The interconnecting Pieces of Life in Community

For the past couple of weeks the air each morning has smelled like the whole of creation has vacationed in Havana and developed an addiction to cigars.  Smoke permeates the atmosphere, and, with any time outdoors, our clothes.  It gets in your nostrils. It permeates your hair. Some days are worse than others, but everyday the tendrils of the smoke wrap themselves around your very psyche and squeeze.  We tried to sit out on the deck on a few recently warm late afternoons, but we couldn’t stay.  The smell got to us.  Our solar panels aren’t doing so well either what with the smoke veiling the sun.

I have only scattered and indeterminate ideas as to the source.  The cornfield across the road looks singed, but I’ve seen no fire to account for it.  A few miles away the culverts have been burned, which surely accounts for some of the scent, but there isn’t evidence of continuous burning, and none in recent days.  But still the smoke persists.  Someone, somewhere nearby perhaps is clearing land and burning trees, but the duration and intensity of the smell suggests a fire of such a scale as to be noticed.  

But nothing.  No word on the news, nor social media.  Nothing.  Nothing, that is, except the smoke.  

I’m not casting aspersions.  Don’t hear in my voice any condemnation or disapproval.  Years ago, B.J. Thomas had a song on the radio that asked, “Hey, won’t you play another ‘somebody done somebody wrong’ song.”  I liked the song, but that’s not what’s been playing on my jukebox.  I’m neither whining nor complaining; simply noticing.  And thinking about our intertwinement.  No one starts a bonfire in isolation.  All of us participate in one way or another, whether we like it or not.  Or as John Muir once observed, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Take Dwayne for example.  Dwayne is the foster rooster who came to join our flock a few years ago as a favor to friends who live in an area inhospitable to anything that makes a sound.  And this guy, indeed, makes a sound!  Far from content with merely crowing up the sun, Dwayne can be heard to have a cockadoodledo of a comment about virtually everything - all day.  And he’s loud.  Surely our neighbors hear him, even out here in the country.  But thus far they haven’t used Dwayne for target practice.  Perhaps they find him quaint, or simply part of the price of living in the country.  

And before long the farmer across the road will fire up his equipment belching anhydrous ammonia for all the world to smell, and we’ll once again be looking for indoor distractions and occupations until the breeze can clear the stench.  Again, it’s part of our interconnected bucolic bliss.  He is certainly entitled, and owes me neither apology nor explanation.  But while we derive no benefit from the crop he will eventually - hopefully - harvest (there are, after all, no guarantees) we make our own olfactory investment in the process just by being where we are.

Because what one of us does, all of us experience.  We are inextricably tied together.  We affect each other - affect each other, too, as far as that goes.  Out in the country, or deep in the city, there are no isolation chambers keeping us pristinely separate.  Nor would I want there to be.

At the gym where we walk on the track up above an older man frequently occupies the floor shooting baskets.  It’s only him, all alone on the hardwood, shooting baskets by himself.  And he’s good, swishing the net from corner to free-throw line and points in-between; underhanded, overhanded, hook shots and trick shots.  He doesn’t hit them all, but his average is good.  The thing is, though, it’s hardly a game.  Basketball is not finally a drill, it’s a team sport; with other people and all.  There is passing and assisting and rebounding and plays; there’s offense and defense and fouls and blocks - none of which is possible with but one player occupying the court.

But sometimes we live like that, as though we were the only shooter on the floor, throwing up ball after ball, oblivious to all the others smelling our smoke.

The Sweet Table in the Window

(“I’ll have what she’s having.”)

For the second consecutive Saturday we have settled into our preferred table for two in the front window of the small bakery in the nearby community.  The narrow storefront in the old building just off the square tempts with an array of fresh baked pastries and a variety of prepared toasts served on China plates.  It feels like my grandparents’ house without the rules.  Young families, with babes in arms, drift in and out, welcomed by the older couples positioned like church greeters near the door.  The basket of toys gets passed around from table to table, and around the chairs circling the large farmhouse table anchoring the center of the room.

“Give me one of those cinnamon rolls,” the senior member of the assemblage smiled when his turn came at the counter.  “One with lots of icing.”  The host surveyed the options in the tray, complied with the order and smiled in return.  They had played out this routine before.  

Where is Norman Rockwell when you need him?  The bakery is a painting begging to be brushed.  We sip our coffee out of real cups, read the news, exchange contented smiles with a couple seated nearby, reflect the delight of the kids, and savor the remnant crumbs in front of us.  It is an idyllic weekend morning.  

Next, of course, is the walking track at the nearby wellness center - in part, to mitigate the calorie intake of the morning.  But every step will be worth the exertion, as was every forkful that preceded them.  

And we will look forward to next Saturday morning, for the toys passed around, the family smiles, the elderly greetings, the topknotted hostess behind the counter, the extra icing, and the table for two in the window.

And the subsequent miles on the track.

The Flavor in the Fond

Yesterday hoarfrost sleeved the bare branches in that liminal space between darkness and light.  Skyfire red asserted the morning’s birth in the east, while a half-moon benedicted the darkness in the west.  It was a strikingly vivid moment.  I could only pause and take it in.  Pause, that is, and smile.  It was a magnificent morning.  

It all, of course, was ephemeral. Within minutes the moment had passed.  The frost melted into simple wetness.  The orange-red sprays of light coalesced into the single yellow dot well into its ascent.  The half-moon settled into its slumber below the far horizon.

Today the morning is a simple, monochromatic gray.  The air itself, thick with fog, receded into an ashen sky, around and above, as though the very trees, the chickens and all the other scurrying lives, were wine fermenting in a cement cask.  Including me.  Which is not to suggest that there is nothing today to notice, to absorb, to relish, to respond to with a smile; just to acknowledge that whatever it is will not grab us by the lapels and demand our attention.  We will have to look more closely, listen more attentively, discern more patiently.  

And amidst either day - the brilliant or the gray - to savor that which will only be there fleetingly.

Last year, I chose a word to focus me throughout the year.  “Awe” was my word of choice; to be available for even the subtlest experiences of glory.  And the word served me well.  If much of my passage through life had resembled that beginning sequence in The Wizard of Oz - largely black and white - this past year dropped into the land of Oz where everything was more than met the eye and all in technicolor.  

But as the year ended, I realized that simple awe - as precious and life-giving as it is - is not finally enough.  To see is not enough.  To viscerally palpitate is not enough.  What is seen, after all, never lasts.  To feel is fleeting.  What is needed beyond the seeing is the savoring.  To savor is to take in the awe and keep it - tasting the experience slowly; holding it sensually, appreciatively, and finally memorably - enjoying it, yes, in the moment, but lingering with it so that the experience lives on as a sensory echo indefinitely, imprinted.   It is to stretch out the awe by settling it into one’s very marrow.

Savoring has its roots in the kitchen - the culinary wonderland of tastes and smells.  There over an oily pan we test and correct the seasoning; we check for doneness.  And then, with the browned meat or vegetables removed, we scrape up the crispy caramelized bits left behind, stuck to the bottom of the skillet.  Those browned, flavorful bits are called “fond” and they are the concentrated residue of the process - the glory of the dish left behind.  

Perhaps that’s the gift that savoring adds to awe:  it is scraping up the flavorful bits of what has struck us as significant, as momentous, as delicious, and relishing the ongoing essence that lingers.

Awe leaves plenty of fond behind.  It is, after all, the stuff that widens our eyes and swells our soul.  It is the surge of wonderment.  But it is housed in a moment - fleeting, and then it is gone.  But it doesn’t have to be gone entirely.  It’s simply up to us to scrape it up, scoop it out, and savor as long as we are willing the flavor that lingers behind.  

That’s my new word of the year:  “savor”.  Capturing the flavor in the fond.

{While you are reading, you might enjoy my other blog.  You can find it at:

Substack.com/@taprootgarden}

Home By Another Way

Epiphany has been on my mind of course.  It’s that season, after all - at least the part of the season that has occupied my thoughts.  The Christian calendar does a kind of time warp with Epiphany, commencing with the visit of the magi and their curious gifts before jetting ahead to the baptism of Jesus.  Not a baptism of the infant Jesus; no, the adult Jesus, at the hands of his cousin John.  Like I said:  time travel.

But it’s the story of the magi that continues to intrigue me, focusing on the evocative observation that, having done what they set out to do, and having been warned in a dream, they “returned home by another way.”  

I’ve reflected a lot, in recent years, about this notion of “home” - most cogently in my memoir that borrowed its name from this biblical story.  Home by Another Way:  Harvesting Taproot’s Wisdom.  In that book I focus particularly on our surprising move from the city to the farmstead where we continue to live and work and thrive now 12 years after the movers unloaded the last of the furniture and we first sunk a seed in the new garden.  That two of us city kids with advanced degrees and busy “indoor” professions would wind up here, doing this, can only be described as “another way”. 

But it’s more than that.  A native Texan, it never crossed my mind that home, for me, would come to mean Iowa as it has for the past 31years.  Graduating from seminary in my mid-20’s, married and with a child, my sense was that my path was pretty well charted.  I knew where “home” was and how to get there.  Twenty years later that road had detoured sharply due to the “bridge out” of a divorce, years of grieving and solitude, and eventual remarriage which became a flourishing, feeding garden of still another sort.  Home became a reality I never imagined, but knew in my bones to be my place of rest.  

Professionally I could tell a similar story.  Steward of a farmstead wasn’t anything that appeared on a childhood list of “what I want to be when I grow up.”  It isn’t anything my schooling prepared me for or for which my particular gifts fit me.  And yet here I am:  home, in every way that makes sense to me; more settled, alive, generative, animated and whole than perhaps I ever have.  Having traveled a path I never charted, and having arrived at a “place” I had never been nor conceived but knew almost immediately to be home.  

The writer Parker Palmer muses extensively about the importance of wholeness - the integration of inner self and outer expression and pursuits.  I think of it as a kind of existential sweet spot.  It may not be a location that can be pinned on a map, but that wholeness is a kind of “home” as well. 

More then, than a functional location - merely the place where I receive my mail and plug in my car; more than a convenient proximity to work.  Home is something both concrete and mystically intangible. A “state” of being, then, as well as a “place” of being.  Who and where one belongs.  And having found oneself there - however surprising - to pronounce it “good”.

There is more to “home”, I’m confident, than I have explored; more “ways” there than I have yet traveled.  

In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously observed in an opinion about obscenity that he may not be able define it, but “I know it when I see it.”  Perhaps he borrowed the idea from the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes when he commented in The Hound of the Baskervilles on the virtues of a particular portrait, “I know beauty when I see it.”  

Perhaps, then, that’s the most we can finally say about:  we know it when we arrive there, even if we’ve never been there before, and by whatever alternative routes led us there.  Home, perhaps, by another name as well as by another way.

Home.  The wholeness, the goodness, the centeredness that is home.

A Gentle Postscript:

My other blog, Taproot Garden, can now be found on The Substack platform.  I invite you to subscribe to it and read it there at:  Substack.com/@taprootgarden

Holiness Where We Least Expect It - Even Here

 I have a different view of such things, I know, living close to the earth where insects and excrement, carcasses and scavengers all have a part to play in the life-beckoning movements of creation.  But when a popular though seriously corrupt and misanthropic political figure recently reintroduced the topic of “vermin” into our popular discourse I was once again drawn back to Wendell Berry’s astute (and quite theologically sophisticated) observation that, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”  The politician is sadly and destructively ignorant of the wonders of creation, and its holiness – including the parts he finds uncomfortable, disposable, or opposable.  The Advent season does its best to encourage us to wipe off some of that desecration to reveal again the glory to which we have blinded ourselves. 

 

Starting with people.  People – our fellow human travelers – tend to be the commonest targets of our desecration; which, for people of faith, is bizarre.  I’m not sure how we have overlooked it.  Scripture is replete with stories of God playing in the sandbox of misfits - having fun in their company and, through them, changing the direction of the world.   

 

A small tribe of Hebrews.  

Old forgotten women.   

Drunks.  

Prostitutes.   

Immigrants.   

Refugees.  

Shepherds.  

Criminals. 

 Physically “imperfect.”   

Social outcasts.   

Poor.   

Thick-headed.   

Morally compromised.   

The list goes on.  

 

 Routinely they are the heroes of the stories.  And if the stories, themselves, weren’t enough, songs are routinely sung to drive the point home.  Consider Mary’s song in Luke’s gospel – which parallels Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2 - about scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly.  Consider the poetry of Jesus’ Beatitudes blessing the poor, the meek, the hungry, the persecuted; or his observation that the “last shall be first,” and “as often as you did it to the least of these [the imprisoned, the lonely, the hungry and thirsty] you did it to me.”  Scripture routinely recognizes the sacredness of the very ones we most commonly desecrate.

 

But as important as all that is, it fails to finally voice the Advent blessing. The paradox of our behavior is that while we “verminize” those who are different from ourselves who we naturally assume to occupy the moral center of the universe, we simultaneously assume that wherever we are is not where we are supposed to be.  We have thoroughly “heavenized” our expectations.  “Here” is bad; “there” is good.  So we sing about “flying away”, and how “this world is not my home”; we are only “passing through,” "when we all get to heaven" – hanging out on earth for as long as we have to, but getting to heaven as soon as we can.  All of which is to say that we consecrate wherever we aren’t, while desecrating wherever we are.

But again, I’m not sure how we have overlooked the contrary word of scripture.  To be sure, our geography changes.  The people of God move around.  We, to put a finer point on it, move around.  But always, the promise of presence.  When King David wanted to build God a palace, God responded, “I live in a tent so that wherever you go, I will be there, too; with you.”  When Jesus was preparing his disciples for his absence he told them, “I will not leave you orphaned.  The Holy Spirit will be with you.”  As the Book of Revelation is coming to a close with its vision of God’s realized intention, the seer reported, “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…and I heard a loud voice saying, ‘See the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them…’”

And when, at Advent, we sing with the prophet Isaiah and the angel to Joseph about Emmanuel, we are clinging to the promise that “God is with us”.   

The sheer repetition of it prompts a repentant laugh.  All this time we spend desecrating the very people through whom God is speaking to us.  All this time we waste chasing after the God who has already determined to be present with us, where we are.  If it weren’t so sad it would be funny.

 

But in the light of these Advent candles, perhaps we can begin to see things – and each other – differently. 

Sacredness, holy presence, breaking out everywhere. 

Even here.  Even this politically corrupted, war torn, climate damaged, chicken littered, excrement fed, here.  

Even here.

In the Glow of Presence

The light on the communion table was always on in the sanctuary of my home church, illuminating the bas relief of the last supper set into the front. It became a kind of spiritual practice of mine, home from college for one kind of break or another, to borrow my Dad's keys, let myself into the darkened sanctuary, and settle into a back pew. Perhaps I prayed; perhaps I was simply quiet, absorbing the stillness into an otherwise frenetic life. I no longer remember. Perhaps I simply sat in the empty room, the silence interrupted by the creaks and groans of the big room settling into its own comfortable repose, the darkness pierced only by the muted glow of that table centered in the chancel. I never climbed the steps into the balcony. I did not want to look down from above it all. I preferred to look up to it, and its iconic scene. From my position in the back of the room, the subtleties of the details were blurred. But I knew the story, and could flesh out the characters in my mind - their animated conversation, some leaning in and some turning away. And Jesus at the center of the table with the bread and the cup. I don't recall how long I would stay - minutes perhaps; not likely an hour. But in those however-many-minutes I sat there I was transfixed by the capacious room, the edgy silence, the encompassing darkness, the gentle light at the forefront of it all that the darkness could not overcome; the presence. Eventually, I would whisper a grateful "amen", take my leave, turning the key behind me.

Over the weekend we dressed the house for the holidays. Nutcrackers stand guard here and there, a pair of iron reindeer made by a friend look down at us from atop the hutch. Advent candles anchor the table, while the tree, adorned with lights and the bric a brac accumulated over the years, anchors the room. Morning and evening I press the switch to illuminate the tree - the tiny twinkles imitating the stars yet visible through the glass behind.

But this year we also added something new. In truth, it's something fairly old - a nativity scene made by Lori's parents years and years ago, with its ceramic figures and wooden stable. We assembled the scene on the table in the sunroom, on the opposite side of the great room from the sofa and the fireplace where I routinely begin and end my days. And there, its soft light gently illuminating the scene, answers the twinkles of the tree like an antiphon of faith. I used to be a stickler for "accuracy", in such matters, withholding the wise men from the weeks of Advent, finally introducing them on January 6th - the day of the Epiphany. But I no longer carry that burden. Our scene is as crowded as Jerusalem was in that account narrated in the gospel of Luke that left no room in the inn. We have sheep and cows, shepherds and magi, camels, Mary and Joseph, all silently reverencing the mangered baby; all having come to "see this thing that God has done." And an angel.

And mystically, in the quiet of the early morning darkness and again in the settled dark of the evening, the sofa across the way becomes a pew in the back, a beckoning glow across the way centers my gaze. A nativity, or perhaps a Passover table. The sermon is the same:
    • Presence;
        • Emmanuel;
            • The Reign of God is among you;
                • "Don't be afraid;
                    • "This is my body..."
                        • "Take, eat and drink."
                           • "Good news of great joy for all people."
                                • "The Word became flesh and lived among us."

And in the gentle light, viewed from the far side of the room, we have seen his glory.
Amen.

For this most amazing what?

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees 

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(e.e. cummings)

It’s been a year of deep loss and broad discomfort.  There is no need to inventory the specifics just now; the simple acknowledgement of them suffices - the comfortless losses, the discouraging disappointments, the occasional physical blips that are the down payments on aging.  As Daylight Savings Time was running out of ticks and we prepared to “fall back”, I agreed with the meme’s sentiment that, “an extra hour of 2023 was like getting a bonus track on a Yoko Ono album.”  Just a little extra screaming.

But suddenly - and “suddenly” is exactly the way it feels - the year is nudging up against its close, and we stand at the door of Thanksgiving, knocking.  Inside, the familiar motions and smells both occupy us and intoxicate us - the roasting, the baking, the carving, the spooning.  But what else?  The poet Cummings’ prompt is a familiar ritual around the Thanksgiving table - counting blessings; naming gratitudes.  Anticipating, this year, more of a struggle when it comes my turn, I’ve determined to get an early start:

“I thank you God for most...”

How shall I complete my own edition of the poem?

Certainly I am thankful for the beautifully obvious - the daily presence of surrounding love, the sheltering warmth of a comfortable home situated amongst trees and prairie and sky and birds that routinely and reliably evoke and inspire and humble; the nudging nuzzlings of two idiosyncratic corgis who reliably comfort, forgive, amuse and forbid me from growing overly preoccupied with myself; for a flock of chickens who daily remind me that life is never a “big picture” but consists of food and water and a free range sufficient for that single day; and of course my own life and health, never mind the increasingly familiar stiffnesses and technological augmentations.

But now that I am thinking about it, the list spontaneously grows.  I’m thankful for the experience of garden grace, manifest in the form of nourishing abundance despite our inattentions.  I’m grateful for the fruit trees’ reminder that while I get fixated on and blindered by chronos - clock time - there is that other kind of time, kairos - the “right” time, God’s time - that progresses at a different pace; and that in their own “right time” we gathered in cherries and apricots for the very first time.  I am thankful that, even in the present absence of grief, I am kept company by dear and intimate memories of treasured moments shared, the echo of stories told and affections spoken.  I am thankful for friendships nurtured and renewed around the table and fire and the altar of creation, along with new ones gestating in the mingling of fresh exchanges.  

I am thankful, then, for the muchness of memory, but in equal measure, I’m finally realizing, for the expansiveness of possibility - the “moreness” that is yet in front of me that goes beyond leftover turkey and dressing and homemade pie.  It is the blue sky blessing of which the poet spoke:  the...

 

    “everything

    which is natural 

    which is infinite 

    which is yes”

Happy Thanksgiving, then - 

These hours and activities of palpitating gratitude for this new day, 

this fresh feast, 

for this infinite, 

awakening

 “yes.”