We still heat primarily with wood.

For years we heated only with wood…and then we got a propane wall heater that comes on when it cools off in the room so that it wasn’t freezing in the house when we got up in the morning.

It’s still pretty cold here early in the Spring, so this morning one of the first things I did was to get a fire going.

Heating with wood is pretty simple. It’s not a complicated process to get a pile of kindling together and light the newspaper under it…and then put some more substantial wood on top when the kindling has started to burn well.

That process is about as simple as it gets….the stove is just a stout metal box with a fire inside.

The stout box gets hot from the fire inside…and then it heats your house.

I was pondering what to write about this morning…afraid that I was a tired, dry well. I’d run out of whatever let any ideas leak through…I was an early morning husk…just a shell…a caffeine-less empty hole without an idea in my head.

I was “tabula rasa” in a bad way.

And then I saw that woodstove…and thought, “BAM…there’s my idea….a black box of heat potential…my ticket out of the horse latitudes of creativity…my ship has come in…”

But then I back-pedaled a little and thought , “What the heck?! Why is that an idea? That’s crazy and really, really boring…”

If nothing else, my doubt and indecision will always keep me entertained. It makes for some interesting “self-talk”.

By the time that I was a couple of hundred words into writing the blog, it was too late. I was committed. There was no turning back…it was the “wood stove” or nothing…and nothing was never an option.

So the heat box was the topic…the simple heat box.

That would be the word for the day.

And then I had a revelation about the wood stove….my simple, ordinary wood stove.

My revelation was that it sure does take a lot of work to keep something as simple as a wood stove going.

You have to find or order some logs, maintain the chainsaw, saw all the rounds, split it all…either by hand or with a splitter…stack it to dry, bring it up to the house, get and store the kindling from the sawmill down the road or go up in the woods for some twigs…whewwwwww.

I’m sure that I’m forgetting a lot…more and more as I get older…. in spite of the morning fish oil.

There is so much interconnected activity involved with even the simplest of lives.

There is so much going on all the time.

The house is warming back up now…the stove has been “on” and full of fire for the start of the morning.

But…nothing is all that simple.

And there’s never a reason for feeling like there’s a “dry well” situation in the creativity department.

To say, “I never have any BIG IDEAS!!! I can never think of anything good to write about…” is such a cop out.

Maybe the problem is really that I couldn’t see the “bigness” in a small idea?

There isn’t anything that doesn’t touch everything in some way. We breathe in what someone else breathes out. We don’t see the ways we depend on each other.

We are all connected…all the time.

Dangit…I don’t even want to think about it all….makes my head hurt to expand my thoughts too much.

Maybe I should just drink some more coffee and watch “Dragon Tales” with Nate?

First, I need to put some more wood on the fire….