I like candles. There is something about a candle that is soothing, hopeful, simple, beautiful, soft. There is a reason candles are so associated with spirituality and romance. Candles touch our hearts, soften and open them to things wider than ourselves. There is something about the gentle, controlled fire that warms the heart as fire warms the body.

Perhaps it is the light, reminding us of the power a little light has to illuminate many things. Perhaps one cannot read by candlelight, but one can do a great deal more with just a little light than with no light at all. There is something about a gentle light that is far more relaxing and restful than the glare of many fluorescents or the fright of absolute dark. Candlelight sooths the mind and allows one to let go of worry and stress and just be by bringing one back to the simpler things in life: fire, light, warmth.

Then again, perhaps it is the smell, the aroma of fire, smoke, wax...and whatever other scent the candle company decides to stick in there. Granted, we've all met a candle or two that has not the attractive aroma conducive to slowing and resting, but most candles have a relaxing, smooth, subtle aroma that wraps us up and carries us at least a little farther away from our troubles and distress. Aromas can do that, you know. Smells can have quite the powerful emotion, spiritual, and mental impact on humans (both bad and good smells). It's amazing the power the simple things have over us.

Or maybe it is just the warmth of the thing, the little bit of radiating heat touching our bodies and our spirits. Sometimes the things that seem like they couldn't amount to much at all affect us far more than we could possibly conceive. Sometimes it only takes the light of one little candle to begin melting the hardened wax around our cold souls. Sometimes it only takes the light of one candle to reveal the emptiness of our own souls.

And sometimes candles make us thirst, thirst for the thing that can fill up the empty ache that we've discovered. Sometimes we despair, we give up on finding that thing, that thing we can't name that haunts us late at nights when we're alone, that thing that seems to offer fulfillment that we can never quite catch. And so we turn away from the candles, the light and warmth that remind us of the light and warmth we don't have inside of us. We hide from what we feel we cannot have, and so deprive ourselves of the little light left in our lives. I wish, sometimes, that I could be a candle. I wish to be that subtle, sweet aroma in the air whispering to souls that there is more; the small, soothing ray of light giving hope to the hopeless that the more is achievable; the last beam of warmth to hardened, chilly souls that Someone or Something can warm them again and melt the hardness, heal the brokenness, offer wholeness. I wish I were a candle.