I love splitting firewood. It is one of my favorite activities while at our cabin. I love waking up in a cold room and going over to the wood stove to light the (prebuilt) fire inside it. I always try to build a fire after the previous one has burned out and everything has cooled down. We have a stack of firewood and kindling and shredded paper (works well!) in our fireplace here at home right now that I plan to burn this weekend when we are all together. But, before I can build a fire I need to split the firewood that we have. This is a wonderful thing.
Splitting firewood, or really any activity involving wood or soil or anything organic is special. It is soothing. It reconnects us to the Greater. It reminds us that we too are soil and stardust and ash. The smells and sounds and textures. If the wood is knot-free it virtually splits just seeing the impending collision with the maul (mauls are axes made for splitting wood). It splits so effortlessly and beautifully, like a dancer.
It’s even good exercise. Why do I never think to properly stretch until I feel a little twinge somewhere in my body? I think I am just so excited to begin! I also learned this week that I need to start wearing eye protection as a tiny piece of wood flew straight into my right eye and got stuck. It eventually came out. Our body is so amazing. I also learned long ago that I need to wear ear protection. Years of woodworking and concert going taught me this, thankfully before I did hardly any damage. And that beautiful regal stump that I use to split wood upon. It has accepted so many blows as the maul exits the firewood and has come right back for more! That must have been a beautiful tree (you can see it in the picture for this blog post).
But, sadly, is this a guilty pleasure with an expiration tag attached to it? In our understandable race to minimize the planet’s runaway temperature, are fireplaces and fire stoves on the, um, chopping block? Will I tell my Grand kids someday of the beauty and sacredness of fires as if they were stampeding ubiquitous herds of bison? Might my other guilty pleasure of international travel need a time-out until we can figure out how to do it sustainably? And what about walnuts and coffee and chocolate and all the other things I cannot imagine living without if mother nature forces us to reconsider how we can sustainably raise these miraculous friends?
Firewood also can teach. I do not know yet what the full complete carbon cycle is for a tree depending on whether it is burned vs decaying naturally in a forest. Watching a three-minute online video from Bob or Karen doesn’t make one an expert on such things. We would have to consider the digestion of the tree by microbes (which are dependent on soil conditions, which depend on temperature and other living and non-living things) which depend on how much wood we burn! And it makes a huge difference if you use a fireplace and/or an insert or a wood-stove. I wonder what the heat transfer efficiency is for my exhaust piping out the ceiling? Should I add fins to the duct work like we did in my chemical engineering lab in college? It would allow me to burn less wood to achieve the same temperature gain in the cabin. Or should I just wear a thicker sweater and put more insulation in the ceiling?
So much to learn and cherish and share from something as seemingly utilitarian as splitting wood. There is beauty and magic all around us we just have to slow down enough to notice. We have to stop looking so that we can see.
