ones get too hot, burn your clothes, fossil fuel ones are too thermostatty and vaguely dissipated, with their fluxy ventrush of god-its-hot-in-hereness; a straight up fire itself, as in the woods, is too focusedly hot, burn your clothes like an electric heater and so on, I just could never describe the way in which it was soulfully pleasant to be beside a woodstove, as winter guests of ours find when they gravitate toward the stove and stand or eventually lie down there with smiles on their faces, sometimes even saying Oooh this feels so good I don’t want to go home...

It’s not like dipping into an onsen either… I finally realized what it was-- of course! It's like being chilled with winter cold and suddenly being able to stand in strong summer sunlight: that deep, ancient, bone-warming comfort that our unending selves know so well as a kind of mother love. For what is radiating from that stove is sunlight, coming to life again after living through trees, then turning into the music that is playing even now, as I work into the darkness.

GETTING WARM

Living out here on a mountainside with a woodstove has taught me, among many other things, that firewood warms you not just twice, as the old saying goes, but a number of times: once for each day you work to earn the money to buy the land the wood grows on; once when you and at least five muscled friends carry the large cast-iron stove into the living room from the truck parked out on the road; once when you assemble and put up the intricate snake of stovepipe and link it way up there to the ceiling; once when you realize that creosote is running down the outside of the stovepipe because you assembled it upside-down; once when you take down the stovepipe, clean it off, reverse it and put it back up again; once when you come within a whisker of being mulched by a falling tree; once when you cut the tree into sections; once when you cut the sections into sections that fit the stove; once when you split the sections into firewood; once when you just miss your foot with the axe; once each time you learn that firewood knows where your toes are; once when you stack the firewood; once when you restack the firewood where it won't be buried under the next meter of snow; once each time you re-cover all the stacks every time the wind blows the covers off even with those huge rocks you put on them; once when you put those huge rocks on them; once when you finally build a woodshed; once when you carry an armful of wood through a howling snowstorm into the house at night without slipping on the ice or tripping over the cat; once when you at last burn the wood; once when with your clean pajamas on and holding a drawerful of ash you open the door into a high wind; once when you clean the stove at the end of the season; once when you take down and scrub out the stovepipe; once when you nearly fall off the roof while reaming the chimney soot down into a plastic bag taped to the bottom of the chimneypipe where it enters the living room ceiling; once when you go inside and find out that the plastic bag came off the chimney at the first ream; once when you clean up the soot all over the living room; once when you take the top of the stove off to replace the combustor because you've been burning green wood; once when you have a stovepipe fire; once when you have to pay for the new combustor; once when you finally pay for the stove; once when you see the spark burns in the carpet, and I'm sure there are lots more but before it gets dark I've got to go restack the firewood where the wind won't blow it over.

TREE SHRUGS

And I thought I was so smart. Wealth can do that to you. By wealth I mean firewood, which, to the frugal, is the same as money. In fact, for some time now I have been the Scrooge McDuck of firewood, but with no room left in the vault. Because of my growing wealth, even as I did the backstroke through my firewood holdings I was running out of storage space; then I realized that in addition to stacking my woody ingots in the usual way, I could use the many cedars that edge my property as single support ends for stacks! When that space too was used up, I realized that I could stack wood between the trees themselves, using two trees as both end supports, which was a great idea and expanded my outdoor vaultage considerably; but at the time, even at my age, I was unaware that trees shrug their shoulders so close to the ground.

I would come out some mornings after a windy night and see a firewood stack now scattered all over like pickup sticks and think: I didn't stack that right, must've been tilted so much that it was a windy pushover. So I'd restack it as level as an oak floor, but a month later, one morning it would be spread all over the ground again, even getting rained on sometimes - weather loves to add insult to injury - and I thought there must have been a hell of a wind during the night, near hurricanes do sometimes blow stacks over.

Then the big wooden nickel dropped: these recidivist stacks were all between trees. High up, the trees were shrugging in the wind, and the nanoshrugs down near the ground were slowly nudging the firewood toward instability, until... So I started tending to the stacks with my big wooden maul; every once in a while I'd make the rounds and pound the intertree stacks back into alignment. One evening a couple of days ago I noticed that one of the later longish stacks was bowed out at the top and would topple at the next high wind, so I intended to get at it the next day, which was yesterday - there were no winds coming up.

It rained hard all day, though, due to a hurricane far off the coast, with no wind here, so I decided to wait for another day. But last night the tail of the hurricane lashed us briefly after dark and there must have been considerable arboreal shrugging, till around 11 o'clock at night as I was getting ready for bed I heard a big crash outside like the high-speed collision of two heavily loaded giant marimba trucks. I started to say what the hell was that, but only got to about wha- when I realized what it was. This morning, when I went out to head for work in the Big City, there in my garden lay the wreckage of dozens of giant marimbas.

Tomorrow I'll restack all those ingots somewhere beyond the reach of tree shrugs. Labor is the better part of wealth anyway.

HAPPY ONIONS

Yesterday after some early morning gardening, while I was busy editing the doorbell rang; it was Mr. H. from Uji, who has some land upmountain. He had stopped by to ask if I wanted any rice straw. He was taking a whole truckful from his home paddy up to use on his garden, and had more straw than he needed, so he stopped by.

I don't have a rice paddy, but I've always kept an eye out for any rice straw lying around that was clearly abandoned, which is the same thing as saying I've never had any rice straw. The rice stalks left over after threshing are an excellent groundwarmer and natural fertilizer, commonly used on the vegetable fields of rice farmers. You can buy it at the farm store in bags for about must be a dollar an ounce, but that's mainly for folks in apartments with patio gardens, where a few ounces is enough.

It was also good that Mr. H. had stopped by because, as he is a heavy duty power-shoveling big rock-moving kind of landscaper, and has let me have a lot of firewood from his lands, in small recompense I had mail-ordered a pair of steel-toed rubber boots for him from Gempler's, so now I could give them to him. He has a great smile.

After we'd unloaded and piled up some rice straw next to the garden, he said that today he was going to fill in a slope up there on some old residential land he'd just bought and was restoring, so needed some straggler trees cleared, and did I have time to get started today, I said sure, and so it was that instead of editing words I wound up editing the landscape, felling, bucking and loading firewood both morning and afternoon, a welcome change from raw syntax.

It's raining today, so I get to do some overdue editing, but looking out the window at the new cord of wood beside all the bales of rice straw, I just had the thought: that straw will sure make the onions happy.