Ashes to Ashes

This morning I woke up in the woods, listening to the wildlife clicks and buzzing of the early morning face down on my pillow in a pool of drool. I pretended to sleep for an extra ten minutes so I could listen to the nature sounds and think my day through before pulling myself away off of the blanket.

We made coffee by boiling water in the kettle after using the last of the wood chips to make a fire. Everything was damp in the morning coolness. My soundtrack for this camping trip was the soundtrack to Imagine, the biography of John Lennon. I thought of the 9 bundles of firewood that we had burned through, remembering how heavy they were to carry and how as individual units they were almost as expensive as a gallon of gas. In that case our little excursion cost about half a tank. The oldest fuel, as much as commodity now as it has been from the beginning of time.

I stared at the hexagonal ash pit, into which disappeared all those logs, feeding a raging fire that warmed and nourished us. It was the focal point and center of our world for a short while, acting as our hearth, keeping away the raccoons and warming my feet through a dark night. When we arrived, the pit was still hot from the last time it had been used in a fire hours before, and there were old logs of white pulverized powder that crumbled apart when I hit them with a stick.

The ashes were a white shadow of their former form, light enough to disintegrate upon touch. The raging and spirited flames that swallowed all those logs extracted the energy to feed its strength, transforming all that wood into dust.

Jen and Brian tended the fire in a cooperative effort. They made a great team and were excellent at keeping the fire alive, stoked and raging. They'll be married 3 years this September and it was such a lovely thing to see the easy combination of their efforts in mesmerized concentration, sustaining the heat, feeding the flames, fanning them. Giving us insight on the concept of unified energy control.

As I stirred the ashes and watched the dormant buried heat bubble through like a volcano, I wondered what the next part of the process is. That heat was so live! What is ash and how do things like phoenixes and whatnot rise from it?

I looked it up. Ash is comprised of varying levels of metal oxides and minerals depending on what kind of wood you were using to melt your smores and cook your bacon. Burning the wood decreases the wood to 6 - 10% of it's original mass. I was guessing way less than than. The tree that produces the wood extracted the minerals and elemental necessities from its environment (the earth, and the air) in order to grow. The most abundant mineral in trees and ash is calcium, followed by potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and even aluminum. Because of this, ash has been traditionally reused as an alkaline subsitute for lime. This dusty mess was once valued as a fertilizer, recycling the nutrients that were taken from the earth by the tree to plant new ones.

How appropriate that the wood releases its energy like the force of the sun - in a very simplified way when Jen and Brian created the intense beating flames, it was relinquishing that solar energy that the tree had absorbed in a controlled way, leaving behind only what is necessary for the new generation of trees.

Fury in the Skies

Photo courtesy of Accuweather photo archives

Yesterday the weather in Chicago was raging. What began as a pretty calm and clear evening quickly turned into a violent, howling summer storm with gale force winds. (Winds of 94 miles per hour were recorded 3 miles off the shore of Lake Michigan) The weather report stated that there was something around 200 bolts of lightning in one hour from the storm. It hit fast and was ferocious, trapping me at the climbing gym with my younger brother and his friends for hours when the streets around the building got quickly flooded. I practiced tying knots and worked out my forearms and fingers on the rock wall - it was kind of a pleasant way to take refuge actually. The gymnastics team huddled downstairs with us until the sirens stopped. I peeked out the front window and watched the lightning rip with mad flashes all across the sky, making it look like the synapses of Frankenstein's brain. The sky was full of that unrelenting, merciless energy all night. We got home during a brief lull in the rain, but it got its momentum going once again and the windows were rattling scarily by the time I went to sleep. Mother Nature: more furious than anything anyone has seen.

I stared at the lightning and was mesmerized by the force with which it cracked the atmosphere. It was a thrill to see so much electricity in the air, there was an almost palpable charge. It made me think of the significant moments when I've stopped to watch lightning storms at critical times in my life- high above the ocean in a rainless electrical storm, across the Colorado sky high in the mountains. One lightning bolt contains 3 billion kilowatts of power, said to be enough energy to run a major industrialized city for months.

Looking at the way the ground absorbed the crackling bolts thrown at it through the ionosphere, with enough thunderous force to send vibrations through my body miles away - all those billions of kilowatts disappeared on contact- my thoughts turned to Nicolai Tesla, a discoverer of some of the most significant observations in the field of electrical engineering such as the fact that the earth is a conductor of electricity. He was also known as the "sorceror of lightning".

Said to have been born during an electrical storm, he went on to school the world (alongside Thomas Edison) on the principles of electricity. He devised a transformer which generates artificial lightning by increasing the voltage of a current which gets transferred between oscillating circuits. With this discovery we are able to harness the energy of lightning; now we can even make lightning ourselves. (!)

Tesla is ranked amongst my favorite mad scientists: I have a fondness for eccentric geniuses who advance humanity profoundly and exponentially with the work of their lifetime, yet die unrecognized and in poverty. It is heroic to my romantic nature; he was driven by a curiousity more true, sincere and primal than that which motivates the normal person. A curiousity which in itself drove the industrial revolution and allowed us all to better understand certain awe-inspiring forces of nature, at least the tangible mysteries of the physical world we live in.

Shouts!