Stoking the Fires of a New… Whatever

By Penny Costello 

I was so ready to put 2019 behind me. In fact, the whole decade of the twenty-teens had pretty much worn out its welcome. The past year had been marked by loss – first of a member of my dog family, Etta Bear, a sweet and salty border collie who had been one of my life’s greatest teachers; followed by the death of my father a week later. 

The decade had its milestones as well. In 2014, I survived a 30-foot fall headfirst into a ravine ironically called “Dead Man’s Run”, from which I sustained a broken neck and concussion. In 2015 my partner of nearly 20 years and the love of my life became my spouse in the first-ever same-sex wedding to occur in the State Capitol Rotunda, gleefully and precociously officiated by Senator Ernie Chambers. Thank you, Senator Chambers, for tenaciously fighting for our right to do that for nearly three decades. In 2016, we “gave birth” to two teenagers when two of our five grandchildren came to live with us. In 2017, we became their legal guardians. In 2018, I turned 60 and left a 22-year career that I loved, largely due to the residual impacts of the brain injury sustained in 2014. With 2019 came a very welcome and exciting new job followed a couple of months later by the deaths of my dog and my father. So, yeah, at the end of 2019, I was tired.

The exhaustion wasn’t only due to the events in my life that I wanted to acknowledge and transcend. It was what is happening in the world. An increasingly divided country, the loss of respectful and productive discourse, the continued assault on the planet, and oppression of civil and human rights.  Climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinctions.

I sometimes like to welcome a new year with a ceremonial purge of the things I want to leave in the past. I write down thoughts, self-talk and habits that no longer serve me, unhealthy aspects of relationships to let go of or improve upon, and aspirations for new beginnings. Then I build a fire and at the stroke of midnight, welcome the new year by burning those pages I’ve written, sending the smoke up as prayers for continued growth and wisdom.

If any year warranted such a ceremony, it was 2019. So, on New Year’s Eve, we invited a dear friend and neighbor to join us for dinner to ring in the new year and send the old one out with prayers of smoke. But it didn’t go as planned. We had a delicious meal together and settled in the living room until it was time to start the fire. At 10:30, I fell asleep. And that’s how I said good-bye to the twenty-teens.

The new year welcomed me as I woke up to a bright, sunny morning. It was cold and breezy, but clear and crisp. I was determined to have that fire ceremony. In doing so, it brought a shift in thinking, and a sort of epiphany. Starting that day, this year, and this decade by looking ahead rather than looking back felt like a more productive investment of energy. 

I began to build the fire as I had so many times before. Starting with a base layer of dried leaves and twigs, on top of which I piled kindling topped off by a few slightly larger pieces of wood, but not heavy enough to collapse the pile. The leaves were slightly damp from a layer of frost the night before. So, they smoked a bit as I tried to ignite them. They began to burn and then hesitated to a glow around the edges. I gently blew on them until they burst into flame, bringing the fire to life.

That’s when the epiphany struck. Building a fire is very much like building a life. It’s all about the proper balance between air, energy, and fuel. You need to know when to intervene, and when to leave it alone and let those elements just interact. You need enough dry leaves or paper at the base to sustain the flame until the kindling can catch and feed the fire to those larger pieces of wood. You need to know when to add more fuel; whether to blow on the embers or poke it and re-situate the twigs and branches to help the interaction between air, energy, and fuel. If you poke it too much or pile too many big pieces on too soon, the whole thing collapses and smothers itself and you have to start over. Yeah, life is just like that.

At 10:30 on New Year’s Eve in 2019, there were too many big pieces, not enough air, not enough energy, not enough of the right kind of fuel, and the fire in me collapsed and smothered itself. As I tended that fire the next morning, letting the smoke from the damp leaves envelope me as it made its way into the universe, the fire spoke to me of this sacred interaction between air, energy, and fuel. As the fire burned, building a hotter, thicker bed of embers that would sustain the fire for as long as I chose to tend it, my thoughts turned to the bed of embers in the metaphorical sense. Who and what established the embers in the fire of my life. 

A family heritage that allowed me to grow up on a ranch in western South Dakota. My first landscapes were the Badlands and the Black Hills, which instilled awe and a love of Nature and animals. A childhood spent outside, fueling imagination, self-sufficiency, and resilience. An extended family with dozens of cousins who taught me perspective and never let me take myself too seriously. A grandmother who was a safe place in hard times, and helped prepare me to be the same for my grandchildren. A partner who has given me the gifts of love, forgiveness, family, and never lets me take myself too seriously. The dear friend who helped rescue me from the bottom of Dead Man’s Run, and who forgave me for falling asleep at 10:30 on New Year’s Eve. A border collie named Etta Bear who taught me that I don’t know as much as I think I know, and maybe I should just watch, pay attention, and learn. A father who cherished me, challenged me, enraged me at times, and waited for me to get to his bedside so I could hold his hand and thank him before he passed. 

That bed of embers burns hot and bright with those memories and experiences, and so many more. All the friends, mentors, tormentors who have tickled me, taught me and taunted me. These experiences have shaped me, for better and for worse. The interconnection between all of us, this planet, this universe provides the air, the fuel, and the energy for everything. 

As I tended that fire, smoke, and prayers rising and dissipating into the heavens, a sense of peace settled over me. All of us have a conscious awareness of the lives we impact, and yet there are countless other lives we impact every day in ways of which we have no idea. What if we all walked through our days with an awareness of the fire we fuel in so many others’ lives? What if we resolved to act in ways that feed those fires, to help them through struggles and celebrate triumphs? To be that spark that ignites the flames. To be the breath that facilitates the interaction. To be an ember that burns hot and bright. To be a part that sustains the whole. This is my 2020 vision, and I welcome and embrace all who will join me on the journey.