Born from a pilgrimage…
…sustained by the path forward.
To be human is in equal measure to be seen as well as to see; to be heard as well as to listen.
The embersway was born out of a pilgrimage I took in the fall of 2020- an extended solo wilderness venture in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. But more than this, it was born out of a long-held but little understood sense that life and the world it lives in, had something more to offer than a first glance could reveal.
For all the grandeur we aspire to, for all the knowledge and wisdom that comes with experience, there is a wisdom in the silence, in the beholding of the unknown, in the meeting of our unveiled selves, that we all too often pass by in our haste to live.
We often find ourselves living under the tyranny of the expectation, whether from the world around us or more subtly from within ourselves, of fooling ourselves into claiming to know the answers to life’s biggest and smallest questions alike.
The invitation to innocence, vulnerability, and curiosity is forever open to us. The life that awaits just on the other side of accepting this invitation, of saying with the last breath of this moments’ life “I don’t know,” is a life of unrivaled possibility and connectedness.
Just as an ember is balanced on the fulcrum between the extinguishing cover of death and the fanned breath of life, we too find ourselves moment to moment suspended between life and death. And meeting our choice with open arms, we may come to find that they’re one and the same. Herein lies the essence of our humanity.
This work is a celebration of the choices that makes us oh so human.
Nick Theisen- the writer behind Woodland Hearth.
I’m a log cabin, fireplace kind of guy who loves people and wants nothing more than for people to come alive. I relish in the freedom of not always needing to make sense and dancing with no reason at all.
I’m in love with story- how we tell story, how we understand story, how we live story. Listening, attention, laughter, curiosity, questions, silence, words, and presence- these are my greatest tools and it’s my joy learning to use them better and seeing how others use them.
Enjoying my humanness and that of others is my fodder for writing. I’ve worked as a freelance photographer, story-consultant and storyteller but now I prefer to spend my time simply writing, reading, observing the simplest of the fineries of life, meeting and conversing with new people, meditating, drinking tea or a pint at the local Irish pub, exploring, spending time with loved ones, and dwelling in the great mystery of life.
Often times I use 100 words when 10 would suffice. But the writings here are an illustration of a journey- a journey of coming to terms with the world as it is, an expedition of discovering and wrestling with what it is to be human, a pilgrimage of self-understanding that still has an entire life’s course waiting ahead. These writings live free from the pretense of possessing anything final, of being written from a place of completed arrival. They are, taken as a whole, a story of seeking, finding, and losing solid ground on which to rest.
