Joe’s Garden

At the party, Joe’s table contribution was two grocery sacks stuffed with salad greens, cucumbers, carrots and radishes, which I ignored when filling my plate because I hate cold crunchy food.  But everywhere I turned that night, there was Joe, talking about his produce with the enthusiasm of a first-time astronaut just back from a stroll on the moon. “I want to see your garden,” I said, and that’s how I, maven of the frozen entre, ended up at Joe’s place last fall.

I hear us now.  Me, giggling.  Joe’s voice, exuberant.  “Look at this,” he exclaims, “Chinese Red Meat Radish.”  He whips out his pocket knife and slices into the white roundness.  “It’s magenta inside, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”  I murmur an appreciative “No,” Joe continues, “It tastes every bit as good as it looks, sweet, crisp, great for stir-fries, and over here.”  He points up the row, “German Heirloom Radish, more pungent.”  Tenderly brushing back the mounded dirt, he sighs, “See that green shoulder?  And this.”  I  hold my breath to the silent drum roll.  “Black Spanish Radish.”  Triumphant, he holds aloft a verdant sheaf from which dangles an ebony globe.  “Grated, sliced, raw, fabulous with lentil soup,” he boasts.  I make a sound I hope is sufficiently admiring of such versatility.

Over the next hour we will wend our way up and down the long rows, where every plant took seed first in Joe’s heart and he knows them as a mother knows the children of her womb.  With him I will rave over the collard leaves, that look like some flower’s wild, green dream.  I will wrinkle my brow, wondering, Will that tiny cabbage make it before first frost?

Joe’s friend, Mike, is in the far field, plucking kale to make Maryland Stuffed Ham.  Joe will call out, “Make sure you get some broccoli, it’s absolutely gorgeous!”  He will stoop down, straighten, place a rock in my open palm.  “Part of the beauty of gardening here,” he says.  “This land was settled long before we arrived.”  The rock is triangular, knapped to a sharp point, notched at the broad end.  My forefinger curls into the groove, brain slowly registering what hand had instantly learned:  a fine digging tool.

It smells like the dirt it came from, seed-like promise of something both urgent and unfathomable.  Shaped like a heart?  A womb?  I imagine I am the ancestor who wielded it, readying my store of implements for Spring, which isn’t even a green blush yet.  The season of growth will be here soon.  From planting to harvest I will know, even as I am known: a unique and irreplaceable beauty.  Worthy of love and admiration.

And if this is what we all want, isn’t this also what we could give birth to?  The whole world to be our carefully tended, our bounteous, our infinitely diverse, oh-so versatile and generously shared garden?

Maybe I’ll meet you at the party.

Baking for the Holidays

“Lay me down like a stone, raise me up like bread.”  As prayers go, this one’s a champ, don’t you think?  I picked it up from a character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace some thirty years ago.  Still murmur it at night before drifting off into sleep, that dark oven that bakes us new again each morning.

Yes, and it’s October already.  Time to prepare for winter’s dark oven.  Time to befriend the night.  From my deck I see her stride towards me, earlier each evening:  arms outstretched, palms held open in surrender and supplication.  From my deck I listen to her song:  the stars and the crickets, a soprano of vast distances, an alto of all that is near and dear, yes, it is good to get to know this woman, darkness, for isn’t she our mother?  It seems so, at dusk, when lengthening shadows hurry to the solace of her breast.  Or at dawn, when all things reluctantly depart the refuge of her silhouette.

Out in space, the sky is always black, for there’s no atmosphere, no dust or gas molecules to absorb or reflect light’s waves.  Out in space, it’s always silent, for there’s no medium through which sound’s waves can travel.  Out in space, it’s almost always cold, the objects that could conduct or radiate heat so few, so far between.  Out in space is where our earth is planted, who could forget it, with cold dark silent winter coming on?

Yesterday I woke up earlier than the sun.  From my deck I watched night’s beloved, inmost mystery become tangible in the day’s affairs.  As an incoming tide of light submerged the stars like pebbles on a beach, all the known and familiar configurations emerged: bird calls and traffic and a laughing child, the comforting evidence of routine and rational thought.  Yet when I went to the store, it was magic and unreason that overflowed the aisles in festoons of orange and black.

We call it Halloween, but for the ancient Celts it was “Samhain,” “summer’s end.”  Their New Year began with winter on November 1^st, so October 31^st was their New Year’s Eve, a moment outside of time when the natural order of the universe dissolved back into primordial chaos before righting itself again.  The dead could walk the earth that night, their strange and otherworldly soprano blending with our close, familiar alto.

“Lay me down like a stone, raise me up like bread.”  As prayers go, this one’s perfect for the season.  First comes Halloween, that riotous, phantasmagoric celebration of everything we fear and can’t understand.  That should soften us up a bit.  Next comes cozy Thanksgiving.  No need to fret the constant plunge through cold dark silent space, because Thanksgiving’s warm and loving hands will knead us.

Finally, winter’s long sleep.  May we go in as dough, spirit and flesh.  Come out next spring, body and soul newly risen.  And if anybody asks, please say you picked up that prayer from me.

The Barn

Hushed and expectant, they await their moment of usefulness.  Tillers, plows, lawn mowers, arranged by size.  Rolls of chicken wire and electric fencing, neatly tied.  Nestling tidily inside each other: empty buckets.  Arranged on a pegboard:  hammers, mallets, screwdrivers, wrenches.  A level.  Work gloves.  Even the rowboat seems to be anticipating something, off in its corner, under its tarp.  Because after all the digging and planting, the hewing and pulling and pounding, after one too many an arduous day, the tired homesteaders will turn away, briefly, from their labors.  Kick back.  Relax.  Enjoy their row up the Potomac despite the jeers of the other boaters to “Get a motor!”  Powered by nothing save muscle and purpose, the homesteaders will explore the river where fish swim and birds fly and worms churn the sediment and all things arrive where they’re going, fueled only by muscle and purpose.

And where have we arrived, with our motors?  With our technological advances that can take us to the nether reaches of the solar system but still can’t feed the population of this planet?  50,000 children will die of hunger today because you and I like to get where we’re going fast and easy.  That’s 100,000 parents.  500,000 brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents.  They’ll all be grieving tomorrow because you and I want our food grown, packaged and even prepared by others.  I’m no expert on geopolitical, geosocial, geoeconomic issues, but I do know this is true: I take up more than my fair share of this world’s goods.  More warmth in winter, more coolness in summer, more comfort and convenience than I’m entitled to.

I’m not lazy.  I labor diligently, just like you, but I’ve lost touch with something vital.  The barn at the homestead is red.  It’s a tough, hard-working muscle with invisible arteries fanning out into all the fields, where grass feeds the sheep, and bugs in the grass feed the chickens, and sheep and chickens feed the homesteaders, who harvest tomatoes and squash and peppers and onions, then toss what remains on the compost heap to feed the soil on which the cycle depends.

What, then of the human heart, which is more than a tough, hard-working muscle?  The dictionary says love arises from recognition of attractive qualities or instincts of natural relationship, and manifests as feelings of affection, attachment; as solicitude for the beloved’s welfare, delight in the beloved’s presence.  I don’t feel this for the food I buy at Giant, do you?  After she puts her animals in their stalls for the night, my friend the homesteader calls out, laughingly, “You’re good sheep!” Then she goes inside to spin their wool into warm sweaters.  She frets over the turkeys she must butcher, and discusses her seedlings as any proud parent might boast about a child.  When I’m with her, the rafters of my heart expand.  All love’s tools await their moment of usefulness as, with muscle and purpose, I set myself to the task of caring for this place of my belonging, this Earth, my only and every beloved.

Woodswalk

Where I was is not where I am. That grassy, sunbright meadow. This dark shroud of trees. That smiling froth of birdsong. This somber silence. Purposeful, expansive strides brought me here. Now, my feet make hesitant progress on a narrow ribbon of path that curls and furls as it will, not as I plan.

I pause. My breath slows to match the dark and secret pulse of sap. I remember. High school botany class. Water and inorganic nutrients, tugged from the soil through the roots and up along the inert xylem cells. The magic of photosynthesis. Presto-chango, abrakazam, now the water carries sugar into the living phloem cells. Down, around, throughout. Yes. I remember. How to breathe. Taking in air’s rich elixir. Letting it steep in lung sac, bone marrow. Down core of heart, pith of soul, then through and out.

Pausing winds down to stopping. I sit on a moss-clad log, letting my body adjust to the stillness.  Like when you walk into a dark room. The time it takes for your eyes to adapt is the measure of the brightness you left behind, and I’ve left behind a lot of churning. A lot of plans and schemes.  A whole big enterprise that sometimes seems more an industry I have to support than a life I get to live.

As quiescent hush silences militant maelstrom, I am free to be here, only here, in the midst of this vertical embrace, this upright hug, this skyward clasp of trees thrusting up, up, up – I see them – of roots plunging down, down, down – I don’t see them, but sense their blind groping into enigmatic depths. I can’t see my own roots, either, but with the rising, falling flow of sapwater everywhere around, I imagine that the tiny hairs all along my arms and legs can become, presto-chango, abrakazam, fine long tendrils growing me down into the earth. Finding me nourishment, and a strong anchor.

Still at last, I can at last take notice. High above, sunlight trembles onto every leaf fluttering in the wind. Here below, leafshadows wobble and jog, shudder and shake, a spotted dotted leafsong, a stippled spangled leafdance, a freckled flash of leaf-fingers playing the keyboard that is me, releasing from my heart a splash of leafnotes, presto-change, abrakazam, I am music, I am dance. My face now sports a leafsmile, and my soul claps leafhands in wonder and delight.

I rise, slowly, not wanting to break the spell. The path that had seemed so cantankerous and confused is now a loopy, meandering marvel. I guess it really is like Dante said. When he found his way to paradise. Because he let himself awaken “in a dark wood/Where the straight way was lost.” I shudder to think how many paradises I have forfeited in my lifetime, and tomorrow, when I pick up the paper to read the news, I’ll remember today’s walk in a dark woods. I’ll remember to remind myself, presto-chango, abrakazam, we’re all just waking up.

Vigil

I waited.  High up in the Smokies, where mist curls from the treetops like steam in a hot green cauldron.  Where clouds stack up like mountains, and mountains roll away like clouds, rippling to the horizon in an undulating current of hill and vale, high and low, a pulse as regular as wingbeats, up and down, a vertical in-ing and out-ing, like the tide.

I waited.  On the first night, dark blue cloud-tongs opened briefly, letting fall to earth a glowing ember of sun, but I saw no stars.  On the second night, the clabbered clouds parted long enough to reveal a pearl white moon on a nacreous chip of pink sky-shell, but I saw no stars.  On the third night, I rose at midnight, peering past black lace leaves onto an unfurling bolt of ebony velvet.  From tree to tree I heard the antiphonal chant of crickets and frogs, but I saw no stars.

Six nights I waited.  Flesh of my flesh, I thought, bone of my bones.  Elemental ovens, where carbon, nitrogen and oxygen were synthesized, released, refashioned, relinquished, formed all over again then set free to make all the planets and every manner of thing inhabiting them.  Billions of years up and down, infinity’s wingbeats, billions of years in and out, a cosmic tide.  How I longed to see them, my ancestors, my companions, my guides.  Six nights I waited, and on the seventh day, it was time to come home, where artificial light has long since replaced starshine in the nighttime sky.

The word ”vigil: means ”awake, alert, watchful.”  There are formal times set aside for such watchfulness – on the eve of special festivals or holy days.  There are times when life makes spontaneous demands of alertness from us – at the bedside of a sick child, a dying friend. On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day celebrated in Autumn, the congregation prays, “May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are at fault.”

When I was in North Carolina, I kept my evening vigils, praying to see the stars. By day I drove on steep narrow roads through a thick cloth woven from sunlight and shade, embroidered with the sounds of birds and insects.  I drove through the V-shaped folds, up and down, in and out, thinking of the Cherokee people who had lived in those mountains for 10,000 years, until, coveting what belonged to others by virtue of ancestral gift, the strangers living in their midst claimed the land as their own.  Back into the thick cloth that is Southern Maryland, my pen stitches the names of the people who lived here for 10,000 years –Patuxents, Piscataways, Nanjemoys, Mattapanys, Wicomicoes, Portopacos, Mattawomans, Chapticos – until we took the land they lived on, and their inheritance became ours.

Columbus Day is upon us.  Guided by the stars, Columbus made his voyage of discovery and stumbled on this continent.  The stars guide us still, for tomorrow’s new world is today being synthesized in the elemental ovens of all the peoples’ hearts.  Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, we are learning to say to each other, to the Earth.  Everyone at fault, everyone forgiven, everyone set free to begin a new voyage of discovery that will take us, not out, but in.

Shall we acknowledge that life on this planet is making a spontaneous demand of alertness from us?  Shall we begin our vigil now?  In the great cycles of day and night, there is a light appropriate to every work: the sun for growing up, the moon and stars for growing down. Tonight, as our eyes flutter closed and darkness covers the waters of our sleep.  As all thinking and desiring melt away.  Let us pray for something deeper than thought or desire: that the Earth’s own wanting will take hold of us, that the Earth’s own dream for herself will take shape within us. So that tomorrow, as our eyes flutter open, we can say,  “Let there be light.”

Rock Chorus

Today they are submerged by the tide, their voices muffled. Two swans swim above them, foraging. Listening? A solitary heron stands in the shallow breakwater, the blue-gray smudge of his folded wings echoed by the blue-gray storm clouds unfurling overhead. He does not fool me, this heron, with his fisherman’s vigilant pretense, I know he has come here to eavesdrop, same as I.

I heard them last month for the first time. Some big storm’s swirling skirts had chased the Chesapeake’s waters out to sea. The rocks lay glistening in the sloping sand as if standing on risers. I knew they were singing the same way a hummingbird knows a flower holds nectar: by its own body’s instinctive hovering.

I hovered. My beak opened to imbibe. All colors, shapes, textures, sizes. Each its own impenetrable and inviolate self, yet each a fragment of some lost whole, a cipher for the aeons. Some may have traveled here frozen in the ice of an ancient glacier. Others could have been spewed from a volcano now extinct and crumbled to dust. Still others might once have been clods of dirt in Jurassic gardens where primeval flowers bloomed. Call them rocks, or call them musical notes: earth, air, water, fire. Composed by pressure, arranged by accident, and by time.

The sun was bright that day. I picked up one large stone and held it aloft. Shades of ox-blood, ocher, umber, shot through with black flecks, gray striations. The wet surface sparkled in the light, and a phrase from that biblical collection of love poems, the Song of Songs, shot through my head. “Set me like a seal on your heart,” I heard the rock sing, “Like a shield on your arm. For love is stronger than death, vast flames cannot quench it nor rivers sweep it away.” I put the stone back down among its fellow choristers, and smiled, and walked away.

In today’s leaden light, the metallic waters of the Bay swell sullenly. The economy still seems to be splintering, despite the promised repairs. Children – theirs and ours – are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan while we continue to pour out millions of dollars daily to perpetuate those wars. In my own little spot on the planet, bulldozers keep ripping away trees and grass to plant more concrete, more houses, more shopping malls, from which more waste leeches into the Bay through the watershed. And the leaders we elected to steer us through this crisis? Crisis. From the Ancient Greek. “Krino,” meaning, “to choose, to judge, to decide.”

I am just a little clod of dirt. Some of my molecules were frozen in the ice of an ancient glacier. Others spewed from a volcano now extinct. Tonight I will go outside and look up at the stars, stacked in the night sky like rocks on a beach. I’ll listen to the throbbing pulse of crickets, and I’ll sing with them, for vast flames cannot quench love, nor can rivers sweep it away. And if by chance you should be eavesdropping on us, by all means, feel free to join the lithic chorus, so that whatever decisions we make, we make together, fragments of a lost whole, ciphers for the aeons.