Beech

fire drew me near to trees

Pacentro is in a beech forest.

The European beech tree (Fagus sylvatica) is a tree historically used for firewood in Pacentro.

I made the fortuitous mistake of ordering 50 quintale of wood from the comune to heat my home this winter. A quintale is a unit of measurement, for those of you readers who have never experienced the beauty of an olive oil harvest in Italy. One quintale is the equivalent of 100kg or 220 pounds. That is right, you did the math quickly in your head and figured out that I ordered 5,000 kilos or 11,000 pounds of fresh wood.

Winters in Italy have revealed to me a whole culture surrounding wood. A culture that is quickly extinguishing. I would argue that heating homes with firewood gave humans an excuse to have a relationship with trees. We studied trees, knew them by name, when to cut them, how to graft them and plant them. Now it is impressive if one can distinguish between deciduous or coniferous trees.

As a companion to this piece I ask you to engage with the self scoring test, “Where You At?,” found in the book Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, by answering this inquiry….

Trace the heat source in your home from organic material (biomass, fossil fuels, sun, water) to your hearth (fireplace, furnace, boiler, HVAC).

In short: How do you heat your home?

After you meditate on that energetic chain, I would like to weave you through the politics of air quality in Italy and forest management. Then we might be ready to encounter the element of wood within ourselves guided by movement practices and traditional Chinese medicine.