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The View

The Gift of Joy and Wonder

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To my youngest grandchild:

Your tiny hand squeezing my pinky finger. Your bright blue eyes studying my face, studying the world. These are some of my earliest memories of you. At one month, you stare at the dark ceiling beams overhead, then the trapezoids of light that are your living room windows. Those, I am told, are beyond your focal point, so you cannot see the detail—the turning-red leaves of the black tupelo against the clear October sky. But your eyes are hungry to absorb your surroundings, too curious to close until you are tired beyond sleepy. You delight in the world around you.

Circumstances brought you to live with your Grandnan and I at two months of age. Now you are going on five months, so you and I have had an intense, round the clock bonding, more like what I could have had with your dad and his brothers, if I had been more aware and open and mature. We’re buddies at 2 AM feedings and again at 4, when you need a diaper change and you think it’s time to play. I’m there in the evenings when you are fussy—as sleep or that last burp won’t come. I’m there in the mornings when you’re all smiles, lighting up the room.

I note the day to day changes, your growing strength and coordination, your curiosity and observations. I kiss the soft fuzz on your round dome a dozen times a day, noting the heat radiating as your brain makes ever more connections.

We talk, you and I. You regale me with your stories—those sounds you are learning to make—and when you discover a new one, you joyfully repeat it over and over and over. I tell you stories, too, about the cousins you have yet to meet, about the things we will do together—read books, play in the woods. 

You are still drawn to strong contrasts and patterns: the false shamrock in the window, dark leafless trees against gray January skies, lights. But you are also aware of the subtler things: someone leaving the room, the dog inviting play via a dropped tennis ball. You recognize a recording of classical guitar,  my go-to when you need a distraction from the painful gas bubble in your stomach.

Delighted. Still delighted.

In the Episcopal baptismal service, there is a prayer with the line, “give them … the gift of joy and wonder…” You were born with that gift; I suspect all babies are. Perhaps the prayer should be that we adults don’t snuff that gift out of you. Perhaps the prayer should be that we adults are opened to have that gift renewed in ourselves, to let you be our teacher.

It’s a scary world you’ve entered.  During your lifetime, climate change is likely to cause great physical and social upheavals. Wars and acts of hatred seem closer to home than at any other time in my life. I worry about your future. But, you also give me hope. In a recent (January 21) On Being newsletter, The Pause, Krista Tippett writes of the teachings of the civil rights leader and, later, congressman, John Lewis: “in the space between the world as it is and what we long for it to become, we are called to “live as if” the possibility we aspire to is already present.”

Can I live in love when the world spews hate? Can I live in hope, not fear? As much for your sake as for any other reason, I try. And you also teach me how. You exhaust me, little guy, and I so look forward to your returning to your home soon. But your presence in my life is a precious gift. And the gift I most want to give you is the knowledge that you are loved. 

Granddaddy

The View

A Progress Report

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Transitions

Transitons. Transitions. Transitions. They keep piling on, and it is hard to catch a breath.  Starting with happy ones: our fifth and sixth grandchildren are on the way. The fifth child in one family and the first in the other are both due in late summer.

In more happy news, our youngest took a new job with greater career potential and then decided to move house in order to shorten the commute. It’s a seller’s market, and their house sold quickly.

Then, an unhappy transition. Nancy’s mother passed away  just before Easter. It was a blessedly short illness, just eighteen days from diagnosis until the end. Time enough for appropriate goodbyes to be said, short enough so that agonies were not prolonged. 

Just this past week, Nancy’s father decided the time had come to move into an independent living facility. It is a transition not entirely resulting from his wife’s death—we had all known that the time was approaching for both of them. But not unrelated either—her parents had remained backstops for each other, a level of safety net that her death took away. Moving to a facility is not a milestone we typically think to celebrate. But I do celebrate that he took the decision on his own rather than being forced by some type of emergency and that he now has a deeper safety net and a level of social engagement not available when living alone in an apartment.

Watching (and walking with) my own parents in their last years, plus accompanying Nancy as she goes through the process with her parents, has led me to ponder how I will make that journey when my time comes. Each of our parents has had moments of graceful acceptance and moments of stubborn denial as the boundaries of what is possible have shrunk with age. How will I respond? Will I “rage against the dying of the light?” Or will I let go of my ego’s need to achieve and control? I am no scholar on the topic, but it seems that multiple wisdom traditions describe this letting go as an essential  stage of a life well lived—an emptying in order to be filled with something greater. In her wise book, Old Age: Journey into Simplicity, Helen M. Luke draws from classic literature (The Odyssey, King Lear, The Tempest, Little Gidding) examples of “growing into old age.” As with all growth, painful and rewarding.

Moving, Moving, Moving

You might have caught on that some of these transitions necessitate the moving of persons and stuff. Nancy’s father moving from his apartment into the facility. The disposition of all the “stuff” that does not go with him. 

As to the kids, the ones moving in order to shorten a commute, they are both sellers and buyers. A seller’s market it is, a buyer’s it is not. They are still searching for a new house. And they just agreed with their buyer to move up the closing date on their old one. That means—Oops!—vacating this weekend, putting most of their possessions into storage, and moving in with parents. Us. 

As I am writing, Nancy’s dad’s decision is less than a week old, and we have just received four day’s notice regarding our new house guests. Can you spell, busy?

Nature at Neverdone

Neverdone is the tongue-in-cheek name I have given this place we bought almost five years ago. We are for the moment at a point of stasis on construction projects. But the rescue of our two acres from invasive plants and its restoration into something like a native wildlife habitat is an ongoing and never-ending endeavor. A brief update.

Frog Pond with Iris

 

Nancy’s frog pond is a living, breathing thing of beauty—teeming with frogs at all stages of development, dragon flies, healthy aquatic plants, even a predacious diving beetle!

Tadpoles

 

We are continuing our experiment of smothering weeds under black plastic for a year, then sowing native wildflowers. Strip #1 is in its second year of flower, currently yellow with Blackeyed Susan and coreopsis. Strip #2 is in its first year, blooming blue and pink with cornflower, tinted brown with ripening wheat. (I wonder if the threshing unit on the combine was malfunctioning when our straw was baled. Never have I seen such a crop of wheat from bales of straw!) Strip #3 (it will be our last) is under plastic until fall. We are happy so far with the experiment, but the ground ivy is already creeping back into Strip #1. Can we keep it in check with hand weeding? Perhaps, if we can stay healthy (Nancy lost a couple of weeks to Covid) and get beyond this flurry of moving.

Meadow Strips #1 (background) and #2 (foreground)

 

In other parts of “the estate,” our war on invasives is a see-saw battle with no clear winner. I had thought we were winning against the oriental stiltgrass: A year ago, in some areas where we had pulled or scythed it down for two successive seasons, native violets seemed to have reclaimed their habitat. But this year, the stiltgrass has returned with a vengence, smothering the violets. Some was already knee high when I took the string trimmer to it earlier this week. The oriental bittersweet vines (that modifier, “oriental,” seems to herald trouble when applied to plant life in East Tennessee) that I pulled or poisoned last year seem to have become Hydra, their underground root systems pushing up new vines seven-fold. As to English ivy, we are holding our own, just barely. When one troublemaker seems in retreat, another surges ahead. I can almost hear a race announcer, “Italian Arum is fading in the stretch, but Air Potato is coming on strong.”

Our late winter hard freeze cut into the redbud and dogwood blossoms this year, but the spring show of azalea and rhododendron was spectacular. Whether by design or happy accident, the mix that we inherited have staggered bloom times. One or two or three shrubs will be in glorious color for a few days, then as they fade another set will open up, so that the azalea/rhody season lasts for a couple of months. I had thought the show was over for the year when some large rhododendron that had not shown much in years past revealed themselves as late bloomers whose white-to-pale pink blooms extended the season into late June.  Now the hydrangeas are taking over, and the show continues. 

Our wildlife predator mix is changing. For the first few years, we frequently sighted barred owl and red-shouldered hawk. As recently as a year ago, the late winter/early spring air was filled with barred owl mating call and response. This year, nothing. Nancy may have heard an owl one night. I may have spotted one in flight through the woods. I heard a hawk just last week, but it was the first all year. Could their absence be related to the increasing sightings of coyote and (for the first time) red fox? From the number of chipmunk I see running about, there appears no shortage of prey for all. 

 

That’s our brief report from the frontlines. Back to packing.

The View

Epiphany

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Christmas has come and gone, all 55 days of the commercial season, which began the day after Halloween, as well as the twelve days of the liturgical one (December 25 through January 5). Epiphany, too, (the day, January 6) is behind us, although the liturgical season will be with us through Fat Tuesday.

Epiphany, from the Greek word, reveal. In the Christian church, Epiphany refers to the revelation of God’s physical presence in the world—the universal Christ in the form of the baby, Jesus. In secular usage, an epiphany is a revelation or realization of a deep truth.

Last year, January 6 became another of those days that will live in infamy, a different kind of epiphany, the day on which the depth of this nation’s social and political disfunction was revealed to the world and to ourselves. A year later, the disfunction has hardened, and the wounds show no sign of healing.

I have been struggling with these two epiphanies, one of light, the other of darkness. Torn between despair and hope, it is the signs of hope that I cling to. 

Just after Christmas, Archbishop Desmond Tutu died. A few days ago, we observed the Martin Luther King national holiday. Against terrible odds, these men found hope and the courage to work for justice. In their lives and witness, I find hope. 

________________

After a crazily warm November and December—mid 70s on New Year’s Day—temperatures plummeted into a cold and wet January. Mona gets walked usually four times a day—long walks including down into our woods and meadow—so that means donning boots and heavy coat or rain gear many times a day.

Winter at Last!

All that walking helps to burn off her excess energy and keeps me from getting lazy (maybe part of Nancy’s agenda in talking me into getting another dog?). With Nancy’s training and patience, Mona has mellowed into something of a lap dog. Cuddle time and exercise! The annoyance and inconvenience bring lots of compensation.

When the weather is suitable, I combine a work session in the woods or meadow with one or more of those daily walks. Loading The Goat with tools and a cable to tie her to, Mona and I trek down one of the pathways, and I spend time cutting, trimming, digging. 

I have three huge brush piles, each growing faster than they decompose. We are trying to build up—a native, wildlife friendly habitat. But that requires some tearing out. Edges I would like to fill in with shrubs and forbs must first be cleared of invasive bittersweet vine and privet and rampant raspberry tangles. We’ve removed some small trees for aesthetic reasons. Much of the constant rain of deadfall from the large overstory trees can be left lying where it fell, but some needs to be removed from paths and open areas. It all adds up.

The heavy plastic silage tarp we are using to smother weeds has been moved to its third location, after a year at each of the first two sites. The roughly 100 x 25 foot strip at site #2 has been seeded with the same native wildflower mix we used on site #1. The experiment is a mixed success. The wildflowers are a great replacement for what we smothered out. But already the ground ivy has reinvaded site #1 or was not adequately killed back by a year without light. And this infestation is probably more than we can control by hand weeding. Barring a heavy chemical treatment, which would kill the wildflowers, we may be stuck with the ground ivy. 

It is cold, and we are still in the depths of winter. But signs of spring are emerging. We have a few snowdrop blooms, and lots of daffodil stems are pushing up. A few weeks ago, we saw a doe being followed by her successful suitor, while a rejected one still hung around in the background. Life goes on. May Epiphany shine through all our darker epiphanies.

Snow on the Cumberlands
The View

Conversion

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In a pre-Christmas issue of OnBeing’s newsletter, The Pause, Padraig O’Tuama tells a story from his late teens, a period of his life that he describes as “too interested in religion” and “too much zeal.” Working for a church in Dublin, he encountered an elderly woman in chapel nearly every day for five years. And every time, she would say, “I’m praying for you; for your conversion.”

He goes on to say how his initial dismay (“I was already converted”) evolved over time to a deeper understanding of conversion: “It is an embrace of the possibility of change and future. … It calls us again and again throughout a life.”

He might have said, It calls us to life—to a deeper, richer, more genuine life. 

In some contexts, conversion is seen in binary terms: yes or no, before or after, saved or not saved, sheep or goat. St. Paul is the prototypical example, to the extent that “Damascus Road experience” is a familiar idiom, even in the secular world.

In others, the pattern is more like that of St. Peter, conversion on conversion on conversion. Even after his uncomfortable post-Resurrection “little chat” over breakfast (“do you love me … feed my sheep”), even after Pentecost, we have the story of his dream on the rooftop in Joppa.

I have been blessed with many conversions over the course of my life. But I say “blessed” only after the fact. Conversion, in my experience, is not a pleasant thing to go through. Most of the time, when we say we are praying for someone, we pray for favorable external circumstances: May you get well, may you get the job, may you win the lottery, may your pain go away. To pray for another’s conversion is to wish pain onto them. Granted, a necessary pain that will lead to that deeper, richer, more genuine life, but pain, nevertheless. 

What a startling, presumptuous prayer! And one fraught with pitfalls for the pray-er. If I pray for your conversion, am I ignoring my own need to change? (E.G., May all you folks who voted the “wrong” way in the recent election come to see the light.) If I pray for your conversion, am I assuming that I know what you are in need of? I have repeatedly made the mistake of thinking I knew the particular way my spouse or child needed to change. And yet, more than one of my own conversions came at a wise and loving challenge from Nancy.

_________

On another front, signs of spring are all around. Shoots of the spring ephemerals are popping up through the leaf litter. The woods are full of birdsong. Nancy spotted a pair of red-shouldered hawks in the big pine tree below us.

As usual, the list of tasks we were going to accomplish over the winter is barely diminished. We did spend two afternoons crawling around under some rhododendron, pulling out the English ivy—a task I am only willing to do when it is too cold for the snakes and other critters to be active. In our observation, the ivy does not climb and cling onto the rhododendron and azaleas. And under the rhodies, the ivy was far less thick than just outside their reach. Too shady? Or does that genus somehow suppress ivy?

_________

A final aside: Here is a clip entitled “Mona Plays Basketball.”

The View

Thanksgiving

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I have been privileged on these cold and cloudless mid-November mornings to watch the daily purpling of the Cumberlands. My days begin when my dog pops her head over the side of my bed at daybreak, signaling “You are wasting daylight, and I have to pee.” To the north, the Cumberland escarpment is a uniform wall of deep blue, beneath a pale blue sky. By the end of our walk, however, the rising sun shines a red-tinted spotlight on the mountains’ face, and soon their ridged and folded topography is revealed, as the high places turn purple while the hollows remain deep blue.

For much of the year, only the mountain tops are visible to us, with the lower slopes hidden by the row of still growing tulip poplars that will someday cover the entire view. For now, their bare trunks and branches are almost black random mullions in our temporary window onto the full mass of these mountains—easy to look through and forget their presence.

If the wind direction is into the sunrise, the windmill tri-stars on Buffalo Mountain shine a brilliant white. On other days when they are turned oblique to the sun, they are hardly noticeable. Meanwhile, the ever higher sun lights up the nearer trees in the valley a yellow brown.

Now comes coffee. After trying several methods, we have settled on a slow pour-over. The ritual has become another nod toward mindfulness (and adding the used grounds to the compost bin is easier with this method than the messy disassembling of K-cups).

Settling into my easy chair with my coffee, I must choose: Will I start my day on a contemplative note, with my journal and/or a dose of Richard Rohr or Mary Oliver? Or will I succumb first to the blood-pressure raising siren call of the morning paper and news feed?

In any case, my time in the easy chair is limited. Mona needs to play, which she typically announces by dropping a tennis ball into my lap. Once, and only once, I snapped, “Go play with yourself!” and, as if I’d thrown a switch, she spun into her tail-chasing dervish mode. Mostly, though, she will charm me or wear me down until I get up and pay attention to her. 

Over the course of a day, we will have two or three sessions of chase-the-ball-down-the-hall; a couple of trips outdoors to harass chipmunks or race around with a nearly flat basketball that she scavenged from the woods gripped in her teeth; not to mention the four walks on a leash, poop bag in hand. The latter, pursued vigorously up our very steep street, double as my aerobic interval training. Our previous dog called me to Sabbath; this one calls me to action.

Our long-term project to replace the invasives on our property with wildlife-friendly native plants is slowly showing progress.  Our rogues’ gallery of undesirables has become a Ten Least Wanted: English ivy, Japanese stiltgrass, ground ivy, Italian arum, mulberryweed, Oriental bittersweet, privet, mahonia, Rose of Sharon, and poison ivy. The work of many of our days consists of removing one or more of these pests from some small definable patch of ground. 

Arum is Nancy’s current villain #1. Impervious to herbicides, it reproduces by means of tiny underground corms. Dig a plant up and it leaves many corms behind. Her current strategy is to do “Mohs surgery” around the mother plants, digging outward and down until all the visible plant is removed. Then wait a few weeks for the corms that were left behind to emerge and do it again. And again. And again. Her hope is that by preventing the emerging young plants from producing new corms, eventually the soil’s inventory will be depleted. It is grinding work. For each young plant that is visible, she will find a dozen underground. Fortunately, this is cool weather work and their bright green leaves are readily visible against the seasonal brown.

How to do this on the greater-than-45-degree slopes below our driveway? We use a climbing rope anchored to my truck, with a prussic knot allowing the harnessed digger to hold a position on the rope and work with both hands.

Some days, it seems we only tear down. Yet the work also includes building up after the tearing down. In woodland patches cleared of English ivy, long-suppressed native forbs are coming back, and the wood asters we planted are propagating. A strip of our stilt grass meadow, weeds smothered under a silage tarp for a year, was recently planted with a native wildflower mix. An American holly, rescued from a choking, cloaking tangle of Oriental bittersweet, displays its glossy foliage once again. We added The Hazels—a pair each of hazelnut, hazel alder, and witch hazel—to define the northern border of the meadow.

Woolly Aphids on Hazel Alder

Our hazel alders have white fuzzies. Tennessee Naturescapes tells me that is good news. These are woolly aphids, food of the caterpillar phase of the Harvester butterfly—the only carnivorous butterfly larvae in the western hemisphere. You can read here how these meat-eating larvae manage to co-exist with the aphids and the ants who “guard” them.

Mary Oliver wrote*:

“I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it nothing fancy. But it seems impossible.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

(*From “This World,” in her collection, Why I Wake Early.)

The View

Blue and Other Delights

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I am sitting on our deck in the middle of a perfect September day. The sky, and the Cumberland Mountains, are an astonishing blue. I recently had cataract surgery, and my renewed acquaintance with the color blue is a constant delight. I opted for the multi-focal lens implants, so am without glasses for the first time since second grade. But the color intensity is still the most noticeable change. It as if I’ve swapped all the 3000K LED bulbs for 4000K ones.

My vision had become uncorrectable with glasses, one eye much near-sighted, the other extreme in the other direction. It had become so bad that, when driving at night, by the time I was close enough to read a roadside sign, it was no longer illuminated by my headlights. Now, I am watching a hawk sail overhead, a mile or so out over the valley, then back again.

Another recent delight is our new dog. It has been almost a year-and-a-half since the last one died. Nancy has been chipping away at my reluctance for a while, noting that our grand-dogs don’t visit often enough to satisfy her need for a dog fix. She has been haunting the websites of dog shelters, and Jay has fueled the fire with his own web searches. Our new addition looks amazingly like our former one, who, in turn, looked like Nancy’s first dog. So, Mona iii has entered our lives. A rescue, about a year and a half old, seems to be a mix of border collie and lab. And way too much energy for a couple of geezers-in-training. But she is attentive, wants to please, and is a quick learner.

The third major event of our recent lives is the publishing of the first virtual performance of the Oak Ridge Community Band. How does a band keep playing while shut down for a pandemic? Earlier this summer, several small ensembles made recordings while spread out on our deck. Most recently, nearly forty musicians made video and audio recordings of themselves playing in isolation while listening through headphones to a click-track. The piece, “The Distance Between Us,” was composed by the band’s director, Shaun Salem, and honors all who suffer through this pandemic, by isolation and other losses. Nancy has spent the last couple of weeks in a frenzy of effort to merge all the videos and overlay them onto the merged audio track. You can see this virtual performance, and the small ensembles at the ORCB Facebook page.

The View

Black Lives Matter

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Someone mentioned recently that it had been a long time since my last post.

I have tried. I tried to write about the paths we have been making in our woods. Paths to get us past the unwelcoming poison ivy and English ivy and into the woods more intimately (plus providing edges from which to tackle those unwelcome ivies). Alternative paths in order to give a rest to our one road down into the meadow, a rest to the roots of that magnificent chestnut oak over which the old logging road runs.

I thought to write about our New Year’s resolution, “No Contractors in 2020,” and how it had to give way to the need to replace our corroded cast iron waste plumbing with new PVC (requiring boring underneath the basement slab and cutting a large hole in the laundry room floor), plus the need to install a radon removal system. 

I thought to write about how the Covid-19 isolation has given us time for projects at home, but also allowed the weeds to take over the church gardens we used to tend. Or perhaps about how much more relaxed I find my music practice sessions, now that I do not have to face my teacher each week. Or about the books I am pulling off my shelves for a second or third or fourth reading.

But the unrelenting news of yet more police killings of non-whites, in particular the gruesomeness of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, makes the above topics seem silly and inconsequential.

Where and to what am I called in the face of overwhelming evidence that our society contains deeply engrained racism? Where and to what am I called as I begin to acknowledge at this late stage of my life how I have benefitted from this racism? As I listen to black parents’ talking about the cautions they give to their sons when they go out at night, cautions I never had to give to my own sons? As I listen to tales of being pulled over and harassed for Driving While Black, tales not just from distant anonymous strangers, but from people I know?

It has to start inside me—reflecting deeply on what “white privilege” has given me and listening deeply to the stories of those excluded. It has to start with my paying attention each time my internal dialog makes a distinction between an “us” and a “they,” whether that distinction is based on skin color, wealth, education, or politics.

Typically, when I write these posts, I start with an idea, then struggle to find the ending. But the ending usually comes; some resolution ties the original starting point into a satisfactory literary unit. This particular post has languished for weeks, and I have found no satisfactory way of wrapping it up. Perhaps that is the point after all. A beginning. Unfinished work. 

The View

Endarkenment

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The funniest story I have heard about covid-19 hoarding came from my son in Oregon. He was at a gasoline station when someone pulled up in a homemade go-cart and asked for one-half gallon of gas. Any more would have just leaked out through the rust holes higher in the tank.

I don’t know about you, but I find myself whipsawed in my reactions to the pandemic. So far for me, it has been more like a vacation than a hardship. My vacation started back in that distant time (three weeks ago) when covid-19 was mostly a problem for other places. I had minor surgery and was forced to be inactive for several days. So I read. Books. A lot of them. Some new, others pulled from my bookshelf to be enjoyed for a second or third time. My recovery coincided with the local onset of social distancing. Normally at this time of year, I would be juggling gardening and other projects between my home and church, and spending lots of time on the two bands that we belong to. With the bands shut down and normal church activities curtailed, I just stay home. Work outside or in the shop for awhile, practice the sonata I am trying to learn, then settle in my recliner for more reading. A vacation.

Sure, there have been minor quandaries. Is it okay to make a quick stop at Home Depot on my way home from physical therapy? Should I quit physical therapy? (They are shutting down, so my last two appointments will be remote.) When the contractor I have been trying to get for a month finally says he can look at the job, do I turn him away?

I will admit to one or two moments of panic when reading about what could happen and imagining myself as one of those who needs a ventilator when none are available. In truth, however, I have barely been inconvenienced.

One can find—in the media, in the commentariat, among acquaintances—views on where we are heading that range from Pollyanna to Armageddon, from fears of social breakdown to signs of empathy and solidarity with the afflicted, from the fatalistic “I will die” to jokes about hoarding toilet paper when the symptoms are respiratory. 

Nancy and I were having a “best of times, worst of times” discussion recently. Relative to most of humanity, past and present, we were born into place, time, and circumstances of prosperity, safety, freedom, and privilege. Furthermore, my worldview held that, over time, these blessings of prosperity, safety, freedom, and privilege would spread to larger segments of humanity. Observing 1) the accelerating pace of fallout from climate change, 2) worldwide political tendencies toward the nastier forms of nationalism and tribalism, and 3) our revealed vulnerabilities to this pandemic, that worldview and our blessings seem increasingly fragile.

As a former spiritual director regularly asked me, where is God in this? I reject the simplistic and naive answers to that question: That God is absent or non-existent; that God is vindictively punishing us for some infraction; that God is testing our faith, and we need not take the precautions, such as hand washing and social distancing, prescribed  by mammon (updated versions of snake handling and the prosperity gospel). I do not believe God has willed this disease on anyone, but I do believe it has something to teach me.

Exactly what, I do not yet know. But I see some hints in the recent daily meditations of Richard Rohr. I won’t try to summarize, because I am still digesting. If you are interested, I suggest going directly to those meditations, March 21 through the present. Contemplate what the psalms of lamentation (March 21) have to tell us. Explore Barbara Brown Taylor’s word, “endarkenment” (March 26). (That one has prompted me to re-read her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark.) 

It is, amid many rainy days and a frightening pandemic, an intensely lovely spring. I am trying to pay attention to both.

The View

Getting Lost

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I had personal business in Augusta, Georgia, recently. The plan was to drive down Sunday after church in Nancy’s van, leaving her my truck with questionable tires and brakes. I got a late start by deciding to go home after church and change into more comfortable travel clothes. Then, when I stopped at Sonic for a quick lunch, the van would not re-start. Nancy was nearby in the truck, but my attempt to jump one vehicle from the other failed. It took an hour for AAA to arrive before I could finally get underway. 

I had another delay at the North Carolina state line—DOT had left a bunch of orange cones in one lane of I-40 and the merge process took three-quarters of an hour. (I later caught the tail end of a news story claiming that they are reinforcing the concrete barrier between the east-bound and west-bound lanes, but no construction equipment was present when I passed by.) 

I ran out of daylight around Hendersonville. Felt, but did not see the descent into the Green River Gorge. Caught the merest glimpse of lights dotting the South Carolina Piedmont as I-26 dropped off the Blue Ridge escarpment, and was still two-and-a-half hours from my destination.

Apparently, I am out of practice with this travel business. Planned the route before leaving home? No. Checked for traffic delays? No. Packed toothpaste? No. 

Once in South Carolina, I needed route guidance. The simple stay-on-the-Interstates route is indirect. Think of a triangle. You want to get from point A to point C, but the Interstate route takes you first through point B. The “direct” route from A to C is anything but—a zig-zag of two-lane state roads through small towns, a route not in my memory bank. I did not have a paper map, and my phone’s battery was depleting fast. 

Oops! Nancy had had trouble with trying to charge her phone from a USB port in her van, so she’d bought an external backup. My phone is the same model. I had not brought her external battery. No problem, I can charge the phone from my computer. Oops! I had not packed the dongle that links the Thunderbolt port on my computer to a USB phone charging cable. And where had I made reservations for the night? For some reason, that email confirmation was not showing up in my Mail app.

As it turns out, my phone did accept power from the van’s USB. When the time came make the route choice, I took the leap into the lesser-known two-lane zig-zag. These roads were nearly deserted. Was this wise?

In retrospect, it turned out to be an OK trip. Lots of annoyances, no big disasters. But it left me wondering, should I 1) travel more, 2) travel less, or 3) always take my wife with me? Right now, option 1 seems the least appealing.

I am reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World. And my not-well-planned and somewhat impromptu trip reminds me of her admonishment to embrace the “practice of getting lost.” When we allow ourselves to step off the familiar path, to venture out of familiar territory, to risk the unknown, we are more likely to encounter the holy. Not that those unfamiliar places are the only places where holy resides, but they are the places where our guards are down, and we see what the routines of our lives so often filter out.  They are the places where we are the stranger, the vulnerable, where our illusions of control are exposed.

Shortly before Christmas, on a trip to the art store, Nancy discovered the Dream Board, a pale blank medium on which you “paint” with clear water. The brush stroke leaves a black mark that disappears in a few minutes as the water evaporates. Lately, I have incorporated the Dream Board into my morning contemplative routine. I make a squiggle on the board, sit back, and study it. Surprisingly often, the squiggle brings to mind an image that was not in my conscious intent. Mountains on the horizon. A running horse, tail streaming behind. A curled fetus. Other times, I set out to evoke an image in a few brush strokes. A sailboat. A bird in flight. A tree. These efforts are hindered by my lack of skill and the annoying tremor in my dominant hand. But even the ugly failures are interesting to observe. Disappearing images often morph into something else entirely. 

It seems to me that my Dream Board experiences, and contemplative practice in general, are akin to Taylor’s “getting lost.” They take me out of my planned and scripted life, out of my ruts, out of my ego; they open me to the holy that I would otherwise not see. 

I was never really lost on my recent trip. And I had no dramatic “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it!” experiences. I did, in my daylight return trip through the heart of South Carolina’s peach country, see mile after mile of peach orchard, trees already red-tipped in early January. And the magnificent Blue Ridge escarpment looming ahead. Not a bad way to start the new year. 

So, maybe more travel, not less. With Nancy. We’ve been thinking about revisiting The Jerusalem Grill in Rome, Georgia—just a three-hour drive to the best shawarma we’ve experienced, with not a mile of Interstate. Or maybe Nashville, to try out full-sized vibraphones on a showroom floor—lots of waterfalls between here and there, if you stray from the beaten path.

The View

Thoughts on the Feast of Stephen

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As I wrote the date in my journal, I appended, Feast of Stephen. That set me thinking about how far removed contemporary culture (myself included) is from the time when saints’ feast days were equated with calendar dates in ordinary vernacular. History and/or Shakespeare buffs will know that the Battle of Agincourt was fought on St. Crispin’s Day. But what time of year is that? The rabble in the Globe Theater knew. 

I am reading a book about the northern border of the U.S., which begins with a history of sixteenth century French exploration of North America. That led me to read up on the preceding forty years of religious wars in France, where I found a reference to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. St. Bartholomew’s Day? When is that? Sixteenth century Frenchmen knew. 

St. Swithun’s Day? Yes, he did exist, and there is a reason for the rhyme tying his feast day with a weather forecast. No, I am not going to tell you. Have your own fun looking it up. I will only divulge that the Feast of Stephen falls on December 26, which is also The Second Day of Christmas.

Of course, we have our own (almost) contemporary saint’s day massacre (St. Valentine’s). But aside from Valentine, and of course, St. Nick, what saint’s days take your mind immediately to a calendar date? St. Stephen is my limit.

Looking out on this Feast of Stephen, I did not see snow, deep and crisp and even. I did see a lake of fog in the valley below. That’s been a feature of the last few days. Below is a series of photos taken on Christmas Eve as day broke—the Cumberland Mountains stark against a clear sky with a lake of fog in the valley below. (Photos begin at 7:25 am and end at 8:29.)

It is too cold this time of year to do my journaling out on the deck, so that series of photos represents jumping up from my writing every few minutes to walk out onto the deck and capture the sight. I claim my journaling as my current contemplative practice. But sometimes I wonder. My entries often seem little more than making “to do” lists and “Dear Diary” reporting, more narcissism than contemplation. The saving grace is that the exercise forces me to pay attention, to be present. 

We bought this place in 2017 and spent the entire fall of that year on the initial round of renovations before moving in; 2018 was a year of trying to settle in and planning how to accomplish the other improvements we thought were needed; and 2019 has been the year of the contractor. Major sweeping changes to two bathrooms, removal of some scary trees overhanging the house and garage, reshaping the drainage around the uphill side of the house, construction of safer and more convenient exterior access to our downstairs. Enough! Our resolution for 2020 is “No more contractors!”

Both the tree removal and the drainage improvements sent Bobcats up and down the old logging road that is our principal access to our meadow. Now that steep pathway is a muddy mess, likely to stay that way well into spring. I am especially anxious to put a deep organic cover over the roots of a huge chestnut oak, to help it recover from the compaction of all the unaccustomed traffic. If it fell, it would likely take with it the whole 200-foot long row of big trees bordering the west edge of the meadow. I have a truckload of leaves at the top, and a similar pile of wood chips at the bottom. But the muddy steep slope is too much for The Goat. So I reverted to more primitive technology—raking the leaves onto an old bedsheet and lugging it on my back like Santa’s toy sack. Later I hope to do the same with the wood chips, although that will be an uphill slog.

2019 ends—and 2020 will begin—with a big push to get our studio, shop, and garage sorted for future creative endeavors. Construction leftovers and an excess of “that might be useful for shelving (or storage or…” have all these spaces overcrowded to the point of gridlock. We have goals:

  • Nancy’s studio table art-ready, not cluttered with sheet music and bins of miscellania to be sorted 
  • My shop cleared of unusable wood scraps, with dreamed-of work stations functioning 
  • The music end of the studio free of intruding leftovers so that we can walk in, pick up mallets, and play.

These last few days of clear skies and warm temperatures have me wanting to play in the woods. There is easily a couple of weeks of tempting tasks calling me out there, and I will heed some of the calls. But cold and wet days will return, and we will continue to tackle the studio and shop. It looks to be a very good year.