Lighting your own fire

Lighting a fire on your own, for only your own comfort is a revelation. I can do this. I want to do this. Yes, it’s work. A “man’s work.” Building fires and all. It can be such a goddam turn on to have a guy light a fire for you. It doesn’t have to be a guy. It’s really pretty sexy. So of course it’s sexy to light my own fire. I don’t need someone else to survive, is the message.

So you know, you are crunching up the paper and you want to take a short cut and you wonder if you do really have a girlscout in you anymore or maybe you have allowed yourself to become handicapped and don’t have the goddam patience like your cavewoman foraging foresisters who apparently are not so distantly related…It’s entirely possible that you did allow that skill to atrophy because you always had a fire-loving man around. Or a man who knew that’s what you expected of him. Or both.

Turns out my fires are different than my mate’s fires. His are more about pyrotechnics than mine, which require periodic blowing and repositioning of the wood, and sometimes don’t work, really.  Tonight my fire is just right. And this cedar A-frame house is starting to warm up.

I wanted to get away from my home in the Loin. Not because I’m afraid, but just wanted some nature to counter-balance all the urban decay and death. Plenty of death in nature, too, but it feels different. I’m trying to allow the presence of death in my life, not in a necropheliac or super dark way, just make it normal, so it’s not like that big bad fear that unconsciously drives actions. That big gnarly beast that is gnawing away inside us all. Maybe only if you are fifty or older, but you know what I’m talking about no matter what age you are.

So I came to Bolinas. It’s like coming out to see a lover. You skulk a little, because you don’t really want to see anyone you know. You don’t want to fritter away any time chit-chatting on nonessential business.  You resolve to avert your eyes if you run into someone, because you know they will want to know what you are up to. But you don’t want to talk.

You want to get right to it. You want to be alone. You have the keys to your friend Anny’s house on the Mesa. You are practically low-riding because you just want to get there without being seen.

Alone at last in the A-frame. There is no one who could possibly see you. You take off your top. You leave your pink bra on because it’s sexy. You sit in different chairs and simply take in your aloneness. You check out the fridge. Of course, the best everything, fresh, nothing packaged, a perfect avocado for later.

You take a hot tub by yourself, the hot water, sky darkening, you can still see remnants of orange light on the ridge.

You walk down the new terrace road and you are uplifted…You walk down into the eucalyptus grove and the canopy sways above you like the mother you always wanted…protective and distant but not too distant…The comforting creak of the trunks and branches that allow you to see the sky above, but hold you, until you emerge onto the meadow. The amber light becoming lavendar and the feeling that you belong to this land, that you are connected to it on a soul level. 

That’s what I keep coming back for.

When I send this post it will be from my Stevenson perch, looking out on the old 9^th Circuit Court building that now houses some forgotten or perhaps top secret beaureacracy. But here, while it lasts, my soul is resting by the fire.