Sustainable Steps – Burn like your fire
Fire is what keeps one warm and dry, under the wide-open sky or behind shut doors. It cooks, it brews, it melts down, it thaws out, it dehydrates.
It also makes light in form of a single flame or a popping, sparking, dancing collective of arms that hug their food, the wood, peat or dung, but also surrounds you and your company into a friendly, loving connectedness across space and time.
Discover the fire in your child’s eyes and in your lover’s, that is equally docile, sparking, warm or burning hot, sometimes out of control for a moment, but a fire that always needs tending and not forgetting.
Feed your fire like you would feed yourself and those that matter a lot to you: with love and appreciation. Above the flames your food shall be cooked the same, with affection channeled from your heart (another hearth) through the utensil into the sauce-pan. So, don’t allow non-compatible synthetics, electronics and techno(il)logical waves to create an interference with this life-affirming fiery love.
Never allow any sort of plastic to start or keep your fire. Never!
Protest against, wherever you encounter such a disgrace. And protest quietly against any fire that has a man at the end of a pipeline telling you when, how much and with what conditions you can use its unsafe and unlovable fodder.
And don’t you fall for the virtual fire of induced heat. You are wiser than that.
In the meanwhile, stay safe and sound around your pit or stove, enjoying its music and smell, that even keeps you from drying out, despite the paradox it may sound as. Of course, we have been praising wood fire all along. The most primordial kind of fire, second or third only behind lightnings and volcanoes.
This is what keeps you and what you ought to keep in return, in perpetuity. That means a perpetual, therefore responsible, supply of wood. Ask the woods, ask the wood when and which one is ready to support you in exchange for caring even of the ashes of one another.
What kind of firekeeper are you?
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