Life Curiously Sprung From Death

 The trails we cleared last year through the woods have been one of my favorite improvements to the property.  Through the prairie, or around and behind the chicken yard, the path extends into the trees, over a creek, up a hill and onto the bluff, and then out again.  It is an extraordinary walk even on the most ordinary of days, but especially in winter; especially in winter with snow; especially in winter with snow, while it is snowing. 

We missed that magical window of opportunity last weekend when five inches of snow settled over the farmstead, but with temperatures in recent days moderating enough for the snow to soften we seized the moment yesterday before the blanket completely melts away.  Reminded by a neighbor in recent weeks that hunting season is underway, we bundled up for warmth, and then wrapped ourselves in neon jackets, just to be on the safe side.  With the dogs settled in for naps, we tugged on our boots and stepped off onto the trail.

 

Even in the best of times, it’s easy this time of year to feel “enclosed.”  The warmth of the hearth is hard to exchange for the icy wind outside.  Sedentariness is a struggle to interrupt with physicality.  But left to themselves, these quiet “comforts” can, without noticing the loss of emotional oxygen, quietly and psychologically strangle.  

 

That’s in the best of times.  And these aren’t those times.  Even with a vaccine on the horizon, the havoc wreaked by the global pandemic has demoralized us.  Even with the election behind us, our collective partisanship embarrasses us, and offers little promise of anything but more angry and paralyzing dysfunction to come.  Perhaps it is that we are simply weary of it all, or maybe it all really is as ominous as it seems.  All we know is that we smile less; tears wet our eyes more readily.  It doesn’t feel like the week of Christmas.

 

As we trudged into the woods, then, the chilly air felt renewing in that bracing way it can, and the hushing silence that only woods can beckon began to quiet that persistently disquieting drone deep within that we hadn’t been able to still in recent weeks.  We pushed aside fallen branches that cluttered the path – “nature’s pruning,” we call it.  We noted the various tracks and trails of wildlife who know this tree cover as home far more than we.  We noticed the remnant green leaves that remain on the miscellaneous branch tips, and mouthed the Peter Mayer song lyrics that spontaneously came to our lips, 

“Even when white obscures the scene

Still, in winter, there is green.”

 

And then we turned a corner, deep into the woods, and saw a broken tree trunk a short way off the trail.  The tree was clearly dead, and yet it was just as clearly alive in a completely new way.  I am no expert in flora fungi, but my subsequent reading on the subject suggests that the fungus that has happily taken hold of this fallen tree is opportunistic, rather than malignant – not causing the tree’s demise, but using that death to nourish its own vitality.  In a demonstrably vivid biblical sense, new life out of death.  A beginning, birthed by an ending.

 

I needed that curious discovery.  Preoccupied by death and dying of so many kinds, on so many fronts, I am profoundly grateful for the metaphorical reminder that all this cultural mess; all this rotted wrangling and hollowed out body politic; all this literal disease and death just might collectively represent some type of birth pangs.  Compost, in my line of work; “holy shit,” as Gene Logsdon once described it in his helpful book with that title.  

 

If that is the case, then whatever might be struggling to be born will have ample nourishment; there is plenty of…compost…to sustain it.

 

The fallen tree back in the woods doesn’t eliminate the stench of all that is seeming to suffocate us, but I’ve taken the image of it back along the trail, into the clearer spaces of my life as a curiously hopeful reminder of that which I know – and trust – but still forget:

 

Life will have its way.

 

May it be so.

Days When the Good is Not Far-Fetched

 It is oddly quiet around the farmstead, save for the gusting winds that portend chillier changes to come; a kind of suspended animation.  The garden is cleared of its spent vines and bushes; the tomato cages stored away.  The chicken yard is fully winterized, with the more capacious waterers replaced by the smaller heated ones plugged in and ready; runs wrapped with tarps and sided with straw; windows closed and secured.  The chickens, themselves - only yesterday, it seems, pathetic and threadbare with their molting - have replumed with warm resplendence.  Beyond our humble address, democracy, too, is holding its breath; waiting for the recent election to be clarified and settled.  In a pandemic-frozen world a vaccine is nearing release, but not yet.  "Suspended animation," indeed.

All is ready.  We are waiting for what surely will arrive any day.  But precisely which day is beyond our sight.  The belly is swollen, but thus far only false contractions.  The election will get resolved.  The virus will eventually be quieted.  Winter will descend and grip us.  But today the forecast predicts 50-degrees.
.  

We aren't usually this prepared.  Winter more commonly catches us distracted with other busyness.  Last year the garden had to wait until the new spring to be cleared of its autumn detritus.  More than once I have winterized the coops as the snow flurried.  But whether by uncharacteristic discipline, fewer distractions, or more time on our hands, this year has been different.  Yesterday we even trimmed down bushes and hedges that sometimes go years without shaping.  

Ready, and waiting.

It's hardly Purgatory.  We are incredibly privileged.  There is no tacit condemnation awaiting ached-for redemption.  It's a blessing, really, to be nestled in a taffy-like autumn that is stretching into uncharacteristic reaches of November.  It's just...different.  We have more experience with frenzy, with rushing, with "Just in Time" - if not a little past that.  But we could get used to it.

Already our personal roots have begun to reach into deeper soil, stretching into corners of the soul usually undiscovered until January's darkness or February's existential ache.  With less exhaustion and more stillness, our reading is already meatier, our prayers loamier and more considered, our conversations more expansive with equal parts analysis and imagination.  We are settling in - into the changing season, into the comfort of the glowing hearth, into the interior environs of a home we love, and into the evocations of the Word that pronounced day and night, creeping, swimming and flying things, flowering trees and fruiting plants...

...and even humans...

..."very good."

Despite the world's seemingly endless and concerted efforts to contradict that assessment, just now - at least here on the farmstead, poised in suspended animation
- it is easy to believe.  

Soil Work Yet To Be Done

When we first settled on this land we came to call “Taproot Garden,” we knew nothing about soil.  We had read some things; heard some lectures; come to understand something of the architecture of it.  But we hadn’t explored it, dug around in any of it; we hadn’t scooped up a handful and examined the character of it beneath our eyes and between our fingers.  Moreover, we were deluded.  We live in Iowa, the apex of fertility.  This is the land where things grow.  We had no idea that this was only occasionally true.  

 

I don’t mean “occasionally” to suggest the vicissitudes of time, although that, too, can be true.  Given the almost fiendish undulations of flooding and drought, of the mischievous late freeze (or early) and the intervening storm, sometimes things grow and sometimes they don’t.

 

No, by “occasionally” I was thinking geographically rather than temporally.  Iowa does indeed have fertile soil; it just doesn’t have it everywhere.  Take Taproot Garden as Exhibit A.  The U.S. Geological Soil Survey classifies our property as “highly erodible.”  The very feature that keeps this land above the flood plain puts our topsoil at risk.  We enjoy a higher elevation, with a domed landscape.  Rain washes the soil downhill.  Shortly after moving here we acquired soil maps from the County Extension office that indicated wild and multiple fluctuations in types and character.  There is some good soil here; it’s just located here and there, interrupted by wide bands of less promising…dirt.  Having moved here with the intention of producing a garden, I arrived fueled with the naïve assumption that the matter was as simple as sowing a few rows of seeds.  The land itself quickly disabused me of this ignorance.

 

We learned that there would be work to do, not simply using the soil but building it, first.  There would be compost to add, microbial activity to encourage, organic content to develop, fertility to build and restore.  And it would not happen overnight.  

 

We just completed our 9^th garden season here – a season cut short by early frosts and snow.  We didn’t really mind, because it has been a busy season – harvesting and preserving - and we were happy to slow the pace.  We will eat well throughout the winter and subsequent spring.  The in-gathering has been abundant.  Which is to say that these years spent encouraging the soil are bearing fruit.  Literally.  Of course, there is more to do.  Soil, after all, is a living thing that, like the rest of us, needs care and feeding and loving attention.  It is a partnership.  A reciprocity.  If we want good things to emerge from this garden we have to invest good things in exchange.  

 

Constantly.

Intentionally.

Intelligently.

Faithfully.

 

I ponder these things on this election eve, acknowledging that the same is true of democracy, community, culture.  Regardless of who prevails at the ballot box, there will be work to do.  There are fertile corners and bands in this American soil in which good things grow.  But there is heavy clay, as well, in which good seeds struggle to find purchase.  Erosion has taken a heavy toll on our life together, fecundity washed away by turbulent acrimony and the misguided presumption of permanence.  

And then, of course, there is the poison.  God, there has been so much poison spilled!   We have deluded ourselves into thinking it actually aided or protected or cleared the way for better things, but the evidence is increasingly clear.  Poison does what it always does:  it kills.  We have been denuded, defoliated, deadened.

 

Now remains what always remains:  the slow, determined rehabilitation of the soil.  The soil which is "us."

 

Whoever wins.

Whichever “side” prevails.

 

Compost.  Spades.  Determined will.  The sweat equity beneath anything of promise.  We have work to do.  

 

If we want anything nourishing to grow.  

One thing is certainly true:  we have plenty of accumulated manure piled around to help us get started.

Letting Feathers Fall

 It’s molting time again.  It sounds like a Buck Owens song – for those old enough to remember Buck Owens. And it isn’t pretty.  "Crying time," indeed, as Buck originally sang it.  There are feathers everywhere in the chicken yard, carpeting the coop, blanketing the nesting boxes, littering the run and beyond.  It’s a disconcerting sight under normal circumstances; doubly so given the recent memory of feathery piles left by raccoon invasions only weeks ago.  Gratefully, these feathers haven’t been ripped, but merely shed.  

 

Naturally. 

 

Annually.  

 

Productively, rather than murderously.

 

Loss of these feathers is in the chickens’ best interest.  

 

Nonetheless there is a price to be paid.  A molting chicken is a pathetic sight.  Happening gradually, over time, the feather drop leaves bare patches that resemble mange.  Once magnificently beautiful, the hens are increasingly scraggly and half naked. Given how they now separate themselves from the others in the flock, even they seem to have looked in the mirror and recoiled in embarrassment. 

 

A marred appearance, then, with bodies as touchy and sensitive as one might expect with all that exposure, but also altered priorities.  With feathers to replace before winter - and temperatures already dropping - inner resources shift from egg production to more pressing business. 

 

It doesn’t take long these days – or a very big basket – to collect the ovaline deposits. There are fewer and fewer.  The chickens are productive, in other words, but in different ways; and the benefits are personal.

 

So what’s the point?  Why is this happening?

 

The answer, in a word, is renewal.  Restoration.  This, for the girls, is a kind of sabbath time.  Thoughts of progeny are set aside for the season while self care takes priority.   Over the course of this sabbatical, a new and lush winter coat gradually replaces the dimmed and tattered and jostled one that has outlived its usefulness.  It is the biblical prophecy’s fulfillment played out before our eyes:  “Behold, I am making all things new.”

 

And it gives me pause.  My season is changing as well.  I’ve got no feathers to drop and our outer coat to replenish, but plenty else that needs refreshment.  There are more than a few faded and tattered parts, both on the surface and deeper in, that could benefit from some shedding and the reassignment of resources.  

 

It isn’t, the chickens are teaching me, less work; simply different work.  And the result is something warmer and yet more beautiful than before.  

 

“…all things new.”  

 

A metaphorical molting.  I rather like the idea.  Somebody else can lay the eggs for awhile.

 

In the meantime, let the feathers fall where they will.  We'll see what new colors, what new textures, take their place.

Just When I Needed You Most

I owe you an apology.

No, dear reader, not to you.  The apology I owe is to the garden. 

Back in the annual romantic horticultural swoon of spring and early summer we spent such fond hours together, refreshing beds, working in compost, sowing seeds, transplanting seedlings, assembling the irrigation system, relishing the intertwining fecundity of soil and possibility.  As the weeks went by I spent perspirational but soulful hours inside your gate, weeding, watching for predatory bugs and withering diseases.  It was hard work, but it was good work.  They were satisfying hours.  

 

But in recent weeks something in me shifted.  I wasn’t aware of when it happened.  Even now I can’t pinpoint the moment, or the reason.  Perhaps I got otherwise busy.  Perhaps I was distracted.  To be sure, COVID concerns have ground the reverence out of all kinds of things in recent months.  Too many things have devolved to merely the functional, the necessary, the basic.  Masked shoppers in stores barely make eye contact with one another; casual conversation is almost unimaginable.  We get in, gather what we need, and check out as fast as possible.  There is a vacuous wariness in the air between us that is almost as stultifying as the virus potentially within us.  A joylessness has come to characterize us as the pandemic has dragged on.  Head down, we simply get it done – whatever “it” might happen to be.

 

That could extend to the garden.  But I can’t blame it all on COVID-19.  After all, one could argue that the garden should have been the most powerful antidote to the malaise.  Nature, growth, fresh air and soil, and unaffected work.  Nothing about the garden’s daily needs has been altered by health concerns; neither masks nor social distance nor virtual interactions.  The CDC has published no guidelines about safe gardening.  All that was needed continued to be what always is needed – a hoe, a hose, time, energy and attention. 

No, what happened in me was far more insidious. 

 My relationship changed - as human posture relative to nature so routinely changes.  I became a user; an extractor; a predator of sorts – mining and pillaging the garden assets and stuffing them into the freezer, the dehydrator or the water bath canner as fast as I could with as little thought as possible.  I’ve been going through the motions.  Absent, suddenly, was the reverent partnership; silent was the stewarding joy.  The prolific fruiting became an objectified warehouse – a rooted pantry - rather than a holy abundance.  Gone were the hours spent scooting on my knees or leaning on an implement’s handle, lost in reverent appreciation.  Past were the stolen moments I simply wandered among the rows, marveling at the progress, taking deep and satisfied breaths.  Lately I have shuffled out with harvest crate, perfunctorily filled it with as much as could fit, and lugged it back to the house once the gate was latched behind me.  

Minutes expended among the plants rather than hours.  

It has been mechanical rather than marveling.  

Taking; rarely giving beyond lifting the hydrant handle to drip a little moisture near the stems.

 

And so I apologize, and am determined to recover a warmer, more participatory way.  Starting today.  It was good to snap on the overalls again this morning, gather up some tools and get down on my knees.  It was good to restore some breathing room around the young pepper plants transplanted late in the season that were getting crowded out and choked by extraneous and invasive growth.  And it was good to notice among those now-liberated plants some optimistic prospects.  It was good to tend early summer’s new bed that is sprouting the adolescent asparagus stems now fronding and gaining strength for years to come.  And it was satisfying to finish weeding a row and turn to admire the progress.  And yes, it was good to fill a bucket with harvest along the way – in the course of my work, rather than being the sum total of my work.  We were in it together again.  

 

And it did, indeed, feel good – to you, I’m guessing dear garden, as much as to me.

And after something of a melancholic season, the simple therapy of it feels good as well.

 

And so I’ll be back – more patiently, more gratefully, more reverently this time.  

More partner than predator. 

 

In the meantime, thanks for all you’ve done without me.

I owe you.

 

The Miraculous Wonder of Here

 

I've been tending to things.  

This morning, as the new dawn replaced the full moon, I released the chickens.

I shivered In the cool foretaste of autumn.

I watered flowers and herbs and the sweetgrass I recently planted behind the labyrinth.

I disposed of a dead raccoon.

I sowed native prairie seed, sprinkled compost and watered.

I swept the barn and set up the pen in anticipation of baby chicks arriving soon.

I harvested vegetables.

I added many of them to pots on the stove.

 

It has been, like each day (though each in its particularity), a juxtaposition of life and death, hope and decay, seed and soil, preparation and completion, nourishment and depletion, salivation and repugnance.  My hands and energies the hyphen and comma connecting the disparate words and phrases of living.  

 

And it all belongs – the parts that make me smile right along with the elements that make me gag.  Side by side I get to wonder if seeds will grow while delighting in the issue of those that did.  I protect, which unfortunately means I also kill.  A wondrous alchemy of mundanity and profundity, I marvel at the matter-of-factness of the beauty.   

It happens.   I do my best to midwife all sorts of nascent possibilities – in the soil and in my mind – with water and compost and weeding and brooding, but I only assist.  The rest –

the conceiving, the flourishing and the thriving – is well beyond me.  That my hands get wet in the birthing is speechless privilege, coupled with the comic gratitude I continue to feel at the reality of the “me” I have known for 64 years actually being here in the messy, sweaty, earthy reality of it all.

 

Here in the granularity of it all.  

Here in the birth cries and the death throes.

Here in the sowing and the hoeing.

Here in the tending and the disposing.

Here in the perspiration and the chill.

Here in the cacophonous, riotous, exhausting abundance of everyday of life.  

Here in the miraculous “here.”

When Mary Oliver poetically asks me what I intend to do "with my one wild and precious life," the most and the best I can think of, by way of response, is...

...to simply notice,

and pay attention.

Thriving By Walking Around

We maintain trails through the property - through the prairie grasses, through the woods, around the lawn.  More than mere "access", they are an invitational feature of our particular landscape.  They beckon, as surely as a curled finger motioned in our direction.  "Come," they whisper; "explore."  And though not nearly often enough, we do - on foot, on snowshoes, on the bench of the utility cart.  We answer the summons to pay closer attention.

Every season has its reward - in summer the joints of the bluestem, the monarch on the wildflower, the lushness of the foliage; in fall the crispness of the air and the color in the leaves; in winter the muffling carpet of snow, the crystalline accents in the elbows of the trees; in spring the myriad awakenings, the buds, the awkward fawn.  There are textures.  There are scents.  There is more than meets the eye and ear.  We walk amongst it, not to get anywhere in particular, but to see, to feel, to listen attentively and receive the gift of what life along the trails has to say.

Not, as I earlier confessed, often enough.  We make excuses.  "It's too hot."  "It's too cold."  "It's raining."  "I'm tired."  All the while, the grasses whisper, the leaves shimmer in the breeze, the hedge apples swell and fall and roll like bowling balls, the deer tamp down trails of their own, the colors evolve.

I'm determined to counter my neglect.  Recently an old word reentered my orbit that has tugged with a gravitational pull.  "Peripatetic" is a transliteration of a Greek word that means, at its simplest, "to walk around."  It is an "onomatopoeia" kind of word to me - it sounds...ambulatory; active.  Peripatetic.  Aristotle's educational endeavor (4th C. BCE) was known as the "Peripatetic School" because, not being a citizen of Athens and therefore unable to own property, he lectured to his trailing students while walking along the pathways of the city's common spaces.

In his own version of "The Peripatetic School," business leadership guru Tom Peters centuries later encouraged an effectiveness strategy he coined, "MBWA" - management by walking around.  A leader can learn a great deal, he argued, by pushing away from the desk, exiting the office, and wandering around the workplace, observing, listening, chatting, building rapport.  It is to suggest that as much or more can be learned viscerally - through our pores - than via the data of reports.

At the very least it is more interesting.  And nourishing.

I'm determined to more regularly feed our "Peripatetic School" of homesteading - which is to say, "of living."

Walking around.

Paying attention.

Listening.

Learning.

Not merely maintaining the trails, but using them; and allowing them to use me.

TBWA:  "Thriving By Walking Around."

It might not be an efficient strategy for getting places, but it may well be the only means of living in them.

A Big Silence to Fill

We didn’t want him in the first place.  We tend chickens for the eggs, and roosters aren’t qualifited.  We only buy hens.  But accidents happen - “sexing” is an imperfect art - and so it was that of the two Mottled Java hens we purchased from a nearby hatchery, Samantha turned out to be Sam.  As I have noted elsewhere, by the time all of this became clear, we were invested.  Time.  Money.  Feed.  Affection.  

And so it was that Sam found a home in our flock.  It hasn’t been trouble-free.  There was that winter when, amidst an excrutiatingly cold spell, Sam’s comb was frostbitten.  He took on a tragic posture, shuffling out of the coop each morning, only to stand hunched over most of the day just outside the door.  No crowing, no chasing the girls.  We were sure he was dying.  And then he didn’t.

There was the time his foot was injured.  We were never sure how it happened, but one of his “toes” was one day abbreviated and bloody.  His movements were impaired.  He limped.  He did the best he could.  We treated the injury as best we could, but our medicinal expertise is limited and our expectations were low.  But once again Sam recovered.

And then there was the fox invasion.  I’ll spare you the details but it was ugly.  Usually something of a guard rooster, Sam abandoned his post amidst the carnage, adopting the “fight another day” strategy of retreat, and we found him in the front yard, traumatized.  With the help of our neighbor, we restored him to the coops and eventually nerves settled and normal life resumed.

Until yet another unintended rooster revealed himself in a batch of chicks.  Gallo was young and fiesty and colorful, but small.  Compared to Sam, he was junior varsity.  But Gallo became the aggressor, chasing Sam, abusing him, pecking and humiliating him.  Cowling him down and standing on him.  One day I watched Gallo chase Sam across the chicken yard and over the fence, after which Sam went missing for the day.  When he finally returned that evening looking like a bedraggled shell of a man, I subdivided the yard, putting a fence between the two roosters for safe keeping.  There Sam has lived ever since - Sam and the several hens who rotated in and out to keep him company.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was at least detente.  Everybody was safe - physically, socially, and psychologically.  And the two developed a kind of ritual.  They would crow antiphonally.  Back and forth, call and response.  For hours at a time.

Until yesterday.  This summer we have a new family of raccoons living in the neighborhood.  We have seen them running along the tree line.  I have seen evidence of their digging around the coops.  Most disconcerting is their desire for breakfast.  I am accustomed to them moving and hunting at night.  We work hard to secure the chickens in their coops at dusk to have them out of harm’s way after dark.  But this little family is active in the morning.  I shooed one out of yard one morning earlier in the week, and trapped still another.  Unfortunately, yesterday, after releasing the flock at daybreak, I went back to bed.  It is the intense time of garden season and we have been working hard.  That paralyzing fatigue coupled with an atypical late night drew me back between the sheets for a few extra minutes of rest.  Somehow I didn’t hear the commotion.

At least two of the chickens were victims - Sam among them.  I can picture him defending.  He was, as I said, big, and he could ruffle himself into an imposing presence.  He would stand his ground.  He was always the last one to head inside at night, sanding sentry outside until all the girls in his charge were safe.  I can picture him trying to defend them.  

Futily, as it turned out.  

And strangely - or not, perhaps - we are heartbroken.  We didn’t want him in the first place.  But in the end, we loved him.  And despite the remaining hens, the coops seem somehow empty.  

And quiet.  Gallo crows, but there is no answer.  There is call, but no response.  He even laments the loss of his old nemesis.  And his job has suddenly gotten bigger.

It is, as we continually remind ourselves, the way of nature.  The raccoons aren’t evil, just hungry.  But that little bit of rationality doesn’t help much just now.  It’s deafeningly quiet out there.  Out there, and in here as well.  

Gallo has big shoes and silence to fill.  As, I suppose, do we all. 

Spending the Currency of Perspiration

I am not a heat-loving guy.  In truth, there isn't really all that much of it in Iowa - a couple of months on average, unlike the oppressive expanse of it across the calendar in the Texas of my rearing - but heat is heat, regardless; which accounts for my frequent consternation.  Despite the opulence of the season outside, my waking hours are increasingly spent indoors.  Early mornings are tolerable, and I use them to keep as many of the garden weeds at bay as I can.  Lori is more intrepid.  I arrive early, she remains late.  Between us, we are keeping up, if only barely.  The vegetable beds are thriving and growing; salad greens and turnips frequent our table, and the braising greens are coming into their own.  The green bean bushes have blossomed, along with the squashes and cucumbers, and adolescent tomatoes are burdening their branches.  Berries, both cultivated and wild, we manage to glean as we pass their snagging reaches.  The peppers and cabbages won't be far behind.  We'll wince at the water bill when it eventually arrives, but the flavors that bill has enabled will be some balm for the financial pain.

But while the vegetable garden's invitation is primarily gastronomic, the flower beds proffer other inducements.  The butterfly bush is awash in blossoms and, as advertised, butterflies.  The day lilies - justifying their biblical splendor that shames even Solomon - open like a ballet in slow motion.  The iris, the poppies, the daisies and echinacea, the towering sunflowers and spindly zinnias - the beds are awash in them.

But the blooms are ephemeral.  They arrive as if by magic, and just as suddenly disappear.  These are their glory days.

These days that we spend largely inside.  Avoiding the warming sun that has beckoned the color.

I'll get acclimated.  Eventually.  As much as I dislike the assault of them on my skin and the drain of them on my constitution, these, too, are days "that the Lord has made."  Comfort and ease are no substitute for the beauty that swabs and dots them.  It is a common passage.  What practicing scales is to a pianist, what calisthenics are to athletes, what knife scars are to a chef and iambic pentameter is to a poet, intemperate days are to a human aching to master the art of being fully alive.  Living through the onerous and strenuous disciplines is the only door opening into the beauty they evoke and beckon us to celebrate.  And savor.

It is summer - not my favorite temperature, but my favorite benefactor.  And so I'll get up in the morning and embrace it.  There is work to do, but also beauty to attend.  The blooms won't be around for long.  And perspiration is a small enough price to pay for the glory of embracing them.

The Breathless Wonder of the Season

I know, we are behind.  Maybe not that far, but we feel the need to sprint to find the progress we had intended.  It's not that we have been idle.  We took it upon ourselves to rework the garden fence - all 350-feet of it, more or less.  Grass and poison ivy and all manner of unidentified other tree like invasives had worked their way up and between and into the chicken wire rabbit fence and the polypropylene deer fence, and varmints had breached the fortifications over the years.  It's hard to believe, but we are finishing up our ninth year at Taproot Garden and while other aspects of the farmstead are showing steady improvement, the fence was showing its age.  We removed the old chicken wire, dug up the invading growth, added landscaping fabric to hopefully slow the rate of its return, installed new chicken wire with securing staples.

All that, plus nature has had its own ideas.  The fencing project had to wait for the ground to thaw out from winter's freezing, and then occasionally wait for it to dry out from springtime's rains.  And then there were late season freezes and hail and high winds and...

Meanwhile, the greenhouse grew more and more dense.  Herbs and flowers and vegetables alike started crying out to passersby, "Help!  We are being held here against our wishes!"

Finally, the fence project was completed and the garden was, once again, reasonably secure.  And the great migration could begin.  We had already direct seeded several rows - lettuces, spinach, potatoes, beans, beets, carrots and collards, okra, Swiss chard, turnips and radishes.  But now the big stuff could join alongside. We started with a smattering of tomatoes - black krim, Cherokee purple, Paul Robeson, indigo apple, black cherry, Lilian's yellow, Brandywine, Amish paste, San Marzano, Dakota Sport; then added broccoli, cabbages, kale and peppers.  It's progress.

There is some distance yet to travel, just to get where we ought to be.  There are onions for which to find a place, and leeks, more cabbage and peppers and I don't even want to think about how many more tomatoes.  And we are rapidly running out of room.

We'll figure it out.  And at least it's underway, this annual adventure in the soil. Eventually we'll hit our stride and find a rhythm - the warp and weft of weeding and watering, monitoring for bugs and noticing diseases, aching for sun and cursing the heat, shoes sucked off in the mud and praying for rain.

You know, gardening.

One of these days we may even get to eat some it.  In the meantime, let the breathless pace and wonder of it all begin.  I've got my hoe and my hose ready.

The Beauty of Distant Light, Interrupted

Some people, I recognize, simply know this kind of stuff. They are bent that way.  Perhaps they took lots of science classes in school, or in a fit of curiosity along the way, studied up on it and integrated the perfectly fitted knowledge.  That's not me.

I was not the math and science guy so in vogue these days.  I sang in the school choir, competed with the speech team, and performed in school plays.  I didn't blow things up in the science lab.  In college, when the curriculum forced me into yet another lab science, I tried to get "Gourmet Cooking" qualified - it included a lab requirement, after all - but the Dean said "no." Word around campus was that Astronomy was the blow-off class that anybody could pass.  I registered, faithfully attended the first four classes and then, with an exam closely approaching and I not having understood a single word heard or read, quietly dropped the class.

But the evening sky this week erased all that feckless indifference.  It was, hmm, different.  It was as haunting as it was beautiful.  I was captivated, curiously troubled and yet strangely warmed.  For once I wanted more than to simply receive it with gratitude; this time I wanted to somehow understand it.  How can it be that somewhere in the universe above me and the chicken yard, in the waning moments of a day suspended in the stranglehold of a season stifled by cloying pandemic fear and isolation a phenomenon so evocative and poignant could ephemerally materialize?  I snapped the picture, but by the time I returned indoors a few moments later it was gone.

Where does the purple/pink of sunset come from?  Scratching around several internet-offered explanations, I could only smile at the summary answer.  I should have guessed. It's almost always the explanation of the origin of larger-than-life beauty.

Struggle.
Adversity.
Obstacles surmounted.

In the vineyard, the best grapes emerge from vines that have struggled  into challenging soil.  On the stage or the playing field, the finest, most artful performances result from the most rigorous practice and rehearsal.  And in the evening sky, it turns out that the most alluring colors are daubed by sunlight that has traveled the farthest from the horizon, along the way stripped of its light-weight blues by molecular obstacles and interferences and storm clouds.

Distance.
Distortion.
Disturbance.
Interruption.

It is color that has had to work hard to find us.  And the result is beauty, itself.

Somehow, in days like these when obstacles and limitations and the ominous hovering of metaphorical clouds are palpably - oppressively - present; in this season during which beauty seems a distant enough and pale phenomenon, this wisdom from the evening sky speaks grace to me.  And I not only better understand; I am even more deeply grateful.

A World-Renewing Fire*

Every three or four years, the 3-acre native prairie which we established with the help of the DNR and the Fish and Wildlife Service a number of years ago needs burning.  It is a process that, for millions of years - billions, more likely -  happened naturally courtesy of lightening and such; but we tend to prefer our fires a little more controlled here in the neighborhood of our home. And so it is that when conditions are right - meaning “dry enough” and “still enough,” the contractor appears with his crew and reduces the 6-7 foot tall grasses - the blue stems and switchgrass, the little bluestem and the June grass - to ash.  And so it happened again last weekend.

Ferocious in its execution and stark in its aftermath, the burning is, nonetheless, therapeutically and horticulturally beneficial.  The fire clears the accumulated detritus and debris that builds up across the seasons; it stunts the invasives, strengthening and vitalizing the forbs and the grasses, allowing them time to get a head start on growth.  The fire is nature's channel of resiliency - deepening roots, opening seeds, and clearing the accumulated obstacles to growth.

I try to remember all that as I survey the scene through the windows that have sequestered us these past several weeks as a global pandemic has forced us into isolation.  Our beloved prairie wreaks with a charred stench; it looks like a scar; and it feels like a death, though the truth of it, I have come to trust, is exactly the opposite.

I don’t know if, analogically - metaphorically - any of that has any resonance in this season outside of all of our windows that feels, for all the world, like death.  But I am not unaware of all the accretions that build up in our cultures and lives that need purging; and the invasives that intervine our souls whose stunting would happily benefit us; and the hard-shelled seeds that only calamity can encourage open.  

I recall the stories and insights of all the spiritual mystics - people like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Francis and Clare and more modern ones since for whom "suffering" was the doorway to profound enlightenment and depth; "torment" the window opening onto ecstasy and glory; for whom "humility" and "surrender" were discipleship - quite in contrast to our preference for tranquility and pleasure, and our determination to dominate and control.  

Concurrently I recall all those biblical images of loss and gain, death and life that form the furrows of our faith…

…and I hope there is some transfering resonance.  We grieve the loss of precious lives in this viral fire, there is no burnishing that pain.  But we do not lament the exposure and loss of the lies we tell ourselves and each other, the arrogances we animate, the bigotries we protect, the delusion of independence we pridefully salute.  These, perhaps, will all beneficially come to ash.  

I try to see the blackened prairie through different eyes - vision shaped, in part, by Frederich Buechner who noted through the eyes of faith that, in God’s hands, “the worst thing is never the last thing.”

And so we take a deep breath, never minding the occasional residual whiff of fiery smoke, and continue our work as best we are able. 

* Adapted from a meditation offered to the Trustees of Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth TX, April 24, 2020; the title modifying a phrase by Wendell Berry.

Curious about the Movements in the Night

"To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."---Wendell Berry

Something visited the coops during the night.  Evidence of determined digging shows itself outside the door and along the side of two of the coops.  Whatever it was made little progress, whether due to concluded futility, weariness, or distraction I cannot say.  The activity does not overly worry me.  Even if the critter had succeeded in its tunneling, it only would have entered the run.  The birds, quietly nesting in the chamber above, were safely secured behind a protective door, wedged immovably closed behind the raised ramp.  The visitor would have been sorely disappointed for all its efforts.

So, it isn't worry that gives me pause, but curiosity.  What was it?

The likeliest culprit is a raccoon.  They are certainly common in the area, have visited and reconnoitered the coops before, and tend to be persistent.  But it could, as well, have been an opossum - more than one of which has found its way into the occasional live traps I set when their attentions grow bothersome.  Neither is a skunk beyond the realm of possibility, though I hope that isn't the case.  I could do without that olfactory complication.  And these in no way exhaust the possibilities.

Closer inspection might reveal subtler clues - a paw print, perhaps, or the scratch trail of a toenail.  Even without actually releasing, surely a skunk would leave behind some trace of its scent.  Lack of damage to the fence suggests that the visitor was either agile enough to leap over, or small enough to scoot under - this latter, it seems to me, likelier than the former.  Deer have never shown the least bit of interest in the chickens, and though wildcats and coyotes could almost surely clear the four-foot barrier, I've not been aware of such interest in the past.

And so here I am, surprisingly fascinated.  I could set up a light, but that rather reminds me of the old joke about the man looking under a street light for his lost keys.  When asked by a passerby if the man had lost them in this area the searcher replied, "no but this where the light is."  I could, then, set up a light, but that would only stake out the location where the visitor would absolutely not be.  Alternatively, I could set up an infrared wildlife camera, but that would necessitate me buying one - precisely the kind of investment in which I am more and more disinterested.  Or I could make occasional forays with a flashlight, almost surely scaring away anything of interest.  That, and as Berry notes in the poem, to go into the dark with a light is to only know the light.

If I truly want to meet my guest, I will need to heed the rest of Berry's poetic advice:  I will need to go dark in order to know the dark and the dark feet and wings that inhabit it.

Which, of course, is scarily vulnerable.  Risky, even.  I may not like what I find, or be safe in its presence.  Or get sprayed in the process.

But it could, just as well, be something quite wondrous - something I have never seen, and know nothing about, but that, knowing, could enlarge me.

Like so much about this sequestered time in which the lights are off in every existential way.  We hear scratching around our psychic and emotional periphery, and are aware that things are happening, but the ambiguity, the unfamiliarity - the great veil of blindness and unknowing - keep us paralyzed, and afraid; "inside" in more ways than one.

I wonder what it would mean to explore the darkness of this new time - in the dark - instead of retreating from it, grappling for any light that might be within reach.  I'm not talking about venturing out among the infection; I'm wondering about venturing out into the unknown created by the virus - the solitude, the different constancy of family time, the more limited availability of goods and distractions and options; navigating within new constraints, testing heretofore unseen capacities and sampling untapped resourcefulness.  As long as we confine ourselves to the lighted spaces, we will only know what we have known.

Something has been scratching around out there in the darkness - digging, exploring, sniffing.  Once upon a time I would have panicked.

Now, in more ways than one, I'm curious about what's out there...

...in the dark.

Protection in Anticipation of Tomorrow

Cleo is brooding again.  Cleo - short for "Cleopatra" - is the Light Sussex hen who has taken up residence in the further reaches beneath the freshman coop.  Presumably on top of eggs.  It happened once before, not quite a year ago, and so we recognize the signs.  She rarely moves.  Occasionally I see her sipping from the waterer or taking in a little feed, but mostly she settles herself in the bedding in the crawl space beneath the coop.  We have another week or so to wait before learning if there is actually something to hatch beneath her maternally spread frame, or if she has simply wearied of the company of her coop mates and opted for more private accommodations.  I'm betting on the former.


Last time this happened, the resulting chick received hovering supervision until the three care-giving nanny hens offered it enough space and exposure to apparently come to a bad end.  But that hatch occurred beneath a different, more public coop.  This time, the brooding is playing out beneath the freshman coop which is already secluded and separately fenced.  Should new life emerge, I'm determined to give it a better chance.  Yesterday I added a new layer of more securing fence inside the existing mesh, just in case.

The garden fence, too, has needed some attention.  A deer fence surrounds the entirety of it, but while the polypropylene mesh satisfactorily keeps away the deer, rabbits are undeterred.  Hence, the additional layer of chicken wire around the entire 1/3 acre circumference. But after 8+ years, even the chicken wire has been breached.  There are holes.  Here and there.

Vulnerabilities.

Already needing to modify the outline of the fence, we took this week's opportunity to remove all the old wire and prepare the perimeter for new.  In the coming days we will pull intruding grasses, lay out shade cloth, and encircle the growing space with fresh protection.

In our off-minutes, we have pulled emerging grasses from around the rhubarb just peaking above the surface.

It has felt good, and productive in this season when vulnerability is the only news.

Here in the midst of virus-necessitated semi-isolation on the farmstead, we have been dutifully compliant - washing our hands, sanitizing countertops, keeping our distance from lurking infection, eating healthy foods, and opening ourselves to the sunshine whenever it chooses to break through the spring clouds and rain.  And that is all well and good.  Good, and prudent, but ultimately grounded in fear.  Protecting ourselves is certainly a priority, but anticipating chicks hatching beneath the coop and food growing in the garden is a welcome alternative. It feels hopeful more than fearful.

Generative more than precautionary.

Incubational more than prophylactic.

And as I say, it feels good - to protect, to anticipate, to plant seeds in the greenhouse; to do more than wait and prevent, but to prepare...

...and protect.

It's not enough, after all, to merely live another day.  It is beckoning to think there might be something warm and animated and nourishing in that next day that warrants us being there.

Perhaps the Other Buds We Simply Haven't Seen

Filling the depleted feed bins in the chicken coops, I notice a change in the young fruit trees planted just beyond.  We are in the wide space of winter here in the upper midwest - so deeply into the thick of it that neither beginning nor ending is any longer or yet in view.  The days are thick with cold, and the sun is more capricious surprise than reliable presence.  Days are lengthening as we slide glacially, if inexorably, toward spring; but still they are short, with outdoor activity confined to essentials.  Maintaining the feeders and the waterers is hurriedly accomplished, without extra moments commonly built in for observant reflection.

But this morning the sun made one of its celebratory cameo appearances - like one of those movie stars who occasionally, unexpectedly opened a window as Batman and Robin scaled the exterior of a building on the old '60's television show.  The morning is frigid, but somehow companionable; hospitable, despite the chill.  I took in a deep, cleansing breath, surveyed the wide view, and then the nearer one.  And that's when I noticed the buds.

The chickens share a 1/3-acre enclosure with a dozen or so fruit trees - apples, pears, pawpaws, persimmons and figs.  The trees are juvenile, but even so provide a shady respite beneath the foliage of summer.  In recent months they have looked naked and dead, but clearly they have been busy throughout these wintry weeks.  Buds now swell at regular intervals throughout the twiggy branches.  Countless packages of promise, stirring, preparing, gathering momentum for the sweet possibilities ahead.

It's hard not to smile at the prospects.  We are hungry for even a hint of something more flavorful.  Nothing, of course, is guaranteed.  There is always the threat of harmful insects and disease; and there is much pruning to accomplish between now and then.  But it is good to find promissory notes abounding and surrounding - metaphorically as well as literally.

There isn't a lot of good news these days.  Culturally - globally - it is a cold winter, indeed.  We seem more intent on chopping each other down than encouraging much growth.  Th air is poisonous; our interactions are toxic. Everyone seems angry or fearful, or both.  We mock, we ridicule, we impute and then impugn one another's motives as if we had clear windows into the soul of others, and we, alone, are righteous.  It isn't the stuff of fruitfulness.

Or hope.

We have come to view the essence of evil in the guise of each other.  Today is bleak enough that there isn't much incentive to look up and out and beyond.

The buds, however, offer opportunistic distraction.  Here and here, there and there they break the surface of apparent death with an eruption of promise.  Of course the trees, themselves, afford that hint as well, but it is subtler.  They necessarily require a longer view, albeit one that, precisely because of that longer view, I am prone to forget.  But the buds, thriving amidst a shorter calendar, foretell a more accessible fruit.

I should be able to hang onto the promise of that turnaround - the farmstead, after all, is constantly teaching that lesson in one way or another.  Decay is never the final word.  Autumn's decline and winter's dormancy are eventually replaced by spring.  Even the fetid stench of today's decay signals a transformation into tomorrow's feeding nutrients.  I should remember, and trust, and keep pushing forward, but what with the iciness of winter and the acrid smoke of our interactions, I forget.

And then a budding branch catches my attention - like a burning bush - speaking a word of promise.  A prophetic word in fact.  "I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11).

Hope.  And a future.

Buds.

"We can get through this," I think to myself.

And suddenly it's not so cold after all.

A Promise of Warming Fires to Come

I left my glasses inside.  They wouldn't have been much use where I am headed.  The warm, moist breath inside my balaclava greeting the -2 degree air outside would have resulted in a foggy blindness that I can't afford.  It's foolishness to choose a hike in the woods on a day like today in which frostbite and snow-covered footing make every moment and step precarious.  But the breeze was still and the sky was blue and I am obsessed with the new trails we have cleared beyond the prairie.

Multi-layered, then, from feet to head to hands, I crunched across the glistening snow, smiling at the morning greetings from "Gallo the Younger" and "Sam the Elder" who christen the chicken yard with cock-a-doodle-doos.

It's becoming habit to start where the trail used to end - down the eastern path toward the derelict fire pit now sadly overgrown.  The circling stones have even shifted over time, with the appearance that some are even missing, though I find none fallen or scattered nearby.  It's hard to imagine the squirrels pushing them away or the deer finding for them alternate uses, but there are gaps, nonetheless.

Only once have we filled the ring and ignited it into its intended purpose - shortly after moving to the farmstead, when the kids were visiting.  We stacked kindling and logs and stuffed newspapers and coaxed it all, finally, into flames.  We roasted marshmallows and made s'mores - standing around the fire because we hadn't thought to bring chairs.  It's a fond memory, but we never repeated it for reasons I don't recall.  I have an aversion to dead ends, and perhaps for no other reason, after awhile, this little cul-de-sac in our woods faded from my interest.

Until now, that is, since we have opened a way beyond.  Now my imagination is constantly drawn down that lane, even on a morning like this one when wiser souls remain inside beneath a coverlet, in  a comfortable chair near the fireplace, with a book.  I lunk along inside all my quilted layers, stiffly, like the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man, the only sounds the crowing of the roosters, the songs of the birds in the branches, and the skittering of the rabbit I've disturbed up ahead.  It's worth the cold to enter this crystalline carpeted, tree-walled chapel.  The path is an aisle; the slope into the valley below a transept; the overreaching branches a dome to rival the Sistine Chapel; the deer droppings, in a surreal sort of way an offering of their own.  Tracks of multiple kinds confirm that this is an active sanctuary.  Cold, yes, but hushed.  Holy. How could I not be here with this congregation?

I walk through, first one direction; then, having completed the circle, repeat it down the opposite way to change my angle of vision.  And then, again, the fire ring - overgrown, but in the snow still distinct.

Purposeful.

Evocational.

Invitational.

"We will kindle fire here again," I promise the silent stones, "and this time we will sit...and linger."

The stones made no response, but I smile with anticipatory satisfaction and resolve.  There is something sacred, after all, about stirring cold embers and a dormant hearth into flame.  Vocational, even - this business of enkindling a spent fire.  A pastoral - prophetic, even - prayer.