The Ember’s Long Breath

There is a particular quality to the light of a dying fire in the deep dark of a winter night. It is not the steady, reliable glow of a lamp, but a frantic, pulsing orange that seems to be fighting the encroaching frost. In the north, we learn early that heat is a temporary visitor; we watch the embers pulse like a heartbeat, knowing that the cold is always waiting just beyond the circle of warmth. We try to hold onto these flickers, to stretch the moment of radiance before it dissolves into ash and shadow. It is a human instinct to want to pull at the edges of a fading thing, to see if we can make the light linger just a second longer than the laws of nature allow. We reach for the heat, but we are only ever touching the memory of it. Does the fire know it is being watched, or is it simply burning because it has no other choice?

Nathan Simko has captured this fleeting intensity in his image titled Monday’s Flame. The way the light stretches and pulls reminds me of how a sudden gust of wind can distort the horizon during a storm. Does this movement feel like a dance to you, or something more restless?