Stack the firewood
Kindling
Paper
Woosh
Combustion is a warm red glow
In a dark space
With uneven outlines
Each morning
Igniting my heart
Inducing the sweat
Cedar lined womb
Returning to the primordial realm
Softening
Beginning again
And the words drift away behind me
When I close the door
And take my seat
Becoming immovable as an inward facing fencepost
Marking this day
In the line
Of when I began
And those fence posts become a curl of wire
The boundary they formed
Renewed in steel
I drive past them
The farmer renewing his grandfathers work
What once was a tree
Becomes the post
And where the ant once climbed
And Magpie perched
A thousand suns
The final fire
Thankyou tree
Thankyou fence post
Warming me
For this brief time
The ashes blow in the wind
As I empty the grate
It all comes around
This fate
My husband built a sauna and yoga shala for us last year. I have long practiced yoga but hadn’t experienced a sauna much.
We are in intensely pressurised times – the tail end of the snake year that was 2025 and I will be glad to get rid of that skin yet deeply grateful for the lessons learned
Each day I go across in the dark, light the fire in the fireplace of the sauna, my head torch carving a path through the still pre morning air full of the sound of night bugs. It has become a ritual.
A few hours later the fire is a furnace, the rocks atop heated to take steam, the door is closed and it begins. The unwinding. What an experience to begin the day – it has become as necessary as coffee.
This post is just a marker poem to hold this memory in our lives. My blog is a decade old this year and I hope it makes it another ten years.
In the end though
If we can be as useful as the source of warmth – first tree, then fencepost, then fire, perhaps it’s enough. Perhaps that’s all we ever are.
as always, wonderful imagery Kate. i have an upcoming blog on this but aren’t those stoves perfect? something about it that brings us back to a simpler, more profound essence. Mike
There is definitely something about fire and humans that instantly links us to something ancient Mike. Starting the day, and now often as it closes as well and stepping outside to the sun setting – grounds me in reality and nature but also within my own nature. I just wanted a simple hut or shala for yoga but then Steve turned it into a building that also has a cedar lined sauna room – when he built it I was dubious as to whether it was worth the cost …as so often happens (but don’t tell him I said it) he was right.