The Sun Also Rises

"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen. . . . There are no fixtures in nature."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"Generations come and generations go, but the earth never changes. The sun rises and the sun sets, then hurries around to rise again. The wind blows south, and then turns north. Around and around it goes, blowing in circles. Rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full. Then the water returns again to the rivers and flows out again to the sea."

—Ecclesiastes 1:4–7

 

New hives of bees are on order for spring delivery.

Baby chicks are scheduled to arrive in May.

As of yesterday, the last of our ordered seed packets have arrived.  

Last week I unloaded a pallet of compost and seed mix soil, preparing for greenhouse work.

 

Each of those is a sign.  Despite the fact that it was negative two degrees this morning when I trudged outside to release the chickens, and despite the snow that still covers the ground, the incrementally shrinking nights and stretching days confirm that the season, as though italicized, is leaning forward.

 

But that deceiving description – "leaning forward" - belies the deeper reality of our story.  Forward movement is relative.  At least since the beginning of the industrial age, we have charted our imaginations on the illusion of linear progress.  Sure, we may take two steps forward followed by one step back; sure, there may even be occasional leaps backward, obscuring any evidence of progress made, but all life we have imagined happens on a line.  We advance or we retreat because those are the only two options on a line.  We move, one foot in front of the other, on a line.  Forward, always forward.

 

As ancient peoples have long recognized, however, that's not really the way it works.  Life travels in a circle, not a line.  "Progress" is something of an illusion.  We don't move "forward" as much as we move "around".  Today's bare branches lead to bud break, to blossom, to fruiting, to leaf drop, to bare branch.  Repeat.  Perhaps that is why the circle is the most common geometric shape in nature:  to remind us.  We moved past spring and summer and fall only in the way that a clock hand moves past "2" and "3" and "4".  They will come around again.  As with winter.  

The sun sets, but it also rises.  Hemingway borrowed Ecclesiastes' wisdom to speak of generational resilience, and I suppose resilience is a part of it.  But the biblical sage, I think, was reflecting more on circularity than strength.  We've tended to view his more famous observation that, "there is nothing new under the sun," as a cynically callous, almost nihilistic view of life.  But instead of dismissively mocking our creativity, couldn't he actually be making the same macro point again:  that the sun, supervising this great rotational rhythm, has simply seen it all before – and will again in life's rotational turn?

 

The rain falls and soaks and runs and evaporates in order to do it all again.

The soil nourishes the seed which flourishes to nourish the animals and birds – and us – whose waste then nourishes the soil in order to do it all over again.

Ends are beginnings which are ends which…

 

"Around every circle," Emerson wrote, "another can be drawn." 

 

Taken by itself, one can't discern from a photograph if the image captures the sun rising or setting – which, perhaps, illustrates the point.  

 

"Around and around the wind goes, blowing in circles."

 

And hopefully each time around I learn again what I learned before, only each time more deeply; gaining wisdom, each time, moreso than volume.  

And given that nothing is ever left behind, hopefully what I discarded last time around doesn't present too putrid or toxic or formidable of an obstacle as I approach it all over again.  

Because what goes around comes around.  

 

"…there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning"

 

"The sun sets, but also rises."  

 

This round earth having moved in a circle, not a line.

 

The Flakes, the Gray, The Promise

It is snowing this morning – an effortless, windless descent refreshing the crusted remains of last week’s storm.  It’s mild for this time of year – low 30’s – but the forecast cautions that this will be the high of the day.  By sunset we will be back below zero, replicating the pendulum pattern that has characterized this winter –

- Back and forth –

- bitter cold juxtaposing thawing mild.

But it is winter, and we expect such things.  

Three cardinals ornament the tree outside our window – swollen red counterparts to the shriveled red berries left over from autumn.  Undeterred by the morning flurries, they greet each other and the dawning day.  On the opposite side of the tree remains the nest that has miraculously survived not only snowy blasts, but derecho winds.  I haven’t given it closer inspection, not wanting to disturb or deter future occupants should they want to take up residence there for a season.  But I am curious about its general construction, and the nature of its adhesion.  What natural glue or binding could withstand 70-80 mph winds?  But there it remains, durably and securely ready.  Poignantly available.

 

The chickens, too, seem adjusted to the season.  No doubt the added minutes of daylight since the solstice advantage them to productive effect, but whatever the explanation I’m finding eggs again after a fallow season of several weeks.  To be sure, they had better things to do with their protein – refurbishing feathers, replenishing spent stores, remembering how to keep warm – but I’m grateful for the fruitful resumption.  And while it might be an overstatement to claim that they bound down the ramp as soon as it is lowered, after a few deep breaths and a ruffling of feathers, they do in fact descend and emerge to see what they can see – and consume.  Dwayne, the rooster, emerges with his usual announcement, before shortly thereafter bolstering it into a warning to the hens about the overflying eagle.  They retreat back inside, this time not for warmth or food but out of an abundance of caution – preferring not to become someone else’s food if they can prevent it.  

 

The winter day is commencing – sunless on this side of the gray; snowy, with the frosty confirmation that this inclement season is yet with us for weeks – and months – to come.  And yet…

 

…and yet there are buds on the branches foretelling promise and change.  Swollen nodes dotting the extremities of the trees, hinting at leaf and blossom and fruit.  

 

I shiver with a giddy gratitude and open my face to the flakes, taking in what I’m promised will not last forever.

The Power of Logs and Their Splitting

 We split logs. 

It was among the coldest days of winter thus far – bitter, but at least sunny and still; unlike the previous day of breeze and freezing rain.  Multiple mounds of oversized logs had languished for months, long after the more readily useable ones had been claimed following the tree trimming and removal in the fall.  This was to be the day for dispatching the formidable remains.

 

It was new territory for me, and I’ll admit to some trepidation. For a city kid more accustomed to books and guitar strings, power equipment intimidates me.  My dreams toss with anticipatory calamities involving broken bones and crushed extremities from hydraulic force gone awry.  But John had booked the rental of the splitter, and we were anxious for the wooden rubble to be gone.  He eyed the wood as fuel for the wood stove heating part of his house.  Our socially centering fire pit could use the rest.  All that, plus the prospect of physical activity was compelling.  Holidays aren’t known for their exercise, and these days had been illustrations of the point.  Too much kitchen time, followed by too much table time had led to too much sofa time.  My body ached for a change.

 

Never mind, then, the cold; I picked up John in the pickup, headed over to the hardware store, and hitched up the splitter which looked like it had seen better days.  That, of course, only added to my apprehension.  Back home, we abandoned caution, pulled the engine rope, and set ourselves to the task at hand.

 

I will say that, despite the age and state of this particular piece of equipment – hardly a model of maintenance - the splitter is a marvel of basic ingenuity – marrying power and physics in a productive partnership.  Position the log on the platform, pull the handle, and the modest lawn-mower-sized engine animates the hydraulics to slowly propel the iron wedge up against and then through the wood, grain divorcing grain, cleaving the whole into dismembered sections.  Fellowship and warmth, the benefactors.

 

The work went quickly, methodically.  By the time Larry joined us late morning to contribute an extra set of hands, the project for which we had set aside the day, was largely accomplished.  Oak and walnut and Osage orange; log by half, by quarter, by stack.    And it felt good, this active exertion on a holiday morning, gloved and frosty breath, recycling the farm’s woody harvest with friends, in embodied anticipation of life in the new year.  

 

Towing the splitter back into parking lot, unhitching and paying for the abbreviated day, we drove away, smiling; as warm inside from a day well spent as the fires and the friendships our labors would fuel.

Even Here. Even Now

 In years past, the barn has been given over to Advent.  The equipment has been pushed aside to make room for a lighted tree, wreaths and a piano, holiday treats and carols, and the eventually hushed recollection that we are someplace reminiscent.   Even in this barn – even in this metal building with a cement floor whose only livestock has been an occasional brooder with baby chicks – holiness could be born.  

 

Remembering that it happened once

Writes Wendell Berry,

We cannot turn away the thought,

As we go out, cold, to our barns

Toward the long night’s end, that we

Ourselves are living in the world 

It happened in when it first happened.

That we ourselves, opening a stall

(A latch thrown open countless times

Before), might find them breathing there…

 

Somehow, even in this enclosure smelling more of diesel and grease and soup and cinnamon than hay and manure and animal sweat; even in this collection of red sweaters singing of snowmen and bells, silent nights and a prayerful Dona Nobis Pacem, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in our very midst.  And into the night and the encircling days and the poignancy of it all reawakens a dormant reverence.  Eventually the room is left dark and the door is locked and the last of the taillights disappears down the drive, but the songs somehow reverberate in and beyond this silent night made audible.

 

In years past.

 

This year, like the one it follows, the barn remains dark and crowded with tools instead of friends.  The tractor dominates the corner instead of the lighted tree.  Empty buckets an apparent metaphor for yet another COVID Christmas.

 

But “apparent” is the revelatory word, for we have long-since known that appearances can deceive.  Holiness, we have long-since heard it preached, has this quixotic habit of appearing where we least expect it – in barns, yes, and babies; but even in less likely vessels…

 

…like me and you, like living rooms and Zoom, like memories and hopes and songs sung on mute, like the space cleared by the clear-eyed conviction that no place is infertile; that no place is beyond the germinating potential of redeeming grace, and reconstituting peace.

 

Even amidst a pandemic.

 

Even here, and now, on this less-than-silent, socially distanced night…

 

…we can sing.

The Rests Between the Notes

quo·tid·i·an

/kwōˈtidēən/

adjective

1. of or occurring every day; daily.

o ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane.

 

These are those days. Ordinary.  Mundane.  

Outside the chores are reduced to chicken feed and water.  It is simple work – almost rhythmic – with, as the word suggests, a common dailyness that lends the morning hours the faintest hint of structure.  There is an occasional egg to collect, or two.  Otherwise, ordinariness is the norm.

Inside, yes, there is decorating to do for the holidays – among my favorite days of the year.  Carols in the background, tree lights and treasured ornaments in the foreground.  Christmas cookies iced with memories along with the sprinkles.  But the festivization of the living spaces will be accomplished soon enough, and the oven will return to commoner baking.   

Which is not to bemoan these quotidian days – inside or out. To call them “ordinary” or “mundane” is not to mock or malign them.  There is something replenishing about the plod of the days; centering.   I think back to the wise insight a mentor once offered a youthful me:  “If every moment were a mountaintop experience your body couldn’t handle the electricity.” 

I’m grateful for those mountaintop exhilarations, whenever they occasionally occur, but I’m equally grateful for these slower, ordinary, pedestrian ones.   

Music needs rests to elevate the notes.

Gardens need fallow seasons else fertility declines.

As we need the mundanity of days.  

Feeding and watering outside.  Washing and laundering, sorting and discarding inside.  And reading – replenishing the soil of mind and soul.  Patient chronos, preparing space for kairos.  Snow is finally in the extended forecast – three consecutive days next week.  If it falls and if it blankets the ground the pace will dial down even more.  Meanwhile, the clock ticks, the heart beats, the sun rises and, soon enough, sets.    Sleep, and then rising yet again.    

Metronoming the simpler rhythms of these quotidian days.

Practice Drill

Perhaps it was Black Friday weariness.

We have three coops for good reasons.  One - the Freshman Coop - is the "pre-school" shelter that serves as the transitional home for juvenile hens who have graduated from the brooder.  It is fenced off and over-netted.  In the main chicken yard are the Varsity and Junior Varsity Coops (the names an homage to my wife's career in public education), and they house the adults - the 30 or so hens and, at present, one rooster who make up our flock.  There are two here because neither is big enough to accommodate them all.  

Except on occasion.  Like Friday night.

Though I hadn't been aware of any unusually frenetic activity - shopping or otherwise - that Black Friday evening the entire flock bedded down in a single coop.  As I noted, it has happened before on rare occasions, coaxed by the onset of frigid temperatures with the prospect of keeping warm, or as aversion to some opossum exploring the other in search of eggs or a comfortable place of his own.  Friday the temperature was quite mild for this time of year - warmer even than the night before - so winter chill was not the incentive.  As best I could with my cell phone flashlight I explored the nooks and crannies of the empty lodging - beneath; within - but found nothing hiding or threatening.  It was simply and silently vacant.  A puzzlement.

As a child at school we routinely drilled in preparation for one calamity or another.  The bell would ring in a certain pattern for "fire" and we would line up, centipede-like, and head down the hall in one direction.  A ring in a different pattern signaled "tornado" and we would line up and head off in a different direction.  In my earliest memories, from a time clouded by the Cuban Missile Crisis, frosted by the Cold War and electrified by the "communist threat in Vietnam", we would periodically and on command retreat beneath our desks for a bomb drill.  I don't recall if the bell would ring for that, or if the teacher simply shouted, "Go!" and there we would crouch until receiving the "all clear." With countless others I have wondered in subsequent years, skeptically, exactly what protection our desks would have afforded against overflying, bomb-dropping communists, but we were prepared for them - or so we thought.  Who knows?  Maybe we should be huddling beneath our desks to protect us from COVID-19?

Regularly, then, we would practice making our way to the safety of the playground, or the cafeteria, or the shelter beneath our desks, hoping we would never need the skills we were rehearsing.

Maybe that's what was going on with the chickens.  Maybe nothing at all was amiss, and they were simply running practice drills in preparation.  Winter, after all, will surely arrive one of these days with a vengeance, and I have no reason to think we have seen the last of the opossums.  and who knows what other calamities might threaten.  A lingering communist, perchance.  

Perhaps, then, it wasn't fearfulness after all, but merely prudence.  Preparation.  Practice for what is coming.

Saturday morning at sunrise I made one final inspection of the empty coop and confirmed that I hadn't missed any intruder.  Lowering the ramp of its occupied neighbor and opening the hatches, I watched as everyone spilled outside and commenced the new day.  No one seemed worse for the night's cramped conditions.  Smiling at the resilience of the birds and what I presumed to be their prescient preparation, I walked back toward the house suddenly aware of their instructive nudge.  Advent would begin the following day - Advent, the season of watching and waiting, yes, but more importantly the season of preparing.  Getting ready.  Running "practice drills" for the greener life within as without.  And I wondered how I might prepare.  

I don't know that the rooster and hens are the religious types, but their example has been an inspiration.  I don't imagine that I'll be huddling under any desks, or bedding down in a crowded coop, but I do intend to make myself more ready...

...for renewing life. 

In whatever way it might drop down, blow through, flame up, or simply blossom
out.

Between Now and Then

 With muted gold and rose striating the indigo, the night sky moves toward dawn.  Predictions anticipate a warmer day ahead – 60’s instead of 40’s.  It is a pendulum I’ve come to expect in these swing days of nature’s indecision between autumn and winter.  Simultaneously reticent to let go and eager to move on, we hover along with the transitional ambivalence; dancing between “there” and “then”.  
 
We are no stranger to the tension.  As one, myself, who abhors goodbyes while simultaneously delighting in hellos, I am easily sympathetic.  How many treasured visits come to an end by moving out from the living room, only to stall in the driveway with one more story, and then another, and only finally one last hug?  How many warm and convivial Thanksgiving gatherings are truncated by Black Friday strategizings.  Staying or going?  Holding or reaching?  Tomorrow tints today which, of course, bears the lingering scent of yesterday.
 
High winds have been foreshadowing blusters on the way, but today the last remaining hose outside will still flow freely, and there is wrap-up work to accomplish with the hives.  We will take, perhaps, a final walk around to see about final winterizing details and then, with little choice, settle into the limbo of this betweenness; alternately freezing and thawing and pondering what other comings we need to prepare for with welcome, and what grips our fingers need to loosen around those of which we need to let go.  If that sounds ominous, it isn’t really. It is simply the nature of things.  We take up; we drop.  We receive; we release.  “When I was a child…,” the apostle Paul contrasted, “…but when I became a man…”. 
 
Yes, as the song observes, “We live our lives between then until now,” but it seems true to me that we likewise live our lives between now and then.  I know the Buddhists will counter that we only have the “now,” and while I agree that the present is the only real place to live, it exists among the broken pieces of the shell of the past from which it broke out, and for all its immanence, is always moving on without staying put. Life, then, as constant motion; undulation.  Going and coming.  Goodbye and hello.  Releasing and embracing.  Sunset, sunrise.
 There are gratitudes to speak aloud, coupled with farewells.  Greetings, as well, though we know not yet to whom to speak them.  Eventually, as is the way with things, it will become clear.
 
In the meantime, we wade into the tidal currents of this day and it’s incumbent ebbs and flows, its grippings and releases – its darkness and, just now, its dawns. There are seed potatoes to order for spring and coop bedding to refresh for winter, along with deck planters to store away.  And time to protect for each other.  Being alongside the doing.  
It will rise to 62-degrees in the hours at hand if the forecast is to be believed.  I’ll just note that the forecast for 7 days hence is for 11-degrees. Goodbye, and then of course, hello.
 
Now, with the fluttering of autumn’s few and last remaining leaves, and, inevitably, then.