The Coals that Glow

Pleasure is to draw up a comfortable chair to a large open fire and meditate upon the crackling coals. The heat surrounds you like a friendly embrace, making you perspire lightly into your clothes. This heat seeps pleasantly through your boots, massaging the life and feeling back into your numb toes. Your fingers redden in response to their heat bath and your eyes lose their expression as your stream-of-consciousness halts and the fire becomes a focus point for your contemplation.

As the fire destroys the coals in a shower of red sparks, their shapes assume familiar faces and treasured objects. Memories long forgotten, or swallowed down long before suddenly jolt from their seclusion in your mind to your conscious thoughts. You would never have given them mental input had you not sat down to warm yourself and drifted from one state of consciousness to another.

The grey tendrils of smoke, like slender waving fingers, carry the remains of the coal up the chimney, staining it black. They carry your thoughts and ideas with them. If the fire is burning from logs instead of coal, then these grey fingers are scented with sweet smelling steam. The steam acts as a very powerful drug, such as laudanum which caresses you into a gentle sleep, aided amply by the heat.

As you stare unblinkingly into the fire, it is only when your eyelids finally descend and rapidly retract that you realise that your eyeballs are dry from staring into the heat. This rouses you from whatever reverie you were ardently pursuing into your mundane stream-of-consciousness. You get up and reluctantly leave the fire to get extremely cold once again.