Ten Things to Light Your Fire

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Ten Things to Light Your Fire
By Foy Valentine

"There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not," said the wise man, "the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid" (Proverbs 30:18-19).

Well, there are five things that are too wonderful for me, yea ten, that light my fire. I share them here in the hope that your own imagination will be stirred to conjure up some goodies of your own.

A good meal in good company. The Bible says that in heaven folks will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and sit at table in the kingdom of God. A foretaste of that goodly prospect is often experienced here and now when good friends gather to put their feet under the same table for good food and good fellowship. An unhurried prayer of gratitude to God, a cup of hot homemade soup, fresh corn bread cooked in an iron skillet and right out of the oven, real butter, savory roast, brown gravy, fresh corn on the cob, sweet potato souffle, fresh shelled black eyed peas, and hot coconut pie. I don`t ask for much. Just a plain and ordinary little meal. Keep it simple. Take plenty of time. Drink a couple of glasses of really cold iced tea. And garnish the whole nine yards with good conversation. No wonder smart people want to go to heaven.

A walk in the woods. In the fall, you kick the leaves, revel in the color, savor the smells, walk a couple of fallen logs, sit on every stump you come to, marvel at the mushrooms, feast on a few dead-ripe persimmons sweetened to perfection for having hung for the last week or two in the wonderful warmth of the late fall sunlight, eat a bunch of possum grapes brought to their height of flavor by a couple of frosts, and at a little creek skip two or three flat rocks across the sun-dappled surface of still water. When you come to think of it, such a walk in the woods is worth a thousand dollars, maybe more.

A deep drink of cold water. When David was desperately weary, utterly exhausted, and sorely stressed by guerrilla warfare against the Philistines whose garrison was in Bethlehem where he grew up, he longed for "a drink of water of the well of Bethlehem which is by the gate." It`s remembered from a far safer and more tranquil period in his life. He did not crave food. He did not ask for deliverance from his enemies. He did not ask for a nice bed with clean sheets-he longed for a drink of water. When a body is thirsty; nothing can compare with a drink of water.

Work. Does this seem odd to you? Probably not. When we stop to think about it, work is a very special gift from God. Work gives purpose to life. Work enables us to be useful and to feel that usefulness in our bones. When work is well done, it builds self-confidence. Work identifies us with God who is himself a worker. Work is the mother of sound sleep. Like others who write a little, I hate to write, but I like to have written. That is, the goads of discipline are for the moment grievous, painful, but there are special rewards once the work has been endured. So, thank God for work. Butting heads with little grandkids. Some peculiar people, oddly enough, do not seem to relish this splendid sport. Gently butting heads with a three-year old little girl or a five-year old boy does for me, however, what it apparently does for a cow who nuzzles her calf and thus communicates affection, secures bonding, and shares by this unique sense of touch deeper feelings of love and pleasure and kinship than could ever be done with elemental sounds or mere words, no matter how intricately crafted or elegantly uttered.

Watching the sun set. Beautiful sunsets never, ever get boring. Lasting hardly longer than five or ten minutes, fine sunsets are infinitely varied, gloriously hued, wonderfully new, and breathtakingly original.

Seeing the moon rise. Few things in nature, or in all human experience, can rival a full moon inching up over the horizon on a late fall evening. It is a fascinating slow-motion marvel. As the earth does its inexorable turning, the faintest sliver of a big, golden moon peeps out, and then pushes up ever so deliberately until the whole gorgeous orb looks the world right in the eye. If you could only see this marvel once in a lifetime and could know what sheer delight it would be, you would gladly go halfway around the world to experience it. But for us, right where we live, it comes every 28 days. Enjoy.

Nestle down in a good bed for a night`s sleep. And just to think. When I was a kid, I hated to go to bed at night lest I miss something exciting that might happen or something wonderful that could develop. Well, things have changed. Now I can hardly wait to get to that blessed bed. This is something that is nothing short of delicious: to get in a pleasantly warm bed on a cold, dark night, pull the covers up under my chins and then around my oversized ears, nestle down in the bed after a small spell of twisting and squirming so as to get fixed just right and then to listen to the little mountain stream making exactly the same gurgling, audacious music it did when I built that little cabin forty years ago-the same sound it was likely making 10,000 years before that. Do please excuse me. I can`t stay awake any longer. Let`s talk about it in the morning.

Stare at the fire. This has to be one of the oldest, simplest, and finest of all human pleasures. We`re talking neutral. All gears are disengaged. All muscles are hanging loose. All electrical systems are unplugged. Tranquillity reigns. The flickering firelight makes its infinitely varied display but the real show is the coals. Some are red. Some are yellow. Some are white. Sooner or later they all get gray around their temples (don`t we all?) as the ashes start to form. Gravity pulls the larger pieces down into a natural little heap, not totally unlike what is slowly transpiring on the surface of the sun where a somewhat different kind of fuel is being spent on its way to some far-off black hole. The visual wonders related to staring at a fire are enhanced, of course, by the welcome warmth that radiates a body`s reveries. Anyone who cannot frequently sit in a rocker and stare at the fire is infinitely poorer for this deprivation. And all who share the blessing of this ritual are together in a select company of God`s truly fortunately people.

Talk. Jean Paul Sartre allowed that the Frenchmen of his day were interested in only two things: to fornicate and to read the newspaper. Our baby boomers do not seem to be very interested in reading the newspaper. The Generation X people seem caught up in their version of going there and doing that. (Having already been there and done that, I could ask them some helpful questions if they were only interested.) And it strikes me that Generation Y (Youth) people have an absolute compulsion to move around and spend money, as long as they don`t have to make it. Me. I`m from another generation, another era, maybe another planet. I like to talk. I relish talk. I crave talk. I revel in talk. I go out of my way to get involved in talk. Like the Australian aborigines who learn three or four utterly disparate languages in order to talk more and tell more stories, I admire those gifted persons who talk much and who talk well. A talk fest with a very small company of good friends with nobody trying to pull rank, nobody seeking to dominate, and nobody compelled to preen, is about as close to a "lovely" evening as I can conjure up.

So, here are ten things that are "too wonderful for me." If they didn`t light my fire, I would just have to tell you my wood would be wet.