Fires Inn; The Mind

              Fires Inn; The Mind

    “By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. Do you think that is a strange way to answer a question I proposed to my class about life?”

    “I guess if I had to be truthful, and I always am, as lies as you know, are nothing more than an attempt to win an argument with yourself.  I’d say it was a pertinent question, and promotes a revealing answer.”

    I was just at the library. I am fortunate to live in a small town where the library remains a central feature of a society, that would have moved on without the mores and ethics of a past, had it not been for that place. Before TV, the internet, cable news, people discovered each other, and different ways of thinking about living, by sharing other’s experiences, through words, stories. 

    I don’t know that we do that anymore. At least, not as much as we used to. That is why I keep this journal. It gives me a chance to let the leaves burn, smell the smoke, let it take me places I have been but have forgotten. That is the thing I find most discouraging, the disconnection I feel from a past, because of the speed we enjoy in striving to reach a future.

     I remember the fires of fall. Street gutters lined with small fires, each predicting another seasons approach.  Each spell slipping into a past we wish only to comment on, but not necessarily revive. Reliving a past is difficult. Time has the ability to distort the reflection of what has occurred. It enables us to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle and create the picture we wish to hang on the wall in the garage, glued to a piece of cardboard that we hang with anxiety, as we know, it too knows, it will one day be nothing more than a memory collecting dust.

    We tend to burn what we can’t use, or we recycle our perception of what is no longer needed. We forget that progress, which we always assume is for our betterment, can and does move simultaneously in opposite directions. Our perception of change is tempered by the fact we tend to look only towards the light, as the dark is a place we have learned to fear. We believe if we can’t see it, it must be evil, and yet we pride ourselves on being capable of accepting much that is invisible. The grace of a God, a prayer, time, all things we cannot see or touch, yet entrust our futures to. How have we become so callus about the visible, tangible, which is all we really have, unless we accept the notion that we only exist, in our own imagination. 

    Thomas Paine implied, “We can’t go home again.”  I believe what he meant was, we chose not to. Following your footsteps in the snow when lost, will lead you only to the place you began. It is the divergence from the route so plainly marked on the map, that leads us into areas less traveled, but the most likely to supply the inspiration we seek to find reason for the madness we see, feel, all around us. 

    Our world began by expanding into an unknown territory, complicated by differing cultures and ideals. Our response to the unknown was to build walls to protect ourselves from the infusion of difference. When that was not adequate, as disparity seeped through the walls we erected, we decided our freedom depended upon the eradication of ideals that differed from our own. 

    Things have not changed. We continue to live for a future that we cannot unconditionally accept, for not to have it cast in perpetuity like a God, prejudices the outcome we imagine. It leaves too many unanswered questions and too few opportunities to answer them. We do not live our New Year’s Resolutions because they are not resolutions, only suggestions we make to ourselves to refine our refinement.

   When I began to find the fires burning on the curbside, I realize time once again has managed to hide the smoke; that invisibility that irritates us, reminds us we are alive. The agitation we condemn as disconcerting, is the very thing that awakens us from the complacency of everyday existence and allows us to drift in a different direction. We find ourselves wandering off the trail through the blackberry vines and thistles, and after the cursing has subsided, we find ourselves in a high meadow, surrounded by birch trees, where the leaves speak a different language, but we somehow understand what they attempt to tell us.

    As I stand by the fire, hands flat against the heat, shards of embers raining into the blackness above, I find I do remember to see the stars. Their presence, no more real than a dream or prayer, as I cannot touch them, but know they exist, if only because I want, need them to. 

    The future, my future, our future, is what we need, want it to be. We can continue to build the walls to keep out change, but the chinking will succumb to time and fall by necessity, as it no longer is capable of outlasting the hope, that change does move in two directions, and it is up to us to hitch ourselves to the star traveling through the universe, we need, want.

    “Here! I know you’ve been looking over my shoulder, read!

     And, by the way, do you think fires can burn in a good way? Not removing something, changing one thing into another, but burning cold enough to do some good?”

“Yes. You know, sometimes we outsmart ourselves, and aren’t aware we have done so, until it is too late. The old adage, putting all your eggs in one basket, it applies every time we begin to build our walls.  It, I believe, is a transient belief of what we think life is supposed to be. We tend to build fires to keep ourselves distracted by its beauty, its warmth. It puts us in the mood to dream, remember, forget.  We are after all, nothing more than a collection of memories we keep in a scrap book, that someday we know will end up in the basement next to the bird cage we purchased, just in case we bought a bird. Because it now houses a plant, does not mean it was not meant to be a birds cage.”

“You feel like going out and burning some leaves?”

“Sure, why not. Just let me find the matches.”