Having an open fireplace has been a fantasy of mine for many years, one that I was unable to fulfil while I lived in cold and dismal Okehampton, England. However all things change in time and it is the irony of fate that I should acquire a fireplace now I live in Greece, where T.max in the shade is greater than 35C for nearly 4 months of the year. Like most wish fulfilment experiences gaining an open fireplace and its attendant fire has been a very pleasant for me.

So, having wanted the luxury of fire for many years, like the majority of my ancestors, I now like to sit in the evening and enjoy it. I would not be the first person by any means to express the idea that I fire is a friendly addition to a room on a cold evening. There is something magic about fire, it is so very, very life-like.

It is dynamic, constantly changing, vibrant and of course warming. No still photo will ever do justice to the beauty of flames licking and curling around the logs in a fireplace. Chemically fire is like life, at least animal life. As animals we all derive our energy from breaking down the bodies of other living things, releasing and utilising the energy captured and stored by another living creature, primarily plants. The fire in the fireplace that warms my room, and the fires in my muscles that warm my body internally are essentially the same process. The remains of a once living thing are combined with oxygen in a reaction that gives of a measurable quantity of heat per molecule. We live from the fires we have tamed within our own bodies.

Continuing the analogy fire is hungry, though it gives freely it also needs to receive, if you do not feed it, it dies, much like you and I. Even more life like fire prepares a path for itself, one small flame licks over a piece of wood many times before that wood can support a flame of its own, and so the process builds, as long as their is breath and food the fire population grows. When life starts in a new place it is a tenuous flickering on the surface, a lichen sporangia, a few small mosses and of course the inevitable bacteria, slowly by its very presence it reinforces itself, by living and dying these small organisms make way for more complicated living things. So the flames of the fire become stronger and more complicated as their hold on the wood increases. It seems inevitable to me that my ancestors must have worshipped fire as it symbolised life, life brought under their control.

Watching a fire is an ages old tradition, an inevitably human action that expresses our fascination with the processes of change in the world around us. I like to imagine that in some way I am put in touch with my ancestors, generations and generations of them, ancestors who knew no electricity, for whom the magic of fire was an essential part of life. In my minds eye I see this strange continuance of bipedal, smooth skinned, practically hairless apes sitting transfixed, their minds lead to different worlds by the dancing form of the escaping energy that is flame.

I like to consider that in order for me to exist each and everyone of them must have been a success in the game of life, living strong energetic lives, protecting their kin and living to reproduce. This means that I am the descendant of a long line of winners, that winning is bred into me, deep into the very core of my being, a gift inherited from these countless generations who have been tested by life and awarded the laurels of champions.

Failures in the game of life do not live to pass on their genes, they do not get to reproduce and so they can not be anybody’s ancestors. It is a comforting thought to have while I am struggling to make enough money to pay to keep paying the rent without doing anything that my heart, mind or soul disagree with. Of course I am not alone in this, the same applies to everyone else in the world. We are all thoroughbreds, good strong lineages, the offspring of life’s winners. Life itself is success personified, the cutting edge of biological and metaphysical technology whose designer constantly eludes us but whose efforts surround us. It is important to stay in touch with the ideologies of life. I see life itself as a fire burning through time, the constantly changing history of living species is the dancing chaotic rhythm of its flames. We are a living expression of one of those flames, a microsecond of illumination in the fire that warms the heart and body of some incomprehensible God.

This reflection of the fire in our fireplace and the life within us goes further. The similarities between the expression of fire, its expansion through the myriad small efforts of numerous undefinable, inseparable individual flames, with the colonisation of new environments by life and the diverse and fascinating organisms that are its physical expression applies also the thought structures of our minds. New ways of thinking, especially enlightened ways that lead us to lives of harmony and peace are, in some ways, like a fire in our minds. Not only do they give warmth to our souls and light to our intellects but they, like both physical fire and life, start out small and uncertain. Hesitantly looking for a purchase on the dead wood of our old habitually destructive, self indulgent and self delusionary thought processes, this inner fire, like many attempts to light a fire on the physical plane, often fails to get a hold and dies. However like a physical fire once it is alight it will continue to be warming as long as it has something to burn. Furthermore like the fire in the fireplace this inner fire needs to be tended, looked after, fed and controlled.

Other fire watchers will know, like I do, that an open fireplace in a room is far more conducive to beneficial contemplation than a television set. Also the contemplative states induced by fire watching are more likely to endure and be fruitful than those that may, or may not, be achieved by inflicting suffering on the body, either through adopting un-natural postures or through the actions of the nimiety of drugs we humans have discovered to help us escape the pain caused by our blindly stumbling into the walls and stones of the non-physical world. There is something about the constant state of rebirth that a fire is in, such that at different grades of perception it is both endlessly new and fortunately similar. Somewhere between these two my mind is stilled, focused and set free. While the idiot is fully occupied with the flames the sage is free to push back the boundaries of his understanding and the animal can relax, peacefully enjoying the glow of inner satisfaction as much as the glow of the fire.

If there are problems in this world, the 1st world, the technologically blessed world, then they are partially the result the failure of modern people to apply an old adage, “read and inwardly digest”. In our modern achiever, informivore world, with our mobile phones, TVs and the internet we are constantly being focused outwards and downwards. There is nothing in our lives anymore that focuses us inwards and upwards. Yet there is this idea that information taken into the mind is like nutrients taken into the body, and that it therefore needs to be broken down and rebuilt, to be made apart of our mental selves in much the same way as the food we eat is made part of our physical selves is solid. This is not to say we do not think about things, which is our mental digestive processes at work, just that we throw away the good food and digest the garbage, that which is of little nutritional value. Movies, soap operas and computer games can no more maintain a healthy mind than ice-creams, chocolate bars and sweets can maintain a healthy body. Oh they keep the system from falling apart completely, and those who have never known anything else must surely wonder what else is there, “I’m alive aren’t I”. Ignorance however, is not a state of bliss for the human mind.

To return to the fireplace, everybody knows what happens when you put garbage on the fire, especially modern garbage. You get black smoke, unpleasant acrid smells that can lead to retching and breathing problems and if the fire is indoors you will get dark sticky residues on all sorts of surfaces. The same inevitably happens if you feed garbage into the fire of your conscious mind, you end up with a mind full of dark and poisonous ideas, many of which cling to you with an unbelievable tenacity, coating the surfaces of your mind with their mephitic presence. In much the same way that good old fashioned wood is the best for any fireplace, and old fashioned food, like meat, vegetables and particularly fruit are good for your body, so much of what has been known for a long time, in terms of thought, is good for your mind.

This is not to say that everything old is good, but things that have stood the test of time are always worth a second look. Anyone who has seriously tried to understand the essence of common sense, or the wisdom of proverbs will have given his mind something of real value to desire. The mental smoke that arises from the effort to understand, why good is good, and bad is bad, to know clearly what makes right actions right and wrong actions wrong, will be like the physical smoke that arises from aromatic wood in the fireplace, a pleasant experience for all.

I am not suggesting that anyone get involved in the convoluted meandering of formal philosophy, but a person who understands through direct mental perception the reasons that underpin the laws and mores that govern the world we live in will be far more likely to abide happily within those laws than someone whose understanding is limited to the level obedience and punishment on the immediate level.

Of course to achieve this sort of understanding a person needs to spend time in physically silent contemplation of the factors involved, and understanding like digestion, is a work for life, a little everyday. I sometimes daydream, as I watch the flames in their eternal variability about what the world would be like if children in schools, even up to 18 year olds were given time during their lessons to simply sit and think about the relevance of the information supplied, if they were actually given time to digest something, to burn some of the fuel we give them rather than just storing it in an apparently endless, and all too easily forgotten series of mental cupboards and store rooms.

To me a good fire is much like a person, it starts off small and helpless, totally reliant on fate or some other force to support and protect it. Gradually it grows becoming rapidly stronger, more vital until it seems that it will consume the entire world with its enthusiasm and energy. Thus it burns, a slowly diminishing, but bright and warming fire for some time. As it grows older, it decreases in heat and becomes more approachable. Until finally, in old age it becomes an unassertive but still warming pile of coals. More useful than at any other time in its energetic life, it serves excellently, from the depths of its experience, to help me prepare fuel for the seemingly more mundane, but equally magical fires that fuel my thankfully human body.