Thanksgiving Reverie

On any map, St. Mary’s County, Maryland is clearly a peninsula formed by three rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.  But it’s not the map that makes it ours, this land, this peninsula, this long, narrow trestle table heavy laden with such rich and bounteous fare.  It’s that we come to the table to sup together on what, together, we have been given.

The gift of water.  Like silver or silk or tumbling jazz notes.  In diamond dashes or foam-flecked tiers.  In sheets of lead, on cloudy days, or pocked and roughened by some storm.

The gift of sky.  How legion, those blues: azure, cerulean, cornflower, Wedgwood, robin’s egg, sapphire.  How changeable, those clouds: wisps, tatters, billows, or even, at sunset, carnelian paving stones.

The gift of earth, whether carefully cultivated (lawn, field, rose arbor) or wild and profuse (thick woods, ivy-clotted cliffs, leaping deer).

In college, our class read “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.  I clearly remember scoffing at those famous last two lines:  “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”  How stupid, I thought.  How can people say this guy’s a great poet, I wondered, when he’s foisting nonsense off on us like something we can rely on?

I was young, and angry.  I wanted life to make sense – it didn’t.  I wanted certainty – none could be found.  Keats’ words disappointed me, epitomizing all the broken promises and frustrated hopes the world had so far proffered, so I marched off to find a more substantial truth.

Flash forward.  November 2007.  I’m walking somewhere, and I’m startled by the vivid purple tips of a seed-blown thistle flower.  Or maybe I’m driving, and the shape of a drifting cloud catches me off-guard.  Or I’m sitting in my back yard, and some bird pipes up with a burst of song, and for one instant I’m freed from my tiny self’s illusory baggage of broken promises and frustrated hopes, catapulted to a place that’s large and real and true.  I need to name it, the place where I’ve been, so I smile and think, “O, that’s beautiful.”

Flash back.  1621.  Plymouth, Massachusetts.  A harvest festival.  A handful of immigrants and native-born folk, come together to sup on what, together, they have been given.  Never mind the table, heavy laden with bounteous fare, it’s the place that really matters, because the beauty in which we dwell is the truth that dwells within us.  It’s the American dream.  It’s the American challenge.  It’s the one thing that can take us beyond red or blue states of mind, beyond politicians’ broken promises or the frustrated hopes of bogus social agendas.

Flash forward.  Some future Thanksgiving Day.  “O beautiful,” they’re singing, from sea to shining sea.  The native-born and the immigrants, the black and the white, the yellow, the red, the brown folk.  Poor and rich, young and old, all come together – like us – to give thanks for what, together, we have been given.

Cardinals

A flick, a flash, a fizz.  Dash of, startle of, zing of red.  The cardinal.  Color of my beating heart, pumping blood.  Color of the flame that brightens my dark, cooks my food, warms my cold.  Red.  For good luck in China, purity in India, courage in Europe, joy in Russia, mourning in South Africa, success among the Cherokee, death for the Celts.  Red.  Stimulates brain waves, quickens respiration, raises blood pressure.  Symbolizes danger, energy, passion, power, anger, desire.  Used in brothels, on fire trucks, stop signs and as a bouquet to signify undying love.

Small wonder, then, that this little crimson chit is a state bird seven times over.  Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virgina have all claimed the Cardinal as their own, and I must confess, I’ve been smitten, too.  My lips just can’t help it, they need to stretch from ear to ear as soon as my eyes register his allegro arrival on branch or feeder.  I love the way he’s sharp all over: pointy crest, razor-edged whistle; quick, keen snaps of tail and head.  Never still, this bird, never dull.  Always a spark of bright and cheer.

In the 1800’s, Cardinals were confined to the American southeast.  Prized for their color and song, they were trapped and sold as cage birds to European markets, a lively trade that terminated with the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918.  As human settlement changed dense forests into bushes and parks, the bird’s range expanded, and now, wherever the annual precipitation tops 16 inches, he zips around on a feathered wavelength of 750 nanometers.

Cardinals are helpful.  They eat weed seeds and harmful insects, including the voracious seventeen-year locust.  Both sexes cooperate equally in child-rearing, not unusual in the avian world, but what is unique to the species is the way males and females share song phrases, stitching together their separate patches to make one melodious quilt.  Not a bad model. Cooperation leads to peace, peace leads to joy, who knows where joy might lead.

I looked it up in the dictionary.  It means “a vivid emotion of pleasure arising from a sense of well-being.”  The root word is joie, jewel.  A joyous spirit sparkles, a glad heart shines, a ruby-red bird flashes forth what’s hidden in the secret heart of the world.  Season by season.  A stun of scarlet on snow.  A surprise of crimson on budding branch, in dense foliage.  A fat feathered berry at harvest time.  All year round.

So I have a plan.  The cardinal will be my decimal point for happiness, my bookmark for gladness.  Every time I smile to see one I’ll remember to rush right out and share a song with someone, or beat back some weeds, or vote for universal health care, or put an end to war, I don’t know, all it has to do is make someone feel a little better, a little safer, then, flick, flash, fizz, there’s a dash more joy in the world.

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.