8-28-16

Crop Rotation

The last post mentioned how Anne Lamott's brother became paralyzed by the extent of a postponed project in school, generating the bird-by-bird philosophy and giving the name to her book on life observations. This was on my mind this week when I harvested field tomatoes for seed and faced this crate of fruit.

It was a hot day in the field but I was able to sit in the shade of a building and begin the work of seeding all the tomatoes. As I sat there, it occurred to me that I was privileged to see this miracle of harvest. As I began to take each tomato, slice it open, and scoop out its seeds into a bucket, I knew that each of the tomatoes was having its own moment in my hands and that each of those moments was a metaphor for impermanence as well as the connections we shared as living beings. Now, lest one say how improbable this is, let me say that my intention was to move through the task as quickly as possible but it was only when I slowed down for each tomato that a more nuanced meaning emerged.

Certainly, not every task in our lives can be afforded the individual attention this tomato task required. Some tasks call forth greater energy and speed and that is appropriate to them. Persistent and consistent  hard work are innate to the profession of farming.  Few other professions offer as much metaphorical material to work with. In farming, Mother Nature is fully present. She is the metaphor for fertility and abundance. What she creates from the soil is nourishment. What is created demands the work of human hands for cultivation and eventual harvest. The seeds in every tomato are the beginning of a wave of abundance in years to come. The colors of the farm wash over us as we tend them and they tinge our dreams and our storytelling. Who hasn't heard the story of Jack and the Beanstalk?

The metaphorical way of farming is intrinsic to the reality of the work. Hand tools are the technology of choice for small-scale farming. Hands-and-knees weeding is the task of tender care for the limited crops. Small is beautiful, to borrow a phrase from E. F. Schumacher. Hard work is beautiful, too. Hard work is the heart of growing food for the hundreds who rarely consider how it has all come about. I sing the praises of the farmer, just as Walt Whitman did of all things and beings.

"These are the thoughts of all men of all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing,
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe."

Yes, being close to the earth is a privilege for one who has grown up on concrete and blacktop. It is soul work to be as intimate with the earth as the farmer is with his land. Seeding tomatoes for several hours made real how hard it is to be grateful for what the earth provides us. Yet, tomato-by-tomato, the song is sung. There is gladness in a farmer's hard life. Crops and the cycles of the seasons are a measure of our own mindfulness and commitment. Let us look closely at the mighty tomato. What can the tomato teach us?

8-21-16

Whither Wisdom?

Wisdom is where you find it. We have the idea that there is something fixed about wisdom and, to be sure, there are some universally accepted components of it. Those components are shared over time and space, in many cultural contexts, and among those who subscribe to them. Having said that about the solid nature of wisdom, there is something to be said for those same cultural contexts and the people whose lives include versions of wisdom that make us think that wisdom is fluid. To the same extent, truth is fluid. I am not talking here about "truthiness," that concept hatched by politicians to explain dark motives. I am talking about components essential to personal and civic wholeness.

Because my concept of wisdom is fluid, I read and study and act with the intent to find wisdom wherever it may be found. Even the mouths of babes may be sources of wisdom. My reading this past week brought to my attention several aspects of wisdom. Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder mentions one source of wisdom.

"So the people of civilization read books. For some centuries the 'library' and the 'university' have been our repository of lore. In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!
"Philosophy is thus a place-based exercise. It comes from the body and the heart and is checked against shared experience. ... We make a full circle in acknowledging that it is necessary to pay attention to the village elders and also to the wise elders of the Occident who have been miraculously preserved through the somewhat fragile institution of the library."

Anne Lamott picks up the theme in this passage from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life--wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean. Aren't you? I ask."

 It goes without saying that one era's "wisdom" is another era's junk thought. I'm not sure that there is a thing we could call common wisdom. If there were, wouldn't we all be kind and loving and compassionate? Wisdom doesn't seem to be commonly recognized, but there is wisdom for all of us to find. Books may be one repository and deep relationships may be another. In a time of loud language noise and bombast, we seek the wisdom that conforms to what Gary Snyder and Anne Lamott describe--in books as one source.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the well known Vietnamese monk, has spent most of his life promoting the wisdom we can find in each one of us. He has been teaching about mindfulness as the practice that uncovers our innate wisdom. He says that we are all related to one another because we are human beings. He calls this Interbeing. The mindfulness trainings he teaches include one for nourishment and healing. In part it says:

"Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I am committed to cultivating good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I will practice looking deeply into how I consume the Four Kinds of Nutriments, namely edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness. I am determined not to gamble, or to use alcohol, drugs, or any other products which contain toxins, such as certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations."

His wisdom is a path open to all of us. We are all able to enlist our intention, attention, and mindfulness in ways that open up the path to wisdom, to the universal elements of life that make us healthy and whole. In the long run, most paths of wisdom lead to the relief of suffering--ours and others'. The threads of wisdom we can pick up can be used to patch the fabric of a life shattered or a frayed civic conversation. Books are certainly a durable source of wisdom, but our experiences with other human beings and with all the beings and things of the earth can also be sources of wisdom for us. Books are a metaphor for wisdom sources, but experiences are the basic lifeblood of our loving concern for one another. Being and doing are the poles of our daily lives.

The Short List

One of the most interesting aspects of blogging for me is writing with the scary knowledge that others will be reading what I write from a personal perspective that is very different from mine. I like to think of this as other people "holding my feet to the fire", making me more accountable not only to myself but to them. I am aware that I need to scrutinize what I write with more care, being more certain that the words I choose are appropriate and that the they all come together in some sensible way. Even though we are in an age of massively overwhelming amounts of data, much of it is not really information, if by that we mean useful to the purposes of living a meaningful life. There is definitely pressure in all of our lives to consume information on a scale that, were it food, we would find ourselves massively obese and fundamentally disabled.

In light of this tendency for information consumption, for building a steady diet of new bytes and bites of data, it is counterintuitive to consider reading something we have already read and put aside. However, when one thinks back to the books that have made an impact on one's life, it is probably true that all of us could name at least one book that we would like to revisit. Maybe it was E. B. White's Charlottes' Web or (could this be true?) Melville's Moby Dick. I have caught myself saying "There is so much to read that rereading doesn't make much sense". I have a fondness for saying that "Life is short" and that serves as some sort of rationale for plowing ahead with the newly issued New York Times "bestseller". But these expressions don't ring true when it comes to rediscovering an old friend on the library shelf. Life is not so short that we can't welcome a new reading of a personal classic. Do we reject our old friends because they aren't young? Books from long ago are our elders. They contain some wisdom that has embedded itself in us and we honor their permanence by opening their covers. Wisdom is ever new and, in the case of what we glean from books, required reading.

All of us are amalgamations of influences we have accumulated over a lifetime and some of the most important are what we have gleaned from the books we have read. Even if we are ensconced in a livelihood that doesn't depend on reading, all of us have been formed by something we have read. An ongoing habit of reading brings us in touch with the minds of others whose life experiences overlap with ours in surprising and interesting ways. Of course, we won't be able to read everything on our lists of books, but we will be able to identify the books we have loved. It will be a much shorter list than the ones we have yet to crack open. It would be worth a few minutes of our time to compile our own short list of books that we might wish to reread.

 The old favorites will look very new and different in the light of where we now find ourselves moving through the thickets and paths of our daily lives. The fresh look we will get is just another good reason for starting over with them. Perhaps they have more to teach us, more to tell us about our memories and expectations for the future. Many well-thumbed books will now find us in different life circumstances, perhaps with children or partners or even grandchildren. We will read them silently or, better yet, aloud to a new audience that is evolving. The magic they held for us will be passed along to someone else and so it will go in the life of a good book. There won't be any winners or losers on our short lists. What books are on your short list?

8-7-16

Our dog Rosie and I (and dog Lucky for many years before this) go for a walk up beyond the house on the county road as often as weather and inclination allow. The land around us is packed with rocks and nature periodically thrusts them up through her skin and they protrude at all angles. Some around here charge money for others to come and gather just certain ones for sale to landscapers and home developers in distant places, as far away as California we are told. Sometimes the county scrapes the old road and lays up stones along the way, some bigger than 4-wheelers. When the road is scraped down and widened, the stones are shoved to the side and piled up in new places.

It has been my weakness to fall in love with stonescaping. I am not one of those purchasing rocks for clients in California. I am someone who uses them to build walls and rock gardens, all of which are designed to be small and inviting. I make stone paths to and from the gardens and around the old farmhouse that is our refuge. I have helped build cairns along the side of the county road where the stones are obvious. When I am building I am thinking about how each stone has a better face and a better edge and how that stone will fit in with all the others. No stone is left behind. There is no discard pile of rocks. The walls and gardens are nature's things and she does not discriminate in the beauty of each rock. Every rock has a place in the wall somewhere. Who am I to favor one over another?

Many of my walls were being built when something else was on my mind. When my dad was sick and I worried about him dying, I was building a wall and I dedicated the work to him. When I developed a space in the front of the house for a garden and was beginning the wall around it, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. I had my portable radio on those days and as the tragic scene unfolded and the nation reeled I dedicated the wall to the victims and their families. I wished into every stone of the wall memories and commitment and healing. Somehow I knew that my hard work to construct something that had heft and stability was what I had to do. I knew that my wall was a small effort at counteracting encroaching death and immeasurable suffering. It was all I could do at the time.

Now, as time has passed and my walls remain much as they were when I first built them, I have taken them for granted. They continue to serve as they did when I laid them in along the garden's edge. But I have forgotten how they came to be metaphors for aspects of the human condition. When I read about someone in the Middle East being stoned, I don't think of my walls. When I hear that someone is "stoned" from drugs, I don't think of them. I am reminded to begin again with the things I take for granted. I am reminded to awaken to those things that have shaped me and which I have shaped. When I do this, I am in a dialogue with the earth. I am once more a resident of this place in our solar system amidst the multiplying galaxies that lie far beyond our measly comprehension. I could be swallowed by the incomprehensibility of it all, were it not for the stones stacked in the walls outside the door of my house. What else can I do but embrace each stone as a marker of this life all of us are leading?

So, one day, Rosie and I were on our walk and the cairn we had helped construct on the county road from all the stones cast up by the grader had been pushed over. In my earlier life, I might have lamented the loss. I might have been angry at the scattering of a precious thing. Stones are precious because of what we make of them. They have our memories and our intentions and dedication. This was a new and different day and the new cairn we began that day was fresh and common, as rocks are common and taken for granted. But we handle each one as though the whole wall could not be built without it. And in truth it would not be the same wall without it. So rocks are like minutes in our lives and like our intentions, too. They are like our commitments and our compassion. They are all the versions of love. They are elemental but we often take them for granted.

What happened?

8-4-16

So much has happened in the six years since I began this blog. It isn't necessary to catalog the details except to say that my journey has taken some twists and turns, like life for all of us. More importantly, what has happened to cause this blog to resurface is a realization that I needed to learn more about the technology of communication in the 21st Century. I am of a geezer age and instinctively inhibited when it comes to accepting change. Of course, I favor progress and have only lately come to understand how change is part of progress. Changing hearts and minds is a very difficult challenge and not always obvious but I am of the mind that progress is being made all the time. How do we notice it? Can it even be measured? Where is progress taking us?

I am reviving this blog at a time in our lives when so much is uncertain about the seaworthiness of our ship of State and the direction in which she is headed. I don't plan to advocate for any partisan causes here except for the causes that brought very different individuals together several hundred years ago to create the ship on which all of us are now passengers. As we are all passengers on this mighty ship of State, so are all people around the world passengers on this ship Earth. My intention is to advocate for all of us in a way that is relatively comfortable for me, as I am not by nature an "activist". All of us are activists in small ways that we might not notice. We are activists if we are members of a family and recognize the need to share a common lineage. We are activists if we buy organic produce and are willing to pay a slightly higher price for the safety it offers in this age of chemically treated mono-culture crops. We are activists if we volunteer for a local food bank or blood donation drive. We are activists in an almost infinite number of ways because activism implies an intention to engage one another for the good of all.

In addition, community and its varied iterations has come to represent a model for bringing diversity and tolerance into our lives when we are faced with troublesome dualities of us/them, black/white, for/against, good/evil, when we know deep inside ourselves that what brings us together as fellow human beings is greater than what separates us. Blogs, properly and respectfully constituted, serve to strengthen one's sense of community. Blogs are a forum for conversations among those who might otherwise disagree with one another. Ideally, a blog would gather together ideas about many truths and about beauty. It would be a pathway and not a destination. It would be a place where trust could be tested.

Perhaps my notion of what a blog is and can do is naive. I am willing to be taught and willing to be vulnerable, two aspects of my life that were not always prominent. Perhaps aging has had the effect of making my ego more pliable and permeable. I only hope so. In the spirit of community and sharing resources, I welcome your contributions to this conversation. In any case, I will periodically and in a more timely way add to this blog as ideas come to me or I am moved to share something with my community of readers.