Burn Cycle
Yoga, firewood and softening into the harmonious cycles of nature and reality.
Our breath straddles the threshold between being autonomic and sympathetic. In other words, it happens on its own and we have the conscious ability to control it at will from moment to moment. The practice of yoga involves gaining an increasingly more subtle connection to both the autonomic and sympathetic aspects of the breath as well as weaving the breath into physical and mental exercises with greater and greater elegance. Those who have spent some time walking the path of yoga and working with their breathing have almost certainly discovered that it is a doorway to many facets of their being, ranging from their emotional state to physical processes such as digestion, the breath can arouse survival instincts as well as soothe the nervous system into a state of rest and recovery. There are few levels of the human experience that are outside of the realm of the breath.
Recently I’ve been guiding my students through a Katonah Yoga style breathing practice entitled “Breath of the Seasons.” This practice is physical and imaginal, it involves envisioning the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter layered respectively onto the inhale, the pause when full, the exhale and the pause when empty. I turn to this practice both in times when the season is peaking and when it is transitioning. Currently in the Northeast of the U.S. we are in the depths of winter, the peak of the cold season. This practice, in addition to helping my students to embrace the empty, still and contractive aspect of the breath when fully exhaled, also helps them to harmonize with the ever fluctuating energetic patterns within themselves. And while these patterns express themselves constantly, regardless of our attention to them, we benefit greatly by embracing them with awareness and consequently surrendering to them with humility.
I open with these thoughts on breathing as a way of conveying the immediacy and constancy with which cyclical patterns determine our experience of living. In part I am writing in order to explore my own resistance to and embrace of those cycles, particularly the domestic cycles that are assigned the category of chore, labor and task. This past October my wife and I decided to invest in a wood stove in order to heat our house. The combination of being able to save money on heating oil and the romantic notion of a warm cozy stove in the hearth at the center of our home made it irresistible once the image formed in each of our minds. I knew that coupled to this switch would be the responsibility of managing firewood, however I did not anticipate the extent of time, energy and headspace that it would occupy for me.
In the past two months I’ve engaged in several missions to secure firewood. I’ve driven around Litchfield County, Connecticut loading up wood that is split and wood that is still in log form or cut into rounds. I’ve sawed, split, moved and stacked firewood for hours and hours during this period of time. I’ve also had my stomach drop when seeing that our cache was getting low and I didn’t yet know where I was getting more as well as gleamed with pride after filling up our entire porch with almost 2 cords of split, seasoned wood.
Bringing wood inside to get the stove up to the requisite 400, 500 or even 600 degrees to heat the house has been a mixed experience, sometimes yielding satisfaction and sometimes causing me to worry about whether what we have will be enough. In short, I am fully absorbed in the “wood stove life.”
The different points on the wheel of the “burn cycle” that I’ve described have made me think about the idea that humans are unique in that we are able to fantasize about one day being able to stand outside the cycles of coming and going, gain and loss, victory and defeat. We have a way of convincing ourselves that summer will go on ceaselessly, that we’ll be forever young and vibrant and that we’ll inevitably earn enough money one day that everything will be otherwise taken care of for us. I find myself in a peculiar version of that when I feel reluctant to take firewood off of the beautifully balanced, painstakingly stacked pile on my porch and throw it on the fire. To what? Heat the home for an hour or two before more is required!? There is a logic that makes the entire project feel ridiculous, a perspective from which it all feels deeply pointless and redundant.
I’m not sure that I’ll ever understand why my (and I suspect many) human mind(s) arrive at the conclusion of pointlessness in regards to mundane cycles like these. I’ve gone on deep dives into the history of philosophical ideas that have led to the current “western” cultural worldview and gained slivers of insight there. I’ve relinquished the comforts of society and lived minimally in the forest for months on end and found some clarity there. Yet ultimately as someone who deeply wants to be involved in the world, I’ve had to accept that I don’t know why a part of me wants to stand outside of these inevitable cycles. Nevertheless I have come to accept (or perhaps have been dragged into the acceptance of) the fact that finding harmony with cycles of reality, from the most mundane to the most glorious, is the only, ONLY way to experience any degree of peace.
So while yoga was once a way for me to escape the life I felt I was careening towards, it is now a way for me to embrace the life in which I find myself. The mental energy with which I used to belittle myself and the world has now been turned towards connecting and accepting it more deeply. The breath that once fueled me as I ran to escape up the highest mountain I now find grounds me into the cyclical nature that makes life not only possible but unimaginably beautiful.
