“In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws.”

Joseph Campbell

Years ago—more than a quarter of a century ago—I walked into a classroom at the University of Montana on a sunny September morning. I was there not to study but for the first time ever to teach a class.

Last week I walked out of a classroom in Littleton, Colorado, closing the door on a long and fulfilling academic year that involved guiding a couple hundred students toward knowledge, potential, empowerment. I did my very best, and am pleased to say it again: this is good work and I am privileged to do it.

Any good teacher of adults knows the work is mainly to motivate people, and once they are motivated, to open the gate into a garden of ideas—and I must insist that is not a strained metaphor at all.

Will anyone deny the world can at times resemble a wasteland, at least by Campbell's definition, above? Which of us can claim to be entirely free of serving purposes other than those we know to be most authentic, most independent and gratifying? I see it in the eyes of many of my students, year after year—that their efforts to learn and improve their lives is an assertive response to the recognition of living in the wasteland. Those who are aware of the deal, who understand themselves and their circumstance fairly clearly, those are the ones I can help. The others, not so much. They need more time to stumble and sweat in the wasteland, to be made humble and motivated so they're ready to strive.

Writing saturates my classes—artistic, informative, rhetorical. I teach by teasing out and developing metacognitive activity in my classroom. That is to say, I teach my students to think about thinking, or in our case, to think about writing. I ask them to make one of the great leaps so necessary to writing well: examine not just what you write but how you write it, its effects beyond rather than within you, the originator. Expression in language is not the goal, it is the raw material with which a writer begins his or her real work. Refinement of that material requires metacognitive skill, the ability to see the text as a master gardener sees a garden—the potential, the problems, and the occasionally surprising brilliance.

And I'll carry the comparison further. As a gardener, I must finally make some deals with myself about what can and cannot be done with the ground entrusted to me. I can't make the entire wasteland bloom. I can't make anything bloom at all if I don't learn to read things well—the health of the soil, the way the weather really works, the best location for a particular plant. Plants do not do what you tell them to do; rather, they do what they will, but only after you do what they tell you to do. By getting down on my knees, by getting dirt under my nails and the smell of the greenery in my nose, I can begin to assemble a true sense of what's possible.

Every learner has to make those acknowledgements, too. Learning is not and never will be about a grade on a transcript. Real, usable knowledge is about absorbing information, developing skills and abilities, and being effectively metacognitive. For writers, it's moving from illusion through confusion to clarity. To put it another way, the most successful students I have often start out falsely confident in their writing, only to reach an epiphany that it's going to take a lifetime to actually master the art. Once there, they can begin the real work.

Look, you can see it here: those tendrils are thin as pins, at once delicate and tough, unfailingly persistent. Just take a minute and look again—see how they've found purchase on the bamboo support, wrapped round it, used it to climb. This is a greenhouse vine, a balsam apple. Like a student in my classroom, it needs a protected start. I know that given the right conditions, I can transplant this vine in a few weeks and it will grow profusely—taller and broader than me, heavy with fruit, remarkably beautiful in August light.

I like this work—teaching and gardening—and not a single day passes that I don't see these activities as interconnected, echoing each other in shape and substance. The good news for me is that I'm on a turning wheel, and I've just clicked over from the academic year to several months where my main activity will be with green things. Spring is spilling into summer, and I get a necessary break from teaching so I can rest and recharge. Who knows, I may even coax blooms out of the bricks, a garden from a wasteland.

Clearly, that is not the case with the array of early season items above, picked just moments before this photo was taken, rinsed and assembled into a simple salad whose flavors popped in the mouth. Clockwise from left (add the word "fresh" before each item that follows): chives, flat-leaf parsley, mixed baby greens, radishes, cilantro, and ruby mustard greens.

It's been a strange spring on the Front Range of Colorado. Winter was mild here, as elsewhere in so much of the U.S., and finished by leaving drought conditions and early spring surges of heat. Last year we had significant rain, which gave early plantings a boost; this year, perennials have struggled in the parching heat and wind, even though the blossoms on the forsythia were stunning. As we turn to May, I'm hoping for at least the occasional drenching rain—hoping but not expecting it.

Our last frost usually occurs within the next ten days and just this morning, a very light rime lay on the grass at dawn, courtesy of the skies clearing late yesterday, allowing heat to escape. It's going to be a tricky call in coming days: plant delicate things early for the boost in growing days or hold back a while longer and be safe? Having a greenhouse allows me to take the latter course and not lose much but for those who have rushed forward with planting, this could be a difficult season.

Fortunately, early season greens thrive in the cool high plains weather of April. We've been making forays into the herb patch, sometimes pre-dawn, to snag herbs to add to the oh-so-fresh eggs from our six chickens, all laying like pros these days. Even as the chives go to seed the cilantro is coming in fast, alongside healthy contributors like French tarragon, Italian parsley, and lemon thyme.

Intense, pungent, savory—it's a good day when these fresh flavors grace a dish. Winter, the season of flavors preserved and dried, is giving way to a run of weeks stretching into October, where we'll draw directly from the source, losing none of the textures, tastes, vitamins, and minerals of our produce. A salad garden is one of the easiest things to grow for a beginning gardener or a person with little space with which to work. An area just a couple feet square can yield a bounty of greens like those above, all before the first of May. You don't need a lot to make it happen—just a bit of work to prepare the soil in a patch (or even a large container or two) that gets sun for a good portion of the day.

For more seasoned gardeners, especially those working an established garden, there is the knowledge that while one cultivates these early season delights, there is the promise others everywhere, as in this tiny peach just breaking out of its blossom coat, intent on swelling full of peach flavor and sweetness for a midsummer harvest. 

Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of that abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water also in abundance, with these words: Have you not been well entertained? This garden does not whet your appetite; but quenches it.

—axiom engraved above Epicure’s garden

Just the act of trimming was a sensuous treat. Sweet and tangy, fresh rhubarb delights the senses, similar to the way a citrus scent rises when you peel an orange. There's something remarkable about the aroma of cut rhubarb that I love. I've heard people say they don't like rhubarb and I just don't understand.

Now, for perspective: this all began 22 years ago when I and my family moved into a rented house on Colorado's Front Range. I was starting a new teaching job and we needed a place to stay for a while, until we could buy a house in what was then a very affordable market south of Denver. I had done some gardening in different places I'd lived—New York, California, Montana—but I had a lot to learn about the particular patterns of gardens in this region. One thing I did not understand at all then was that if you want to know what to grow in a new garden, your best bet is to look around at other gardens right near you—literally. Neighborhoods are microclimates, and as I would later learn, even a patch of yard has its own "nanoclimates."

I was intent on putting in a salad garden that first year and saw an existing but overgrown bed out by our back fence, so I did what seemed right at the time: starting way too early in the season, I cleared the patch. This meant prising grass roots out of the bed, and then digging deeply to turn over the soil, which to my surprise was decent stuff—rich, friable, and full of earthworms. But I also found something else: a half-dozen large, woody, orange-colored roots, roughly the size of footballs. I had no idea what they were, and presuming these were undesirables, I dug them out and disposed of them. Idiot move.

Those were a row of well established rhubarb plants, and had I left them be, they soon would have yielded a plethora of delicious stalks, among the first things any Front Range gardener gets to enjoy in early spring. Too late, I realized my mistake. A small root mass had survived my destructive shovel and sent up a few troubled stalks and when I saw it was rhubarb and checked out the roots, I knew what I'd done. This was reinforced when my neighbor's patch, adjacent to mine and left utterly neglected, gave rise to a row of huge, glossy rhubarb leaves on stalks tinted that telltale crimson on bright green.

We moved shortly afterwards and I set to work putting in what would be the garden I still keep. Among my first goals was to make recompense by putting in a few rhubarb plants. My attempts were not successful. At one point I managed to get some going from seed, which is challenging enough, but I'd picked the wrong location and my multi-year effort to coax them to robust health finally failed. I was cursed. Eventually, I gave up on the idea.

But a few years ago, I came upon some very nice rhubarb starts at a local nursery and having learned from experience, I found a good garden location for them. They were leggy and weak looking that first year but did make it through the winter. However, the yield was not good in that second year, and I had not expected it would be. I was patient, and that patience has finally paid off.

This year's early spring has brought the rhubarb bursting through the soil. I've been watching carefully, out among a garden still mostly bare soil at this point. So it was that this week, I determined that there were enough heavy stalks on the plants to make for a good harvest.

Another bit of learning came my way during this time that is so obvious, I have to wonder why it took so long to arrive. Some of our favorite food combinations exist as they do because the different produce needed ripens concurrently. Of course. For example, gardens typically deliver delicious rhubarb and plump strawberries at about the same time.

In my region, this timing is not exact. Rhubarb is ready April-May and my strawberry patch fruits best May-June. But I usually find good, early-season strawberries available at the market, so I can live with that. All that's needed for a fantastic pie is on hand and the recipe is simple enough—sliced rhubarb, sliced strawberries, sugar and spices, and a homemade crust. I love the way these basic things look in early preparation—each main component bursting with flavor, color, and texture that will not truly yield its magic until combined the right way. I rolled out the crusts, mixed the fruit, and chilled it all for a couple hours—enough time for juices to gather—and then assembled the pies while the oven preheated.

If you're looking at this post, and are seized with the desire to do as I have done, promise yourself that you will not use a bland, pre-processed pie crust. Ever. Again. Find a good, basic crust recipe and take the time, which isn't much. A good strawberry-rhubarb pie deserves that much, and as some will attest, the right crust can be the star, not the supporting cast, in this endeavor.

The rest is easy—a short run at high temp to get the crust established, then 80 minutes at a reduced temp to let the flavors blend, set the juices to thicken and bubble, and the crust to turn golden. Can I just say the whole house smelled like heaven?

This pie had work to do. I heard this week from a good friend that there was trouble on her horizon and like anyone might, I was fighting the feeling of being helpless to do anything about it. And it dawned on me that I could deliver this pie to her door, still warm, on a Saturday afternoon, and that would be the right kind of healing.

Eventually, she and I will sit down and talk through the difficult news. But for now, the pie has made a point. Trouble is a given in this world. A good strawberry rhubarb pie is not a given, which makes it a powerful affirmation of life. A dollop of good vanilla ice cream on top turns this into a meal unto itself. If you manage to save some for the morning, you can start out your day with another slice, alongside a cup of steaming coffee—and if that doesn't make the day blossom for you, what could?

So today's garden-to-kitchen episode was more than two decades in the making. If I go back to my mistake in uprooting those rhubarb plants, and carry forward through the false starts and eventual success with establishing new plants in my garden, I can see today's culmination as worth all the effort. I hope all that goes into the flavors, and also into the healing.

Ten days. During that time, I was distracted—and I say it like that because work is a distraction from real life, unless you're one of the unfortunate ones who see it the other way round. In the midst of a working day, I often find myself thinking about my garden, fully aware that's where I'm most fully alive this time of year.

While I was looking away, the salad garden seeds I planted ten days ago broke through the soil. Think time lapse photography . . . ground bulging, light and dark passing over, a seam splitting in the soil to reveal bent seedlings laboring up, popping through into more light and dark, extending tender leaves.

Unseasonable warmth has washed over the Front Range of the Rockies for two weeks, and while that also means drought conditions, a tended patch of garden can be coaxed to life. A gardener in this part of the globe never knows what will be coming, though in the 22 years I've gardened here, I do know to expect surprises. Up ahead lie possibilities of scorching early heat, heavy rains in May, hailstorms small and large, hard frosts, snow, or all of the above.

Constructing a small greenhouse is something I should have done a long time ago, but I finally managed it, precisely a year ago this week. There was a learning curve—I'm still on it—but I did find out through trial and error that I have to open it up, door, vent, and window, every morning; I have to close it down in the evening, and run a small space heater that allows me to keep the night temps at about 60 degrees. If I'm diligent about this—and I plan to be—seeds will germinate and grow very well in this space.

Careful, sequential transplanting into larger and larger pots over the next eight weeks will allow me to select the healthiest seedlings and work on establishing their root systems. They'll be pampered, and they'll respond by putting on prodigious growth. Eventually, when conditions are right for each plant, I've move them out into the garden.

This is in part a story about investment. Some money is involved, but the real investment comes in the form of time and energy, resources and knowledge. I've spent most of my adult life learning about growing things, and while this has mainly led me to understand how little I really know, I have managed to master fundamentals. I invest all of that again on these spring days and the payoff comes rolling in, now through October, and on into the autumn and winter months when we eat fresh and preserved garden produce at our table every week.

Planning and organizing seeds gives me a great deal of pleasure precisely because it represents this investment. There was a time when I was shooting in the dark, not really aware of how to grow things right, ignorant of everything from microclimates to seed saving. Now, I have a much greater sense of when and how to do things correctly, and while I'm always experimenting, I make fewer mistakes and generally get better, more reliable results.

This year we got relatively little snow in the Denver area. Still, I put out a basic catchment system to collect snowmelt and have been rewarded with about 20 gallons. I could use any water to initially irrigate my seed starts but I took special enjoyment in using the melted snow to kick things off.

There's no chlorine in this water. That should help gentle the seeds out of their coats and into growth. My plan is to put in a more elaborate catchment system eventually so that at the start of spring I'll have much more water to work with, and can hope to collect still more from the rare rainfall we get here. Another idea I've been toying with is installing a basic solar system to charge a bank of batteries, for use to power the heater in the greenhouse and also for running basic electrical tools in the garage and shed.

In short, I live in an old suburb—post-WWII war housing constructed south of Denver to house the families that sprung up at the start of the Baby Boom generation. We came forty years later and raised our kids here, and now a whole new batch of families have taken up residence. Our house is surrounded on three sides by people raising young children, and their laughter and cries filled the neighborhood today as I was planting. That's a garden, too.

I wish more people would turn their yards into gardens. It's good for the kids, good for the gardener & family, and everyone benefits from the reduced reliance on the food machinery that fills our supermarkets. We keep chickens here and work the 900 square feet of soil that gives us plenty of fine food. This ought to be the future. Maybe it will be.

The year's circle begins with dirt—under your nails, in your boots, on your shirt and pants. It's good work, if you can get into a rhythm. The year may start humbly, with dirt, but trust me—it peaks with a burst of summer flavors in your mouth.

A warm spell has run through the second week of March here on the Front Range of the Rockies. Only fools fall for this--La Niña may give us a warm, dry spring but there will be frost yet. Still, it's worth a gamble to put in a salad garden in cases like this. Cool weather crops can handle, and may even benefit from, a chilly start.

The garlic above was planted mid-October and is breaking through nicely. It includes three delicious varieties, seen here furthest to nearest: white hot Georgian Fire, pungent Broadleaf Czech, and smooth & buttery Georgian Crystal. I noticed the first sprouts about five days ago, so they are definitely coming on strong.

For the urban or suburban gardener, or for anyone wanting to use space conservatively in a kitchen garden, companion planting is key. I've learned over time that if I have spaced my garlic rows well, I can lay in a variety of leafy plants and other root crops to create a full salad garden. The garlic will grow tall, the leafy plants will shade its bulbs, and the plot will thrive.

I space my rows—laugh if you wish—as far apart as the length of my index finger. We'll call that about four inches.

Into these rows I run shallots, French red scallions, a couple varieties each of lettuce and spinach, mustard greens, and radishes. These leafy veggies and alliums will come up and in about six weeks provide us with baskets of delicious greens for everything from salads to sauces to omelettes—eggs from our chickens, baby. Add to all those a fistful of the nearby and indefatigable chives, a perennial which is characteristically bursting out already. It's weeks of feasting.

The spring garden is a challenge. One has to read the season and know the microclimate of the garden well, and then hope to synchronize inside their pattern, which is never precisely the same, year-to-year. I've learned to use successive plantings, which in short means I plant the same seeds at 2-week intervals as needed, in case some seeds don't germinate or unpredictable weather intervenes. If there are no such incidents, the early seeds germinate and grow well, and that translates to a booming salad garden available for meals in April.

The bounty of leafy greens runs well through April-May, a season of salads and fresh food that is so welcome after a long winter. But June heat spells the end for the salad garden, pushing the plants to seed even as the strawberries start to peak in the nearby bed. But the ace is up the sleeve—remember that this all started with garlic, many months previous.

As the salad garden finishes, the garlic ripens. I cut away all but a few of the beautiful scapes as they begin their graceful curves. Those I leave behind make in the sunlight a kind of poem for the garlic patch. Before long, I'll knock down all the stems and after a few days of that I'll pull the garlic, braiding it into ropes and hanging it in a the shed for a week or so to cure. Then, and only then, will I do one of my favorite things: make bruschetta.

Full disclosure—I am in no way of Italian heritage. I grew up in New York and was surrounded by Italian American families, and that's where I get my love of the food. Bruschetta is such a simple food, and also so exotic in flavor when made from fresh, organic garden ingredients, that very few food pleasures compare.

In high summer, if you have as I will a full list of the fresh vegetables listed below, it's easy to make a stunning platter of bruschetta in about a half hour, as an accompaniment to any main dish Italian.

Cut a baguette in 1/2" slices and toast lightly. Meanwhile, seed and coarsely chop several large, fresh tomatoes. Select a few large cloves from one of your delicious heads of just-cured garlic—smash those with the flat side of a chef's knife and peel—chop—add to the tomatoes. Stir in a TBS of good olive oil, a teaspoon of good balsamic vinegar, and 8 chopped basil leaves—ideally, also from the garden. Stir and let sit a half hour or so to blend flavors.

We aren't done with the garlic yet. Select a few good cloves—peel and slice in half. Now, for the garlic joy: rub those halves over the surface of the toast slices. Your fingers will smell great—in fact the whole room will smell remarkable. Instant aphrodisiac. Pile on the tomato mixture and serve immediately. If you aren't intimidated, just eat these out of one hand while you sip a good Chianti from a glass in the other hand.

Happy bruschetta to you, and garlic joy to all.

I would call these pie crusts perfect. Perfect forms are something I don't really believe in, yet I found myself on Wednesday evening trying to explain Plato's allegory of the cave to a group of students and I could think of nothing better, at that moment, than vodka pie crust.

It was a done deal that after talking about them, I'd have to make some this weekend. I was momentarily distracted in the classroom by this prospect but quickly regained my equilibrium and got on with the mix of philosophy and mythology and general mindbending for which I'm paid.

For those who are interested, the secret of the crust is not complex: just subtitute half the amount of cold water you use in your crust with chilled vodka. It works as water in the dough but when baked, the 40% alcohol burns quickly off and therefore reduces the development of the gluten, leaving the crust heartbreaking in its flakiness.

But back to perfect forms. Look below at the bowl of sliced apples, chopped pecans, sugar & spice. Do you see a perfect cranberry in the colander or are these jeweled fruits all just slightly . . . individualistic in their expression of the ideal?

You're on your own if you want to invest a lot of energy in maintaining neoplatonic idealism and asceticism. I'm over in Epicure's camp, and see perfection in the sensible world. Consider that phrase again—the sensible world is precisely what it says. It is the world we can sense.

I can sense that the pies, loaded and ready to bake, will be very, very tasty when the time comes.

On that long evening in the classroom—three hours of deep lecture and discussion introducing the history of myth considered across eight discipline approaches—I was trying to move my students from paleolithic concepts of everywhen, as Karen Armstrong calls the undifferentiated material/metaphysical planes, all the way to Joseph Campbell's articulated concept of the transcendent field vs. the field of time. To oversimplify that latter idea, let's just say these pies are in the field of time.

The apples were, none of them, platonically perfect. The sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg were from plants that no doubt had blemishes or broken limbs. The pecans' shells were not precisely engineered and did not break open in the machinery in any way that could be idealized. Who knows what sea the salt was from, and what imperfect creatures cruised its deeps and shallows. All of that is a long way from the kind of perfect I mean.

Here in the field of time, we have the choice to see our physicality as beauty. The realm of the senses is real and its pleasures are precious. I and my dinner guests will be well aware of this when we slice into these beauties tonight.

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. 

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.