Taking Time to Treasure Time

I never seem to learn. I almost always start these entries too late to make them as beautiful as I could within the time frame I've set for myself. Nine days ought to be enough I suppose, but it never proves to be, given my skills at not-writing, which are highly developed!

It's not all me though. Really it's circumstance too. Things get in the way or you could say they muscle the writing out. Things both good and bad and somewhere in between. All the regular daily work of course. The music rehearsals. The walking to get where you want to go. The dishes, the laundry, the gardening, or the chopping of the firewood, the returning of the library books three days overdue. And then there are the unexpected daily variations too. The necessary shopping ahead of the big storm. The phone calls that start out as hey a how are yas but pretty soon turn into hour-long conversations and whoa where did the time go? 

The point here isn't to moralize or even to commit myself to somehow doing better. It's just to state the facts: that just like everyone who's reading this, I have my juggling to do too. Of time and priorities. Sometimes I manage that juggling better than at others. Sometimes too, the juggling gets to me, and I ask myself is this the life I really want, and should I seek greater efficiency or greater simplicity? And if I chose to change, what would that change entail? What would improve and what would regress? 

Here's a thought I had today though:

You're probably trying to do too much, if you find yourself forgetting about the most beautiful things that happen to you. 

About a week ago I dreamed about my mother, who has been dead these seven years now. I don't as a rule remember many of my dreams, but this was a beautiful dream, beautiful and compelling. She had long hair, the way she did only when I was young. But she was neither young nor old, and how can I say it, but she looked like an archangel of herself: full of power, and projecting it, but having no need in the moment to use it. No light. No spectacle. Just the essential her, spiritualized and indelible.

The two of us sat on opposite sides at an ordinary wooden table. And she calmly smiled. And I reached out my hand and she reached out hers and took it, and then she dissolved from sight. And when she left, there was this moment of strong grief for me, but then—well then it was as if the grief I was feeling was a storm up on the surface of the sea, while beneath it, far enough beneath it, there was only the deep undercurrent of peace and that's where I found myself, traveling in the deeper peace of things, knowing that obviously she was not truly gone, but had in fact just met me and assured me that she was simply gone from here, and how exactly can death be as bad as we seem to consider it, when it is nothing more than an usher into that greater hall? A wooden, beneficial door?

That was my dream, and when I had dreamed it to the end, I actually woke up and it was maybe four in the morning. So I just lay there next to my life-companion under the warmth of the covers thinking over that dream, turning the image of my mother's truest face over and over in my mind. And then when I had gotten up and my wife had come downstairs to eat breakfast and I was cutting shavings from a log of cherry-wood to light the stove, I told her about my dream. And for the rest of the day, and for a day or two after that, the dream stayed with me as a sort of talisman against despair of any kind.

But here's my question. Why was it that, yesterday afternoon, a mere five days after I had that dream, when I first sat down to work on this post, I was not sure what I should write about? How could an experience so full meaning for me have fallen, in that small interval of time, fallen completely off of my heart's list of meditative concerns? 

The answer? Activity I suppose. Activity crowds out thought. Busy-ness nixes meditation. 

Nothing removes us from the touch of ultimacy more effectively than a crowded schedule or a long list that says at the top, “to do.” Worry. Stress. What others think of us. What we feel we ought to expect of ourselves. Most of this is impediment. It blocks. It prevents. It obscures. It diverts. It distracts. It divides us from our our wisest and most knowledgeable dreams. It causes us to forget who we really are: servants of transcendence, human beings crowned with consciousness, and intricately designed for the enjoyment of the living earth. Living gifts to one another. Co-creators of play. These are facts. And yet again and again we forget them.

What to do? 

Some possibilities.

1. Find someone who helps you reflect on your experience by listening to you, by means of conversation with you, by just being interested in you and in what you are becoming. This is to say, find a friend or two. Pass some time together. As much as possible. 
2. Cut back on the expectations. Do less. You are probably already richer in experience than you know. 
3. At the end of the day, take a few minutes to think over your day. Try to remember what happened. A small kindness done by a neighbor, a smile from someone on the street—these can stick with you for a long time, if you just think about them a little.
4. Remember that what makes an experience important to you, is not just the initial experience itself, but how often you return to it. It's like going to a favorite campground. The more often you go there, the more favorite it becomes!

Of course these are all just suggestions. But I encourage you to consider them. Even just small steps in the direction of slowing down and reflecting on where you have been can prove enormously rewarding. 

Best wishes in the journey!

HB

These Variations Brought to You by the Letter K

Our musicologist friend K dropped by on Thursday to give an impromptu hearth-side violin recital. Why? Well partly because she's nice and likes to share her music. But also because she was preparing for a public concert the following day and wanted my wife and me to lend her a set of friendly ears for a dry run. By the way, I'm calling her by the letter K, not because there's any particular secret about her name, but because to do so fits in with a general spirit of minimalism here at Sunnyside. Also because I like the letter K, which is a joyful comical letter, and makes me think of a gymnast/illusionist who for the moment has set aside her head and is doing a cartwheel to the left. Though as regards our own visitor, the more meaningful bit of information is that K originally signified kaph, which is ancient semitic for “hand.” Which in turn means that K is hugely appropriate for a violinist, whose intricate art at every instant involves the most skillful work of the hands. 

Now, it may seem strange that a classical violinist has, for the second time in as many months, been featured on a homesteading blog. But that is simply (and sadly) because our music heritage, like heirloom vegetables, is probably not a consistent enough part of our lives. We limit such music to hi-falutin concerts and maybe to church, whereas....well, music should be to daily life, as rice is to India, or as bread and cheese is to France. Away with all these conceptual compartments in our lives! Let beauty flood our hearts!

There were not many preliminaries. She arrived with a smile. She took out her violin and the all-important bow, then proceeded to tune up as my wife and I found ourselves listening-seats in the living room. The fire in the wood-stove crackled amiably, while the stove itself made little iron sounds expressive of the pleasures of expansion. 

K played in the threshold between our living room and our dining room, facing the picture window that looks east. And what she played was Bach. Specifically his Partita in D minor for unaccompanied violin, which is to say, the partita that, as its final movement, features a chaconne that is one of the principal glories of western music.

I plan to say something about the Chaconne soon. First though I want to list four ways in which K's concert illustrates the minimalist, elemental, but also imaginative and gracious life that this blog aspires to encourage, and which I believe is possible without nearly so much money as many of us spend, and not nearly so many machines as most of us use, and not nearly so much fuel as we presently burn.

1. K walked here, serving as her own means of transportation, as well as her violin's. No need for a car.
2. The music K played required only one violin! No accompaniment. No sheet music even, because she played it all from memory.
3. The character of the music that K played was, like so much of Bach, unabashedly dance-like and physical, earthy and rhythmical. Which suits us here Sunnyside, where we believe that all things thrive best in communion with the universal dance.
4. The music itself, and especially that final chaconne, illustrates that even with the most basic of materials, the most extraordinary results are possible, in art as in daily life; given that is, sufficient inputs of imagination and a consistent willingness to work. Simplicity does not ever have to mean stupidity. Elementality need not entail ugliness. Trust Bach on this one, and his oracular Chaconne.

Speaking of which. I'm not by any means a musicologist, only an enthusiastic listener with a longstanding attraction to the classical stuff: I reach for meaning when I listen. I try to fit what I hear with what else I know and read. I offer these words then, as personal meditation and intelligent guesswork, not as scholarship.

But so here we have a chaconne, which is a strict variation form, the subject of which, in this case, is not a melody, but a harmonic progression stretched out over a musical distance of about eight measures. This sequence then repeats itself something like three dozen times—although in this particular chaconne, the musical borders of each variation, for the sake of subtlety and flow, are often blurred. 

The task of following the progression, which is often very artfully camouflaged, is a huge part of the fun of listening here. So much is going on in the music that masks the progression! Mood changes. Modulations of key. Passages of such spectacular technical difficulty that they seem like rapids and waterfalls, and you think the player is sure to capsize. Still, if you listen attentively, you can begin to follow what's being done. And the chief beauty of the variations in my opinion, is that they flow so artfully into one another and exhibit such infinite variety of invention and transmutation, even as the basic form is so strictly kept to.

Now here's the thing. What the whole process reminds me of honestly is alchemy. And here I mean the ancient magical art of transforming one substance into another, step by step, in a scripted metaphorical journey that yokes the soul of the alchemist to the physical process itself, so that the chemical changes induced by the work serve to mirror and empower the alchemist's inner journey toward purity and transcendence. (The modern world has of course defined alchemy as nothing more than a hopeless attempt to make lead into gold, but this disappointing definition says far more about our fixation on wealth and material ease than anything else. How sad.)

But to flesh out the metaphor: the progression on which the chaconne is based serves (in my opinion) as a sort of alchemical lesson to be learned by the alchemist-listener. It is the wisdom that you hold onto as you journey through the performance, but that you cannot know the full meaning of, until the journey is over and the final note is played. As for the variations themselves, they are of course the outward transformations of the substance that we as listener-alchemists are working with as we actively, attentively listen. These transformations serve both to empower and to mirror the changes that occur within our consciousness as the piece is played. 

And what is the goal of all this? Why, a change in consciousness of course! An adjustment of inner perspective. An attenuation of the soul toward the beautiful and the good. What else could it be? What else is worth all that trouble and work? 

I would forgive you if you said I was naively dreaming all this up, though I take the comparison between the practice of alchemy and the performance of (especially Renaissance and Baroque) music very seriously. I am not, mind you, saying that Bach had alchemy specifically in mind when he wrote the Chaconne. What I am saying is that it is clear to me that he believed that music had the power to accomplish many of the same things that alchemists believed they could accomplish with their art: again, a transformation of consciousness. Of outlook. And perhaps even of one's day to day personal character. 

But all of this is musing in the abstract. Listen to the actual music, and see what that does for you. See if it doesn't flex and vary you into something just a little different in the end! For myself I can say that when I'm discouraged in my work; when life seems just a little too much to take; when yet again I realize that, on this day too, I have to die and be reborn into yet another iteration of what it means to be human—well, music like this equips and encourages me in that task.

Finally (as coda) what I want to say is this: that there are moments in life when there's only one sensible response to what's happening, and that's to brim with gratefulness the way a fountain brims with water, or a bluebird in the morning brims with song. Gratefulness in this case, that certain utterly beautiful gifts come to you free of charge sometimes, unattended by any necessitous grasping. No work on your part. No strings attached. Just the willingness to receive it. K's afternoon performance at Sunnyside was one such gift to be grateful for. So thank you K. 

(And thank you G for JSB.)

HB

(Next Post Wednesday, February 4th)

The Art of Asking

Every day I walk my wife to her place of work. I carry her backpack, which is often pretty ponderous, and we just enjoy each other's company as we go. It's a good time to talk. And we really do talk about anything. Post-war German literature. The oil crash. Stellar evolution. The comparative advantages of the mountain- and the hammered dulcimer. There's nothing like stretching your legs, tromping through the crispy snow, and stretching your mind, all in in the presence of someone whose company you prize. 

Our route these days takes us across a street that's part of the Lincoln highway, then past the grounds of the old hospital, and a school for nursing, where the students come and go, looking young and idealistic. Just past the nursing school (only five minutes now from our destination), at the end of a street that's only one block long, stands a modest white house. Out back of this house is a substantial yard, populated with a number of young hardwoods—oaks, hickory, a few maples. And on the north side of the garage, very much in view of passers-by, stands a substantial pile of unsplit wood. Season after season, the logs have sat there aging to a dark shade of grey. When, I wondered would we ever see the woodpile shrink? Or anyone outside getting down to work with an ax, splitting the logs to usable firewood?

Well one morning, just a few days ago, standing in the driveway of that white house, was a rental van, and three or four younger men were carrying boxes and lamps out of the house and into the vehicle, so obviously someone was moving. Later that day, when I returned to pick my wife up again, the men were still working. For a moment I hesitated, out there on the sidewalk. "Should I?" I asked myself. "Yes you should," I answered. So I went into the garage, and I asked about the wood. If they weren't planning on taking the wood with them, I said, I'd sure be interested in taking it off their hands.

The young men seemed receptive to my request, but they referred me to the owner, who was just then coming out. He was a bearded gentleman in a brown knitted cap, and with a well-rounded but inwardly robust physique. A sort of lumberjack on vacation. A hard nut with softer caramel coating. His eyes were his most arresting feature. They were of a depth and a tangibility of soul that's difficult to come by these days. They sized me up without making me look down. They also recognized me.

“You used to live here on this street didn't you?” he asked.

I did a bit of a double take. “Wow, you have a memory,” I said. “That was something like ten years ago now. And only for a year or two.” Grateful for even this small connection between us, and hoping I could take advantage of it, I repeated my request, mentioning that I had a wood stove at home, and that I would be grateful for the extra fuel, that is, if he wasn't planning on taking it with him.

“Well, I was going to take the wood,” he said. “But you know, there's also some wood where I'm going to. So go ahead. Enjoy.”

I communicated my thanks, and then was off. Happy especially with his imperative: “Enjoy.” 

And in fact I already have acted on that task of enjoyment. Using two plastic sleds yesterday, I dragged the logs over the snow from the wood pile to the car. Back home, I unloaded each trunk-load and stacked it, then swung the ax for awhile, splitting several of the larger logs for the evening's fire: all hard work of course, but certainly enjoyable. And the warmth of the stove at the end of the day capped these enjoyments. A plentiful harvest of heat.

But what I want to say about this little incident is that it illustrates the employment of a useful skill, which has only recently become an exercised part of me, and which I want to commend to others. It's a skill that in my opinion is becoming more and more useful and necessary as we move into more and more uncertain times. And that's the art of asking. Asking for advice. Asking for help. For a favor, or, as in this case, for a free gift: 

“Say I'm just wondering if you folks were planning on taking that wood with you. Because if you're not, I could sure use it at my place.” 

Just a few words. But words that took some trouble to speak. You see, it's actually a pretty multifaceted skill, making requests. It involves seeing the opportunity in the first place, and judging the opportune time to seize it. It requires overpowering your pride and setting aside your supposed independence in favor of a different way of looking at the matter. Often too, it requires introducing yourself to people you don't know, and who you wouldn't otherwise mix with. It requires meeting someone's eye. It requires the articulation of humble-tasting words and phrases: “Could I..? Would you happen to..?  Is it possible...?"

But of course the art of asking, especially when practiced consistently over time, has its indisputable benefits. Yesterday it netted me nearly a half a cord of wood, absolutely free: which at Sunnyside, in the dead of winter, works out to a good three or four week's worth of fuel, and quite possibly $200 knocked off of the winter utility bill. 

As coda too, I want to say too just how pleasant it was to have the owner of that house recognize me, as having lived on his street at one time. I did not remember him, but his memory connected us, and left me just a little warmer on the inside the whole day. 

HB

(Next Post Monday, January 26)

Why I Chop Wood

The past week has been a cold one here at Sunnyside, and I've had to keep the stove continually stoked to keep up with it. I've been chopping wood too with my Finnish-made ax, which cuts like the prose of Oscar Wilde, being finely balanced, elegantly constructed, and devastatingly effective. The firewood we buy comes already seasoned and roughly split, but if you want to keep the fire hot and also burning clean, it's best to have a healthy mix of smaller wood pieces in with the larger ones, hence the need to split at least some of the wood. As a rule I work about forty-five minutes a day, chopping and tending to all the needs of the stove.

In any case, as I was splitting wood this week, I was reminded of a moment, oh a month or so ago, when I mentioned to a coffee shop acquaintance that I chopped wood daily to fuel up my stove. This was someone with whom I've occasionally discussed books and a little politics. I think she is only vaguely aware of my homesteading aspirations. 

“Well,” she said, turning the thought over in her mind a moment, “at least that's good exercise.” I agreed that it was, and that was that; the conversation moved on. Nevertheless, I stored the moment up, especially the rather awkward pause after her “well.”

My impression of my coffee shop friend, is that, like many well-educated left-leaning Americans, she lives an environmentally concerned sort of life, so long as it doesn't cost her any appreciable sacrifice or comfort, which probably in her mind shouldn't be necessary, since eventually science will come up with the necessary improvements in renewables. Furthermore, her ideals are scholarly and cultural. She assumes that the life of the mind can be lived without much reference to the life of the body. That, if there's learning to do, or an enlightening interview on the radio, the chores can wait. That the reason we have snow blowers, automatic washing machines, central air, and food from the deli, is to free ourselves from drudgery, and commit ourselves to the pursuit of more worthy tasks. 

So what she was struggling with in that little awkward pause, I think, was just how to justify in her own mind, my spending precious personal time on the task of chopping wood. Chopping wood, is, after all, not what most people would classify as mentally enriching, say like a book or a good jazz concert in Chicago. It's not self-improving like meditation. It's also what Reagan did to pass the time on his ranch, which doesn't endear the activity to the Left. So, some part of her was probably asking me: “If you're looking for a little heat in the house, why not just locate the thermostat on the wall and press the up-arrow where it says "temperature"? Or, if you really MUST own a wood stove, why not purchase wood for it that's been chopped to an accurate choppiness in the first place? Why waste time chopping it yourself? Just think what you could be doing with that time!"

Which is why apparently the only real justification she could come up with that fit with her sense of my basic sanity was, well, exercise and all the good things that come with it: a life free of heart disease and maybe cancer too, which, in turn would ensure a decent life span and thus more time for concerts and books and meditation. So, good. Exercise. That must be why he's chopping wood. 

Now, I am aware that I'm being a little satirical here. And the satire is of course intentional. Satire has real uses. Satire clears the mind of cant. Still, my point is not to make fun of a human being for having a certain outlook, especially when such views on living (if I've described them accurately) are not far from the views I myself held say, five years ago. I am a Johnny-come-lately to the peak oil, de-growth, and homesteading camps, and I certainly have no corner on carbon-free lifestyle purity. No one does really, except perhaps the poorest of the poor in places far away from me, and they, to be frank about it, generally not by choice. 

But. It was certainly not for exercise that I bought the ax. Nor for longer life and all that. I bought the ax because I wanted to chop wood, and I wanted to chop wood because that's part of the art of keeping a wood stove hot. And we bought the wood stove because we wanted to heat our home as minimally as possible and as renewably as possible, and a wood stove does that pretty well—not perfectly, but pretty well. 

So it's a pretty big thing—the ax. It's a kind of creed in the person of a tool. It chops about what I believe. About how much I want to give to the world, and how much (or how little) I want to take from it. It's an image of my resolve to give every hour of every day something of a physical tang.

So, in harmony with my ax, while the year is still new; while it still feels like a propitious time to reassert and recommit myself, I want to articulate once again, for myself and for my readers, the two major reasons I do the homesteading work I do, chopping wood inclusive—work which is, by and large yes, physical work. Work that's sometimes, yes, boring and repetitive. Work that yes, also takes a good deal of time.

1. I believe that for the earth's sake, and also for the sake of humanity's future, it's time to wean ourselves from the daily use of so many machines, which pollute the planet in their manufacture and their use. Carbon pollution is maybe the biggest and most weightily worrisome of these forms of pollution, but it is by no means the only one. There is for instance, sonic pollution. Distraction pollution. Narcissism pollution. Sex pollution. Information pollution. Speed pollution...etc.
2. I believe that physical work, done for a purpose directly connected with my own body's keeping, deeply enriches my mental and spiritual life. It's as simple as that. The sense of competence gained. The sense of closeness to the elements. The sense of immediate access to beauty, in flowers and the living earth. The depth of what you might call “the reality factor” in my life. Also the way my relationships with my family and community have been strengthened by means of this work: All of this has combined to make the considerable time I put into homesteading seem much more like an investment than a thing consumed away. Of course, I can't be certain that the householding experience for others would be as positive as it has been here for us here at Sunnyside. Still, plenty of other venues on the internet and plenty of books these days, resonate with the same theme: “Don't be afraid to change. The rewards are real.”

All of which makes the thought of chopping wood merely for exercise seem pretty small in comparison. Or maybe you could say that the goodness of exercise is just an extra that  comes with the complete homesteading kit, that when certain of your ducks are in a row, the others waddle their way into the line as well. Because of course, hefting the ax, washing the clothes with a board and plunger, kneading bread, lugging rainwater around the house-corner in a pail, hoeing weeds, chopping leaves to enable their efficient assimilation into the protozoic nation of the compost pile: sure, all of it's great exercise. I can't think of any better exercise. I can't think of any better kind of life. 

More on the question of time though soon! There's so much more to grapple with. So much more to say. 

HB

(Next Post January 18th)