Tousled and Strewn

It is still today — a relief after two days of relentlessly battering winds.  The Christmas arrangement in the front planter near the road twice took flight, which is why it is now stored in the barn.  The deck chairs are overturned, and the chickens’ parallel bars were summarily dismantled.  Checking the mailbox was an elevating experience, and any time at all on the highway overpass was too much.  It’s as if the celestial eye determined that the world needed a thorough sweeping, which looking around is an uncomfortably accurate description.  The streets of our little cosmic neighborhood have, in recent years, grown disgracefully littered — politically, relationally, morally and socially to name just a few of the pieces of trash that have us tousled and strewn.  We can’t seem to stand one another, though if the popcorning allegations have any merit the most powerful among us apparently can’t keep our hands and other appendages off of their subordinates or casual acquaintances, while the weakest among us can’t seem to get a hand of any kind.  We talk a good game about our religion and our noble priorities, but our actions dramatize a very different script.  We snark and snarl and grope and grab.  A little clean sweeping would do us good.

But whether the wind completed its work or, more likely, simply gave up trying, the winds calmed overnight and morning welcomed the sun into a crisp, cloudless and calm day.  I filled the chicken feeders and replenished the water, then paused to relish the new day.  It has yet to get bitterly cold, but even so the green patches still evident in the grass, asserting an impressive resilience, nonetheless surprise me.  Passing deer, almost clandestine among the tall prairie grasses, pause to take my measure as I pass nearby.  The towering cedars along the tree line, with their silvery-blue berries, hint at future possibilities, and the older “orchard” — the dozen or so fruit trees we planted the first few months after moving here — are poppled, like goose bumps, with buds.  

Fruit — nascent and anticipatory, to be sure,  but a portent of something nourishing and sweet for a change.  

Those buds, alone, are almost enough to get me through these cold and prickly days.  At least they set a good and hopeful example…

…of the fruitfulness the rest of us might find the time and space to resume.  

Finding Our Way In the Circle

We have finally stowed the ear protectors, looking forward to an auditory break.  And a muscular one, for that matter.  Having put the chain saw through its paces the past couple of weeks, we have in more recent days been encouraging the chipper/shredder to flex its muscles — and ours.  And did I mention that it’s loud?  Once we had trimmed the cuttings and stacked them Goldilocks-style into “shredding” (the little stuff), “chipping” (the medium stuff) and “burning” (the big stuff), we pulled the starter rope, affixed the eye and ear protectors as the 14-horse engine roared to life, and started feeding the beast. 

It turns out that there is a little more chainsawing to do, shortening a few of the larger limbs that had escaped notice to make them more suitable for the fire pit, but otherwise the piles are gone.  And it feels good — partly to have several of the trees in better trim, and partly just to have the project completed for a time and cleaned up.  But what feels especially good is having the limbs turned back around for their next contribution.  In the coming months, the wood chips will become mulch around the bushes and flowering trees in the meadow to help initially with moisture retention, and later, as the chips work their way into the soil, as organic matter rebuilding the soil to support the growth of new limbs that will eventually be pruned and chipped and mulched all over again.  It’s nature’s “right and left grand” around the circle of life before returning home.

And it’s one of the lessons we have been trying to practice from nature’s way of farming: that there is no such thing as waste.  The end-put of one process — trimmed and shredded branches, animal manure, egg shells, food scraps, etc. — becomes the valuable input of another.  “Waste”, as commonly understood, is less an indictment of the unappreciated material at hand than it is of my lack of understanding and underdeveloped imagination.  Waste is simply that which I haven’t yet discerned how to beneficially use.

But we keep learning and exploring and experimenting. The kitchen scraps that the chickens can’t eat we compost.  The grass clippings and leaves I once bagged and hauled away get the same composting treatment.  The straw bales — “waste” from someone else’s field — now stacked around and insulating the chicken coops will, come springtime after a winter of weathering and manuring, get spread over the potato beds among other things to protect and nourish a new season of growth.  And then become organic matter worked into the soil.

The circle of life.  Right and left grand.  

If only the idea would catch on in other parts of life.  

More appreciation than judgment.

More creativity than disposal.

Respectful welcome of the intrinsic possibilities, rather than dismissive rejection of the richness undiscerned.

Who knows how fruitful we might become?

We might even begin bowing not only to our partners, but to our corners as well; and dancing — promenading — along with the rest of creation.