It’s a down year in the garden. The garlic and tomatoes (not sure how we missed the blight) are doing ok, but other than that, not much. The herbs are coming along though and with years like this one, when there will be no apples or squash, the test is to make use of everything that did grow.
Our ancestors were aware of these rhythms in the growing seasons and would fall back to the harvesting of native tubers and roots when the crops failed. We’ve grown a bit soft in this area and our collective fascination with show like “survivor man” is rooted in the fact that only a couple of generations separate us from depending on those skill sets.
The bee balm is doing great…Oswego Tea anyone?
One of the greatest gifts living in this rural location is quietude. It’s the gift I needed to learn to appreciate, one that can easily be left on the shelf.
We crowed out the silence with all types of fillers, the radio in the car, the tv, the i pod. Anything to create a bubble of white noise that can keep us from the subtle and at time strange music that is the world of quietude.
The gurgling brook speaks the voice of silence, as does the crow now flying over the hill. And the distant notes of a child’s recorder, somewhat mournful and slightly flat, summoning imaginary friends out of the shadows.
The sound scape ties us aurally to the environment differently than our sight. I wonder, is it silence or reality itself that we are trying to keep at a distance with all our white noise?
There’s a great little book by the philosopher Max Picard on the subject: The World of Silence.
These hills and valleys are difficult land for farming. Hay is the major crop. The positioning of the building on the hills gives a sense of straddling a hump. My mind goes to the thousands of miles that have been walked up the slopes back to the farm house, the clouds passing by like an occupying army.
This oil on linen 22 x 36 inches
“The choice is simply,
I will-as mind is a finger,
pointing, as wonder
a place to be.”
Robert Creeley “The Finger”
There is something I wish to send your way, seated as I am at these keys, before this screen, the hum of the laptop overtaken by the hot air blower now straining to heat the basement and thereby, the rest of this home which was built, at least the original two rooms…and here it needs to be shared…that these very two rooms I see through the repeating doorways off to my left apparently served a peculiar separation of function back in 1858, when this small German farming community formed (and what poor luck to land in these part to farm when a plow is mostly useless for a hundred miles around). The one room housed the family, and the other, which serves as our dining room, the horse.
And by that I offer if not open: much like the ice I hear melting from the roof outside the window over my right shoulder, the commonplace drips with wonder.
Screwed Up, as in the past tense
Recognizing the Personal Risk in Risk Management
Tales and Soul
Lifestream Digest for December 7th