Living the Seasonal Life - Building Fires to Heal the Heart

A lovely roaring fire in my home last winter.

Being an herbalist, witch, gardener, hunter, or homesteader, a person gets acquainted with the nearly ritualistic way of living by the seasons. By the moon and sun and stars. By weather changes and mood shifts and the cycles of the body. By the rising and setting of the sun.

We have evolved over the last 100,000 years to live cyclically. To orient our lives by what’s happening in the natural environment - of which we are a part, not separate from.

Technology, while amazing, and providing the outlet for this here post, has dissociated most of us not only from natural world, but from the truth of our needs, and who we actually are. We have lightbulbs to provide artificial sunlight, allowing us to stay awake performing tasks at a time when our bodies would really rather be sleeping. Water is pumped in, giving us more time for tv but removing the reward of going out and getting the water to hydrate our homes. A variety of heat sources are radiated through our homes, warming us without effort and depriving our bodies the opportunity to strengthen and minds to plan and execute and souls to heal from the crackling heat of a fire on a cold day. Something visceral within us in enlivened by the experiences of water, warmth, and natural light and darkness.

I use all of these technologies - not because I want to necessarily - but because I’ve grown into adulthood in a world that is dependent upon them, in a world that requires more of my energy and mental effort to ‘contribute to society’ than is natural for the body I was born into. All of us are in this same predicament. We can not do anything about what we were born into. But I have discovered for myself over the last year, that I am bound and determined to separate myself from the trap of modernity to the extent that it is possible. My body wants a slower pace. My brain is smart, and people expect a lot of me that I don’t want to give, becuase it doesn’t seem right to use my intelligence to feed into a modus operandi that does not suit me - body, mind, or soul. I want to use the gift of thinking to solve problems creatively, to create a life that is aligned with my nature, to fulfil the needs of my home and family in a way that extracts as little as possible and returns as much as possible to the Earth, while being as comfortable and colorful and connected to community, as possible.

For the last year I’ve been living in a little mountain town in Arizona. It was my first experience at high elevation (6600 feet), and in the most snowy and cold winter the area has experienced in 10 years or so. Aside from the loneliness of living 2.5 hours from the network I built over 10 years, and 2000 miles from my family of origin, and working from home in a job that was both unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) and felt like a total waste of time and mental energy, I loved this new experience of solitary rural living. I am blessed to reside adjacent to 4 million acres of national forest land, which has provided the most abundant and beautiful playground for me to explore. The juniper and wild horses and bugling elk have become my neighborly friends.

My little cottage came with a wood burning stove, and I expected to have fires here and there. But the man in my life at the time and his dad had another plan - they knew wood burning heat was the way to go in the mountains - and they helped me collect, haul, split, and stack 2 cords of wood. Two full weekends we were out there with chainsaws getting downed oak and juniper. That wood was a precious gift that warmed my cottage all winter, and the last fire it built was the same week that man and I ended our relationship. It was a very peculiar synchronicity.

My first day ever using a chainsaw =)

Needless to say, this year the idea of getting wood has been heavy on my mind. I no longer have the human resources I had last year. That season of my life has changed, and I have no choice but to accept it. It hurts sometimes, and until yesterday, I have occasionally felt bitterness that I was set up to live the kind of homesteading fire building life I wanted, with a man I loved, and then the capability of reproducing that year after year, seemed to have been stripped from the realm of possibility for me. Last winter, I felt that man kept me warm every day, even when he wasn’t there, because he prepared me so well for the fires I lit every morning.

But yesterday, a new season began for me. I decided that no matter what, no matter who is or is not involved, I want this way of life. I am so deeply satisfied by the act of finding and procuring the heat source for my home, and then generating that heat with my hands every day, that I want to keep it going even though I don’t have a chainsaw, a crew of masculine support, or the physicality of the men who helped me. Despite that, I want to feel the deep sense of connection with the Earth and her seasons that comes from being on the land and respectfully harvesting what I need - knowing I will not use more than is necessary, I will not intentionally take any life that is not required for my survival (I don’t kill trees - I only take what’s already fallen). Knowing that I will respect and honor the trees that have given their lives to fire or lightening or old age, and with each fire I light, I will give them and the soils that nourished them, gratitude. The emotions of longing and resentment, I turned also into gratitude, for the skill, and the knowledge, and the ability I received last year that encourages me through this one.

I decided to shift some things around to generate a new energy of this endeavor for myself. I relocated the wood pile so that this year it would be mine. Only my energy would go into its placement, its collection, its stacking, even though the materials themselves came from someone else. I cried a lot as I released my dependence on what once was. I also cried tears of thankfulness for him, the kindness of his heart, and everything he and his dad taught me. There is no way in hell I could even begin this journey of wood collecting and fire tending had I not learned so much from him. No matter what happened between us and how sad I can sometimes still be, that man was the most skilled and talented man I’ve ever met besides my brothers and dad (my mom would go in there if she was a man but she’s not - she’s definitely the most talented and skilled woman I’ve met and I gotta say, this determination and inner strength come solely from her. Thanks Mama Sugie!) and I learned quite a lot from watching him, and the patience in his teaching me. How to split, stack, use a chainsaw, build a solid fire, select wood, etc. It hurts my heart that the season has changed, but the change and what I learned from him, empowers me beyond my own belief.

The new location. The big stuff needs to be chainsawed.

So I set about the task. I got the new location set up. And I got a fuelwood permit from the forest service and set out to collect. I don’t have a chainsaw. I don’t have a truck. I don’t have a trailer. But I have a hatchet, a splitting maul, and an AWD Subaru Impreza with seats that fold down. Me and my doggo filled my hatchback and took it home. It was one of the most painfully proud moments of my life, even though I’m gonna need to do it like 15 more times to get enough to last through the winter!

A small load in the Subi and a super dirty face on me!

Here where I live, at 6600 feet in a town of 5000, summer is fading. I’m beginning my second year. There have been times when I wanted to leave because there are reminders of what I’ve lost everywhere, but Fall is my season. I was born in the most beautiful part of Fall in Virginia, a truly magickal time, and I always feel revitalized when it comes back around. I can move through what needs moving through - I’m tired of running. Up here in the mountains, it’s happening a little earlier than I’m used to. It’s shifting me away from a time of depending on another to make my dreams come true, and into a time of taking what I’ve learned from that past to create a present and future of my own. I’m seeing my strength and resistance to what we’ve been told is the right (easiest) way to live. I’m giving my energy to tasks that align me with the very essence of being alive on Earth. I’m spending my time creating, organizing, rearranging, so that my home is my own. My life is my own. My wood is my own. That’s not to say I wouldn’t accept help if it showed up - I’m not an idiot. But I won’t use the propane unless I have to. I won’t buy the wood so long as I can go get it myself. Now if the snows come and I haven’t collected enough, I might not have a choice, since I don’t have a truck yet.

Living the seasonal life is a choice. It didn’t used to be. It’s not easy. It’s not for everyone even though I wish it were. But it is singularly the most profound, enriching, and spiritual way of living I have experienced, and I hope that as I progress through my life, I find ways to live even more entrenched with the natural cycles of the Earth, befriending seasonal struggle and turning it into seasonal abundance.

I will keep looking for chances to refine my life away from a technologically oriented one towards a nature bound one. I hope the seasonal shift upon us grounds you into the core of who you are. How are you going to more deeply connect with this time of change?