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