Another Breath: The Campfire

Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Campfire

Tired soul hunches in
To warm the hands and soul
Life's demons and angels
Attend as sparks fly
And smoke ascends

Connecting
Stars and Earth
Love and Ashes
Forever and Flickering

Toss in temporal
Wood and Whimsy
Garbage and Guilt
Failings and Fear

Soak up eternal
Life and Love
Wind and Warmth
Sky and Stars

Flames consume all
With crackling resolve
Body warmed
Troubles dissolve

Awaken new soul
Renewed and revived
Cleansed by the flames and
More fully alive

The campfire!
Earth's mystery
The great equalizer
The great servant

- Glen Brown, August 27, 2012, revised December 16, 2012, October 5, 2019

Devotion, Inspiration, and "The Noonday Brightness of Human Genius"

"... Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

- Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship