What is a “Real” Christmas Tree, Anyway?

I've never had a "real" Christmas tree - the kind found cut and bunched in a parking lot and sold by a church youth group or a scout troop or high school band as a fundraiser.

As a child our family annually erected that most oppositional of alternatives, the aluminum tree, complete with circling color wheel light set off to the side. A silver tinsel-like tree glistening in the front window's sunlight by day, and filling the living room walls and ceiling with rotating colored spots by night like a silent holiday disco. I suppose part of me envied my friends with their sap-oozing, needle-dropping, pine-scenting trees.  Allergies were our default rationale for the "artificial alternative", though I suspect expense and nuisance were the likelier reasons in a household with a tightly managed budget.  Nonetheless, I loved our silver tree. I loved positioning its broom handle-like trunk in the base and assembling the tree, branch by branch, each inserted into its pre-drilled hole. In the weeks that followed I remember creeping into that magical space alone while family members busied themselves with other things. I would lie down on the floor and be mesmerized by the rotational sparkle. Wrapped gifts eventually occupied the space beneath the silvery boughs, but I wasn't drawn to shake the packages and fantasize about their contents. I was there to be caught up in the graceful pirouette of the tree, the swirling of the colored spots, and the motorized rotation of the wheel from blue to red to yellow to green. That was Christmas, then, to me - the tree and the songs, the candlelight Christmas Eve service and the Christmas morning drive to visit grandparents.

In adulthood I have sustained the aversion to potential allergens and, with aluminum trees now out of fashion, have annually retrieved from the attic or basement or barn the green, more familiar style of artificial conifer. In more primitive times the decorating began with the ultimate tedium of stringing lights in some artful draping, before moving on to balls and stars and tinsel and bows, but having reached the zenith of holiday convenience and expedience, we now simply assemble the pre-lit layers and plug it in. Voila!

There are yet, I'll admit, those occasional and wistful moments when a "real" tree sounds romantically appealing, but the thoughts are as fleeting as Christmas cookies. I rather like our representational specimen.

That, and the sudden ambiguity about what is a "real" Christmas tree in the first place? Is a truncated, now lifeless cadaver of wood still a tree, and by extension any more "real" than a fabrication of bristly plastic and wires? Or cut, has it ceased to be a tree but become, instead, a product - a derivative like lumber or paper or utility pole or mulch? Is nature any more honored by a tree destroyed than by a tree imitated? Is the spiritual dimension of the symbol any better expressed by the evergreen turning brittle and brown and raining down on the floor than by the literally evergreen artificial branches from the box - or for that matter by its aluminum antecedents?

Could it be, instead, that a "real" Christmas tree isn't defined by its material composition at all, but by the life it invites me to ponder, the creation it points beyond itself to celebrate, the birth it's lighting symbolizes and its decorating reveres? Could it be that the "realness" of the Christmas tree is what happens around it?

Could it be that the Christmas tree is like a pancake which is less of a culinary star and more of a simple and unobtrusive conveyance for the sweetness that covers it?

Resuming the Christmas playlist through which Bing and Perry and Andy and Nat serenade us into the season, and plugging in the lights on the tree and sidestepping the corgi snoozing on its skirt, I finger the adorning ornaments accumulated through the years and contemplate all the sweetness they convey.

And it is real. Whatever all the accoutrements are made of, it's the sweetness - spiritually, relationally, sentimentally - that is real.

I'll go outside for the trees.

Transitioning to the Cold and Quiet Season

The kale is all that remains.

The other garden beds have been cleared, raked, seeded with green manure, and covered with a layer of compost. The garlic cloves, in anticipation of summer, have been nestled under ground. The garden has been put to bed.

Except for the kale. Like curled ribbons tying closed a wrapped gift, the rich green leaves stretch a line of residual giggles across the garden. Little horticultural alleluias punctuating the season's end.

We should clip the lot of them - blanch them, squeeze away the excess water, and freeze them for later use. And we will. It's too good to waste; too nutritious to neglect. But we procrastinate, reticent to erase this last echo of summer, this resplendent beauty, this resounding testament to the sweetness the cold can evoke. Indeed, this hardy brassica is actually improved by the frost.

It is not, after all, an abstract consideration. Despite the temperate days that have been the norm these autumn days, cold is in the forecast for later this week - lows in the teens and highs just barely above freezing. Cold, and the likelihood of measurable snow. Winter may toy with us, but it will eventually arrive full-throttle. And "sweetness" isn't the first descriptor that comes to mind with the shivers. We are more likely to resemble the Swiss chard that, until recently, joined the sturdier greens in the row - once proud and stately plants now browned, bent and brittled. Thus the kale, in resilient contrast, as inspiration. There, as the garden's final promenade of the season, their leafy curliness reorients, nourishes and beckons. The row stands as our own very green and present expression of Mary Oliver's observation that,

"...​The world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment​?'"

The kale is all that remains in the garden. But it is enough to ask the question, and encourage the response of our sweet and curly living.

To Be Here, Home

The darkness dissipates as it does every morning, gradually, glacially, as the sun inched northward, relinquishing someone else's day in pursuit of our own. As I say, it is hardly novel; indeed, this quotidian movement is so ordinary as to routinely go unnoticed.

But not this morning. I sit out on the deck and allow it to unfold me as well as the morning. Yes, the sky - only moments ago full of stars - is clear and permits the emerging glow it's full and unobstructed stage. Yes, the air is crisp, befitting a new autumn day. But singular beauty is not what simultaneously settles and evokes me this emerging dawn. It is simply that I haven't seen it envelop this particular landscape in quite awhile - first, the silhouette of the trees, and then the rounded shape of the chicken coops; the outlines of the leaves in the nearby trees, and eventually the hints, the teasing foretastes, of autumn's golds and reds and yellow and bronze. The morning of a new day. The dawning of a new season. Now the rooster officially announces the fact.

We've been traveling.

First, there was grief work to attend. Emotions, consolations, ruminations, details; simultaneously carrying and being held. Physically we were elsewhere - emotionally, relationally, psychologically, too.

Home, then, for a rapid-fire turnaround during which we scarcely looked around before flying off again.

The hours and the stories and the laughter and the tears, the tasks and the memories and the new experiences forged, first, days and then weeks until finally, long after darkness had settled upon our traveling stamina and Taproot Garden, we arrived home last night. Our travels have been rich. Glorious, even. The distance and the privacy came at a good time. The celebrations we indulged, the landscapes on which we became drunk, the time together to both remember and dream. To simply "be".

I listen now to the stirring chickens, already clamoring for release. I survey the garden from the deck's distance, wondering what gifts might still be on offer after such neglect. Mostly I simply receive the familiar and now beloved landscape, night's curtain raised, accept the sudden lump in my throat, and whisper a prayerful gratitude for being here.

Here.

As the poem of this day begins, I recall the observation with which Wendell Berry closes one of his own:

"What we need is here."

Here.

It's good to be home.

Together, The Persons We’ve Become

 

The table is laden with leftover bottles of water, cans of tea, chips, nuts and plates.  The chairs and tables have been folded and returned to the barn.  The microphone cables have been coiled and the sound system ensconced again in its corner of the basement.  The farmstead has quieted again to the usual crowing of the rooster and squawks of the hens and occasional grunts of the alpacas next door, and our routine shufflings here and there.  

And the enduring whispers of memory.

 

On Friday evening, as this holiday weekend commenced, we hosted the opening gathering of Lori’s high school reunion.  Memorabilia hung from tree branches, and animated tables.  Music from the ‘70’s backgrounded conversations.  An “In Memorium” display sobered one end of the displays, while nostalgia and news and food lubricated the rusty relationships.  There, under the waning daylight and beside the fire pit, the flowers and the expansive sky, a remote season, once again, drew near.  

 

Memories are mercurial – ephemeral even.  “Do you recall…?” someone would ask from this corner of the gathering, and then another.  And the answers varied.  “Yes.”  “No.”  “Kinda.”

 

Pictures helped.  Artifacts nudged.  For every anecdote reanimated, two were irretrievable. It has been a long time, and many roads have been traveled. Some things are dearly held, while others are best forgotten.  We don’t agree on which is which.

 

The evening crackled with laughter and conversation, and stories etched into older faces.  For a few hours we were younger again.  Me, as well, for though these were not “my people”, rooted in a school and a community 1000 miles from my own, their memories reanimated my own; their rapport refreshed the faces in my heart of names and personalities with whom I had shared classrooms, built homecoming floats, made music…and a life.  “Me,” along with the other spouses along for the ride.  We, too, listened and told stories and found our places in narratives that preceded us.  It was nourishing to inhabit, if only for an evening, deeper recesses of my beloved’s life in which I had had no part, and vicariously to retrace a few of the lines of my own.  

 

And to marvel afresh at the myriad fingers that shape us.  

 

I have long found evocative the assertion of one of my teachers that, “We are all born human, but we become persons by our associations, our affiliations, our conflicts, our relationships.”  

 

On Friday evening, it was good to touch our fingers, again, on the cooled forge that formed at least a part of the persons we’ve become.  

 

And to give thanks for the gift of those days, and this one.

The Raccoon Wars Resume

After a long season of detente, in which the raccoons constrained their foraging to the darkness while the chickens busied themselves in daylight, the peace was suddenly breached.  It has happened before; August seems to be the month when raccoons step out of bounds.  An early evening dinner guest recently stepped away from the table and into the sunroom to answer a call where she noticed through the window a chicken, clenched in the jaws at the opposite end of the ringtail, being dragged toward the fence line.  In broad daylight.  Our friend raised an alarm, and the group of us hurried outside accompanied by as much noise as we could generate.  The offending raccoon, concluding that safety was more desirable than supper, dropped the dazed hen and scurried into the woods.  The traumatized chicken survived, and eventually shook off the assault.  A quick census of the flock, however, revealed that this had not been the first incursion.  

War plans were subsequently drawn and set in motion.  

The battles, in the ensuing days, grew hot and then cold.  Escalating and then briefly calming, they would quickly escalate anew.  We are now three weeks into the conflict, and though it’s hard to know who has the upper hand, I can say that my efforts have not been for naught.  In keeping with my larger vocational urgings, I have evangelistically introduced 25 raccoon souls to Jesus.  

So to speak.  

I’ll spare you the details of the baptism.  And I have every reason to believe that the bushes - if not the fields - remain “white for harvest.”  

So I continue.  So I remain vigilant.  It’s not that I have any particular prejudice against raccoons - and harbor no peculiar animosity.  I completely respect the fact that every life needs and deserves its nourishment.  

Circle of life and food chain and all that.  “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as the poet described it.

I simply require that predators look for their sustenance somewhere other than in our chicken yard.  I have taken the chickens to raise and tend and protect.  It is a commitment I have made to their keeping, and I intend to keep it.  The raccoons are welcome to the rabbits which, this year, frolic in abundance.  There is a veritable carpet of bunnies these summer months, and the bunnies have been known to commit yet another farmstead sin of sneaking into the garden.  Rabbits I can do without.  I have proffered no promises to them or on their behalf.  

But the chickens are another matter. The chickens I will protect.  Should the raccoons return to their nocturnal normal I will happily reinstitute the armistice. 

In the meantime, however, I am vigilant - set, baited and watching.  

Amen.

Sweet Collaboration

“How hard could it be?” I wondered on more than one occasion as I set up the beehives last year.  “Bees have been tending to themselves for thousands of years.”  

 

Despite the latter observation’s affirmative truth, the answer to the former question is, “More than one might think.”

 

I learned that the hard way.  Purchasing two “packages” of bees and setting them up for housekeeping around the back of the prairie, I apparently went out of my way to be inhospitable.  Within a month one of the colonies was gone – dead or merely departed I couldn’t ascertain.  I did my best to nurture and cajole the remaining colony through the summer and fall, and with the outer reaches of my microscopically limited knowledge did what I could to prepare it for winter.  Through the course of those bitter months I would pass by the lonely hive, neither seeing nor hearing any sign of life.  

 

On the foundation of this astonishing failure, I began the new year by ordering three new colonies for springtime. I would execute a “reboot.”  As winter faded, I made the sad journey to the apiary to dismantle the remaining hive, only to lift the lid and find a burgeoning colony, happily undertaking a new season.  That one, soon joined by the three I had newly ordered, and eventually joined by the two successful splits from that overwintered miracle.  The swollen population meant that August honey extraction season approached riding the momentum of six healthy hives.  Not all would be ready to share their stores, of course, but some were extending their hand.  Questions arose.  We consulted teachers and mentors and YouTube videos.  We purchased equipment.  We sanitized and organized and asked a few more questions.  Finally, when we could think of or justify no more impedimenting delays, we loaded up the Club Car, gathered the promisingly loaded frames, encouraged the clinging bees to stay behind, and returned to the processing area we had laboriously staged, and got to work.  

 

Yesterday.

 

It will likely take years to master the uncapping knife, but we got the job done.  It took awhile to finesse the electric extractor, but we eventually fell into a routine.  We spun, we drained, we strained the viscous gold.  We licked our fingers when we thought the other wasn’t looking, and we filled bottle after glorious bottle until we closed the bucket’s honey gate for the final time.  

 

And then, surveying the 52 pounds of bottled harvest, we smiled.  It’s hardly “free”, this liquid largesse.  The dollars invested in beekeeping have been surprising; the labor demanded has been as exhausting as it has been fascinating and disciplining.  And yet the abundant generosity of it all is a wonder to me.  Bees, themselves, were already a wonder.  A “super-organism” that functions enviably and organically as a whole rather than a collection of individuals, the hive is a throbbing body of specialization and efficiency; nursing, guarding, cleaning, gathering, reproducing, sustaining and monitoring.  And then the honey.  Honey manifests the bees’ alchemical accomplishment of spinning, Rumpelstiltskin-like, straw into gold; transforming the myriad pollens and nectars into a life-supporting pantry and medicine cabinet.  

 

That happens to be delectably sweet.

 

A friend asked how the bees feel about being robbed of the fruits of their labors.  I can’t imagine that they are thrilled, but they acquiesce.  Industrious, they’ve already gotten about their business of making more.  And we will help – planting more flowers for the long term, filling sugar water feeders to augment their efforts in the near term, attending to their health and preparing their space for winter.  It’s a partnership, after all; a reciprocity that nourishes and delights us both – the colony in the hive, and the colony in the house; sweeter for the collaboration.

 

 

Garden Mentors, Shining in Their Way

 

Sunflowers were in our imagination this year as we filled greenhouse trays with seeds. The infatuation paired nicely with our resolve to scale back on vegetables. Having finally comprehended that we aren’t growing to feed an army, we mentally allocated more space for flowers. We’ve added bees to the farmstead enterprise and they would certainly benefit from additional flora, and while we still had plenty of vegetables in mind for the season, the reapportionment of garden rows would better align with the fact that it is just the two of us and miscellaneous dinner guests consuming the harvest. We would still be over-supplied.

Sunflowers weren’t the only flowers we seeded. There was a floral diversity, but sunflowers were at the heart of our efforts. Lots of them. Lots of varieties of them. “Evening Sun,” “Chocolate Cherry,” “Earthwalker,” “Panache,” “Mammoth Grey Striped,” “Hopi Black Dye,” “Short Stuff,” among others. There are, perhaps, a hundred of them now transplanted into rows - a number to rival the tomatoes.

But why? 

To be sure, they are striking in their Seussian quirkiness. They stretch and sprawl and tower above it all. We like the fact that they reseed themselves and return, year after year. Presently, we like their resplendent mindfulness of the people of Ukraine as they reel under the onslaught of murderously colonizing tyranny, but their hapless plight couldn’t have been on our minds when we ordered the seeds. Sunflowers are a food source not only for humans but pollinators alike - an adequate justification even if there were no others. They are heliotropic - meaning they seek the light - which might be inspiration enough in this shade-throwing world. Too many of us politicians, preachers, commentators and citizens behave in ways betraying too much affinity for the night.

But surely there is something more.

I rather think, in addition to their other virtues, our enthrallment has something to do with the sunflower’s unabashed, full-throated but unpretentious openness. Their face is like an open hand - petals extended and exposed without precaution. There is no timidity, simply the forthright precocity that seems to say, “Here I am. Welcome.” 

Early in life we are commonly taught, “Don’t talk to strangers” - wise counsel for vulnerable children - but unfortunately too few of us outgrow the caution. I'm not immune.  More times than I want to admit I "pass by on the other side of the road" like the foils in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.  The result, of course, is a collective of adults malnourished by sameness and suffocated by a seduction of safety that is neither tenable nor safe.

The sunflowers, by contrast, are unperturbed and unprotected. They are simply open. There is no artifice or opposition; simply the uninhibited, fully exposed offer of themselves to the sun…and beyond. 

In brightness. In beauty. In seed. In stately grandeur.

A face, fully offered. A hand, open wide and hospitably proffered. Content to be, or be given. And received.

Whimsically, winsomely open.
Turning toward the light.

We could do worse by way of mentors.

Blessedly in the Midst of It All

 It was, ostensibly, to enjoy the wildflowers.  We had spent the better part of the day working companionably outdoors – Lori supporting the burgeoning tomato bushes, while I mowed the grass.  And, indeed, as I had trimmed the path around the prairie, near the apiary, and then back around toward the house, the eruption of wildflowers had truthfully caught my attention.  

Finishing, then, the more detailed grooming, we boarded the utility cart for a look around.  The day had been sunny and blue, with cottony tufts of intermittent clouds; warm but not hot, with gentle breezes replacing the blustery winds of recent weeks.  It had been pleasant enough and satisfying work of the sort that makes for easy sleep and contented dreams.  

And as we crept our way around the pathways, the wildflowers were truly joyful – bergamot and blackeyed Susans, sunflowers and verbena, along with others whose names I need to learn.  The bees should be very happy at all the culinary options.

But as satisfying as was the ride – as lovely as were the flowers – the richer, still lovelier comprehension, was the sense of awe-filled appreciation that this is the anchoring place of our lives.  Yes, we have brought our hands and our souls to this place; yes, we have broken and sowed, we have planted and opened; yes, our fingerprints are here.  But I will be so bold as to assert that our efforts have served to magnify rather than stifle the personality of this piece of earth.  We have resisted the arrogance of forcing it to be something that it’s not, but have endeavored to hear its voice and amplify it.

And along the way it has nourished us.  I’m speaking of more than the garden and the orchard.  These several acres have fed more than our bodies.  It has enlarged and enriched our understanding of self, grounded our relationship to the “moreness” of creation, and humbled our assumptions surrounding our place in the world.  We are, to put it simply, simpler, and richer.  We are increasingly shed of our presumptions and pretensions – learnings, the irony of which are not lost on me this “Independence Day” weekend.  

Amidst a holiday that has come to be a self-indulgent bath in self-adjudged exceptionalism – that we, out of all the nations of the world and history, have managed to get it “right”; or at the very least, are the best among the alternatives (an argument that is at once gratuitously delusional and aspirationally pathetic) – we alternatively take a moment to admire a wildflower, pluck a wild blackberry and giggle at the burst in our mouths of its undeserved sweetness, and simply give thanks not for any possession of it, but for the generosity it unself-consciously tips our way.  

The celebration around the farmstead this weekend, then, is not about “rockets red glare” or some faux narrative about religious freedom or the trumpeting of supposed high and noble ideals.  Those, after all, are mere self-congratulatory fictions we perpetuate in order to elevate our national ego and sell more firecrackers and bottle rockets.  Having forsaken the beauty of community and the mechanics of cooperation, we collectively are left to settle for the fetish of "independence", a hollow and terminal alternative.  

Our celebration, instead, will seek to be a quiet and grateful wonder at the privilege of belonging - that we are a petal on a flower on a stem on a root in a soil that is no respecter of boundaries or borders; partners as busy contributing as receiving; speakers, but mostly listeners to the rustling, the stirring, the emerging and the blooming.  

And as darkness closes the day, "oohing" less at the fireworks in the sky than the fireflies in the field, we give


thanks that we get to be connected to - interdependent with - it all.  

Viriditas Comes Home

 The seed was sown in Italian soil, in the Umbrian village of Assisi.  We had read about a bronze sculpture in the Upper Basilica of that storied village, and nearing the end of our visit to a neighboring village six miles away, we hastily arranged an exploratory expedition.  The sculpture depicts Saint Francis receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit – a common enough theme.  But unlike the usual depictions in which Francis’ hands are extended towards the heavens to receive the descending dove, this characterization positions Francis on his knees reaching downward to receive the Holy Spirit emerging from the soil.  That made sense to us in a way so compelling that our spiritual and agricultural imaginations kept returning to the idea.

And then we met Hildegard.  

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th century German polymath – an Abbess, an herbalist, a physician, an artist and musician, a blunt critic of religious leaders who grew accustomed to her scorn when she deemed their actions contrary to the gospel, a preacher, writer and mystic.  She was, in a phrase, a spiritual force of nature.  

I rather think she would smile at the label.  

Central in her writings was a special attention to the presence and activity of the Spirit in the world/nature. The Latin word she frequently used to refer to a central element in her thinking and approach to life was “viriditas” - often translated as “greening”.  As one contemporary disciple of Hildegard noted, “Viriditas was a key concept that expressed and connected the bounty of God, the fertility of nature, and especially the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

And with that, the seed sown in Italy sprouted in Germany, and blossomed in Iowa.  A friend connected us with a Belgian artist living only a few miles from us – significantly named “Hilde” – who accepted the commission for an outdoor sculpture that would integrate these two inspirations.  Click here to see more of her amazing work.

Early in the process, we sent an email to her that shared our thoughts about this intriguing Latin word, “Viriditas:  Holiness, health, vitality, nature and fertility - all wrapped up into one lovely Latin word; all central to a European mystic whose name reminded us of you.  Delightful. It could name the piece.”

And so it has.  And Viriditas came home to assume its place today on the farmstead, framed by the garden, the chicken yard and the tall grass prairie.  She’s magnificent.  With wings inspired by oak leaves and a gentle spiral evoking upward movement, the corten steel piece subtly incorporates the taproot that names our farmstead, on a base that hints at the labyrinth that highlights our acreage’s western edge.  The color of the bare metal will evolve with the elements and time, much like the farmstead itself.  

And already we gather around it, or pause as we pass; acknowledging in fresh ways that we are accompanied here in our daily work by winds exhaled from lungs holier and more instrumental than our own; evocative breezes stirring life in freshly incarnational expressions, at once grounding and elevating, centering and expanding…

…into ever-new life.

I somehow think that Hildegard is smiling at Hilde's work - singing, even - while Francis kneels and reaches toward it to receive, yet again, the Spirit that is the very creative impulse of God.  

Here.  Now.  In this very place.

The Overturning, Enlivening Breath of the Wind

 

The wind has been a wearisome neighbor this week.

Gusting and blowing, first from the north and then turning to return from the south as if to retrieve something forgotten behind.  Like keys.  Or a wallet.  As I age I increasingly know this kind of problem.  The wind, however, has been neither embarrassed nor quiet about its comings and goings.  It has blown, with gust and gale; wearying, and withering.  

The trash dumpster, emptied by the road, relented in the face of the unrelenting and toppled over on its side.  

The greenhouse door tested its hinges as the handle wrenched from my hand.  

The deck chairs slid in a patternless ballet.  

The chickens huddled in the sheltering calm of the run.  

Trees swayed like concert fans in the mosh pit.   

The prairie grasses leaned into an italicized landscape.  

Everything feels it, responds to it, succumbs to it.  However reticent, however pliant and resilient, the wind has us all, and does with us what it wills.

And then stillness, as if pausing to take a breath that, in exhalation, becomes yet another force to be pressed against.  

I don’t have explanation for why the simple experience of wind is so exhausting - how simply standing in place while the force of it presses and insists can weary.  Perhaps it is that the act of simply being suddenly requires an effort not demanded in stillness.  Neither do I understand why the alternation of its absence can feel so relieving.  But there it is:  the compelling, propelling sweep of its presence, and the centering peace of its absence.  

Or so it seems.

It has always struck me as interesting that in scripture the words “breath” and “wind” and “spirit” are all translations of the same Hebrew word.  The animating breath that brought Adam and Eve to life; the wind that drove back the Red Sea waters allowing the Israelites to safely pass through; the forceful wind that stormed into and revitalized Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones; the mind of God that Isaiah saw lacking in the people; the Spirit that gives life in the Gospel of John’s Greek translation of the word - the Comforter that Jesus promised; the Spirit that the risen Christ “breathed” on his disciples; the transformational wind of Pentecost.  

Wind, Breath, Spirit.  The compelling, propelling movement of the Divine.

Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German mystic, latched onto the Latin word “viriditas” to refer to this enlivening, animating force at work among and through us.  Typically translated as “greening”, the word signified for Hildegard that divine movement - force - that is the source of all flourishing and growth. 

 It’s easy to see this greening activity this time of year in coloring lawns and garden bed emergence.  And yes, that is viriditas.  

But emerging stems and greening grass could inure me to the truth that this inspirited movement is a force, pushing and rearranging, toppling over and breaking through.  

Like the wind.

This morning it was still when I stepped outside to perform the morning chores.  Righting the overturned glider in the yard, I lift my face to the quietude of the rising sun.  It is peaceful after the relentless bluster of recent days.  But I smile with the recollection of that old biblical word and Hildegard’s Latin equivalent, and wonder if this momentary calm is just Divine inhalation - the Creator pausing and gathering oxygen for the next billowing gust of transformational, generative, and quite possibly disrupting greening.

While Anything is Possible

The day began, crisp and sunny - sunny enough that the brightness upon the greenhouse was already blunting the crispness inside.  Stepping inside, into this wholly other world of moist and evocative fecundity, I stood for a moment once the door closed behind me to simply inhale the air of promise.  And to be encouraged by it.  Removing the lids protecting the trays we populated yesterday with seeds, I had to reassure myself that despite the naked appearances, just slightly beneath that surface of potting soil are, indeed, nestled the promissory notes of harvest - tiny packets of DNA and know-how already beginning to soften with the rainwater I sprinkle on; already stirring with the warmth and the dark; already aching to stretch upward into the light.

Just beneath the surface.

I can’t get too carried away.  I know from sobering experience that not every seed grows; not every promise is kept; not every potential grows to fruition.  Some simply smolder in their dormancy, and remain there beneath the soil -

-like words unspoken;

-notes unplayed;

-letters not mailed.

Perversely, it’s tempting to focus on them - the blank blocks in the tray - rather than those out of which a stem, tiny and fragile, is already protruding.   There is yet time.  It's still early.  Seeds, after all, exist in a time beyond my own - “kairos”, the Greek word for that intangible and inscrutable “right time”, rather than “chronos”, that metronomic click of “clock time.”  I can manage the externals - the water and warmth and light - but the internals are beyond my reach.  We might wince at the comparison, but like the gardeners who sow them, not every seed realizes its potential.  

Even then not all is lost.  The unsprouted seed simply dissolves into the soil where it becomes part of the nourishment for other seeds.  

Having tended, then, indiscriminately to both the stretching and the silent - unable at this stage to assess what is won and what is lost - I refill the water jugs for next time and latch the door behind me, stepping back into the sunny crispness of the morning.  Midway back toward the house I pause with a nagging provocation, and take another lingering look behind me and consider again the wonder of what is happening inside that nurturing space.  

Coaxing.

Nurturing.

Protecting.

Germinating.

And I ponder what all might be stirring in those other fertile spaces of these days...

...in the opportune conversations;

...on the blank pages;

...in the quiet moments;

...in the prayers of the day;

...in the seeds, just beneath the surface;

...in these moist and fecund days while anything is yet possible.

The Urgent Awakening of Now

Wendell Berry once commented about the season of deep winter as the time when, “the present has abated its urgencies” (The Long-Legged House).  

For the past ten years especially I have enjoyed that to be true.  That, in the same way that spring has come to be the season when the urgencies of the present re-engage.  

It was less than 2 weeks ago that we were yet again shoveling snow from the porch and driveway.  Five inches of heavy, wet flakes had fallen along with the temperature after an unseasonably warm week.  Even still the nights, as often as not, drop below freezing. But it is undeniable that the seasons are changing.  Warmer days are gradually arm-wrestling winter to the table despite the latter’s occasional bursts of strength.  And suddenly the tasks present themselves.  

Already we are filling seed trays and nestling them into the greenhouse.  It won’t be long until the garden soil is workable, opportunistically between the frost and the mud. There will be beds to reclaim and refresh, irrigation tapes to reestablish and realign, seed plots to allocate, and, with breathtaking speed, weeds to attack.  The rain barrels will need to be positioned and the downspouts reconfigured to feed them.  The compost will need to be spread.  The snow blower on the tractor will need to be unhitched and moved aside on behalf of the mowing deck whose labors will soon be called upon.  

And when it all commences in earnest - when it thunders toward us like an oncoming train - it will feel to us like it needs to all happen at once.  All with the urgency with which we have ached, these recent months, for spring itself.

Rabbits are already exploring the open spaces along the edge of the woods, and birds have resumed their familiar music.  

Life, in ways both airy and earthy, is stirring.  

Slowly.

Quietly.

But with startling acceleration.

And it’s good, these palpable signs of greening, given the iciness that so tenaciously grips and paralyzes the world’s relational fecundity.  We need the crocuses and daffodils and robins and buds to teach us again how to swell, fat, with vigor.  We need role models of thawing and softening and turning toward the light.  We need tutors in daily song; coaches in the calisthenics of breaking through the crusted earth and stretching upward and outward.  

We need the dangling promise of harvest, even if the ripe juice of it is still months away.

But for now it is work enough to acknowledge the shift of the equinox, and submit to its coaxing.  Just the hint of it emerging - the tiny glimpse of the green of it - is enough to get us moving...

...with the urgency it demands.

The Silence of a Sobered Morning

The local meteorologists were tracking the storm path with their usual euphoric chatter. The television was on, and then it went dark.

 

The cell phone tornado warnings alarmed in our hands, and then went silent. 

 

The air was eerily still, and then it wasn’t. 

 

The lights glowed beneath the angry sky, and then they didn’t. 

 

The generator kicked on. The chickens huddled inside their coops, not unlike us in our basement. 

 

The rains sheeted down, the winds snarled, and just beyond our reach, the tornado knifed its way through town, across the county, and then beyond.

 

And missed us.  But we were among the fortunate.  Nearby, seven people lost their lives.  I have to sit with that for a moment.  Lives.  Lost.  From a storm that passed perhaps a half-mile from our home.  We’ve since seen the power lines draping the roads; the carcasses of trees tracing the line.  We’ve since heard of horses moved from barns deprived of their roofs, businesses invaded by the elements, homes battered.  Families displaced.

 

Morning confirmed that Taproot Garden passed the night unscathed.  Not even broken branches.  We awoke to power restored, blue skies – a blank-faced, mischievous morning trying to act like it had not misbehaved in the night.  

 

I released and fed the chickens who were happy for the daylight.  I walked the dogs.  I watered the seed trays in the greenhouse and tried to pretend that this was simply another ordinary day.  But the pretense was deafened by the echo of the hollowness.  

 

I know otherwise.

I know the truth.

This is not simply another ordinary day.

 

Line crews worked through the night to retrieve dangling cables and to restore electrical service.  Road crews worked through the night to bulldoze trees off the roadways.  People picked through their rubble to reclaim the precious, the salvageable.  Insurance adjusters arrived early on the scene to begin the grim assessment of destruction.

 

And families, scissored by death, sat in silence, facing into the disbelief and the inexpressible, untraceable future.  

 

A half-mile away.

 

Anything but just another day.

The Patient Pleasure of Knowing

Knowing this valley, once one has started to know it, is clearly no casual matter. Like all country places, it is both complex and reticent. It cannot be understood by passing through. It does not, like Old Faithful, gush up its inwards on schedule so as not to delay the hurrying traveler. Its wonders are commonplace and shy. Knowing them is an endless labor and, if one can willingly expend the labor, an endless pleasure.”

(Wendell Berry, “The Nature Consumers”)

 

I have more pruning to do today, weather permitting.  It is that time of year, while the trees are dormant and the air is cold enough to suppress infections in the wounds I inflict for the sake of health and growth.  Part survey of the larger shape, and part intimate discernment of the nuances of growth patterns, pruning is a deceptive finesse.

 

I came by coercion to this annual practice.  I don’t mean that someone thrust shears into my hands and compelled me to the orchard; rather that the experts overwhelmed my instinctual resistance.  The books, the classes, the simple weight of evidence finally clipped away at my intuitive resistance to this seemingly counterproductive practice of cutting off perfectly good, fruit-bearing branches.  What I’ve learned is that too many can create problems.  Pruning allows the remaining branches more access to the sun, more airflow to prevent diseases, fewer abrasions from branches rubbing against branches, greater concentration of resources and, in short, greater capacity for the fruit to flourish into better fruit.

 

Less, it turns out, is more. If you want to bear fruit.

 

But it isn’t indiscriminate diminishment.  It does not serve the tree to whack branches willy nilly.  There is attention to be paid; careful observation of branch and bud and fork and direction.  More will be cut than seems needful, but there is a point beyond which is too much.  Care, then, and patient observation; reading tree and listening for what it has to say.

 

As with the very land in which the trees are rooted.  Alexander Pope (1688-1744) once advised those who would invest themselves in a particular locale:

 

Consult the genius of the place in all;

That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;

Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,

Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;

Calls in the country, catches opening glades,

Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,

Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;

Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

 

Less poetically, perhaps, but no less elegantly, David Abram asserts that, “A particular place in the land is never…just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.” (Spell of the Sensuous)

 

Which is simply to note, with Wendell Berry, that “knowing” this place, once one has started to know it, is no casual matter.

 

We have lived in this place now 10 years – an almost imperceptible tick in the sweep in time, but a long and settled season in the course of our lives.  Indeed, it is the longest we have lived anywhere in our adulthood.  We have observed the seasons – how the sun strikes the land differently in winter and summer; where the snow hides and lingers and where it early disappears.  We have noticed how leaves fall and which berries persist; which birds catch us by surprise and which become neighbors in their reliable familiarity.  We have grown familiar with the rolling slopes; made peace with the hard-packed clay, and learned patience for the gradual and coaxed improvement of it through compost and nature’s own interventions.  We have sought not to control, but to participate; to contribute as much as we receive.  We have, with varying degrees of success, slowed enough to nature’s pace as to notice its various deaths and resurrections, its vivid evocations and its silent reclamations; its extravagant generosities and its prudent frugalities; its constancy and its lithe adaptability.  

 

And yet we are but newcomers here – here in this place whose “wonders are commonplace and shy. Knowing them is an endless labor and, if one can willingly expend the labor, an endless pleasure.”

 

There is a particular tree on our eastern edge behind which and ever so gradually above which the sun rises this time of year.  Walking out into the early hours this morning to release the chickens, I paused, despite the cold, to watch the wonder of it yet again unfold.  I’ve seen it before, of course, but for all its commonness it is, along with the day it heralds, a holy generosity. 

 

The sun, the rooster’s crow, the greeting wave of the prairie grass, the shy flip of the retreating deer’s tail, the fruit trees waiting to be pruned. Seeing, listening, learning, knowing – an endless labor.

 

An endless pleasure.