How do you weed the woods?

Book proposals don't always find a home, even for those of us who have a few books under our belts. This is my favorite chapter from a proposal that earned me a slew of (lovely) rejection letters.

Last night, our evening walk twisted down through the rhododendron grove and over the slat bridge that crosses the creek. The sky was laden. I had glanced up, sending a silent wish for snow. But the temperature crept upward overnight and the evening’s flurries became a chill and drenching rain. By the time I woke, the valley was encased in layers of mist. The house felt damp and cold. 

Like a supplicant, I knelt in front of the wood stove. I am always a supplicant to fire; it is simply not my element. There’s exactly none in my birth chart, not a hint of Leo or Aries. Is my lack of affinity astrologically ordained? That seems too easy. But Andrew, who doesn’t give a whiff about astrology but has seven planets in fire signs (if his mom remembers his birth time accurately), Andrew gets a fire blazing in seconds.

My fires take time on my knees. They require devotion.

When we bought this house, it had two wide fieldstone hearths, one in the great room, the other in the main bedroom. I remember the first year here, on a night when the power was out, huddled in front of the bedroom fireplace getting exactly zero warmth from the flames as all the heat fled up the chimney. Before the next cold season, we tucked wood stoves into the fireplaces. Miraculously, these little burners cut our heating bills in half. Plus, there is something that feels connected and in rhythm when burning wood.

I remember driving up to this property when we were looking for a new home. Its smoke-colored cedar cladding blended with the lichen spotting the surrounding trees. So many trees! I had lived in suburbs, cities, and even on working farms, but never in a forest. Looking out at the acres and acres of growth, I said to Andrew how do you weed the woods? I was only half joking.

Now I know how you do it:

You walk the trails with a box, collecting twigs and sticks to use as kindling. The path gets cleared and the house gets heated. This economy of action is pleasing to me (but I’m also the person who plans a circular route for their errands and will not back track. If I get a call from a friend asking me to meet them at a coffee shop I’ve already passed, I will decline. I will not go back. I might be a little too invested in my perceived economies.)

Kindling is just the beginning of making fire. Collecting it is my work. Andrew handles the big stuff: surgically slicing fallen trees into rounds then logs. This might sound sexist. But he doesn’t have a vertigo condition so we both agree it’s best for him to be the one handling the chain saw. Plus, fire loves him. And I want these logs to know their purpose. To sense that they will become flame.

I remember this as I kneel at the hearth. Adding the wood Andrew has cut and split. His energy is here, infusing the logs. I sing to it. Or perhaps I should say, I chant: Catch, catch, catch. Staring at the tiny flames licking the kindling, willing them to leap to the logs. They don’t seem to like my staring, so I sit back on my heels giving the fire some space.

Often, I would find my herbal teacher Eleanor in this position, on her knees but at a distance, as if to show respect to the fire she kept burning on her altar. A perpetual candle. An eternal flame. 

When I was a kid, my parents had an electric Yahzreit candle they would plug in after someone had died. Nestled on the kitchen counter between the dish soap and my mom’s colorful collection of antique creamers, it reminded me of a night-light, useful if you wanted a cup of tea at midnight, but otherwise kind of silly. 

Watching Eleanor tend the flame she kept in a glass lantern, planning her comings and goings so she could change the candle before it sputtered, taught me about devotion. And remembrance. And centering your life on something beyond yourself, and maybe even beyond your comprehension. I suspect this is what the Yahrzeit candle was supposed to do—to help give mourners a center, a focus, a spark to remind them of life during a time when death was looming large. An electric “candle” while safer, is also easier, perhaps in a way that doesn’t serve us. Our hands don’t have to make fire. We don’t have to devote ourselves to the flames. The light from the electric candle is a metaphor, a thought instead of an action. It asks little of us. It doesn’t need us to kneel. 

Eleanor’s altar was an entirely different beast. It required something, a sort of reciprocity. And in return, it was the naval of the house, the place where nourishment entered. Her movements revolved around that altar, that candle. It was her hearth and her grounding cord. It called her home. 

I’d never realized it before, but our woodstoves take a similar kind of devotion. They require thought and care and upkeep…. And, for me, time on my knees. I am always aware of the fire. In the morning, I find poplar for a hot, fast flame to drive back nighttime’s chill. Before making a grocery run, I search out oak logs that will burn long and slow. Sometimes, as I load them into the black cast iron fire box, I remember where the wood came from—the maple that dropped a heavy limb on the roof, the gigantic walnut that came down below the trail which runs up to the spring. One evening, as the light was lowering, we felt the subsonic boom of the tree coming down, but it took a few days to find the dead giant, down a side trail, its root ball now exposed and taller than me.

In the woodstove, the logs have caught. Realizing I’ve been holding my breath, I exhale. My prayers have worked. A particular scent—the smell of warmth, and love, and home—begins to permeate the air as I use the stone lip of the fireplace to push to my feet. The stove’s door was opened for extra oxygen as well as easy access as I stoked the flame. Taking one last inhale of burning poplar, I close it, seeing how, even visually, it really is like a larger version of Eleanor’s lantern. But Eleanor knew to whom she was praying when she knelt at her altar. Her devotion was not to the flame. The flame was a reminder of the goddess to whom she had dedicated herself. I think about that sometimes. The devotion to a god or goddess. A devotion I’ve never felt except perhaps to Gaia, not as a personification of nature, but as the actual Earth—the whisper of the ocean against the shore, the scrape of a pine tree against the canopy of the sky, this I can call God. 

As those words cross my mind, I recall a poem I’d written the year before I left for Ireland:

We contemplated the nunnery

not out of fear, but out of love.

Love of what, we could not say. But we knew

it had something to do with the way

a flower twists toward sunlight; 

the way storms gather, bruised and swollen.

This we could call God.

We sought a life of adoration, not mere glimpses

from the car’s window, but long days to contemplate 

water lapping stone, wing caressing sky.

Years now have gathered and gone. 

My life is not desolate.

Still I wonder:

Is there an abbey for this love?

I think that’s what I’ve been looking for all these years: a hearth, an altar, an abbey. Perhaps it's not about deity, for me, but about a space where I can remember a sense of connection, where I can take comfort from being a small thread in a glorious tapestry. 

Standing in front of the now rolling fire, the knees of my black wool joggers covered in rug fuzz and dog hair, I turn toward the glass sliding doors that, on warmer days, open out to the towering trees. The morning sun is tracking across the ridgeline, a swath of red-gold highlighting the winter gray. My eyes sting in sudden realization: maybe I’ve found it.

This piece feels especially poignant now. with so many trees down after Hurricane Helene swept through, so many twigs and branches littering the trails. It feels especially painful to know the damage that has happened here, the wounds the house has suffered. But it also feels like a love letter, a prayer, a vigil to get me through these lengthening nights.

And for the curious: the book this was meant to be a part of was a series of reflections on my time studying with an herbalist in Ireland from the distance of twenty years. How have the lessons held up as I’ve lived into them? What learnings have become well-loved and which have fallen by the wayside?

Unfortunately, this one didn’t find a publisher…. but I’m glad it found you!

Thanks so much for being here.

xx Maia