Fire

It had been too long since I'd last had a fire.

The next morning the smell of wood-smoke on my shirt stopped me in my tracks.

I didn’t wash that shirt for weeks.The next morning the smell of wood-smoke on my shirt stopped me in my tracks.

After watching Avatar for the first time, I was racked with cravings for the feral life.

I wanted to drink blood from a horn, to let my body grime over with grease and gore.

The ancient Japanese in the Last Samurai and their lives rich in rock, fire, iron, and wood got me the same way.

I mean no disrespect…

But the fact is, America is no longer the land of the free.

You and I…

We are the Modern American Slave.

We are the men who those in power feed upon, use up, and throw away.

The proof is everywhere:

Wall Street robbed us of our future when they raped and pillaged our retirement accounts.

Feminists robbed us of love and affection when they poisoned women's hearts against us.

Washington robbed us of our freedom when they legislated away our God-given rights one by one.

In the process, they robbed us of the most precious thing of all... Our fire.

How did we lose our fire?

You don’t sell your soul in some Faustian bargain.

You bleed it out slow, one sterile, plastic, right-angled day at a time.

You try to jump-start it with nostalgia.

You look back to your golden years, when you were a god.

You look back to that time you trekked through Nepal, or the summer you lived out of your pickup truck, broke, tan, and happy.

You look back and think “God to be single again.”

But that’s not it.

It’s not the large commitments you’ve accepted, but the small ones you’ve shirked.

Remember how simple it all is:

Music. Put on headphones, lose yourself. Drift into sleep with the sounds of the masters in your ears.

Writing. Dust off your journal. Write down your theories, your could-be futures, your unhinged rants.

Outside. Unplug everything. Walk a mile in the dark. Build an unreasonably large bonfire.

Poetry. Put the business book down. Try some Buber or Whitman or Ted Hughes instead.

Conversation. Ring up the best conversationalist you know and take him to lunch. Light each other’s minds on fire.

As a young boy, I had imagined raising my children in the greatest nation on earth.

But before my eyes, I saw our once great country became a nation of handout seekers and special interest groups.

I saw greedy billion dollar companies manipulate the political process to protect their interests and line their own pockets.

I saw moral decay and outright corruption at all levels of government.

In short, almost everything I had held sacred and loved about this country as a boy was being destroyed before my eyes… and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Technically I still lived in a "free" country. But I'd never felt more trapped, more stuck, more helpless.

I'd tried to turn my life around before. Usually by forcing myself to "work harder" and "be more disciplined"… which usually lasted all of a few hours before I crashed and burned and felt even more pathetic than I when I'd started.

I was determined not to make the same mistake this time.

That's when it hit me like a two-by-four to the head: I didn't need to "work harder." I needed to be INSPIRED.

I realized that trying to live your life without being inspired is like trying to drive a car without fuel.

It doesn't matter how powerful your engine is. If there's no gas in the tank, you're going nowhere.

My whole life, I had thought of inspiration as something that was "nice to have."

I realized now it was absolutely ESSENTIAL… and that its absence in my life was the root cause of all my misery.

Today... light the fire, become inspired, live deliberately.