A Misunderstood God

Stumped

In gardening, yesterday’s hope often becomes today’s disappointment. This was the situation that confronted me as I studied the remnants of an old lilac bush that had lost out to the spruce tree in our plans to thin out the plantings in our side yard. I had already spent a couple of hours clearing away the tangle of the older limbs and the thin whippets of new growth. That left only the stump.

But those roots so tenderly protected at planting had grown into tough and wily foes, weaving a dense plait among the soil and rocks. After a half hour or so of poking and prodding and slashing at the roots under a cloudless Indian summer sky, the stump shows no intention of going anywhere.

Another half hour of slash and rest, chop and rest, dig and rest. Arms and back grow weary. The sun moves from behind the house, taking the shade with it. The stump seems to draw renewed determination from the bright glare of the afternoon sun.

Gnats swirl around my eyes that itch from grit carried down the slope of my forehead by swiftly gathering rivulets of sweat. At last, there is the slightest quiver when shovel strikes root. Heartened, I continue my assault on the root, each jab of the shovel tearing through yet another outer ring of roots, growing ever closer to the central mass. Finally, with the help of a neighbor, the root ball is dislodged. It takes two of us to drag it from the hole.

Standing there, resting on my shovel, gazing absently at the now deposed root, I inventory the aches and pains and try to brush them aside in the way that middle-aged men do in order to continue to believe that they can still work as hard as they did 30 years ago. But deep down I worry that I have spent too much time sitting at a desk pushing a mouse around. I wonder if I could ever be as strong again as I was even 5 years ago.

Another autumn of doubts.

What’s In A Word?

Words are the gene pool of our intellect. Like our biological genes, words contain within them a history of what went into their making, and they contain every conceivable future in their expression of new combinations of thought and insight.

Given that our edge as a species lies in our ability to reason, you’d think that words would be treated with respect rather than the carelessness that has become so commonplace in our national dialogue.

Maybe that is what drives a writer to write: the appreciation of the value of words, an appreciation that fuels the passion to use words to dig into the past and to the make visible a future perhaps undreamt of until it took shape inside the writer’s brain.

But it begins with a respect for words and the spaces between them, a sense of words as discrete bundles of intellectual energy that singly and collectively contain the accumulated wisdom of an entire species, from its earliest days until now.

What’s in a word? Everything … and more.

Behind These Prison Walls

I hear the geese before I see them. The syncopated honking heralds their passage, a wedge plowing a furrow through the night sky under the watchful eye of a waxing moon.

They carry with them secrets our science will never fully unravel. Is all that ceaseless honking the amiable bantering of any group traveling together or instructions being passed down the line? How does it feel to lock on to a line of magnetic energy and just know it is the right way? For that matter, how do they know where to go or when they have gotten there?

Perhaps it is punishment for some original sin or just the way things turned out … I don’t know. But the older I get the more I am filled with sadness at being shut out from so much of the natural world around me.

We got to where we are thanks to our intelligence, but at what cost? In the solitary confinement of our brain we can look out through the prison bars to the very edge of time, but the geese and their secrets are forever beyond our grasp.

Prudence

Ezra Pound was none too pleased at the prospect of winter (Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM). That’s a pretty typical reaction. Winter gets a lot of bad press and for good reason.

This is a season that has teeth. Winter winds will gnaw your flesh away if you linger outside for too long on a really cold day. Fall through the ice and you have minutes to live. Forget to pay the electric bill and you have hours before you slowly slip into the big sleep.

Winter is all about being prudent. Prudence is an underrated virtue in these self-indulgent times. Growing up in the New England of the 1950’s, when the winters were still very hard, one quickly developed a natural caution.

You didn’t just go outside. You thought about what to wear, the condition of the roads. You sniffed the air, trying to catch the scent of any snow that might be heading your way. You always made sure there was enough milk, bread, and toilet paper—the Holy Trinity of winter survival—to last a fortnight if need be.

That prudence was the legacy of a uniquely New England Puritanical fear of having too much of anything, an instilled distrust of excess that made you hedge your bets. Prudence served as a flywheel that kept your life from spinning out of control. Not so much any more, or so it would seem.

Mackerel Skies

Sitting by the ocean gives you a sense of the immensity of nature and also its fragility. You can look out beyond the waves to the earth’s curve while the morning tide deposits the flotsam and jetsam of civilization at your feet. A nor’easter can move mountains of sand in a single night. A rising sea can slowly overtake islands and coasts over the course of decades.

Sitting by the ocean leaves you mesmerized by the waves lapping against the shore in the same rhythm that soothed us in the womb. Their sound was the first thing heard on earth and will probably be the last thing heard before the sun novas out.

Sitting by the ocean connects you to the deep past. Stay for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a lifetime and the rhythm of the tides will never vary. Only the gods have longer memories, and the sea has outlasted more than a few of those.

Sitting by the ocean forces you to accept the indifference of nature to the fate of the living things it nurtures. What happens to clams or men is of no concern to the sea. It gives us life; it is up to us what we make of it.

Sitting by the ocean makes you think of generations to come as you listen to the squeals of delight from children as they try to outrun the waves that nip at their heels. You know right then and there that you would do whatever you could to protect them from the dangers that you as a parent know are out there.

Sitting by the ocean teaches you to see and feel the changing world around you. The beach is calm even as storms are forming far out at sea, beyond the horizon line. But nature plays fair, sending mackerel skies ahead of the storm to let us know that a sea change is coming. Such signs are all around us. You just have to know where to look.

Summer's End

Moiré clouds dawdle across the early evening sky. A cooling wind is freshening from the west, clearing away the humid remains of the day. There is a feel of autumn in the air, the end parenthesis closing in on summer.

Around the side of the house, pumpkins are slowly turning orange, in anticipation of the fall colors that are due in another month or two. This year’s patchwork quilt of reds and yellows and purples moving slowly down the slopes of the mountains will be lackluster, another casualty of the months-long drought that has afflicted this region.

The drought this year has been hard on the garden. The older plants and the weeds have managed to make it through just fine, but perennials newly planted in the spring have struggled against the dry sapping heat. Miss a day of watering and the leaves begin to droop, curling inward in a desperate attempt to thwart evaporation of their life’s blood.

High in the locust tree, a squirrel has curled up for an evening’s snooze. His tail hangs down, swaying gently in the breeze. Finches dart across the yard on their way home to their roost. The air grows cooler, raising small goose bumps on my forearms. It’s time to go in.