Standing Up For the Music of the Earth

This was back when I was maybe eight or nine. My family had just come back to the United States from India, and we were living  in a duplex that my grandparents owned. We lived on the bottom floor, and my grandparents lived on the top floor, and an uncle of mine, who was maybe thirty or so, lived (with a bunch of cats) in an apartment not far away, but visited the Raymond Avenue duplex almost every day. He was for the most part gentle, but he also had his rages and depressions. He was paranoid schizophrenic, and things were kind of touch-and-go with his treatment. He couldn't hold down a job. His hands shook from his meds. 

He was a huge music fan, and to satisfy his acoustic appetites kept a pretty impressive stereo system up in his room, which was on attic floor of the duplex. He would spend hours up there, lying on his bed like a teenager, just kicking back in his socks, smoking, and listening to his (pretty sizable) collection of LP's. Clearly his music was a way of escaping from the difficulties of his life. You had the beauty of the music. You had its ability to surround you and enfold you, and just soothe away the pain. It was like a suspension bridge, beautiful and golden. Listening, making use of its transportational beauty, you could get yourself to the other side of a difficult, die-hard hour, or maybe even two, and not really feel as if it had been so bad.

An oak tree stood about a hundred feet from the house, and we kids had built a tree house in it. That was my hangout; no roof, just a platform with a carpet of artificial grass. I would read up there. Or just lie back on the artificial grass staring up at the sky. Sometimes, from the oak, you could hear my uncle's music, and I liked that. It felt companionable to me--as if the two of us were loitering together. 

I never really got the whole story. Then again, when it comes to the intricate precincts of the human-heart-in-suffering, is there ever such a thing as the full story? Maybe his voices told him to do it. Maybe he was angry at someone for telling him to turn it down, and was trying to hurt them by hurting himself. Whatever it was, one day he just gathered up all the records in his room--every one of them--just gathered them all together, took them out to the alley, and threw them in the trash. We're talking a couple hundred LP's here: everything from James Taylor's Fire and Rain to Dave Brubeck's Take Five to Eugene Ormandy conducting Beethoven's Second. God knows how much money they represented. How many Christmas gifts. Or how many hours of enjoyment he was losing, by throwing them away.  If only he had managed to stare down this mysterious and irrational urge to throw the records away, to uproot all that beauty from his life! 

I was thinking about this story just the other day, when I was sitting out on the front stoop and listening to the birds, who happen to be migrating through the area just now. There was a flock of songbirds in the maples across the street, just chirping away, garrulous as anything. Talking about Costa Rica.

I was thinking about this story a couple of months ago too, when the katydids and crickets and tree-frogs were making their own kind of music on an August night: chirps and whirs and a sort of continuous background peeping that was so beautiful to hear. So calming. So simple. So ancient. So elemental. So "well, here we are again."

I thought about it back in June as well, when I was out camping with my family in Wisconsin and sat out on a sandstone bluff after the sun went down and heard the whippoorwill making its first enthusiastic love calls... 

Here's the thing though. We as a species are disposing of the music of the earth, in something like the way my uncle got rid of his records. Whether exactly on purpose or not, everything we do--our farming, our logging, our road-building, our urban development, our manufacturing, our shopping--everything seems to militate against that music. Consider for instance the frogs. There are probably fewer than half the number of frogs in the world today as there were on the day I was born, and in another twenty years there will probably be half as many as there are today. Goodbye peepers. You're getting dimmer. We're throwing you away.

Or speaking of the songbirds, here's a quote from an Audubon site:

Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.

Goodbye happy beautiful songbirds; we're throwing you away as well. No more whippoorwills. Go away, purple martins. We don't want you anymore. We prefer our housing developments and malls. 

After throwing away the music of the birds and the frogs, we can also throw away the buzz of the pollinators, which by the way are essential for feeding us. And I hear tell that we're hard at work tossing out the trumpeting of the elephants on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania. Same with the splashing of the salmon in Alaska. But then maybe don't need the salmon; after all, we can grow our own meat in a lab now, right?

Wait a minute! Why are we doing this--throwing away the music of life? Are we crazy? Are we sick? Do we have an excuse?

And once the planet's music has been hauled off, paved over, and zeroed out of existence, where will we as a species, stand? After all, the music that my uncle, in his illness and confusion threw away, could be replaced, and in fact--painstakingly, partially--eventually was. But the music of the earth, once it's gone, will never come back. And remember, remember oh mortal, this music is intimately connected to our own sustenance. A silent planet is a dead planet. A dead planet is nobody's home. Not yours, not mine. Not anyone's.

What terrible voices are telling us to dispose of the music of the earth? The voices of economic capital? The voices of technological pride? The voices of bad religion? The voices of consumerism? The voices of human self-importance?

Wherever they are, and wherever they come from, we must stand and resist them.

HB

Until Saturday the 2nd!

Let it Start with Me

Well, all kinds of things are winding down and ending here at Sunnyside and related places nearby. The family garden is falling asleep. The bees have dwindled. On the streets the sugar maples are turning fully red and gold. For the first time this fall I filled and hung the bird feeder out between the birch and the pine, like a lantern of nourishment. Also, I have a collection of some three dozen houseplants, some of which, during the summer, I like to keep outside. Last week, just ahead of the first hard frost, I brought the last of them in. That was my Norfolk Island Pine.

"I brought the pine in" I say, but actually, the labor is always more of an act of importation. It's huge, this thing. It's main trunk is thicker than my femur, and the whole kit and kaboodle including the pot is a good foot taller than me and weighs a good hundred pounds even with the soil dry. It's so big in fact that, to fit it back in the sun room every September, I have to cut off the crown--something that in a practical way is easy to do, but in an emotional way is very hard. You see, when you cut the crown, there's a milky substance that the plant exudes for awhile from the cut. The botanists call it latex, but it reminds me of the milk of human kindness. There's nothing to do about it though, because the ceilings are only so high in Sunnyside. It's not a castle. It's not a cathedral. It's just the home of a few ordinary citizens--a two bedroom Dutch colonial  built in 1922. So, I tell the pine that I am sorry, wait till it forgives me, then take a deep breath, grit my teeth, and cut off about a foot of the crown. I use a culinary shears for this operation, the same sort of shears you use for cutting up whole chickens. 

On the morning I brought the pine in, I told myself to take my time. It was heavy; it was ungainly. If I worked too quickly I might hurt my back or tip the plant over and damage it. So I lifted and slid it, lifted and slid it, all the way from the breezeway to the stoop, then lifted it up the steps one at a time to the red front door. As I alternated working and resting, working and resting, the neighborhood kids from across the street gathered on the corner to wait for the school bus. One of these kids, a girl, always carries a flute in its black case. She never talks to the others, whereas the others are all friends with each other and like to talk. None of them, though, were talking that morning as they watched me move the pine. I felt their gaze on me, and their attention made me work all the more carefully. I didn't want to ruin the dignity of the moment. I wanted all of them to remember the scene for awhile. It is, after all, a fairly unusual sight, worth a remark or two: Neighborhood Guy in Knitted Brown Sweater Moves Huge Potted Pine. 

Anyhow the pine stands inside the sun room now. And its presence changes the room completely, into something of a forest grove now, soft and green. In the afternoons, when I like to read some history, I sit down on a chair facing the pine to read. I can reach out and touch the soft long fingers of its needle-groups, then get back to reading about Rome or Greece or the Middle Ages or my favorite, the Renaissance. 

Folks, these days--these darkening days in the Northern Hemisphere--don't believe there's such a thing as progress anymore. Progress as we over the last century have defined it--economic growth, perpetual technical advance, growing personal comfort--is as good as finished. If we want to define for ourselves a different kind of progress, that might be fine, but don't for instance believe the economists who say things are getting better, or will bet better if we just stay the course and borrow more and engage in more spending. Things are not getting better. We're ruining the world. We're burning (literally burning) through all of nature's capital, which is the only capital that really means anything, and the only capital that keeps us alive. The oceans are broken; huge swathes of the Pacific have been rendered lifeless by indiscriminate fishing and disintegrating plastics. Our forests are being cut at a rate that can be measured in acres per second. The honeybees and wild pollinators are dying, the moose and the frogs. The whole beautiful planet is dying, and we will die with it. The only hope we have, and I mean the only hope, is to thoughtfully, purposefully, ruthlessly, painstakingly dismantle the consumption-based economy, and (piece by piece) import a sense of the cosmic economy back into our lives, finding over and over, again and again, ways of meshing our own individual homes intimately with the earth. (Bringing my pine into the house, by the way, is an active sign of this course of action; just a sign of course, nothing more; a visible sign to me of what I want to see more of in my life: a home more green in every way.)

I'd like to say there's hope, but in the first place, there's an awful lot of us human beings here on the planet, doing a number on it, and in the second place there's the problem of changing so many minds, and disestablishing so many habits of consumption. You see the trouble is, that even those of us who feel real concern are pretty much unaware of the necessary scope of change involved. It's not just a matter of donating dollars to the Nature Conservancy or of purchasing yearly carbon credits, or of eating a little more organic or of petitioning the government to invest in more wind technology and high speed rail. Least of all is it about buying things because they label themselves green and sustainable. It's about turning our basic conceptions about the good life inside out. It's about changing our habits from the ground level up. It's about turning down and turning off. It's about giving it up and doing without. It's about shutting the wallet on what doesn't make the world greener, really greener. It's about staying home and developing your imagination instead of traveling and seeing it all first hand. It's about planting and preserving. It's about prizing the human hand once more in the daily work of the home. Most of all, it's about saying, "if there is to be a start, let it start with me."

Here, if it helps, I'll say it first: 

Let it start with me. 

HB

Until Tuesday the 29th!

Let it Be, Let it Be

Short post today, simple idea: I want to recommend a strategy that we at Sunnyside have used to help us take control of our consumption and reassess how we're living: if something breaks or stops working, don't replace it right away. Let it be. Go without the item at least long enough to assure yourself that replacement is really necessary.

Let me mention three moments in the life of Sunnyside in which we followed this strategy, though before I do let me also say that at the time these events occurred we had not necessarily decided on "let it be" as a conscious strategy. Only recently have we come to consider it the normal procedure. 

About three years ago what broke down was our microwave, and yes our first reflex was to go out and purchase a replacement. At Best Buy though, we found ourselves oddly disturbed by how cheap a replacement would be. Fifty dollars? Fifty dollars? was that the true reflection of the costs of production? Or was that low price simply a function of the fact that the machines were being put together by underpaid labor abroad, in countries with no enforcement of environmental laws, and furthermore with such cheap components that in a few years we'd be back at Best Buy to purchase yet another? We decided to do without the nuker for a time. A few months passed. We cooked and cooked. The microwave stayed absent. We found we liked the extra counter space (a scarce resource in our kitchen). We also found the culinary inconvenience represented by the absence of the microwave to be minor. Yes the thing had been good for warming up muffins, and for softening butter, and also for cooking rice, but these few uses failed to justify a niche for it in our (necessarily concise) pantheon of appliances. So. The microwave oven's temporary absence was graduated to permanent banishment. We never replaced it. One less piece of electric trash for the landfills. Or actually probably two or three right? Because we'll never have to replace the replacement either, or replace the replacement for the replacement.

A second and somewhat more spectacular opportunity to apply the strategy of "let it be" came about a year later. That was when our clothes washer gave up the ghost. In this case the potential cost of replacement encouraged procrastination; we might have repaired the thing, but even that would have set us back a couple hundred bucks. For a few weeks I took the clothes to the laundromat, until, thinking back to my childhood in India (and the dhobis there) I realized there was another possibility: I could try doing the work by hand. And that's what I chose to do. By now, hand-washing the laundry is a permanent part of my life as a domestic laborer, and I'm perfectly content with it. In fact, this afternoon as I tried to review in my mind the three examples I wished to offer up to my readers here for consideration, I had to walk around the house to re-discover this second one. Apparently the way I wash the clothes has become so transparent to me that most of me has forgotten there was a mechanical way!  (For readers who have not yet read about my antique washboard, clothes racks, and plunger of cerulean hue, the specifics of this continuing adventure are recorded here and here.)

Finally I'll mention that, in early September, Sunnyside's DSL went on the blink. The three-week-long customer service trial that followed involved more than a dozen phone calls and three technician visits, eventually causing me enough frustration that I asked my wife whether, at least for awhile, we could do without web access at home. She said she was game, and so Sunnyside is now officially off the web. I'm sure I'll write more about this choice as time goes on. For now though, I'll say that on the whole the change has proven freeing and bracing. Another filter between the inhabitants of Sunnyside and the experience of good-old-fashioned straightforward reality has been removed.

Now, I realize that this strategy of "let it be" could be parodied, and pretty ruthlessly. "Eyeglasses destroyed in a bicycle accident? Consider a white cane! Shoe missing a sole? Make do for awhile with newspaper and twine!" But I don't mind taking the risk of being thought a nut, or being satirized. I think it's important for us to reflect on our possessions and how powerfully (often without our noticing) they shape us. Not only is there, for environmental reasons, a desperate need to reduce what we as a human population manufacture and use, but there are also real personal costs to thoughtless use of our possessions. After all, if it really does prove I need such and such an item as badly as I believe, well then maybe something important is missing in my life, and maybe the possession in question is serving as an anodyne or substitute for that absence. Then how much better it would be me to act to fill the real lack than to continue with the pretense of "I'm just fine, as long as I have my Grand Theft Auto. Or my eleventh handbag. Or my texting machine."

Of course there's nothing to say that "letting it be" has to end in forswearing ownership of the item under review. Not at all. But even if, in the end, you do decide to replace the thing, it will still have been useful to your sense of ethical physics to have done without it for a time; if for no other reason than that the item's temporary absence from your life will almost certainly increase your appreciation for it once you have it in your possession again; in the same way that the discipline of fasting reminds us of the goodness and the blessing of food, or the way that not seeing a good friend for a few weeks increases our pleasure in the friendship once that friend has been restored to us. It's common to say that we take everything for granted until we no longer have it, but that doesn't make the observation less true.

In any case, the next time something in your home goes on the fritz (or threatens to break its pledge of allegiance to your sanity) consider doing what your teachers and your mother always told you not to do; consider letting it be. Consider procrastination and delay. Consider doing, at least for a time, without. You might just find yourself on a vivid, counter-cultural, nine-volt nomadic adventure!

HB
  
Until Saturday the 26th!

Earth-Notes Toward Human Unity

•  It is time to dignify the work of the hands again. Even the most humble household tasks. It is time.
• Mockery is a terrible impediment to necessary change. Mockery is nuclear.
• It is time for simplicity and plain living to become the norm.
• Time for us to leave off speaking of progress in computational and mechanical terms, and seek instead connections of the heart.
• Time itself has always been the first instrument of the imagination. To re-imagine the world, one must first re-imagine the use of time.
• To renew the earth, one must take and spend the time.
• For two centuries now we have obsessively substituted the ownership of machines and the burning of fuel for the blessing of undivided attention connecting heart to human heart and humanity to the earth. But for all that we have gained in terms of physical comfort and material weath, we have lost so much. Even in our immediate neighborhoods, we no longer believe ourselves made for one another: capable of comforting one another and of managing our trials communally. Here is an obesity of self-regard, which makes us unfit for the hundred foot walk to the neighbors house to say how are you, and really how are you?
• The home. The castle of the soul. The possible ground of expression of every nuance of decency and human relationship: The look of adoration. The word spoken in comfort. The prayer uttered in sorrow. To keep it clean, this place. To decorate it in sincerity of heart. To fashion it into an instrument of hospitality. To fill it with the smell of wholesome food. What are these labors if not holy, and beyond the measure of every number, except perhaps for the holy number one, which represents unity and amity? How outrageous that our understanding is so diminished as to denigrate the work that might be done at home, because that work cannot and is not remunerated in money. Infinitely sad.
• Many will consider our low-tech labors a foolish waste of time. We ought to consider them as acts of love: love of the earth expressed in preserving as best we can the gifts of nature for the uses of the future; and also love of meaningful labor. Love of the movement of the body. Love of the consistent incarnational miracle of the body's labor and the mind's attention translating into order, utility, and beauty. Take for instance the chaos of the overfilled dirty-clothes hamper, the contents of which by means of the labors of the body, are transformed to a neat pile of clean and folded clothes, which can then be used to clothe and dignify the body. A bountiful circle. A virtuous cycle. We need more of these, in all places and at all levels. God grant us more.
• Nothing sadder and more wasteful than our modern underestimation of the body to heal itself and keep itself and the psyche happy. We do not sing when we work. We used to sing when we worked! Why not sing again?  
• It is time for us to speak not of growth but of managed decline. Material consumption must no longer be used as a means to wield power over the earth or its inhabitants. On the contrary, consumption must consciously be avoided and the world re-defined and re-experienced as a space of shared enjoyment, in which the primary effort is toward a prosperity of perception and imagination.
• Here is the inexplicable gift of life. What shall we do with it? Enjoy it. Love it. Live it. Cultivate it to greater and greater beauty by means of the collective application of the human imagination, which can often be done without a single cent or mechanical crutch. Consider Socrates, who taught without a book. Consider choirs, who produce music without any instruments other than the human voice. Consider the game of tag, whose only necessary ingredients are self-locomotive children and a knowledge of the game. Consider mere conversation, which is the most nourishing food of human friendship and conviviality that there can be. Consider the act of sexual love, with its power literally to produce humanity.
• There are no necessary limits to the growth of love, but there are many that we ourselves impose on love and human unity: avarice being the most obvious and the most viciously barbed.
• Let's choose love.

HB

Until Tuesday 22!

Local Man Stays Home, Likes It

When my son was still a toddler and my wife was still studying for her graduate degree, I quit my paying job and stationed myself at home: a stay-at-home parent and part-time writer. Time has since moved on. Sixteen years have passed. We've traded towns and my son is in college now. Still I stay home. Do I like it? Yes I do, and I anticipate that this liking will continue. The work suits me and answers a family need. Moreover it serves as grist for my writing and frees me to pursue my music when I can. I consider it a way of serving the world at large as well, because the practice of thrift and self-reliance at Sunnyside keeps our consumption down, and consumption (though our economists always want us to increase it) is something that without a doubt is destroying the world.

(Here at 9-Volt Nomad by the way economists get very little good press, for the simple reason that all along the spectrum--from Friedman to Krugman, from Hayek to Keynes--they all seem to believe the planet can be treated as infinite in scope and ever-ready for the pimping. Chop chop chop. Burn burn burn. Build build build. Take take take. They are like drummers who cannot alter the tempo or change from duple to triple time. They are geeky berserks, egging us on to a collateral-damage murder of the living world. To capture it all in one mild word, they are insane.)

But I was saying. I stay home in defiance of the economists; in defiance of the economists, I stay home. Circumstances of course may always change and require change from me, but my desire is to stay on at Sunnyside day by day and proceed in the acquisition of the arts of thrift and non-consumption. How long can this go on? Well as long as I live I suppose. Or the world lives. Maybe I'll die filling the birdbath, stirring the oatmeal, hoeing potatoes, or re-aiming the solar oven. But hey I'll not complain. After all, given a modicum of choice, why should a person live or die where he or she is unhappy? Why should ambition for money or professional respect, caught like a bad cold and generally from people with very little imagination, be allowed to muddle the mind and transplant us where we do not want to go or be?  

Since the idea of a man doing the housework is still so mixed up in questions of feminism and the rigidity of gender roles, let me say from the beginning that I am far less interested in these questions than might be assumed, though I have on occasion found them painfully present in my life. Over the years I've taken guff and kidding on these matters from everyone from mattress salesmen to barkeeps and baristas. I've been called a kept man. I've been informed (out of the blue) of job listings, as if it were common knowledge that I needed help finding work. And while these incidents over the years have decreased in number, it may simply be that I do not notice them as much as I used to. Maybe too my having lived in one place for more than a decade now has accustomed the people around me to my manner of living. "Well he's never going to change." And they're right!

I consider myself a feminist in the sense that I believe that everyone, regardless of sex or gender, ought to be able to choose from among possible paths, the one that suits them best. This ought not to be controversial of course. The trouble with feminism though as I see it is that as a political, intellectual, and moral force it continues to insist on associating the domestic sphere with suppression and ennui, as if what happens at home can only be boring and demeaning, and as if life at the office can only be better. But home and the needs of the home need not enslave us. Not in my opinion anyhow. I myself stay at home not only because it seems to me to be the right thing to do--practically, economically, psychologically--for Sunnyside and the people who inhabit it, but also because (to say it again) I like it here. I find the work interesting, fulfilling, poetic, demanding. Boring sometimes yes, but what work isn't sometimes boring? Now, I am no dunce. I am a learned, sociable person who loves conversation and ideas. Surely if I can enjoy the work of keeping a home, then many others could too, who currently might think otherwise; I am not some rare flower. 

One major advantage of the Sunnyside arrangement is that it helps my wife--your more classic busy professional--stay sane and grounded. Emergencies of any sort need not throw her completely off. If she forgets her lunch, it can be hand-delivered free of charge. If she has a meeting that goes till 5:30, well someone can see to it that some soup is bubbling when she does make it home. Repairs to the home or to the car need not impinge upon her schedule. Moreover the arrangement has been good for our marriage and for keeping us connected as a couple. Life is good for us, in part because we are lucky people, living in a time and a country still deeply blessed with at least the sunset of prosperity; in part too though, because the two of us have consciously constructed our existence to exclude ambitions that require high income and instead emphasize time together. Time to talk. Time to enchant one another. Time to re-connect. Time simply to be one another's comfort, inspiration, and stay. If for instance, she's making the evening meal, as she enjoys doing, I will sit down in the kitchen as she works and talk or read to her. (We just finished a fine book by Hugh Walpole, full of suspense and psychological interest, called Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. And we're moving on now to the Brothers K. by Dostoyevsky). Or if I am struggling with a refractory story-plot, I have a literature expert right beside me to talk it over on a walk. 

Of course the arrangement does have its downsides too. For me, it has always involved a certain amount of loneliness. There are not a whole lot of colleagues in the 9-volt Nomad world, at least not yet! As for my wife, well she has often wished she could participate more deeply in the life of the home: gardening, sewing, cooking, preserving food, but that is difficult. She enjoys her professional work, but it requires a great deal of energy, and there is not always much left over at the end of the day to do a great deal else. We make it a point to work together on the weekends on domestic tasks; a couple of weekends ago for instance we drove out and picked free apples at the home of a friend (of a friend): apples which otherwise would have gone to waste. Then the following weekend we milled about a third of the stash into sauce and canned it. But after all, weekends are not everything.

I myself look forward to a day when the question "what do you do for living?" with all its baggage of and "how much money do you make?" and "are you interesting and worth talking to?" morphs into something more like: "how do you make ends meet?" Admittedly this is a question more specific to the topic of economic means, but at least it carries with it the possibility that getting along in a practical way doesn't have to be a matter of being employed for salary or wages, but might easily include expertise in maintenance and thrift, gardening and hand-work, as well as reliance on community and family: skills in other words that we contain within ourselves without reference to money; social resources that we cultivate by means of kindness and generosity.

How do you make ends meet? 

The possibilities, when the question is asked that way, seem so much more ingeniously varied than anything that the burn, burn, burn folks could ever come up with, don't you think?

HB

Until Saturday the 19th!

South Shore Departure

So the nest is empty, the fledgling flown. The other day, when my wife and I were in the grocery, in the milk aisle a friend met us pushing his cart the other way. "So," he said, "have you experienced a drop in your food spending in the past month?"

"Yes," I said dryly as possible. "And it's such a mystery."

Another time recently when my wife and I came home, I was just about to call up the stairs--"we're back!" 

Sigh.

Hardest to deal with is the simple fact he's just not here: the guy that'll sit and play a game of Yahtzee or cribbage every night at nine with his mother (who is a games-lover), or whisk us up some scrambled eggs for lunch while gabbing about corporate strategies at Amazon or the latest scandal at the NSA. Mr. Equanimity and cheer. Mr. Computer Facts and Know-it-mostly; none of that is here. And we miss it. We miss him.

Funny, barely six months ago (just before his high school graduation) what his mother and I missed most painfully was the little kid he had once been: I mean those years when he was small and dressed say in an oh-for-cute jeans jacket with snaps on the front you'd snap up and count them out loud for his mathematical enlightenment and then maybe he'd get back to clambering on the tires at the playground or talking non-stop about the hilarious adventures of Neenachuh, one of his merry band of imaginary otters. But now, now what what we really miss is the young man himself--just as he is: not the seedling or the sapling. Just the present tall tree. 

Of course it's all fine. Sunnyside's adjusting, and from what we can tell the young man in his new collegiate abode is too. It's just that no change this big comes easy, especially when it's your own flesh and blood. And why after all should it come easy? The concerns of your heart naturally follow your flesh and bone. They speak that direction from the heart of prayer. For his happiness. For his peace. 

His college is in Minnesota, and he made the trip himself, taking the train. Why didn't we take him in the car? Well in part for environmental reasons, but in part too because we felt that his move to college might serve as an opportunity for him to declare, simply by the act of traveling alone, the completeness of his crossing over from dependence into independence. It is a significantly different act: taking a young person to college to settle him in, or sending him off entirely alone to settle himself. We believed he was fully up to the challenge of the second choice. And so to say it again, he traveled there himself, taking along just two bags and a fiddle. The remainder of his things--seven boxes in all--we sent along UPS a few days before.

Labor day, the day of his departure, turned out breezy and warm. We arrived in plenty of time at the commuter station and made our way onto the platform, which coincidentally was brand new, having been opened to the public that very morning; in fact employees were directing people over to the platform, so that no one waiting at the old familiar place of departure would be surprised to find the train come and go without them. Not even all of the yellow caution tape from the construction process had been removed. Still attached to banisters and sawhorses, it blew around in the wind--dangling, snaking.

So there we were, the three of us, mother father son standing on the platform tasting the last bittersweet moments of life in the old dispensation. Plenty of folks waited with us, milling, gabbing: these were shoppers, museum-goers, folks wanting to take in a show. A few caps and blue jerseys signified Cubs fans. To our right on the platform two young women who looked like sisters consulted their hand-held devices like oracles. They were beautiful themselves and beautifully dressed, but let's face it the gravity of those puny screens bends every aura toward it, reminiscent of an open drain pulling on a rag. They were hunched. They were thumbing. Ah, to see a young person straight as a mast again! Where is it today: the spirit of youth, eager for destiny? For ports of genius and spice?

It cheers me that most young people today do not seem materially greedy. It heartens me too that so many of them sincerely seem to want to be of service to others. Still, considering the encroachment in their lives, of the digital upon the real, and the way that I literally run into some of them on the street (so immersed in thumbing their hand-helds that they pay no attention to where they are or who they are with) I wonder how many of them, strictly speaking, are having experiences. I mean of unfiltered life: the raw stuff, the nitty-gritty subway dirt. What exactly, when they grow old, will they remember with unmitigated thanks? What scent of what wild rose, or what aching look from what enchanted lover? What beautiful cheek upturned, drinking in what sun? On their deathbeds will they, as Blake is said to have done, sing hymns of praise? How many of them even know a hymn? Or will they consult their machines, their screens, and sing along?

I grieve these thoughts. I grieve them for my son's sake. Every generation, I know, has its challenges. My generation's challenge was to see beyond the need to make money and into the needs of others. So far as I can see, it has more or less failed at that. But the challenge for my son's generation is not to lose hold of reality itself. In the words of one student at the university here in Valparaiso:

The urge to constantly check your phone for emails, texts, Facebook updates, and tweets seems uncontrollable. I personally get fidgety if I do not check my email and texts every 10 minutes....Cell phones have created a wall between people and their lives. 

You see it doesn't stop: this torrent of information, this flood of distraction, this technicolor industrial fantasy engineered specifically to prevent you from thinking for yourself or smiling to yourself or talking to those around you or weeping inwardly or just looking around you now and again to savor the fruits of perception: all of which amounts to cultivating what folks used to call the soul!

And by soul I don't mean the ghostly thing that supposedly floats free of the body at death; I have no patience for that ancient Greek abstraction, that immensely damaging idea. No, what I mean by soul is that unequivocally-existing intangible self that includes history and memory and life experience and love and dreams and communion with others and with places. I mean the part of us that, if we were made of music--as it may be we in some way are--refers back to the Muse. I mean the portion of humanity in us that cannot be measured by tests or by any means at all except sympathetic reference to something like it (subjectively measured) within ourselves. I mean, in my boy, the sum of what he means to me. The sum of what I bless and behold with astonishment, wonder, and delight. I mean something like the Neenachuh of life.

None of the soul needs electronics for finding. Electronics however can certainly help us lose the soul.

The commuter station is called Dune Park. It lies on the south shore of Lake Michigan, and the platform faces north. So in front of us that morning lay the tracks, and beyond them a strip of prairie grasses, and beyond the grasses a small forest of oak, and beyond the oaks, if we could have seen it, Lake Michigan itself: one of the great gifts of nature. A steady warm breeze bowed the grasses that day and shook the leaves of the oaks like little silver dinner bells. On the lake there would have been waves; probably even a real surf.

I wished the three of us, instead of waiting there at the station for the uncertain future, had been down at the lakeshore watching the familiar waves and taking in their primordial sound. Already I missed my boy and oh already there was the train, coming to take him away, the light of its headlamp visible in the distance down the way. God forgive this necessity. This need to hand him over to a world so far from that surf, and from the ageless rhythms it represents. Truly those waves would feed his soul. And yet truly he has to go...

HB

(Until Tuesday the 15th!)

The Cloudy Side of Sunnyside

Three brief points as preface:

1. The trouble with trying to write persuasively, is that, as you work, you usually feel that you have to leave the unpersuasive stuff out. 
2. This a concern if and only if, in addition to persuading, you also want to tell the truth. 
3. As it happens I do want to tell the truth.

There was a moment a few weeks ago when my wife and I were in the middle of canning peaches. It wasn't particularly pleasant work. No, to tell the truth it was actively unpleasant. It was hot in that kitchen. The floor-tile was sticky underfoot with syrup--which just no matter what seems to insist on spilling itself on the floor, and I mean no matter how hard you try to be careful. The two of us had been working for maybe two hours and had probably another hour's work to go: sterilizing, parboiling, slicing, hot-packing, boiling the packed jars. So to buck us up, I said something that turned out to be somewhat fatuous; something about how much I liked the way we were living. My wife replied, calmly and politely, nevertheless firmly:

"Yes well let's talk about that later sometime."

Now this was not a moment of snark. It was her way of asking: "Um just how honest are you being with yourself here? Are you really paying attention to what's going on around you?  Because after all, this is really hard work." 

And she was right. This was where the rubber meets the road. Where the talk that we used to engage in (in the future tense and passive voice) about the troubles of the planet--"something at some point really has to be done,"--was being translated into real action verbs in the present progressive--"I'm digging, I'm planting, I'm biking, I'm canning." And here's the thing: it's in that painful, active space of change that we might do best just to let the slogans be. Not pick them up at all. Not pretend the way is straight and plain, when in fact it's crooked and hard. No sentimentalizing the labor, no exaggerating the benefits, no denying the costs. No. Just quietly do the work.

So in the spirit of that call to truth (while my wife and I canned peaches) here's a little honest list of current costs at Sunny-side. Call it the cloudy side of Sunny-side.

Let's start with a minor pain: Oh, take the fruit flies for instance. Fruit flies, to tell the truth, are a part of our life at Sunny-side right now. They're always around at harvest and canning time. We're not talking clouds: just a few here and there, but they are annoying. There are of course strategies: you can begin by covering all new produce brought into the house with tightly woven cloth. You can set out a bottle trap or two, baited with cider vinegar and a drop of dish-soap. And after every meal it's best to clean up spic and span from sink to table. But of course the fruit flies have their own ways of winning. For instance they have sex a lot, which has a way of producing more fruit flies, not all of which end up in bottle traps. And it irks me that the sex for them has to be more fun than tightly woven towels and bottle traps and cleaning up after dinner are for us.

But to enumerate a cost less seasonal:

To tell the truth, Sunnyside under the current regime doesn't look as neat and clean as it did in the past, when we didn't think of the home as a place of daily industry. Every home sewing project means threads and scraps of material here and there and everywhere on the floors. And the work of canning involves a whole bevy of jars and lids and tools, all of which need a place to be and tend to travel in traffic jams to get there. Gardening has its tools too as well as its associated dirt brought in on freshly dug vegetables, shoe soles, and trouser legs. Furthermore, the house is comparatively small, so that every room has to be given at least two uses--one for industry and one for the attested primary use. My own writing studio (the sun porch) houses all our vegetable seedlings in the winter, and there are a lot of them. The dining room holds the piano and doubles as a musical practice space (another home industry). Our son's old bedroom doubles now as the sewing room. The point is that since our home is not just about rest and relaxation, but a workshop too and maybe primarily so, it'll never be clear and clean in the same organized and minimalist way that my wife and I once considered the ideal. Is this important? Well, put it this way: sometimes it feels like a loss.

Then there's the matter of minimizing travel, which has been one of the more painful changes for me. Because my wife and I take the effects of carbon pollution very seriously, we travel as little as possible. We do not fly, and we limit our driving (errands included) to three thousand miles a year on the one car. But the loss here is pretty palpable. Both of us have enough experience with travel to class it as a wonderful means of entertainment and enchantment. I miss the pursuit. I miss the innocence of thinking that the only cost of travel was the money for the ticket and the price of accommodations and food. On the other hand, this beautiful planet is so damaged already that I just can't bear the thought of damaging it more. Especially when it comes to natural places, I want to involve myself as little as possible in the irony of harming (by means of the ecological costs of carbon) the very sights I go to see.

Again, none of this is intended as complaint. Nor is it intended to evoke sympathy or pity. I have seen enough of the world to know that, in terms of wealth and opportunity, a middle class American like me is privileged beyond imagining. I have really precisely nothing to complain about. Even my hardships are chosen!

No, what I have written is intended as truth-telling, a sort of caveat emptor, a buyer beware: to anyone who wishes to go this way--the more local life, the more hand made life--I promise there are many many rewards! And yet, to say it again, some costs are just honest costs. Some work is just hard work. You do the work anyway. You bear the costs anyway. Because where, in the whole world, is there a thing worth having, or doing, or being able to do, that costs us nothing? And the beauty of the earth and justice for the poor and the sanity of a spirit not focused on consumption are worth a great deal indeed!

Until Saturday the 12th!

HB

Baking and Why I Like It

Baking the bread at Sunny-side is one of my favorite things to do. I've been doing it for four years and what I like about it is...well, pretty much everything; every step has its pleasures. 

I like choosing out what sort of bread to make--wheat or sourdough or white or rye; this makes me feel powerful as a potentate. I like marshaling my forces (the bread pans, the measuring cups and spoons, the yeast and flour and milk and eggs) and laying them all out on the counter. I lay them out in a homey, ad hoc array. It's all very reminiscent of a mechanics' convention or old time town hall meeting. And all of this makes me feel like the affectionate master of my elements.  

I like preheating the oven, especially in the winter time, when the extra heat just warms the house. 

I enjoy the work of measuring, which is all very scientific and precise, and then I like mixing up the dough with a wooden spoon. Wooden spoons are the best kind of spoon. Exposed to season after season of culinary weather, they chip and nick and burn and stain, acquiring soul. 

I especially enjoy the work of kneading, which I do always by hand. Some kinds of dough are more pleasurable to work with than others, but there's always something manly and muscular about the business. The work reminds me of mixing cement or of performing emergency chest pumps in CPR, preferably on Romola Garai. Yes sir, I'm a layer-down of durable walkways, and a ready rescuer of Romola, yup that's me.

Once the dough is vitally alive with kneading (a good ten minutes or so) I deposit it in a metal bowl that used to be my mother's, and lay a damp lime-green linen-cloth over the bowl and set it in some warm place: the sun porch on the carpet when the sun shines in is a favorite selection of mine. There. Now I can enjoy waiting for the dough to rise. During this waiting period I'm like a pharaoh watching his pyramid rise to the triangular tip or like Shah Jahan watching the Taj Mahal bubble into beauty, because you're letting millions of little organisms of yeast do the slave work for you, of constructing the eventual texture of the bread, while you just sit back and watch the movie of life. 

When the dough has doubled in size (say after an hour) I lift the damp towel off of the bowl, performing as they say, a reveal. The dough is speckled with grains. The dough is fragrant. The dough is (to say it again) literally alive, a glory-globe of microbial life. The dough is also ready to be punched. And I really, really like punching down the dough, because this act is allegorical of the vicissitudes of fortune, reminding us as it does of the necessity of persistence in all our actions. Punch. "Listen Kid, one rise is not good enough. Nothing worth doing comes without the experience of failure and impediments." Punch. "No you gotta get your nose broken and your ego de-boosted. You need (punch) busting up. You need no helmet. And don't let any namby-pamby, feel-good, just-whine-to-me, self-esteemy (punch) psychologist tell you otherwise; nope, get back in that pan, stick with it, rise up, and make yourself into your own grainy you!"

I like rolling out the dough on the counter-top with my roller. I like taking this dough and shaping it into loaves as if I were a rough pagan god doing a little man-making, and I like slipping these doughy loaves slug-like into my well-greased pans. Then after a second rise of shorter duration, when the tops of the loaves are just peeking above the edges of the pans, I definitely enjoy maybe slashing the tops of the loaves with a knife, like an outlaw slashing some tires; this gives the final product a rough peasant look. Else maybe I'll paint the loaves with egg yolk, which imparts a shiny shellac to the same final product, which in turn impresses people for very little effort. Heck the rough peasant look impresses people too, and all you have to do is slash. 

But now it's time. Time to slide the loaves into the oven like sarcophagi, which I'm telling you is a vastly appropriate simile I've imported from ancient Egypt, because this is the big step in the process, when the life of the yeast and the sum of the life of the grains and milk and whatever other past life has gone into the dough is baked into the bread and everything is preserved for the use of our own human bodies; it's a transformation of extraordinary meaning, comparable to embalming, which after all, is nothing more or less than a means the dead have been given of traveling onward, in this case into the realms of consciousness--and specifically human consciousness, which so far as we know is about the most conscious consciousness that there is! Do you see what I'm saying? The ingredients of bread have to die before they can take part in our life; but this new life that they participate in by means of their death is a life that includes the miracle of consciousness. Heck, a bit of French bread once fed the man who said "I think, therefore I am." 

Well a half hour to forty five minutes is usually about the time it takes to perform the baking, and now that the loaves are probably baked, I slide them out of the oven and turn them out of their loaf-pans and (listening carefully) tap them on the underside like an old-fashioned internist sounding the body cavities for health. If the loaf sounds hollow, it's done. Tap tap. Yup, done for sure. Good now we can take the loaves and set them side by side on a wire rack to cool. There they are: comestible ingots, weighty with nourishment; arrangements of sustenance, bought with time. And now while they're cooling let's go outside for a few minutes before reentering the house for a sniff. Why outside first? Well, dessert is best enjoyed when the table is cleared, and the same goes for enjoying the smell of fresh bread; you have to precede the deep in-sniff with physical displacement elsewhere. (I call it Harlan's Reset Law of Nostrils, or HRLN.)

So come outside with me and help me trim the quince (it needs it) and maybe fill the bird feeder with sunflower seed. And maybe just sit with me now out here on Sunny-side's stoop, soaking in the maples changing to October flame and the neighbor kids riding their bikes and just the general absolute weirdness and wonder of being here on planet Earth with hummingbirds and books of Kierkegaard.

Okay, time to head back in.

There, you smell that? Sweet as a bouquet of summer flowers. Only it's not flowers, it's bread. It's the life of the earth embalmed now for our mindful use. 

(And yes the bread is done. A little more cooling and it's ready to be sliced and enjoyed and digested, in somewhat the same way as people used to take knives and cut the pages of their books to read and digest them.)

Until Tuesday the 8th!

HB

Twelve Crooked Steps to Fuller Consciousness

Improvement makes straight roads, 
but crooked roads are roads of genius.

W. Blake

1. For a few minutes sit beneath a tree. Remember that its roots reach down into the darkness every bit as far beneath you as its branches reach upward toward the light.
2. Consider your own more metaphysical roots: the means by which you grasp the nourishment of the intangible necessities of life (beauty, friendship, the certainty that you are loved and are worth loving). How do we come by these intangibles; how are they filtered, assimilated, perceived? 
3. Talk for a time with a friend, and talk long enough so that the conversation at some point comes to a contented lull. (It is one of the supreme proofs of a friendship--the moment when you realize that even silence feeds it). Now, within that moment of silence, think of the roots of the tree. 
4. And at least for this moment refrain from picturing yourself as a separate body; after all, you extend with your friend into the silent spaces of mutual comprehension in the same way that trees reach their roots (mutually tangling) into the earth. You overlap with other lives everywhere. Why should the body always be considered the primary phenomenon? What is the body anyway? "Matter," we say. Which is? Sets of probability-points in calculation. Energy in motion. An above-ground happening merely.
5. Find something beautiful and hand-made and take a few moments to admire it. Consider the fact that the object itself is a secondary phenomenon--just as driftwood is a secondary phenomenon of the willow that produced the branch, or just as the ripples on a pond are a secondary phenomenon of the duck taking flight. But what is the primary here, as you look at the object before you? I say consciousness itself--the maker's and yours, the admirer's. 
6. Imagine (or if you like, pretend) that the objects around you in your home all have an inner life: the jackknife smiles at a relevant pear, the hourglass whispers going going gone, and the jade plant is slowly, sorrowfully forgetting its childhood Mandarin. Indeed now that you think about it everything around you--every object--seems to leak with mystery like the radioactive water from the tanks at Fukushima. 
7. What you are experiencing is powerful and dangerous. It is the fire that fuels the cypresses of Van Gogh. It is Jehovah speaking to Moses from the burning bush. It is the unutterable archangel clothed in your neurology a billion years in the developing that holds in its metaphorical right hand Time and in its metaphorical left hand Space, and brings them together continually to form the critical mass of subjective experience. Boom. Blaze. Now transcendence. Now possession. Now the poetry of a fuller life, if we would only see. Don't laugh. Believe. So much in regard to humanity's survival is riding on how well we manage to entertain ourselves without burning up the obvious, material stuff; the oil, the trees, our enemies, ourselves. Yet we love the sensation of risk. So let's be firebugs of the metaphysical, like Moses and Van Gogh.
8. Reflect on the fact that what we directly see is merely the present arrangement of an infinite pattern forever receding into itself. Behind and within the duck-in-flight is a duck swimming on the lake moments before. Behind and within the gray driftwood branch is a willow branch once green and flexible. Behind and within the young man headed off to college on a train is maybe a little boy delightfully voicing the letters on his alphabet blocks.
9. Consider a nine-volt battery cell, and the many ways in which its power can be converted into something that might almost be described as a skill. For instance in the context of a smoke detector, the power of the nine-volt can sniff out burning toast. Or in the context of a weather radio, the nine volts of a nine-volt can deliver the weather forecast.
10. Consider the human systems that we humans have created: the nation state, the global economy, our schools and our many venues of work. Into what, by means of the algorithmic gears of these systems, is the power of our human consciousness converted? Whose benefit do these conversions serve?
11. Think over your daily routine. Ask yourself: is this a vibrant and purposeful routine--one that (say) like the hydrologic cycle, beautifully, perpetually, feeds itself? Or as a total sum of striving does it seem more purposeless and empty--a mouse forced with shocks to remain on a treadmill, or a car spinning its wheels in deepening snow? 
12. How much needs changing? Where must that change begin?

Until Saturday the 5th!

HB