Tag Archives: Nature

Rain is a Holiday

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by in 4th of July, Nature, Rain, Seasons

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Rain was predicted this past 4th of July. The midsummer celebrations always include barbecues, parades, and municipal fairs—all outdoor activities. There are simply no traditional indoor Independence Day activities. There was a good chance that parades would be rained out, that they wouldn’t be able to have the fireworks in Memorial Field. It put a damper on everyone’s celebrations, and there were lamentations far and wide about the unfairness of it all. After all, July is so typically hot and dry, and the weather predictions for the following week were for skyrocketing temperatures and dry, dry, dry. Why should it rain on the 4th?

I rarely complain about a rainy day, even on a holiday. Rain is special no matter when it comes. I mean, water out of the sky? How does that happen? One of the most ancient of Sumerian myths has the two sons of the sky god arguing: one is the deified Summer and one is the deified Winter, and they dispute about who is more important for the growth of crops. Their father steps in to settle the argument: Winter is more important, because without his rains there would be no crops.

But more than that, a rainy day always feels special. A long time ago I was married to a woman named Carolyn. She used to love when it rained, and we would take long walks beneath a large umbrella. This is the right attitude; there is something intimate and romantic about sharing that little shelter, the patter of raindrops on it, the splash of water at your feet, that encourages conversation and closeness.

We once attended Fair St. Louis, the biggest local fair, and one of the best 4th of July parties in the country, on a rainy day. I thought cancelling was the best idea, but she would have none of that. We went to the fair and it was very nice. The temperatures were cooler than normal for July, and the weather kept the crowds small. It was easy to get a beer and a hot dog, to get up close to hear featured musicians, and to find a good seat for the fireworks, even though we got rained on a few times. Our determination was rewarded when the rain held off in the evening and the fireworks went on as usual, everyone oohing and aahing from their soggy blankets on the ground.

Early in the predawn morning I am awakened by the sound of rain. It was a warm night and the window is open and I can hear the rain begin to drop on leaves and on the ground. I know it is falling on the sill and soon I will have to rouse myself and close the window. But I linger against that duty, feeling calm and assured within the sound of the rain. This will be a good morning, cooler and greener, and I hope the rain is still falling when I get out in it.

So many blues songs and popular tunes evoke rainy days as a symbol of sadness, loneliness, and despair. I know, it’s an easy contrast with a sunny day, which is a symbol for happiness and things going well in life. Still, I don’t get it. Everyone complains about rain on a holiday, but to me, rain is always a holiday, a little break within itself, a little remembrance of the cycles of nature and how they can interrupt the artificial lives we’ve assigned ourselves.

A Wasp, a Horse

13 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Seasons

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My wife has been stung twice recently by wasps. She was picking blackberries a few weeks ago when the first sting came. She showed me the nest hiding high in the blackberry canes, and I said I would spray it and get rid of them. But she didn’t want me to; there were still berries to pick and she didn’t want them contaminated with insecticide.

We have blackberries covering a stretch of about 50 yards. Every day for the last month or more we have picked about a gallon. We will never be able to use the blackberries we have, and I do not worry about losing a few. Yesterday another wasp from the same nest stung her, and this morning her hand was red and terribly swollen.

I took the spray out to the blackberries, found the nest, and doused it. Several wasps took flight, a few tumbled down through the thorns, and one held on. I sprayed it again, needlessly probably, but I wanted it gone. I wanted to pluck off the nest and crush it for good measure. But that one kept circling the nest on needly legs, slowly and with determination. Old warrior, I thought, the last of the clan, still trying to protect the nest. But then recalling that this is brood I thought it was probably a female, a mother, refusing to give up on the next generation. I sprayed it again and again until it too fell and I pinched off the nest and crushed it underfoot. I felt a little heartless. Wasps are beings too, just trying to live. But it is important to me to protect my family, and killing that last brave wasp was part of that mission.

When I walked back up to the house my daughter asked for my help. She has volunteered to tend a severely wounded horse, a graceful Palomino mare who got caught up in barbed wire and sustained some really gruesome injuries. The horse would have been put down, except she is showing a healthy appetite and every desire to live. It takes me some force of will just to look at her injuries, and my daughter has to clean and disinfect and re-bandage them a few times a day.

I had to hold the mare while my daughter cleaned her stall. I took the lead rope and stood in the yard, the horse hungrily cropping clover and grass while I watched. She is a sweet tempered, gentle animal, with big brown eyes and eyelashes as fine as those on a My Little Pony. I’m told that she is mostly a trail horse, and I imagine she would be an easy ride. I stroked her neck and her back while she ate, my heart filling with sympathy for her, knowing there is a likelihood that still, if her wounds do not heal or they become infected, she will have to be euthanized. This thought haunted my whole day.

I may feel wicked for the glee I take in destroying a wasp nest down to the last survivor. But I also cannot help being moved by the plight of an injured mare. Both emotions stirred me within a half hour on this sunny August morning, all before I shaved and dressed and drove to work. Again I realized that a life closer to nature, near to other living things, is a life that challenges your emotions and makes you define your humanity.

My wife came out of the house about the time we were finished working with the mare. I told her that I had killed the wasps. ‘Oh,’ my daughter said, leading the mare away, ‘there’s another wasp nest in the barn, right in her stall.’ Immediately my instincts kicked in, spelling out who was the enemy, who needed protection, and what was my role in the drama.

Standing in the Woods

08 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Education, Healing, Mindfulness, Nature, Seasons

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I am standing still more these days when I visit the woods. I am standing still in these woods which I have visited a hundred times and moved through with the purpose of knowing them, of naming their trees and wildflowers, of hoping to spot their elusive wildlife. I feel I have mapped them well enough now, and I stand inside their tenuous embrace and wait, and wait.

For a year and a half I never saw a snake out here. I saw two today. The first was a speckled king snake, creeping slowly out along the blackberry canes, fat in its midsection with some luckless rodent. It made one feint at threatening me to keep my distance, but mostly it was helpless and lucky that I meant no harm. The second I saw towards dusk as I stood on the verge of the woods in front of the house, a big rat snake, black as spent motor oil, sinuously curled over a high branch above a bird house.

Two days ago I was in the woods just past the back pasture and I saw a turkey scuttle off into the brush. Though the turkeys turn out to dance in the pastures whenever it rains, this was the first time I’d seen one in the woods. I have also seen two coyotes lately, creeping through tall grass, noses to the ground and tracking things I can’t see.

For a year and a half I have trod these woods and fields, looking about, plucking leaves off trees to take back and identify, noting colorful birds to look up and identify and write down on a running list. I know in rough outline where the best paths run, where the steep declines into valleys are easiest to navigate, where the dry creek is likeliest to collect a stream after rain, where the persimmons ripen first, the hickory nuts fall, the skeletons of deer lie. I have mapped the territory and put names to things all around me.

But these encounters with the local wildlife are something new. They come because I am standing still when I visit the woods these days. I am quieter, both literally and figuratively. A snake, a coyote, a turkey. The vultures swimming the blue sky in circles above my head. I know the rat snake and the king snake are nonvenemous; I know that coyotes, though predators, will never threaten me. But there is a thrill of the wild in their nearness.

For a year and a half I trod these woods and fields with purpose, mapping and identifying them. Now I am standing still more, and entering this new phase. The woods are mapping me.

 

Living in the Seasons

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Autumn, Calendar, Dates, Fall, Gregorian Calendar, Nature, Seasons, Winter

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I had time yesterday morning to take a walk in the woods surrounding my house. My woods, as it were, since it’s all property we own. I trudged out in a direction I hadn’t been before, walking down a steep rocky slope, which was further rendered hazardous by the slippery carpet of fallen leaves. It was a beautiful autumn morning, partly cloudy, slight breeze, mild temperature, very calm and quiet out.

You walk for a while and then you sit on a rock and gaze out across a valley at the trees that are still glowing in their autumn colors, and then you turn your eyes to the ground right around you, where a dozen kinds of leaves make a tangled pattern of color and shape, and you wonder whether you should concentrate your gaze above or below. Where are the answers? Where are the better questions?

So it’s autumn (or fall, to most Americans). I mean, we’re in the midst of all the things that define autumn–trees in brilliant color, leaves falling everywhere, breezy cooling days of misty sunlight and cloudiness–though the temperature was predicted to drop last night and bring the first snow. Anyone who has read this blog more than a few times knows that I have a problem with the calendar, which was developed to number days in a defined year, but doesn’t do a good job of tracking much else. Each season starts weeks after all the things that define that season have been in place.

That’s why meteorologists have meteorological seasons, which start at the beginning of the months in which those seasons predominate, and people living their lives in the real world start calling it summer when it gets summery, winter when it gets wintery. When you do, there’s always some smarty-pants standing by to remind you that technically, it’s not autumn yet, not winter yet . . . not until such and such a date.

We have this system that insists that spring begins at the vernal equinox, or summer begins at the summer solstice. These traditions go way back to ancient times, when people celebrated solar phenomena as the agency of deities who controlled them, and thereby also controlled the seasons. But the only thing that happens at the summer solstice is the summer solstice: seasonal change is incremental, and always variable.

I stepped out this morning to find that the predawn sky was as clear as a new morning sky could be, and every constellation announced itself. It was cold, down in the twenties. So is it winter now? Of course not. By later this week we’ll have temperate autumn days again, and we’ll still be watching the leaves fall and going to see our kids play football at outdoor venues.

You look up to the canopy of trees overhead, and down to the underbrush at your feet, and you realize that the answers are all around. This is not your woods, even though you’re writing a monthly check to a mortgage company somewhere: this is nature, and it will go on doing what it does independent of your occasional treks out here to check up on it. Likewise the seasons will go on changing in response to a thousand factors, very few of which we can tally and none of which we can control.

What season is it? Wake up, look outside. You tell me. Just don’t expect your calendar to clue you in, even though the page for November carries the appropriate photograph. The days will not be pinned down, and the seasons will not be tacked to the wall. You can’t define them, you can only live them.

Dominion, Or Not

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Fall, History, Mythology, Nature, Seasons, Weather

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Yesterday I was reading an article in Midwest Living magazine about all the things we love about Fall. The author noted wryly that every year about this time she hears the same thing: people lamenting that the trees are not as pretty this year as in past years. There was a late frost in spring, or drought conditions in summer and it affected the trees. And then suddenly, one day, we drive down the street and boom! There’s a brilliant display of autumn foliage, despite everything. Okay, we get it.

Life on our planet is divided into two kingdoms, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, and everything living, with minimal exceptions such as fungi and bacteria, belong to one or the other. I have a friend who is a botanist and she has more than once emphasized to me the preeminence of the plant kingdom on earth. Compared to plants, the animals are johnny-come-latelies, after-thoughts. Popular mythologies like to speak of the cycles of life, the circles of being, but that is an oversimplification, and really only jollies us along in our inalienable membership in the junior kingdom.

The fact is that all of the animals could die off and plants would endure; but if plants go away, so do the animals. Sure, if there were no bees many plants would move towards extinction, but we tend to overemphasize the importance of those particular plants, since many of them are the ones we eat. And birds and grass eating mammals are responsible for spreading the seeds of various plants, but they have at best a minimal affect; some species might wane without their animal enablers, but in general, the world would continue greening and browning in tune with the seasons.

Our popular mythologies also like to talk about Man’s Dominion over the Animals. Much has been made of this in history by way of justifying hunting, meat-eating, mass slaughter of food animals and more. But the interesting thing is that, while dominion over the animals has been easy, what we have fought tooth and nail for is dominion over the plant kingdom.

What is a garden but a place where we exercise dominion over a small plot of land? And a field planted with a food crop is a larger version of that, an area where we not only sow and hope to raise a chosen plant, but in which we hope to prevent the incursion of all other plant life. It is a business fraught with headaches and setbacks, and such is the history of mankind ever since what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution began some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our homesteads, our villages, finally even our cities are places where we have worked, with different degrees of success, to push back the relentless onslaught of the plant kingdom. Weeds are the advance troops of the conqueror, fighting back against us on every front.

And, if you think about it, the seasons are an expression of the natural cycles of the plant kingdom. It is plants that brown and die back when the days begin to cool, awaiting the sun of springtime. Demeter, she who ruled the seasons, was goddess of grain, not herds. Most seasonal deities in history have been vegetation gods. Sure, there are some seemingly instinctual, seasonal animal behaviors, such as hibernation, but these are purely learned responses to what the plant kingdom is doing: there’s nothing to eat, so we might as well sleep.

I have always thought that everything on earth exists around us and we are just along for the ride. Looked at in this light, it seems even more so. Our pride and our chest thumping over dominion of the animal kingdom is small potatoes in the end, and we are still just following along while the plant kingdom dominates everything around us. And the annual autumn display? Those glorious, defiant bursts of gold and red and copper on every hillside? They’re just a showy reminder of who’s in charge. Yeah, we get it. You don’t have to brag about it.

The End of Summer

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Farming, Nature, Seasons

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There’s this funny thing that happens to me once in a while. I’ll be out somewhere, at a store, a movie, at work, and someone will pass and for a moment I think it looks like someone I know. ‘Oh, there’s Joe!’ I’ll think to myself, or ‘There’s Donna!’ But then I realize it’s not Joe or Donna, but someone who simply looked like or called to mind those people. And then, here’s the odd part, sometime within the next few hours I will see Joe or Donna. It’s just strange, like the occurrence of deja vu.

I experienced the seasonal equivalent of this phenomenon the other day. I was walking up the driveway and I saw, in a gust of breeze, a cluster of yellow leaves flying away. It struck me that I was seeing the first notice of the end of summer, the onset of autumn. But once my eyes focused on the sight I realized it was not leaves, but a group of yellow butterflies coursing over and beyond the barn, really quite lovely, but not the harbinger of autumn. And then, an hour later, while driving down a side street toward work, I saw yellow leaves being blown across the road–actual leaves this time, cast down from a tree and scattering in front of me.

There is a heat advisory this week, with heat indices above 100 degrees. It certainly does not feel like summer is drawing to a close, except in the very cool mornings, before the sun has climbed above the horizon and begun its fierce work. In the American Midwest we usually have summerlike temperatures deep into September, so I don’t nurse any illusions about sudden breaks in the heat pattern. But the cicadas are filling the dusk with their vigorous song these days, and I know that time marches on.

I know I’m kind of new at this, but I am ready to offer one opinion about ‘country life.’ Summer is the season least accommodating to the experience of nature. Why? Too much to do. During the autumn and winter, despite household and barn chores, I found myself on many weekend afternoons dressing warmly and walking through the woods, down paths, across fields, finding out what this land holds. In summer, I spend that time on the lawn tractor, trying to keep ahead of Mother Nature, whose goal it always is to reclaim my patch of land for her own empire. It is a weekly, a daily fight. Then there’s the garden, the blackberry patch, the fruit trees and more that need attention.

Of course, to many people, tending a garden and fruit trees is experiencing nature, but I have never thought so. To me, horticulture and agriculture are applied technologies. Yes, you are on the land and getting your hands into the dirt, but gardening is a matter of controlling nature, not experiencing it. And while spring is about planting and autumn is about harvest, summer is the season most intensely involved with agriculture, not nature.

I will miss summer as it goes by, but I am also ready for the cool days and colors of autumn. Next summer I will do better. I will control the grass better, and grow more fruit, and plant more things in a larger garden. This summer was kind of an experiment. I have all autumn and winter to look back on it, to make plans, and to have a great summer next year.

In Which the Seasons Literally Change

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, Calendar, Change, climate, Fall, Mythology, Nature, Religion, Science, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My life in the country, for the first several months, was beset by a troubling literalness. Like I was living the pages of a Country Life calendar showing what to expect month by month. We saw a significant thaw towards the end of February. In early spring robins made their appearance with an almost pedantic regularity, and by late spring, does with fawns crept tenuously across the fields. Asparagus jumped up in April, and strawberries too. We ate radishes planted earlier than other crops, and harvested tender lettuce by the middle of May. Throughout the month of May we saw clouds of Mayflies, and I saw my first June bug–literally saw my first June bug–on June first. It’s like these creatures were being paraded out by a stage manager in response to the verses of a song. I almost expected fireworks to spontaneously generate on July 4th.

Then something funny happened. Summer came on, pretty much on cue. But it failed, and continued to fail, in heating up the way summer does. It rained and rained. As a matter of fact, we have only had the hoses out to water our lawn or garden once or twice this year, and everything is as green and ripe as can be. Now we are setting record low temperatures for late July. We have not turned on the air conditioning this week. This morning I am sitting on the porch while a slow drizzle wets the screens, and as the sun comes up, everything in the distance is a blur in thick fog.

People’s reactions to all of this are interesting. Those who claim to doubt the reality of climate change scoff and say, ‘so much for global warming!’–but of course we have seen many record high temperatures broken in the past ten years. This is the first time we have set record lows for a long time. Many people like the lower summer temperatures, but they regard it all warily: ‘We’re gonna pay for this, just wait and see.’

But having spent the past several months researching the myths and the deities who over time have been thought to control the seasons, my thoughts turn to other peoples in other times. What would people three thousand years ago, who counted on a long hot summer to provide bountiful harvests and good hunts to fill larders for the winter months, have thought of all this? What happens if Persephone leaves her mother and returns to assume her throne in the Underworld months too early? Why did it happen? Did we omit some crucial obeisance to Demeter? Did our ceremonies to resurrect Adonis not work?

To me, this is poetic speculation. I know that Canadian cool fronts have been making their way across the American Midwest in response to erratic shifts in the jet stream, and that this pattern will only hold for a while; that summer will return with all its fierce heat and humidity–that we will indeed pay for this. Writers and poets in modern times often evoke myths like Demeter and Persephone or Aphrodite and Adonis, but they are metaphors in their hands, images to enhance poetic vision. There was nothing metaphorical to the ancient people who believed these myths: the winter was quite literally caused by Persephone’s return to the Underworld, and spring by her return to her mother’s embrace. If the spring did not arrive on time, or if signs of an early end to summer were apparent, it was cause for worry. Not knowing the natural causes of meteorological changes, people worked out their own rites and rituals aimed at effecting the desired changes. One can only suppose they approached these rituals with all the fervency of true believers.

Someone (exactly who is still in question) once said that ‘everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ This is an ironical acknowledgement of what we knew by the late 19th century, that the weather is ruled by natural forces, that there is nothing you nor I nor any mythical agent can do to change it. The seasons change, they are not changed. We get what we get, even though we expect certain things at certain times, like the pages of a calendar: look it’s April, here are the showers! Look it’s May, here are the flowers!

Getting Used to It

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Autumn, Death, Fall, Nature, Seasons, Spring, Stoicism, Summer, Winter

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Yesterday Leah found a dead fawn on our driveway, at nearly the farthest point from the house. She was riding, and came down to the house to get me. I walked along beside her and we discussed the likelihood that someone coming to or leaving the house had struck the fawn with their car. The creature was tiny, scarcely larger than a small dog. There were no signs that it had been struck. Its fur, the lovely white-spotted fur of the newborn, was still slick in several places, as if its mother had not completed licking away the birth fluids. It only took a moment of looking around at the tall grass lining the drive to spot a large area where the grass was crushed and matted, indicating that the doe had struggled here to deliver her fawn. But what happened then is anybody’s guess.

The only sign of trauma on the dead animal was a bloodied muzzle, but that appeared to be more the work of an opportunistic scavenger than a predator. Black flies already swarmed the corpse. My instinct was to ascribe the death to natural causes.

‘It’s our property,’ Leah insisted, ‘we have to do something with it.’ We, meaning, of course, me. I picked it up by the hooves, so petite that all four fit in the grip of one hand. Its weight was minimal, but its head swung loosely as I walked, the flies swirling off in angry clouds around my legs. I walked into the deep grass, about fifty paces off the drive, and tossed the corpse under a juniper tree. Likely it will be food for some of the same predators who had already been at it.

This is, I’m guessing, the sort of thing I’m expected to get used to, living in the country. But I don’t know. I’m pretty old now, perhaps too old to become inured to the casual death of such a beautiful animal. Even this morning I still feel the small hooves in my hand, the sloshing dead weight swaying as I walked. I think its wrong to be indifferent about that.

We had some snowy days this past winter, after a few winters of very little snow. Figures, since deep snow was exactly what I dreaded most. I hadn’t made any provision for plowing snow; I don’t like to purchase expensive equipment before I’m sure it will be needed. We awoke one morning to find it impossible to get out of our drive and onto the road. The only results of shoveling like mad for a few hours were a sore back and a few insignificant, narrow paths in the snow. I think I’ll be needing that snow plow.

Here in late spring I find all of the areas of our property that are not still wooded covered in waist high grass. I have mowed out a large ‘lawn,’ but the rest is undisturbed. Having come so recently from the suburbs, I can’t escape the feeling that this is an encroachment, something I should, but will never be able to, control. I need to get used to the idea that in some places on earth, grass grows without the intervention of power mowers and weed eaters.

I’m sure I’ll have similar qualms in autumn, when the leaves in their stupendous abundance begin to fall. I’ll rake and blow them off of the sidewalks and the patio, back to some acceptable perimeter that defines our yard, and then spend hours glaring out windows at the piles, silently challenging them, inwardly troubling myself for not doing something about the leaves.

Each season out here presents something I’ll need to get used to, whether it’s the snow of winter, leaves of autumn, or summer’s stunning armadas of flying insects. All of these things I believe I can come to assimilate into my lifestyle, to put up with, or ignore, or deal with on some level, whether it’s with better equipment or a more stoic outlook.

But the cycles of life and death–especially when they materialize in the untimely death of a newborn animal–are something that will always mystify and sadden me, and that’s as it should be. This is what makes us human no matter where we are, whether we are in the most sterile suburb scrubbed of anything natural except Bradford Pear trees and banks of mulched geraniums, or deep in the wild, surrounded by uncontrollable vegetation. I know I should have buried the fawn. I just didn’t feel up to it, and now it’s too late.

Everything in Context

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Cell phones, Context, E-books, E-readers, Fall, Mindfulness, Nature, Seasons, Technology

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I’m driving down the road and I see a woman with a baby stroller. She is staring at a little something in her hand, I can only suppose it is a telephone of some sort. She is probably reading a very important text message from a friend on her phone. Could be the tenth or twentieth very important message that she has received from that same friend today. Meanwhile I note that it is a beautiful autumn day, mild breeze, cool temperature, leaves of many colors and shapes scattered round the stroller where her infant lies, ignored.

The problem with much technology is that it takes us out of context. I wrote several months ago about running with earplugs pumping music into my head. In doing so, I missed things like birdsong and the whispering of breezes in the trees that line the road. I have never liked the idea of running on a treadmill. It’s tedious and artificial compared to actual running outdoors, where I get fresh air and experience the changes of the seasons. But carrying a little radio in my pocket and listening to music while I run removes me one step from the experience at hand.

I read an article yesterday about productivity at work. One of the techniques the productivity expert recommended was to leave your mobile phone or your Blackberry (he called it a ‘crackberry’) at home one day of the week. He suggested Saturday. I wonder how many people truly have to be advised to stop their constant communication with work during the weekend hours? What kind of life is it if you are always, more or less, ‘on call?’

But the thing is, it’s not just work. Increasingly, all of us, all the time, are on call. Almost everyone I know carries a telephone. They turn around and drive back home if they discover they’ve left for any outing, no matter how brief, without it. Then there’s social media, Facebook, Twitter, et al. The classic line in a postcard sent to friends or family, when someone is visiting a place remarkable for its scenery or architecture or just its climatic ambiance is ‘wish you were here.’ Now, we try to make them be here, in real time. We send tweets or post updates to Facebook saying, ‘I am hiking in the forest,’ or ‘I am walking on a beautiful starlit beach’–to which I want to respond, well, you were, but now you’re typing messages on your smart phone.

I am not the biggest fan of e-books, but I do read some. I use a Nook, a simple Nook that is only an e-reader. But already, people are starting to read on iPads and other devices that do many more things. People who really dislike e-books complain that they provide none of the tactile, almost sensual experience of holding a paper book and flipping pages. I understand the feeling, though I think I can get past it. What I can’t get past is the thought of diluting the intellectual and emotional experience of engaging with a text for an extended period because the device I am reading it on can also take me online to send messages, receive updates, and play games.

At work these days, I am in the middle of a project to build a new library. I attend weekly meetings with the general contractor, the architect and the construction manager. Each of these people sets a telephone on the table at the start of the meeting. They are courteous enough to turn off their ring tones, but you see them, during the course of the meeting, tapping its screen, checking on incoming messages, barely able to wait to get onto more important meetings than this one. I am the only person who is fully here, engaged only with what is happening in front of me.

We need to preserve context, which is a way of saying we need to try living in the moment we’re in. In my work and study about the seasons, I am always urging people to learn ways to live in the seasons, to observe the changes of the yearly cycle, to get out and experience them, even if only in small ways. It can enrich your life. It slows things down, makes it seem less like life is just zipping by in an endless round of work days and errands. But we are moving in the opposite direction. When we read, we are also somewhere else. When we talk with friends, we are also somewhere else. When we are working, eating a meal, watching a movie, grocery shopping, doing almost anything imaginable, we are also somewhere else. We are out of context in everything we do. How will we ever learn to experience nature in our daily lives, if we cannot even experience a conversation with a friend without it being diluted by technological intrusions?

And don’t think that I am unaware of the irony that as soon as I finish this post, I will post it to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, in addition to WordPress. When I say ‘we,’ I mean we. I’m working on it. I truly am.

Moving

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Adam and EVe, Agriculture, Autumn, Change, Fall, Farming, Genesis, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My family and I are purchasing a property in the country: a ranch house with a barn surrounded by eighteen acres. Much of the acreage is cleared and flat, and will in time be put to use for horse pasture and equestrian arena, but much of it is still wooded. The previous owner was a massage therapist, a woman whose husband, whom we met one afternoon, described her practices as ‘holyistic.’ ‘She has drum circles out there,’ he said, indicating the grassy fields before us; then his face took on a slightly shy aspect and he added, ‘I join in sometimes.’ Their house is full of drums of various sizes and other paraphernalia of Native American spirituality; the bookshelves are heaped with volumes on Buddhist, Taoist and New Age thinking. There are colorful ribbons hung from branches in trees surrounding the yard. These, we learned, are all prayers of some sort. The county where this home is located is a very ‘red’ area. Driving the winding road to the house, we pass yards with signs that say things like Prayer–America’s Only Hope and God Is Pro-Life. There are signs in support of political candidates known to be not only conservative, but decidedly Evangelical. So I wonder how this woman’s New Age/Native American/Buddhist practices sit with her neighbors. But of course any neighbors reside at some distance.

We come from the suburbs. We have lived in our typical brick-fronted, vinyl-sided, two-story house since 2001; prior to that we lived in a smaller home in St. Louis City. I always liked living in the city, which I found to be diverse and vibrant and alive. I dislike the suburbs for the usual, clichéd reasons: but the thing that bothers me the most is that in the suburbs, you cannot walk to anything. In the city we could walk to the grocery store, the drug store, several restaurants, the video store (yes, this was a while ago), and even to our polling place on election day. Out here in the suburbs, one has to get in the car and drive several miles to acquire any supply or commodity. Taking a walk is a matter of pacing the pavement from one cul-de-sac to another, past a succession of homes which are remarkably like your own, the only significant difference–and thus usually the only subject of conversation–being who takes better care of their patch of grass. Walking in a suburban subdivision feels distinctly like being an inmate let out of his cell for an hour’s exercise.

You can’t walk to much of anything out here in the country either; but at least here among fields and woods, you are experiencing something already. I anticipate looking out the back windows in the morning to find deer grazing: and I understand that largely they will be grazing on my garden and landscaping. I wonder with mixed fear and excitement how we will endure the first deep snow: home-bound, baking bread, reading long Russian novels, getting on each others’ nerves. I wonder what it will look like in autumn, when all the trees start to turn. And of course, being a person who likes to write, and given this major change in lifestyle, I ask myself if I should write a journal about the experience–even start a new blog about it.

But this gets me thinking of my own theories about the seasons. I have long insisted that one need not live in the forest to experience the seasons, that people living in the middle of the biggest cities, even people living in the most sterile and sense-destroying suburbs, could find ways to be aware of natural changes and engage with the cycles of the earth.

Frank Lloyd Wright spent a career working on plans to ‘decentralize’ cities and bring more natural elements into human habitats, but all for naught. As critics of twentieth-century architecture have noted, his plans never moved forward largely because, in essence, people like living in cities–the convenience, the excitement, the vigor of them. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson observed this, noting curiously that while cities made men ‘interesting,’ they also made them ‘artificial.’

My biggest problem with the idea of leaving the city to experience nature is that so often, people move to farms, as if agriculture is some kind of re-engagement with nature. But of course it’s not. Agriculture is a way of controlling nature. Nature is wild; gardens are orderly. For hundreds of millennia, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers: agriculture was our first technological revolution, our first move toward controlling the environment and taking ourselves out of nature.

The confusion likely originates in Genesis, where Adam and Eve are born into a paradise of ease and plenty we know as The Garden of Eden. They lost that paradise because they sinned, but even today we see returning to ‘the garden’ as synonymous with getting back to nature, to something simpler and more primal. Scores of consumer products that hope to evoke nature and simplicity slap some version of the name ‘Eden’ on their label. In reality, a garden without effort is an oxymoron. Many people who think they will find a simple life in moving to the country and keeping a garden quickly learn different.

So it’s complicated. On TV the other night David Letterman was rhapsodizing about the splendors of autumn in New York. There’s even a song on that very season in that very place. Do I need to be out in the country to really feel autumn? Or spring? Granted, I will be closer to the natural changes, but the seasons are not just about nature–they are also human cultural constructs. At this point, I can say only that in my rural adventure I will learn new things. At this point, I can say that I don’t know what those things will be.