Smoke: The Mystery and Musing.

I had another little bonfire in the garden today, to get rid of the woody remains of the autumn hedge trim. An old mystery presented itself. I was standing on the south side of the fire and being engulfed by smoke, so I moved to the east side. The smoke followed me. I moved to the north side, and the smoke followed me again. Smoke nearly always does that to me. Wherever I go, the smoke goes too. It can’t be caused by thermal currents coming off my warm body, not outside with a breeze blowing. So why does it do it?

But then I began to muse on why we humans find the sweet scent of wood smoke so appealing. I wonder whether it’s because it makes us feel smug and secure. It tells us that we humans know how to protect ourselves against the cold. We humans are clever like that; we know how to make fire.

So then I began to muse some more, on the question of how we discovered fire in the first place. Can we really believe that one day, thousands of years ago, a human being accidentally discovered fire? Maybe that’s what did happen. I can’t know, can I? And yet it somehow represents too big a leap of faith; it just doesn’t feel credible. I’m certainly no classic Creationist; I have no difficulty at all in accepting the general principle of evolution. And yet there’s something about the human being that seems to make us different, as though we didn’t come down the same evolutionary line as everything else.

This is a potentially dangerous train of thought, because it’s what leads to the human presumption of superiority and our foolish obsession with treating nature as nothing more than a resource to plunder according to our equally foolish whims. That isn’t how I see things at all.

So I’m not going to worry about it. Instead, I’ll continue to concentrate on where I’m going next. That’s when I’m not trying to live in the moment, of course. Complicated, isn’t it?