Heat: the power that brings dead matter into an animated state, i.e. life. Since the scientific revolution, the term “life” has been reserved for independent organisms (i.e. animals), denying “heat” the larger part of its power. A bitch in  heat, though, is ready to conceive, just as is the heated soil of spring brings forth seeds and heated rock swells and erupts upon the earth, creating excitement in anyone who witnesses it, no matter that 50,000,000 years have passed. The heat remains. Heat breeds heat. The result is hot, or matter excited enough to hatch, or fly, bearing both matter and heat onward, together. “Heat” is the body’s word. It is a height, or a hill, that has swollen out of a plain. It is the ground lifted by a seed leaf or a morel mushroom. It is the transformation made to the sun by earth heated by the sun. We, all of us, are the earth’s brood. We are her heat. We are her life. And the sun’s. It’s not that we are neither here nor there, but that we are at one.

“Red Hill,” John Day River Valley, Oregon