nominaly neolithic at the fire festival

It's not really a fire and it doesn't actually burn, but the metaphor works: about this time of year, I start to feel the heat of a particular flame. I know that many others feel it all over the northern hemisphere, and I'm connected to them by a shared knowledge and a set of practices in which we will soon engage.

We tend gardens and farms, from the humblest container neglected on an urban fire escape to a broad swath of Mississippi bottomland flirting with thaw on a lingering, warm afternoon at the earliest margin of spring. It's an old tradition, and it sustains all human life, making possible the fragile hold we keep on civilization. No, I'm not overstating it. Tomorrow marks Imbolc, Brigitania, or if you prefer, the festival of fire—a cross-quarter day when all gardeners can acknowledge their work begins.

Wait. It's not spring yet. Any calendar will tell you it's the last day of January and winter runs until mid-March. Our contemporary culture, largely divorced from agrarian concerns, says it's midwinter. February—a month named for the Roman goddess Februa, the mother of war god Mars—has a bit more war to make on us before gradually and fitfully relenting.

I go by a different calendar, one more ancient than the Roman one in common use, with its roots in Neolithic times when humans were first committing to the desperate struggle of agriculture—a necessary corollary to the rise of cities, civilizations, and a larger cultural flowering. The natural world (there was no other kind then, or now) was not linear but cyclical—a fact that would have been obvious to any person 10,000 years ago, and that knowledge was a survival tool. A circular calendar to represent this allowed the marking of key days in the cycle—key because they signaled necessary action if one was to have any hope of coaxing sustenance from a patch of earth.

Fortunately, I don't have to wage that desperate struggle. If my lettuce fails to grow or gets wiped out by pests, I know where a ready supply can be had. But my calendar tells me it's time to start planning where I'll grow my greens—and all the rest. If my struggle is not desperate, it's still important—a struggle against relying on processed food, produce laced with chemicals and additives, grown far off and fossil-fueled to my neighborhood—and priced subject to the whims of merchants who despite all their ranting never really mean it when they talk about "savings."

I'm ready to take up the challenge again. The days are getting subtly longer, the winter ice is melting in patches, and I can literally smell the soil thawing when I stand amid the blasted Front Range of the Rockies ground I call a garden.

So tonight I'll build a fire on my patio, sip a little Laphroaig single malt whiskey (not up for building a still—not yet, anyway) and make plans. I'll connect, at some level, with 10,000 years of human agricultural endeavors. I'll be briefly and nominally neolithic.

I've been reading Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth—and I want to quickly add that I am learning much from her historical framing of mythology though I disagree with the premise of some of her arguments in the book, most notably the leaning toward a "monomyth." In short, I don't concur that all myths necessarily spring from or lead to one set of common human values—that they are equivalent and ultimately corresponding in their messages. It may be postmodern of us to believe that we can sneak into ancient stories like thieves of insight and then retreat with our sackful of truth to some lofty transcendent position above the chaos and grit and grinding of the world—but I doubt that. To understand any myth, one must enact it. Without that action, the story will likely feel weird, random, profane, or otherwise sketchy in its passions and plot.

That said, I like how Armstrong succinctly explains the shift from the paleolithic everywhen—a worldview comprising an undifferentiated physical/metaphysical plane corresponding to the Dreamtime of Aboriginal people—to the neolithic agrarian worldview in which one must give back to the earth in order to take from it. To be sure, it's more complex than that, but Armstrong posits a leap in human consciousness reflected by the myths of neolithic people, fragments of which survive in the texts of early civilizations, a subsequent period defined by that very emergence of texts.

What came to matter for neolithic people was the shift from a hunter-gatherer mindset, where human and animal life were equivalent, sacred, and interpenetrating, to the housing of the sacred in the cyclical turn of the year, with seasons that gave rise and fall to sustaining harvests of food.

OK, it's getting squishy and metaphysical here, which means it's time for me to draw back. I don't pray to my radish sprouts. Trust me. I don't see a god in a sweet June strawberry. But I do get a serious buzz from rotating my circle calendar as I will do tomorrow to land on Imbolc, the fire festival. It's a connection to the ancient human history I've described. It's connected because I will act on it—and only because I will act on it. Rituals are a step toward dogma, which I despise. Practical action—the work of preparing a garden for planting—is no ritual to me. It's not an empty husk signifying magic. It's science and labor and—hopefully—sustenance. That hope of a payoff is a definite connection to the ancients, even with my safety net of modern conveniences.

I'm filled up with anticipation and pleasure at the thought of what I'll do new this year, and also by the knowledge of the practices, tried and true, that will combine to give me a bounty of food and color and sensory overload all the way to next fall and beyond. I have my garden journal notes from the last 21 years to guide me, and I've already roughly sketched out my garden beds. Soon I'll start cleaning planting trays, surveying my saved seeds, and preparing compost and soil. I'll fire up the heater in the greenhouse and will start tracking nighttime low temps. I'll collect and clean my tools. My calendar confirms what my senses have already told me: it's time.

Tonight—a fire to mark the moment. 

inhabiting a writing life

Writing of her experience after three years at the Tassajara Zen training center, poet Jane Hirshfield states:

When I returned to poetry, a different person in many ways, I brought with me two things I now can see would be useful to any young aspiring writer: the monastic model of non-distraction and silence, and the experience of calling oneself into complete attention. The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate immediate existence through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life, and to learn to stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I never considered going to graduate school. I did this instead. It wasn't necessarily a conscious weighing of one course of study against the other, but something in me did know: you cannot write until you can first inhabit your own life and mind.

—from God at Every Gate, forthcoming from Tupelo Press

These are wise words, the very kind I would not have understood the substance of until perhaps fairly recently in my own life. In fact, like Hirshfield, I had felt this at some deep level since I was young; I can locate its stirrings in flashes of memory, including one particularly poignant one. I was perhaps 13 years old, and I'd climbed up into a tree fort I'd built in a tall cherry tree in the patch of woods behind my house in central NY state. It was winter, a bitterly cold late afternoon, and for some reason I can't reel in now, I was sick with worry.

So I sat there in that tilted wooden cell 20 feet off the ground and watched the light fade.

That's it. I sat and tried to get as fully inside the fading of light as I could. I distinctly recall that I refused to consider anything else for however long I sat there—an hour, maybe two, I can't say. I refused distraction and as I remember it now, it was initially hard work. Gradually, my senses opened up, tentatively at first but eventually, and in unison, they meshed with the chill, the dusklight, the scent of wind and snow, the subtle sounds emanating from what I would have otherwise dismissed as dull silence around me.

I also recall that when I finally returned to the world of cares, reluctantly after much time had passed, I was utterly refreshed. I balk at the term "spiritual awakening," but I will say I can mark it as one of the first times I knew myself an animal in a landscape, a body entirely connected with its environment, a mind not distinct from a body. I had been in that state before, but I hadn't thought about being in those terms.

Another surprising revelation I had at that time was this—I was immediately hungry to write something down. This is significant to me still because I know that previous to this time, good Catholic boy that I was then, I might have compulsively reached for a rosary and thumbed my way down the beads, mumbling prayers written by others. That was what I knew to do in response to moments of mystery. But I see now that was a way station on a transition in my life. I'd arrived at an epiphany, a moment of clarity, recognizing what author Grace Paley states (in the same book mentioned above): "I'm not full of prayers. I'm full of language."

I can't say I started writing that day. I'd already started writing for enjoyment before then and it would be several years before I consciously started a journal, which I remember doing when my family made a jarring move to Southern California and I found myself badly disoriented. There were other moments of insight along the way, the gaps between them growing smaller, until by the time I was 17 it was simply a fact that I would live a writing life.

I'm a long way down the river I chose to ride in my little canoe of words. Sometimes I paddle, sometimes I let the current take me. Sometimes, like I have done this week, I take up responsibility for helping others to navigate.

Wednesday afternoon I found myself, as I have for nearly 30 years, stepping into a classroom populated with others who have discovered, or been discovered by, a writing life. The set up is deceptively simple—they're explorers and I'm a guide, a position earned by virtue of my experience and study and practice over many years.

Let's not confuse the situation. To be sure, there is a huge, broken apparatus clanging around the margins of higher education, a machinery being constructed by ciphers and knuckleheads who do not understand what learning is. When I close the door to my classroom, I close it to keep them out. I close it to claim a kind of sacred space for learning, and I go to work knowing I'll have to leave the room at some point and play a dozen different games just so I can get back to the classroom again and do some good in the world.

So it was I spent a few hours this week trying to communicate to my new class of students what's at the core of their challenge—that they have to fully inhabit their lives and then listen for the language that comes. They have to practice non-distraction. Think about that for a minute. How would you take a group of 20 people, whose lives are diverse but all bounded by the staggering distractions of contemporary noise and nonsense, and convince them to begin the arduous task of dialing it all down to quietude? It's hard work, and maybe only a few will manage it. I'm responsible at this moment for making it more possible, if I can.

I love taking up this challenge, and know that I've made a career out of doing it well. I love teaching writing, and far from draining me, it feeds me. I have managed, against the odds, to stay fresh with it for almost three decades. In part, it's the discipline of being fully there when I'm there, and then detaching so I can return to and inhabit my own writing time with a clear head.

Be fierce, I say, about inhabiting your life. Be fearless. It's real, and it's worthwhile. 

winterturn

Suspension of knowing—it's a hard concept to grasp since the attempt itself assures failure. Winter offers us a brilliant opportunity to suspend, and thereby clarify, even purify, what we might call the self, and never more so than at the time of Winterturn.

It's not a new idea, just my own word for a ancient one. Winter solstice is among the oldest cultural reference points in human history, one my society observes with an unfortunately noisy, enervating, and too-heavily frosted horrorcake of consumerism that subsumes the spiritual clarity I so need and value at this time of year. I am relieved, so very relieved, that the spectacle and its accompanying phony cloak of pseudo-religious caterwauling is finished. I know there are many others out there who feel what I feel, having crawled through it all again and survived, able to open out into blessed space and freedom.

Only now can I seek and find the silence and cold, hard light of the season that so refreshes me. Winterturn.

On the Day Circle calendar I use—itself quite ancient—there is a mark here that represents nothingness. Not nothing, but nothingness, an emptiness in the most positive sense: a receptivity that is a necessary precursor to renewal. Think of the last time you reorganized a closet in your home. You likely got to this task after a long recognition of the its necessity, until the time came when you united both the acknowledgement and the time and space to get 'er done. So you cleared everything out, and maybe you spent time lingering over various items in nostalgic bliss-and-sadness. Maybe you had boxes ready for the dumpster or the charity drop off. But at some point, there stood the object of your labors—a bare space ready to be made functional and effective, re-energized by its emptiness.

That analogy serves for this time of year for me. Winterturn is the moment when I manage to grow empty, quiet, and still. It's a pause, and it's only a pause. Soon, my responsibilities will demand my attention and duties will pour into the emptiness, but if I do what's right at this juncture, I will be able to more effectively contain and discharge those responsibilities and duties so as to leave room for creativity, capriciousness, and pockets of quietude in the months to come. The former sustain my life but the latter sustain my living. Both are necessary and having reached Winterturn, I'm confident in my ability to maintain both.

Humans have recognized and made sacred this space of Winterturn for a very, very long time. It precedes and is foundational to any modern conceptualization of it, especially the more common neo-religious and economic observances. To participate in it old school, as my son might say, is to connect with its fundamental pleasure and function. And here's the beauty of this approach—it's not hard. No special apparatus is needed. No priest needs to chant and dance, no card need be swiped, no dues need be paid. You will see no commercials for it. No songs evoking its shape will be played on every loudspeaker in every building you enter for two months.

Rather, just go for a walk. Open some time, open your mind, and open your senses. Put yourself into winter, into a landscape fully immersed in the season. Dawn, mid-day, twilight, midnight—it doesn't matter. Go into winter, move in the silence, and empty the self, however you define that. I do it by suspension. Put simply, I stop thinking and insist on immediate sensory experience. Eat a handful of snow. Smell the scrub oak leaf crushed in your palm. Stare at the black sky, star-studded, until you see things you don't know, or maybe see that you don't know things. You get the idea.

You'll come back refreshed. That's the idea. You'll be newly capable, and glad to be un-freighted, lighter for what you've left behind. It didn't matter anyway.

 

poggio's refuge

Every man awaits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate . . . . Let us spend our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire.

Poggio Bracciolini
Rome, September 1430

 from Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

18 pounds of pleasure & the complicated life

One pumpkin. Although that's all I got from this year's garden, I am certainly not disappointed by this bad boy. In fact, I couldn't be happier about it.

I scouted pumpkin seeds last winter and decided the Amish Pie Pumpkin would be just right for my garden. I have such an intensively planted plot that pumpkins are not entirely practical, sprawling as they do across whatever available space they find. I hoped that by interplanting them with corn and beans—the legendary Three Sisters or milpas system—I could hope to coax some beauties out of that patch.

I coaxed only one, but it is indeed a beauty, 18.3 pounds of perfection. None of it will go to waste. I've already marked down Sunday as the time to cut this cucurbit up and process the delicious flesh for use all winter. There's enough here for a half-dozen pies, a large pot of savory soup, and a few loaves of bread or a tray of muffins. I'll save some seeds for next year and roast up those that remain to munch while I watch a hockey game and slurp a homebrewed Schwarzbier.

This morning, our first snowfall verifies what we could have denied until recently: we have entered the year's dark half. Just two days ago I walked to work on a balmy morning amid a riot of autumn reds and golds. The low sun was warm, even hot, by mid-morning. Maybe, just maybe, it would hold a while longer. And that is the very mechanism of denial—a fool's hope that somehow buffers encroaching reality until hope collapses—and so looks foolish in retrospect.

That's why the pumpkin matters. Now that winter is here, I no longer feel I'm giving in to it. Actually, I  welcome it, as I knew I would. It's a gardener's mindset—hold out until frost defeats the green, then roll forward over the snow toward the next greening.

Whereas the pumpkin was merely a thing of beauty yesterday, it is this morning a promise of sustenance, a stored joy that soon will render up real pleasure, not to mention a great dose of vitamin C, beta carotene, and potassium. Winter's arrival morphs the pumpkin, or more correctly, it morphs my perspective, appreciation, and purpose. I don't mind saying I'm thrilled to imagine the first stroke of the knife blade, plunging into the dark cavity full of threads and seeds and pulp.

These are unique human pleasures. To be sure, all life feeds and what can we know about the pleasure the crow finds in picking the eyes out of the roadkilled coyote's carcass. I have no real sense of the collective effect coursing through my cat's neurons as he swallows the last of the mouse caught after a hour's wait by the compost pile.

What's uniquely human is the making. I won't just gnosh into the pumpkin; I'm going to transform it into a pie through kitchen chemistry. There's the recipie I've used for 30 years, pulled by a friend from a 19th century British cookbook and married to another recipe for vodka pie crust so flaky and marvelous it would taste good alone. I will steam the chunks of pumpkin until they soften, drain the excess liquid, mix in the brown sugar and eggs and spices, pour it all in the shells. While it bakes, I'll hand-whip real cream sweetened with powdered sugar. In a nod to my approaching 50th birthday, I may even casually scan the registry for a good cardiologist. 

I will enjoy that pumpkin, now and later, and so will the others that gather at our table this winter. I'm with Wendell Berry on this—while people naively talk about simplifying their lives, I want to complicate mine. Simplified pumpkin pie means pulling out some dollar bills and buying a pie at the store. That kind of simplification requires a tremendously complex set of actions by others. It only feels like simplification to the end-user. There is no seed saving, no planning the plot, no planting and cultivating, no harvesting, no processing and storing, no cooking and baking. Hidden, but not insignificant, are the complexities of corporate agriculture, transportation, factory processing, more transportation, shelf-stocking, purchasing, more transportation, and so on.

I prefer to rely on the labor of no one else to render this pumpkin up. I relish the long process that is complex and slow and wonderful. While that doesn't simplify my life to manage the process, it does clarify my mind at every step. Any good gardener knows that time spent with the soil and the vines is magic time. So, too, does the cook know that working from scratch in the kitchen engages the hands even as it frees the mind. The complexity of creative action is potentially a doorway, a simple and direct connection to mystery.

What if one doesn't have the time for such things? I figure that our lives are all different in the balance of circumstance and choice. Once we have reasoned out which demands on our time are unavoidable, whatever remains can be apportioned by choice. To be sure, some people struggle to find time for creative complexity while others have an easier path to it. All that any of us can do is manage the spacetime we occupy. I know what my choices are, I know why I make them, and I know how they nuture me.