Fire has much to teach us. The principles that inform building, tending, and ending fires extend beyond the practical into insights into our relationships with our own life energy and capacity to work toward goals.
If you’ve never built a fire yourself, you may think it’s easy. When there is drought and the land is parched, the plants and fallen wood dried-out, and some asshole throws a firecracker into a place without any ring of stone or brick to contain the flames—fires start easily, without control, and their damage is enormous. While wildfires serve the vitality of the larger ecosystem, they are destructive for our human perspective and purposes.
Most of us want a fire that can entertain us, bring us warmth, illuminate the darkness, cook our food, or burn what we no longer need. We want controlled, concentrated, manageable fire. The first skill is knowing the optimal conditions—when it’s wetter, for example, or when we can contain our fire in a stone circle, a fireplace, or a pit, and keep materials on hand to extinguish it if it threatens to leave the container.
Ingredients of a Campfire
When thinking about the materials for a fire, it’s important to know there’s a relationship between the amount of energy it takes to get something burning and the amount of energy it generates in being burnt. So a wadded up piece of newspaper is going to be easy to light, it’ll burn nice and pretty, but it’ll go out quickly if you add nothing else on top of it. A heavy log is the other end of the spectrum—it requires a lot of heat and energy to get going, but once it does it will last you a much longer time.
You can think of it as both “you need to expend energy to get more energy” and also that the more energy you need to expend, the more you’re likely to get from the effort. The first expenditure of energy is getting the spark, which may mean focused energy drawing a spindle through a bow against a plank of wood, or clacking metal or rock together, until you’ve got a spark.
The exception, of course, are the things we’ve designed to be easy-to-light—matches, lighters, fuel, firestarters, and logs soaked in combustible chemicals. If you’ve got any of these, you’ll need less energy to get going.
In firebuilding, the spectrum of materials is broken down into “tinder,” “kindling,” “fuel.” These are the spectrum of that ratio, from easiest to burn to hardest, and likewise from least energy output to most.
Paper, cardboard, pine needles, dried leaves, and tiny matchstick-sized wood all fall under tinder. Tinder is like sugar. Easy to reach for, very satisfying in the moment, but too much of leaves you burnt out and cranky.
What kinds of things do you enjoy doing that are like tinder? For me it could be scrolling on social media, watching a familiar favorite TV show, snacking, and other things I won’t name in public. Often, when clients and I are exploring their tinder activities, it tends to be the things we go to when we’re really exhausted or bored to get a bit of a boost. We’re looking for energy but it’s possible what we really need is a nap, or a glass of water.
Tinder isn’t bad, it’s useful, but if that’s all you’ve got then you’re going to be spending most of your time and energy heaping more atop the fire to keep it going.
So when building a fire, we start with tinder to get enough heat and energy to ignite kindling, which are thicker sticks the size of your fingers or slightly larger. These are like carbohydrates—also easy to burn, but more energy output. A fire of kindling still requires a lot of feeding to keep going, but it’ll burn longer than the tinder.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like kindling? Could be going out on a date, going to a concert, working out, or going for a hike. We’re all going to have different answers based on our ability, our skills, and our energy capacities. Once upon a time, going out to a bar felt like a tinder activity to me, but now leaving the house for any social activity requires some effort of hyping myself up and reminding myself it’ll be worth it.
If you want maximum heat with less effort, then you want your fire hot enough to start fuel—logs thicker than your arm. These beasts take a lot of energy and patience to get going, but they’ll reward you with hours of heat and light and require less constant tending. These are the fat cells of fire.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like fuel? For these I think of the range of bigger life tasks that require a great deal of effort and patience. Could be applying for new jobs, starting a degree, or deciding to learn a new skill.
There are so many things in my life that I value now which began as fuel tasks. When I was younger, I dreaded going to the gym and doing any kind of exercise, but when I was able to push through—even when it was miserable—I found that when I left I felt energized and happier, and glad I’d gone. Beginning a meditation practice, starting my own business, and learning a martial art have all offered me the same experience.
With experience and practice, all of these tasks have moved more into the “kindling” category, but it was not easy. That dread of beginning stayed with me for a long time with each task, but I also sensed what the experienced offered would make it worth it, and I left feeling better.
That’s the key—fuel gives you more energy than it demands. There are plenty of things that take more of our energy than it gives, and those are not fuel. In some cases, these might be obligations we must fulfill to make our fuel activities possible, but just as often they are habits we continue even though long ago they stopped feeding us and we’ve fallen into resentment.
What you want on top is kindling, pieces of wood that are thicker. Ideally you’d want a range of thicknesses, because the thickness and density of the wood is also its potential. The thicker the wood is, the longer and hotter it will burn, and the thickest logs are what we’d call fuel. But the thicker the wood is, the more energy and heat you need to ignite it. That’s why you can’t just throw a tree stump on top of a fire and call it good; you’ve got to split it into smaller pieces that will be easier to light, easier to store, and easier to use to feed the fire over time.
Shaping a Campfire
Heat rises. That’s the primary principle that informs everything about structuring and tending your fire. The second is that heat feeds heat.
When we’re starting cold, we want to build a fire by starting with lots of tinder, enfolding it with kindling, and then adding our fuel once it’s good and hot. A fire needs oxygen, so adding too much, too heavy, and too densely packed wood will smother it before it can get going. My favorite shape is to build a tent of kindling around a nest of tinder.
Too many of us, when we’re feeling low energy or stuck in life, expect ourselves to be able to fire up some heavy fuel. Then, when we fail, we think it confirms our fate as incompetent failures. But all it means is that we’ve added too heavy of fuel, too quickly, without awareness of these principles.
So if you’re starting cold and want more energy in your life, instead of making a huge commitment to a task like starting graduate school, try finding some tinder and kindling tasks that you can get started to build your enthusiasm and energy. Start with one new habit, like washing your dishes more often, and do that for a couple weeks until you add the second.
If you find you’re struggling and it feels hard, think of it as the energy you’re spending to get this fire going, and look at what you get in return when you’ve finished the task. If you’re losing more energy than you gain, that might be a sign that this task is a heavier fuel than you’re ready to burn, and see if you can find something lighter and closer to your energy capacities.
A Fire’s Rhythm of Life
Starting a fire is tricky and discouraging. More often than I care to recall, I’ve experienced the thrill of watching those first flames catch quick and bright and then the bitterness of watching them gutter out before coming to much of anything. By this, I also think of all the times I’ve tried to start a new group, or a new workshop, or get my communities excited about a new project. I think of all the pieces I’ve written that sparked no connection, and the year or two I spent building my private practice before enough clients noticed me that it became sustainable.
Starting a fire is hard! And what’s hardest is learning to intuit when a fire needs tending and when it needs to be left alone to do its work. We can lose a fire through neglect or smothering. In these learning stages we can only make choices and see what happens, then adapt.
That feels like a deep lesson, one that I can’t say I’ve fully learned. Fire teaches us that if we don’t interpret missteps and collapses as signs of divine judgment—if we can keep learning, adapting, and trying—eventually we’ll get a good fire going. But in experiencing the disappointments and failures of the work, eventually we may decide it’s not worth the effort.
If the fire is failing, we could try wadding up more tinder and using our breath to get the weak coals going again, so we can add more kindling on top and try to get momentum again. Perhaps we need to move the heavier logs away to give the fire more time to get stronger. Perhaps we need to spread things out so that the fire could breathe—if it’s too densely packed, it doesn’t have the oxygen it needs. Perhaps we need to push things closer together to concentrate our energy.
No matter how much teaching and instruction we receive, we can only learn through practice. Whether you’re trying to find a partner, start a business, write a novel, or organize a workshop, it’s rare to experience immediate, instant success without effort or failure. We may imagine there’s a right way to do things, and often there is, but on the ground it becomes clear that “the right way” itself contains thousands of smaller choices to make and actions to take. There may be no right or wrong choice to make, nor no action to take that guarantees success or failure. We simply have to make choices, see what happens, and adapt.
Eventually, however, we’ll get a good fire going with a strong bed of coals. All the lessons we’ve learned continue to apply, but now it’s less urgent and catastrophic. It’s an easier pace to tend the fire, and we can be decisive about when we want to feed it and when we want to cool things down. A good fire could burn for days, if not years, but it still requires presence, attention, and conscientiousness.
And, eventually, we may decide it’s time to end the fire. Perhaps we no longer have use of it, our we’re tired of the efforts of tending and want to get rest or do change focus. That’s when we show respect to ourselves, our environment, and the fire itself by making sure it’s completely extinguished so it can be safely left unattended. What’s left is nutrient-rich ash, which offers wonderful fertilizer for others’ growth.