A BUCKET OF PINECONES

Getting ready for new fires in the just-cleaned woodstove, went at evening to fill the bucket with pinecones from the shed, out to the big bag of them still left from the ones I picked up on Little Pine Beach a couple years ago, my feet going quiet out back trying not to startle the two young does nibbling at the big meadow across the road as I saw from the big side window a few moments before-- I don’t think they can see me here, and I’m downbreeze, but they might hear me, so I try to sound like a bunch of pinecones in a big bag in a shed.

Then trying even harder to stay quiet while slowly pouring out those years-dry pinecones that whisper as they go out of a big chunky bag into the old iron bucket just waiting to be noise, and then in that autumn evening light the surprise to me, so far from expecting the beauty that comes tumbling into the reddish bucket in the silvers, russets and other dun colors left behind by pine seeds long gone into the world; purpose fulfilled, the pinecones are still reaching-- openness their new beauty, they gather together without fuss, arrange themselves in elegance; I add some more on top, they’re still perfectly arranged. Then I add a handful more, just to see. You cannot mess up a bunch of pinecones.

Simple, sleek power they are, gathered there in a bucket in a twilight, fallen altogether in ancient understanding. One must take the time they call for, gaze at their perfection, try to see how they do it, being mostly space, but are we not the same-- it is something that knows us well, some ancient thing, far older than eyes, that life has made and light has painted, a glimpse from a now at what is always, about light and seeds, about hearts and moments, about deep stirrings of time in evenings of lives... pinecones in a bucket.

ON LITTLE PINE BEACH

On Wednesday afternoon I took the beach-hungry beasties to our favorite secret beach, called by us Little Pine Beach, where on that ultrafine calm blue feather-clouded day the four of us got out of the car at the end of the long narrow road to the sand and water about a hundred meters or so away. When I turned around after getting my bag from the trunk, there in the far distance, arms raised in glee, were three tiny silhouettes already screamsplashing into the calm water...

I headed at a slow pace along the hundred meters or so to the beach, and when I was almost there remembered the beach mat in the trunk so turned and walked the hundred meters or so back to the car, got the mat and walked the hundred meters or so back to the beach where I realized that since school was in session, the season does not begin for about another month and there WAS NOBODY ELSE THERE WE HAD THE ENTIRE BEACH TO OURSELVES!

As I spread the mat amidst the joy I couldn't help but notice that beneath the many little pines were strewn about seven million pine cones, perfectly seasoned for starting fires in a woodstove, and there's only one household I know of around here that has any such need for pine cones. Everybody else uses nuclear power. Even better, these were free pine cones, with no meltdown.

But no way would (or could) I ask the girls out of the water when the swimming was perfect, even to gather also perfect pine cones just lying there waiting to be claimed by this lucky winner of the Pine Cone Lottery. No questions from the press, please. So I alone jumped right on the pine cones, but I only had my small back pack and a little plastic bag of the kind they make that holds maybe two pine cones, go figure. And it would rain before I could get back here on the weekend... What's that old saying about Lord, thy pine cone-covered beach is so vast etc.--

So I walked the hundred meters or so back to the car and was lucky to find some large plastic bags that we sometimes have in the car for wild vegs, fruits and herbs, walked the hundred or so meters back to the beach and commenced harvesting pine cones by ones twos and threes in the mango gold of the late afternoon as the girls splashed in the shallows and a powerboat roared aimlessly back and forth offshore, playing music of the kind that requires volume to offset some central emptiness, the roarers seeking in the midst of nature's beauty to somehow drown out her insistent presence in a dull version of fun that seeks distraction from what it will not see and does not want to understand. Unlike the girls, who in their bigger world were fashioning beach toys and houses from bamboo and sandpiles, having deep fun with water and earth-- no boat, no motor, no fuel, no blasting along the surface, no costly layers of separation from what is, bottom line, the ancient part of ourselves.

And so as the girls played in all that majesty I bent to my task about 500 times, wandering not bent/bent/not bent/bent along the shore beneath the pines, gathering only the finest cones - one becomes a pine cone gourmet of sorts after a few years - strewn there by the hurricane of a few days ago and normally soon raked away and burned by the beachkeepers, but the season hasn't begun so I was doing them something of a favor, and I must say I haven't seen such a fine crop of pine cones in all my years here, they were that golden amber of the fresh unweathered kind-- I got 8 big bulging bags full.

Later, after a cooling loll on the shady sand, as it approached time to leave - me wearing my white hemp pants, orange NYC t-shirt under white shirt w/long sleeves rolled and straw cowboy hat with the silver concho on the front - I gathered up three big bulging bags of pinecones in each hand and headed back the hundred meters or so to the car through the narrow alley. On the way, I passed three young Japanese males heading for the beach, who, upon beholding way out here in the middle of nowhere - japanopublicly speaking - a tall, long-white-haired elder gaijin striding along in white pants, white shirt, orange NYC tee and conchoed straw cowboy hat, carrying... three big bags full of pine cones in each hand... it changed their worldview somewhat.

When I walked back the hundred yards or so to the beach to get the other bags of pine cones and carry them the hundred yards or so back to the car before coming back the hundred yards or so to the beach to gather up the girls and their stuff and walk the hundred yards or so back to the car to head home, I saw the young men still standing there on the sunset beach like the enigma in a De Chirico painting with some loud rap music drifting over the water, puzzled to have come to a long beautiful beach empty but for three little girls, and additionally puzzled at major pine cone haulage by a strange foreigner from NYC... It was an odd day, I could sense them concluding at their unsought insight into the inspirational sources of the surrealists. It got even more surreal when I took the three little girls away with me.

Life can get interesting on Little Pine Beach.

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.

BOB BUNYAN

By now, you kind and discerning visitors to these homely efforts of mine must be growing tired of my recurrent converse about firewood, splitting it, stacking it, all its charm and solid value etc., but when you heat using only a woodstove (catalytic combustor), firewood is a big topic; and because you can only store wood for about three years (especially in this climate) before it begins to lose its firewoodiness, and I've never had a three-year supply since I've lived here - we've been burning pretty much hand to stovemouth for the last 13 years - whereas this year, golden firewood is raining on me from all around and I must strike while the axe is hot, must I not, no time even to straighten out my metaphors, I'm doing pretty much nothing else these non-office days, apart from putting maybe a few spinach seeds in the ground on my way between trees, at odd intervals blowing neighborhood kids' minds with the magnificent menagerie of my humungous compost kabutomushi larvae collection (OK kids, now get ready, I'm gonna lift this used-up shiitake log... OHMIGOD!!) (scroll down to late September for humungolarval pics - they're even bigger now!)... And dealing with firewood, bucking logs, quartering, carrying, stacking, finalsplitting and finalstacking, at the end of the day, before toppling into bed like a felled log, who can keyboard with oaken fingers?

THE WISHES OF HEAVEN

When there's a slow steady snow falling in large flakes through the cold still air and a full day-and-night supply of prime dried firewood stacked next to the stove, which is glowing gold with a well-stocked flame of oak and cherry and there's no point in shoveling off the deck anyway until the snow stops, and besides you've just had a big lunch of hot three-bean soup with toasted baguette and that mystery you put the bookmark in the day before yesterday is right at the point that makes a mystery worth reading - plus it takes place in winter - you'd have to be some kind of insane to wash the dishes, let alone do laundry right now, and thus fly in the face of the almighty, for there is no opposing the vectors, the many powerful vectors that point like the finger of god to the celestial aspects of arranging a few cushions in front of the stove and fulfilling the wishes of heaven, is there.

ALL THE THINGS THAT AREN'T PINECONES...

Woodstoves and fireplaces can mean a lot of work if you clean your own chimney and chop your own wood, but the reward is more than the bliss of having a warm fire in your living room; it also inspires you to go out to splendid places you might not otherwise go to at odd times, and do there things you might not otherwise do.

Like yesterday morning, when Echo and I went to Omimaiko, the small but elegant peninsula with the long pine beach, slightly north of us on the lake (we can see the tip of it from our deck) where we walk, swim, picnic and watch fireworks at other times of the year, but this time it was to gather pinecones (excellent firestarters, and free). We'd gone to a different place further north the day before (nice beachside restaurant up there), but the trees in that vicinity are of a selfish variety and keep their cones to themselves. Even the wind didn't shake any down.

The big old pines on Omimaiko though, are much more generous, and their largish, well-dried pinecones were already scattered everywhere on the sand awaiting us, with no one else seeking the treasure just lying there like a spilled cornucopia. More and more folks here in Japan nowadays use atomic electricity to heat their homes, and are not inspired thereby in any noticeable way.

Anyhow, it's interesting being thus nicely coerced into gathering pinecones in the piney shade along a bright beach on a sunny, breezy morning, getting to know the trees and their territory first-hand, bending to pick up treasures here and there (getting to know the properties of your own back, as well) and acquiring a decent eye for a good pinecone (it's an art), learning to filter out everything that isn't a pinecone, which effort in its humble way is excellent practice for modern life and the attendant growth in multiplicity of things that aren't pinecones.

Like all the best undertakings, pinecone gathering also has the pleasant savor of eccentricity about it, as pertains to going around under trees while bent over holding big bags and putting pinecones in them. Passersby wonder at the sight; new conversations begin. Aesthetically attractive as pinecones are, they're generally not much use to anyone except kids, who love to gather them, throw them, stack them up in situ and take a bunch of the best ones home to find years later in the closet. So there's a being-a-kid aspect to it, too, which is always welcome to the kid that cores the elder.

In any case pinecones are not so attractive or useful as to have people walking around gathering them by the bagful as we were, the two of us alone, on that long beach; we soon had two big bags full to overflowing and then began to fill our pockets until all we had was our hands and they were full too, because as with any other bargain in life, once you get going on a superior freebie like pinecone firestarters to use on the coming cold winter mornings - when you bend to a cold stove in the early darkness and light a small cluster of pinecones beneath some cherry kindling and the flame catches, the fragrance rises, the fire grows to give you warmth and light - all vested there in the pine-tree largesse of amber cones scattered at your feet like so many treasures of the future, the little gifts take on a magical appearance and it becomes difficult to walk by a prime golden specimen just lying there looking at you with its arms spread wide and not pick it up, to walk right by a gift of the pine gods...

By the time we were retracing our steps back to the car, though, the wind had gotten a lot stiffer with the growing warmth, the pines were shaking and roiling their furry arms, having a grand green time and being even more generous, practically emptying their pockets in their delight at the day: the large underpine area we had already cleared was once again a gold mine of new-fallen pinecones that we had to walk through with pinecones already coming out of our ears. Interesting anguish, not being able to pick up another perfect pinecone!

But we have more empty bags at home...