or: the week I didn’t tend the fire.
I pulled Zoroaster for the week. Keeper of the sacred fire. I meant to sit with him all week and study the card, live the practice, write it up while it was still warm.
Then the week happened.
Three nights, barely any sleep. Everything running behind. And by Wednesday the fire I was supposed to be tending had burned down to a coal. I did almost nothing with this card, exercise or selfcare. If you’re waiting for the part where I turn that into a tidy lesson, I don’t have one. I have the week itself.
So let’s use it.
Here’s what nobody tells you about the low weeks. When the good fire burns down, your mind doesn’t go quiet with it. It gets loud. Depleted, wired, three nights deep into no sleep and the thoughts start coming fast and mean. I failed at this. I’m behind on everything. I’m not disciplined enough to be running anything. Who do I think I am. How about you act like you have a degree.
That’s kindling too. It’s just lighting a different fire, the one that burns you.
Unguarded, it spreads. Midweek I had a blowout with my wife. A real one. The kind that has almost nothing to do with what it’s about and everything to do with a man running on empty, a fire burned down to nothing, and a head full of thoughts he never once stopped to question. The low fire didn’t stay in my chest. It came out sideways, as heat, at the person closest to me.
Which is the exact thing Zoroaster was trying to tell me all along.
“Use your thoughts wisely” isn’t a good-week luxury. It’s a survival skill for the brutal ones. Your thoughts are the kindling, always. In a good week they light the fire that warms you. In a hard week, left unguarded, they light the one that eats you alive. Right thought, right word, right deed, in that order, because the wrong word comes from the wrong thought. Ask my wife.
So here’s the practice I actually landed on this week, the one I never planned: guard the door.
Not the door to your house. The one between you and your own thoughts.
Because here’s what I noticed, wrung out and raw and paying attention for once, when you’re struggling, other people are kind to you. They see it on your face and they soften. They cut you slack. They show up. That’s what people are for, and it’s worth letting them.
The one person who doesn’t soften? You. Inside your own head, in a week like this, you’re the harshest voice in the room. Everyone around you is being gentle, and you’re standing at your own door letting every cruel thought walk straight in and govern you.
So guard it. Be the doorkeeper. When the thought comes; you failed, you’re behind, you’re not enough, you are allowed to not let it in. You are allowed to be as kind to yourself as the people around you are trying to be. That is not soft. In a week like this one, that is the entire discipline.
Let people carry the parts they can see. But the door to your own thoughts, that one only you can guard, and it’s the one that matters most.
The mantra this week was “I awaken the fire of my heart.” Awaken. Not ignite from ash. Not build from nothing. You only awaken what’s still asleep, which means the fire was never out. It just burned low while I made it through.
I didn’t tend it this week. I banked it down to a coal and I guarded the door as best I could and some nights I didn’t guard it well at all.
And it’s still lit.
Here I am, late and worn through, writing this anyway. Turns out that’s the whole proof.