It is a frigid morning in early January as I begin this. There is ice on the window glass, and in this first discernible light I can see here and there patches of snow remaining in a neighbor’s field from last week’s storm. A few miles southeast of the field Hutch Mountain is yet a silhouette against the slowly unfolding dawn. Above and slightly west of its summit a few wispy cirrus have turned scarlet against the powder blue sky. Soon shafts of golden light will pour through the leaves of a large privet outside the window and dapple the pine wall, the brick hearth, and the carpet.

The fire started easily and is burning well. As usual, Spike has claimed her spot on the hearth rug and is reposed there dreaming. Her paws twitch slightly and she makes little huffing sounds while I wonder, does the crackling and whispering and hissing of the fire soothe her as much as its warmth? Does it sound to her obliquely like speech, as it does to me, and does it carry to her canid spirit intimations of mystery, as it does to mine?

In the tranquil context of the room and the hour, the questions do not feel to me like idle rumination. For the miracle at hand is more, even, than the light now filling our part of the earth after a virtually instant journey of ninety three million miles. The miracle is also that here, and almost certainly in thousands of places elsewhere at this very moment, two members of radically differing species, a human and a dog, are relaxed and at peace in each other’s company, have in fact come to love each other. What seems ordinary is suffused with the movement of Spirit.

And yes. The fire is talking.

In its crackling and whispering and hissing it is articulating its truth, speaking its mystery, singing the spell which converts energy and form, transmutes darkness into light and coldness into heat, purifies what is ordinary into what is miraculous.

The medieval alchemists understood this process and found within in it an impeccable if labyrinthine metaphor in which to cloak their understandings, dangerous heresies, about the purification and transformation of consciousness. They taught that physical existence is the alembic in which the soul is purified and transformed through the application of heat, through passion and grief and joy and pain, through love and bitterness, through laughter and weeping, through the healing abandonment of Self in sexuality and the equally healing reunion with Self that comes in the spiritual ardor of celibacy, and then finally the abandonment of all attachment as one achieves union with Spirit.

Through heat.

Through the fire.

If you could append a sound to the way the sun has just now erupted over Hutch Mountain to engage and burn away the fog lying along the channel of Robinson Creek, the way it enters the frozen globules on the leaves of the privet before effecting their transformation from crystal to liquid, what you would hear would not be guitars or flutes or the muted whistlings of morning birds; you would hear trumpets and drums.

You would hear, as I hear, the call of a coal train on its way out of the Tellico Mountains to a repository in Atlanta. Heat. You would hear the disparate voices of heat - a fire, a train, a waking crow, children shouting playfully at a bus stop, the sound of a dog dreaming.

Heat.

The alchemists saw through the illusion of a geocentric universe. They knew that the earth rolls under and around the sun in a timeless pas de deux, and in this truth couched teachings about the soul’s yearning for union with its source: The mind orbits the unquenchable fire of Spirit, ever seeking the heat of divinity.

They taught that within the context of heat all things are able to perceive their interrelationships and their inseparable connections with all other things. They made obscure allusions to secret kinds of heat in which life could flourish and grow even in the dead of winter, vague references to the necessity of veiling their own art in metaphor and symbol during a time of intellectual and spiritual darkness. And their essential symbol, heat, with its power to fuse, sunder, change and transform, stood for love.

This morning it is not difficult to imagine a man some fifteen centuries earlier warming himself as I am doing by an early fire as the winter day breaks. Perhaps he has also been pondering the manner in which ordinary things, when heated in the alembic of a loving heart, transform into what is wondrous. Perhaps it happens for him, too, that in the crackling, whispering, hissing speech of the fire, and in the promise of yet another golden dawn, Spirit comes to proffer its treasure:

“I bring you heat, out of which you are free to fashion your magic, and your forms of love.”