I love this
word. Hearth.
Hear Earth.
Fire needs
breath to burn: air. Fire needs fuel to burn: wood, product of the earth. Fire
is quenched by water. Four elements present in hearth: Fire, Air, Earth, Water.
Or the saltwater of a tear, or the heat it creates – both derived, too, from
the letters in the puzzle:
T - E - A - R,
H - E - A - T.
Fire will “E - A
- T” logs. As in my childhood leisure I chose Boggle and Scrabble and anagram
word games, so too today I choose words as conveyance or symbol or artifact and
profession. Ra, the Egyptian sun god lives in “hearth” – as do: art, eat, ear, he, and her…and more than
twenty other words and exclamations I found tucked within
H-E-A-R-T-H.
Looking back at
this blog, I found seven posts that contain the word “hearth.” This number is
miniscule compared to the number of essays and book chapters in my files that
also contain a hearth.
This is the
season for remembering my hearth, the inner landscape hearth as well as the
actual one just inside the house in the next room. (It seemed fitting to
compose this blog post outside where one of my neighbors has noticed the change
of season on the calendar but hasn’t realized we’re now in a few day stretch of
mid-nineties heat wave: I smell his wood smoke on the other side of the fence.)
Last Friday we had an untimely hail and lightning storm with flooding rain that
the parched earth couldn’t suck down fast enough; today we have shorts and tank
tops weather despite my insistence that our annual furnace pilot relight
proceed (for today!) as scheduled weeks ago. Our hearth is cozy and familiar.
It is beautiful, unpainted, red clay. It is a special haven in our home,
whether lit or dark. My inner landscape is warmed, brightened, soothed by the
actual brick and mortar one.
It is the hearth
of creativity. The hearth of soul. The hearth of warmth and circling back in
and finding home inside and within, again and again as the autumn begins.
It is this
hearth that I carry and convey, within which I find playfulness and safety,
integrity and perseverance, spiritual and emotional sustenance, physical and
mental wellbeing.
It is this
hearth that propels the spark of my own inspired creativity forward into the
darkness, a match to a candle wick.
Autumn is the season
for calling back into our immediate circle the vital importance of the
hearth…for it is this fire that holds us through the storm, the winds, the
gaiety. The center of home. The core of self.
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2014 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."
