Into the Heat
My Love Affair with Trees, Fire, Saws & Men
Now Available! Click here to purchase.
Intimate, informative, funny, touching…Cindy Bellinger’s new book has it all. One early reader surmised if John Muir had been a woman, this would have been her book. But Muir never ventured into the “heat” of relationships. Cindy gracefully curves this memoir around difficult choices and lets us see the better path she found through a forest.
— From the Back Cover —
A tree falls. Nothing simpler than that. But Cindy Bellinger knows a find when she sees one—especially when her only source of heat is a woodstove.
This brightly rendered memoir from the mountains of northern New Mexico follows the author as she breaks loose from a hapless relationship and buys a house in the heart of a forest.
In short order she finds herself gathering branches after every high wind, splitting logs in blizzards, and learning a chainsaw is the ultimate tool for staying in the now. This is a story of muscled capability.
But plenty of insights travel between past loves and bygone days, and every woman who’s ever doubted her choice of men nods knowingly at the author’s resolve to move on. Trusting her intuition becomes a solid navigational device.
Into the Heat is about withstanding the rigors of rugged terrain, both inner and outer. Mostly it’s about the joy of hunkering down in front of a warm fire on cold winter nights.
— Excerpts —
Living among trees soothes the nerves as living near water does. Both absorb deep inner jaggedness and you don’t even know an alteration has happened until wholeness starts feeling possible again.
There is a culture within trees…the constant aliveness puts troubles into perspective…trees lift then release hurt and cover wounds with their own solace. Trees give lessons in being still.
Upon returning from the river, Fulton asked if he could freshen my drink. And out of the blue, a flash—one of those gut-wrenching, other-worldly knowings—shrieked inside me that it didn’t matter which woman was with him, only that one was. I admonished myself to stop imagining things. I turned my head and fell into a very rocky relationship.
