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