CINIS

The morning after a fire, a fireplace looks very quiet. Grey ash, a few black edges, a warmth that still rises from the stones if you hold your hand close. Everything loud is over.

Ash is what fire cannot take any further. The wood, the bark, the resin have all turned into light and heat and gone up the chimney. What is left is the part that stays.

Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that we die every day. He meant it calmly. Each day, he said, a little of our life is taken away, and even while we grow, our life is growing shorter. The hour that has passed is already gone. He wrote it gently, so that his friend would notice what he had while he still had it.

Loss has a similar quiet at its end. After a funeral, after a move, after the end of something we cared about, there comes a morning when the noise is over and only the essential is left. A few memories that hold. A lesson we did not ask for. People who stayed.

What remains after the fire is truer than what burned.

It can look like very little. A handful of grey dust after all that flame. But gardeners know that ash is one of the richest things you can give the soil. It carries minerals the fire could not destroy.

Sitting with the ash is part of the work. That is why this album starts here: before any new fire there is the ash of the last one, and it is where the next story begins.