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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: June 2016

Country Bird, City Bird

26 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Birdwatching, City, Country, Seasons

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Birds, City

During the years I lived in the country, surrounded by woods, I would occasionally visit someone back in town, and occasionally spend the night. Arising in the morning to step out for a walk, I would notice the birds singing. Everyone notices the birds singing, it’s a lovely part of being awake and outdoors in the morning; but this was my observation:

The birds singing in city and suburban areas were always more raucous, louder, and more ebullient than those in the country. In the country there were delightful, distant peeps and trills and calls from here and there. In the city there was always a crush of birdsong, what could rightly be called a riot of birdsong. One would think, from the demonstration they made, that there were many, many more birds in the city than in the country.

But the fact is, there are plenty of birds everywhere. The difference is that in the country there are many more trees to inhabit. In the city, they have to contest their nesting spots all the time. Much birdsong is just that: the announcement to the world that this is the spot where my mate and I have chosen to reproduce and raise our young. It’s our tree, you go find your own. Birds inhabiting one of the few dozen trees in a subdivision, or one of the ornamental trees in a strip mall parking lot, have so much more to to contest than birds who find themselves in a thickly forested area where the choice of trees seems infinite.

During the early 20th century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright spent much energy working to deconstruct the urban environment, to spread things out and reduce population density. His was a utopian vision of prairies of population rather than crowded cities. Of course it didn’t work, and later critics of his work have written that there is one main reason it didn’t: people like living in cities. They find them stimulating and interesting and full of vigor.

Sometimes I hate a crowd, like when I’m fighting to leave a parking garage after a sports event, or trying to find a parking place at the mall around the holidays. But I also enjoy some crowds, like at our local farmer’s market on a Saturday, where you rub shoulders with people of many ethnicities and cultures and styles. Such a rush of sights and smells, and such a cacophony of sounds, of various languages being used, of accents and discussions and arguments. One’s ears are assaulted, like the birds on a spring morning in the city, all quarreling and threatening and making a joyous noise of it all.

You can live in the country, and find peace, space, and time to think, and make little noise. Or you can live in the city, chockablock with ten thousand of your neighbors, and jostle and fight and cajole; butt in line and sneak an extra portion; or you can open the door for a stranger, and say hello and good morning to people you’ll never see again. Either way your song, the thing that you feel you need to say each morning when you get up, is likely to remain the same.

Counting

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Counting, Mindfulness, Seasons

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Counting, Mindfulness, Seasons

I have an odd habit of counting everything that I do. Perhaps it originates in my lifelong habit of exercise, in which I count repetitions of lifts, squats, and crunches. I count how many stairs I go up, or the steps between my office and a co-worker’s office. I count how many weeds I pull when I’m gardening, and how many times I knead the bread dough. I make to-do lists and count how many tasks I have accomplished in a day. When I’m driving somewhere long distance I count the miles driven, and grow more concentrated on the task of counting the closer I get to the destination. I count weeks in a season, the days of the week, the weeks in a month.

If there is a philosophical foundation to my focus on the seasons as a subject of study, and indeed as a way of life, it is the idea of mindfulness: learning to be present in the moment you’re living, engaged with the people and events here and now, and not focused on imagined futures or tormented pasts. I guess it’s obvious that obsessively counting everything militates against that. It puts an artificial layer over everything.

If I’m walking in a park on a sunny spring day, I should be aware of things around me—the breeze, birdsong, voices of children, splashes of geese as they land in the lake—and not on the 572nd step I’ve taken. 573rd. 574th. It’s all a matter of calming one’s mind to be present in the moment. And while I believe I often calm much of my worry about work, or family, or money, or whatever, I substitute for those things this incessant counting.

I practice yoga usually 5 or 6 days a week. One of the goals of yoga is to calm one’s mind and concentrate on perfect stillness, to listen only to one’s breathing. For this reason many students of the discipline adopt a mantra, some calming word to repeat in the mind to still all other thoughts. It never works for me. I find myself counting the breaths I take while holding each pose. The counting seems to drive out many other thoughts, so maybe that’s good; but the counting itself is a problem.

Humans are obsessed with counting, and the counting of time in the year is the most glaring example of it. We have never been comfortable admitting that counting is our thing, our obsession. We want to believe that the universe is orderly in a perfect, countable way, that our various deities created it just so. We were long loath to admit that it wasn’t really that orderly. We counted by the moon, which was always a mess. Lunar-based religious calendars still in use have holidays happening all over the year. Once we settled on the solar year, or the tropical year, things settled down, but not completely. There is the problem of leap year, making up for the fact that we have laid the year out in a number of days, and once we have counted 365 of them, the universe still has ¼ day hanging there.

When it’s hot we count how many days of summer are left, as if once we pass September 21 someone will flip a switch, the temperature will cool, the leaves will turn, and we can get our sweaters out. In reality these are gradual changes, everything happening on an innumerable continuum. But we don’t stop. What is supposed to by cyclical we try to make linear; what is ineffable we try to tally.

I wish I could stop counting things all the time; but I don’t think the problem is mine alone. I think we all need to think about what purpose our constant enumeration of things serves. And now I will publish this little essay to WordPress, and start counting how many people read it . . .

Cucumbers

12 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Gardening, Seasons

≈ 2 Comments

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Gardening, Seasons

When I was a boy my grandparents lived in a succession of small western Tennessee towns. The names of the towns were typical and prosaic—Edith, Ripley, Dyersburg—but my siblings and I had a field day when they moved to a spot called Frogjump. We’d visit in summer, and the funniest thing to us was that we found the place to be truly almost infested with frogs. I was young and nothing of a naturalist or explorer at the time, so I don’t know if it was because there were nearby creeks or ponds, but there were frogs everywhere. My grandfather was the Baptist minister, and we attended church twice every Sunday. In the cool of the settling evening after late services, the local boys occupied themselves with catching frogs and hurling them to their deaths against the stone walls of the church.

My grandmother always kept a garden, but her garden in Frogjump is the one I remember most vividly. Maybe it’s because it was more successful than others. For one thing, she got a bumper crop of cucumbers one year. I would go out with her in the afternoon and while she weeded I would lift leaves and scrounge until I found a cucumber. It was a thrill, finding the big vegetables, all dusty and covered with scratchy prickles. And it was a thrill when she’d say to me, ‘Another one! Look at you! You’re so good at finding them!’ I was good at finding them. It was my special skill, my first indication that I was going to enjoy gardening, that I was going to be good at it.

When I was older and had homes of my own, I always put in a garden. Whether large or small, I always feel best when there is something that I am growing. Which is a funny expression in itself, because nobody truly grows anything. They just initiate the process by putting seeds in likely soil, watering that soil, and waiting for sunshine and warmth to have their effect. But again, I always feel best when I am participating in that process. It’s semantics, I guess.

But what stood out mostly for me is the fact that in general, I wasn’t that good at it. I didn’t take seriously the need to prepare the soil properly. I was impatient and would plant seeds that called for warm soil weeks before it was time. I’d complain to anyone who would listen about the bad seeds I had bought, secretly knowing the seeds had probably been just fine until I had consigned them to a frosty death in early March. I didn’t fertilize much, so plants that did grow were reluctant to produce any vegetables or fruit. And weeding was a chore I never took seriously, even though if I harked back to memories of my grandmother, weeding was the activity I saw her do the most in her gardens.

I eventually learned. I had some good teachers, and I read a lot. I have had plenty of successful gardens. I have learned that gardening is one of the most seasonal of activities. We mostly think of it as spring planting and summer’s abundance. But in autumn, after everything has been picked, the process of turning the soil begins. Even in the winter months, on any day warm enough to allow, you can be out there checking on the soil, tilling it one more time, getting it ready for spring planting.

Harvesting, the actual thrill of picking ripe vegetables, occupies less of your time than any other gardening activity, although to most of us, it is the payoff. And that’s what else I have learned. To experienced gardeners, every step is part of the payoff. All the preparation of the soil, laying out rows, patiently waiting to put in the seeds or bedding plants at the proper time, each step is gratifying and understood to be part of what leads to the harvest. Picking those cucumbers is the delight of children, and of fond grandmothers who seek to encourage little boys.

 

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