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.