Where Does the Candle Wax Go?

Where Does the Candle Wax Go?

By Kateb Nuri-Alim Shunnar

Where does the candle wax go when it burns?

We watch it melt, slow and graceful, curling around the wick like a silken robe letting go of form. It disappears right before our eyes, the flame flickering gently like a whisper of spirit. But where does it go? Is it gone? Lost? Or has it simply transformed?

This question isn’t just about wax. It is a question about life, love, pain, giving, and what remains of us when we have poured ourselves out. It’s about the light we carry and what is left behind after the heat of time has shaped and reshaped us.

When I was a boy, my grandmother Celestine used to light a candle every night at sundown. No words, no explanation just her hands, aged and knowing, striking a match with sacred silence. I’d ask her sometimes, “Why do you light the candle, Grandmama?” She’d smile with that slow wisdom that only years and soul can shape, and say, “Because someone has to remind the dark that light still lives here.”

One night, I asked her a different question: “Where does the wax go?” She paused. Her fingers held still in the air, and she looked out the window as if she were watching the stars settle into their evening prayers. Then she told me a story a story that has never left me.

She said, “Long ago, in the village of Hushara, where the wind carried voices of the ancestors through the trees, there lived a woman named Luma. Luma was known for her candles each one handmade, fragrant with wild herbs, and infused with a prayer. They say Luma didn’t just make candles; she listened to them. Each candle, she believed, held a soul’s longing a sorrow, a joy, a hope too tender for words. And when someone burned one of her candles, their prayer would rise with the flame, the wax melting away like a soul offering itself to the Creator.

“But the villagers noticed something strange once the candles were spent, people were lighter. Not just the air in the room, not just the shadows on the walls but their hearts. Burdens they carried for years seemed to slip away in the melting. So they began to say, ‘Luma’s wax doesn’t melt. It ascends. It returns to the Source and comes back down as peace.’”

My grandmother said that story was passed down through generations, not because of science or mystery, but because of truth. Not the kind of truth that you measure with rulers or weigh on scales, but the kind you feel in your chest when life gets heavy and something invisible lifts it, just a little.

That’s what the candle teaches us, doesn’t it?

The wax goes nowhere yet everywhere. It changes. It feeds the flame, becomes part of the light, drifts into the air as unseen particles, a dance of energy and devotion. Just like our time here. Just like us.

Each act of love, every time we give of ourselves our patience, our forgiveness, our presence it melts away a little of our ego. It melts the hardened places inside us. And while it may feel like loss, what’s really happening is transformation.

You might look at a candle and see it getting smaller. But to the spirit, that candle is growing. Its flame reaches places wax never could. Its warmth enters souls the solid form could not touch. This is the secret of divine mathematics: what we think is subtraction is often expansion.

Sometimes we are the wax softened by the fire of trials, surrendering to something higher. And sometimes we are the flame burning bright because someone before us offered their wax so we could shine. Think of the prayers your mother or grandmother whispered over your life, like oil poured into your path. You may never have heard them, but they burned so you could be seen.

So I ask you, when life melts you where do you go?

Do you retreat? Do you fear the fire and try to hold your shape? Or do you trust that the melting is sacred, that it means your soul is pouring itself into something bigger than you?

To be poured out is not to be empty. It is to be useful. It is to become light in someone’s darkness. Every challenge, every grief, every sacrifice when given with love becomes a burning prayer. And prayers, my beloved, do not vanish. They rise.

And maybe just maybe that’s where the wax goes. Not to the floor, not to the air, but to heaven, carried on flame-wings, as the universe collects our offerings and repurposes them as peace, clarity, and grace.

Let the candle remind you that your life, too, is meant to burn with purpose. That even as time melts away your outer shell, your flame can still guide others home. That the moments you give, the forgiveness you extend, the beauty you create when no one sees all of it is never lost.

Like Luma’s candles, your light does not go unnoticed.

So, light your candle tonight. Watch the wax disappear. And as it does, whisper your own longing into the fire. Know that the Creator receives it. Know that the universe, in its silent wisdom, turns even your smallest melting into something eternal.

Where does the candle wax go?

It becomes light.

It becomes love.

It becomes you.