Building the Heart of Your Fire

There are four components necessary to start a fire:  a fast, short lived resource which ignites quickly (ie: paper), a fairly fast longer living element (ie kindling), a long lasting burning source (wood logs) and finally oxygen.  Master fire starters tell me a fifth element is key:  a Heart.  A heart in a fire is the successful combination of the first four elements, the thing that keeps the fire burning, the center of a good blaze.  When you lose it, you lose the fire.

And so it is with us.

Our bodies require different sources to create fire (energy) and this is multi-layered and complex.  We need clean, nutritious food, water and whole (as opposed to partial) impressions to keep our organism balanced.  We require different forms of protein, carbohydrates, amino acids and minerals.  Some of those components are “quick igniters” (carbs), others are slow forms of energy (proteins).  Again, the “heart” of the daily fires we build is the sublime combination of these foods, the movement of our body, the quality of the breathing we do.  When we lose the heart or balance in our daily life, stress and toxicity move in, we lose the fire.

And so it also is with our “spirit” life.

As in all things, our spirit life needs tending much like the daily blaze we attempt to build in this complex organism.  It actually is not separate, but very much linked to the food of impressions, something easily dismissed as extraneous as we are bombarded by them from the minute we wake up until we go to sleep.  But for impressions to be nourishing they have to be whole; that is more of myself engaged in the receiving of them.

The “quick igniters”, the paper of impressions are ever present.  We usually try to live off of them, but they are fleeting and insubstantial, have a chaotic sense about them.  They are the impressions of the executive self.  The momentary impression of a mug in a drainboard that needs to be put away, the feel of the dirt on a floor and the idea it needs to be swept up; the “busy” components that fill me from dawn to dark.  The kindling, slightly more substantial impressions are ones I engage with for a longer period of time: a telephone conversation, the hanging of laundry, a purposeful trip down a supermarket aisle.  And the “logs”, slower burning impressions are the detailed “projects” we engage in for lengthy periods of time.  The painting of a room, the article researched and written, the group of patients I take care of on a given day. They are layered and dimensional impressions and engage the organism over a block of time .

What could be an interesting notion is that any of these elements, the quick igniters, kindling or logs in my daily life are vital and necessary aspects to the Heart of my daily fire.  The Heart finds it’s rhythm, by slowing down and opening up, including all my resources.  I become aware of the attraction in my chest to the pattern and color of the mug in the drainboard.  The shape is squarely in the palm of my hand while my feet do their turn to place it with a modicum of awareness where it belongs on the shelf.  All of a sudden the cursory glance and impression are filled out, become more whole.  I’ve made relationship with the object.  More of me is involved, not just my executive decision maker.  Painting a room may involve many long pauses of consideration.  A slowness in my internal mechanism transpires, not necessarily in my external.  My interior becomes more spacious by including the light from the window.  It occurs to me to take better care, more thought in the laying of drop cloths, placement of ladders and paint trays.  They no longer are annoyingly incidental, but part of the process. My usually rushed end-product self relaxes into the fire being created, the impressions expanding (the Heart) in the process.

The thing about building a fire, is that you can watch a master do it, but you really don’t know how until you’ve tried and failed (repeatedly) in your own way yourself.  Tips are accepted, but it is taking responsibility for the event, the watching and waiting and inclinations one feels while the fire attempts to take off.  The subtle awareness one has in oneself, the seeing what it needs, the surprise, the doubt, disappointment and willingness to give it another go when it sputters out. Where is it waning? What does it need?  Where is the Heart?

And so it is with us.