Like embers

When you perceive this freshness, you see every natural object (the surface of sandstone, the bark of spruce in the sun, the transparent substance of water) as embers, for like embers, like flames, they are ever active and ever new. Flames and embers are physically new at every moment. Have you ever seen old flames or old embers ? And you see them as embers because they also are physically new at every moment, -ever new, ever fresh.  

 

For Heraclitus, fire was the basic element : all things are in flux, and all things are flames. I read this in a book by Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963) :

There was no stability left in the world of Heraclitus. ''Everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest''. Everything is in flux, even the beams, the timber, the building material of which the world is made : earth and rocks, or the bronze of a cauldron -they are all in flux. The beams are rotting, the earth is washed away and blown away, the very rocks split and wither, the bronze cauldron turns into green patina, or into verdigris : ''All things are in motion all the time, ...even though this escapes our senses'', as Aristotle expressed it. [...] Thus there are no solid bodies. Things are not really things, they are processes, they are in flux. They are like fire, like a flame which, though it may have a definite shape, is a process, a stream of matter, a river. All things are flames : fire is the very building material of our world, and the apparent stability of things is due to the laws, the measures, which the processes in our world are subject to.

And in Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy (1958) :

In the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus the concept of Becoming occupies the foremost place. He regarded that which moves, the fire, as the basic element. [...] Modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word ''fire'' by the word ''energy'' we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact that substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change, and the elementary particles can actually be made from this substance as is seen from many experiments on the creation of elementary particles. Energy can be changed into motion, into heat, into light and into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.

Street scene at the archeological excavations at Ephesus (photo Ad Meskens). 
To my mind, the important thing to see in this picture is not the vestiges  :  it is the physical freshness of all what you see : all is always in flux, all is always physically new. 

 

In the words of Heraclitus, which I always keep in mind :  
This cosmos, none of gods or men made, but it always was and is and shall be : an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.