Notes from the wilderness
gifts of summer
I’ll begin with an apology for my silence since mid-summer.
I’m sorry for my absence and may what I bring back from this time be of good use….
Summer has been a challenge here in the Mid Ohio Valley. There’s been a drought of several months duration. Right now, the leaves of the young pawpaw trees are visibly wilted and some won’t make it. Crossing the Cumberland Gap into the Eastern Panhandle, there are mature trees that have skipped fall foliage and moved straight into incipient dying…The weather patterns have been odd- small storm cells appear and then just seem to evaporate. This week, I again watched the promise of over an inch of precipitation morph into a damp glimmer on my early run though the woods. I’ve never been a fan of watering the garden, choosing to rely on rainfall and a good mulching, but I changed my tune this year.
The earth transition from summer to autumn (with some accompanying moisture) ran from the last week of July until recently. I spent part of that time in the Panhandle where intense heat alternated with the occasional toad strangler of a downpour. From there, I traveled north to the Ottawa valley. No drought there- lushness abounded aided by lashings of tropical storm Debbie. I spent several days near the River of Abundance and Time- those stories will carry us through the autumn.
Autumn arrived on August 6, bringing the creaking songs of crickets and cicadas. The sky now presses down and it is time again to begin the gathering in the harvest and preparing for the winter to come. What would we gather in at this time to carry us through the human madness of an election cycle and the deep cold of Inauguration Day? Every season has its gifts, so here are some wee packages from the summer…
The first gift I have to lay at your feet is that it is not only possible to go off-grid for a while, but that it is deeply necessary. The craziness of the world seems to tick on perfectly well in my absence and I venture that it might continue without yours as well. My doing this is no accident- I have an ongoing annual commitment to prayer and fasting where there is no room for sound bites or tweets. It was a deep relief to sink into the song of the world for a sweet short time. Notable this time round is that the great quietude of that song has found a little place in me to reside. A small homestead that I might tend in times of wild perturbations…and might become yours as well. I hadn’t realized in my “I don’t doomscroll FB or Instagram or X or BBC World News” little world how much static had wired into my brain from even a somewhat managed approach to the web. So I offer this to you- static is real and noisy and part of our daily discombobulation. It’s a choice.
The second gift that I would offer is the gift of community. I could not have done any of the things I have in the past few weeks without it. There were those who made it possible for me to engage in that great prayer. Those who tended my home world via action and those who simply tended me via their thoughts and prayers.
How has this become a luxury?
It is a great and extraordinary thing to arrive at a friend’s house with 10 days of gear and dirty laundry, leave them with such odd offerings and promptly head out on the next journey…Or as in the case of my journey home, to leave my sister with a fine case of the Covid. She sent me on my way with duck eggs, strong coffee and ceremony. She still loves me.
Who does this for us?!?!
Friends. Which is a term I’ve never taken lightly. Acquaintances can be innumerable, friends are rare. If you can count them on more than one hand, they probably are edging towards acquaintance reality. But what makes a friend? Time in the trenches doing hard things. Cautionary tale- I have a friend who had a circle around them. There were monthly gatherings, expensive trips to weddings, weekends at music festivals, swanky dinners out. But when the income dried up and the roof did not, when the diagnoses began rolling in like carrion crows scenting battle, the ‘friends’ disappeared. Because friendship is created from doing hard things together, be they physical or emotional or spiritual…
If I hear one more ad urging me to ‘make memories’ via cruises and casinos, I might scream. Stop it, Spotify.
Thus the third unsexy gift I would offer you from summer is work. Hard work. Not a particularly popular idea, right? Given that we’re constantly being urged to indulge every passing whim…To work less. Work smarter, not harder they say. Well, look around at the current harvest of instant food, instant entertainment and instant relationship. The fact that I can have (just about) anything I want from bloody Amazon at a single click has not made me or anyone else of my acquaintance happier, sexier or a better citizen. Quite the contrary, I would argue.
By the sweat of your brow
Shall you get bread to eat,
Until you return to the ground—
For from it you were taken.
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.1
See- there’s a lovely autumn message for you. We are all gonna die. And everything is thus right in the world. So get to work. As my mentor said to a dear friend years ago- it doesn’t really matter what you do. You can be married or not. You can be an acupuncturist. Or not. Just get the fuck to work on something.
“Humans participate in the making of the meaning of life—not human life, life—and our willingness to be claimed by life and understand the ending of everything we hold dear as something that helps life to continue is how life continues, and that’s how the meaning shows up. You try to prevent people from dying, or you try to prevent your dog from dying, or your houseplant from dying, or the culture, or what you have instead of a culture, but if cultures die—they surely die. Cultures die. Syndromes don’t die, though.
Until you are willing to be claimed by the way it is and must be, until you stop playing your get out of jail card saying we can clever our way out of this, it doesn’t have to include us, we will never be included in life, we will always be on the outside looking in, we will always wonder about a better time, we will always try to get to heaven, we will always colonize and plunder people who have not given into any kind of syndrome at all in the name of trying to save ourselves. That’s a given.”2
https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.3.19?lang=bi&aliyot=0
https://www.dailygood.org/story/491/the-meaning-of-death-stephen-jenkinson-ian-mackenzie/
Lovely.