Before My Candle

I sit before my candle and watch it the flame. How can a thing so still be so alive? The flame is mysterious to me. I’m told that energy is never destroyed, that it merely changes form. What form does the blue-and-yellow flower of fire morph into as it reaches to the ceiling, immobile as long as my breath does not reach it? Does it cycle back to be used by some other soul, some child of God asking questions that all seem rhetorical?

The candle illuminates my face, and I wonder how I appear to it. I suspect that animals can see and hear and sense things that are hidden to humans, and I wonder if inanimate objects or sources of energy like this flame can do the same. What would it see? Would it see dejection standing behind me this morning, massaging my shoulders and whispering into my ear, asking permission to grow into despair? Does it see my face as a battlefield across which rages a rapid, fluid conflict, with all the regiments of worry and regret and uncertainty and hope and fear advancing and retreating across its landscape, entire campaigns fought and lost with the space of two seconds?

The candle casts soft light onto the small books on my desk — my bible, my breviary, my missal. I start to reach for one of them, but my arm is too heavy, and if answers or comfort do not rise from the pages to change my day and inspire my heart, then the effort will be wasted, and so I talk myself out of even this slight act. I close my eyes again and can almost see the funnel cloud of thoughts inside me, defying my efforts to still them and to banish them.

The candle’s flame bobs in reaction as I sigh and then stand up. It glows even more brightly just before I cup my hand behind it, the gesture of a friend or lover, and extinguish it with my breath, the same breath needed and used by the plants and the trees in my little world. I watch as the thin snake of smoke rises from the red remnant at the tip of the wick, the ember as small as a mustard seed, and then even that is gone, and the smoke is gone, and the living flame is gone from this still room.

Where are the energies, the earnest whispers of my prayers? Where are they gone? Have they changed form? When I said “amen,” did they turn to smoke and curl upwards? Is there a crimson spark of faith left at the tip of my black and melancholy spirit as I turn to dress for the day, as I turn to leave my home and go to a place where I will be caught in the strong and noisy winds of making a living?

When I return to this little room tonight, will the candle see me, be aware of me, listen for the scratch of the kitchen match across the bottom of the little cup that holds the red-tipped sticks? When I sit again before my candle, will anything have changed? Will anything have remained the same as it was while I sat here before dawn, anxious and distracted and trying so hard to feel holy?

~ S.K. Orr