Living in a world worth knowing
A yearly reminder….
Yesterday the sun hung in the sky for 10 hours and 25 minutes in these parts.
Today the sun cheats us out of two minutes, only hanging around for 10 hours and 23 minutes.
Way I figure it, I lost two minutes of Ra time as he travels on his night-barque.
The squash vines, now barren, cast long November shadows as the world dims.
What possible hour do we think we wrought last night?
If I must chose between the sun and hubris, I choose the sun.
Do ghosts exist?
I once lived long enough to know that they don’t.
I’ve now lived long enough to know that they do.
That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us pay attention to the natural world, missing the rhythms and the mysteries that envelop our modern minds every moment.
Today is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms from the inside out, and we die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes piercing our bodies, hoping for St. Sebastian to save us.
The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow the spirits of our own making, the rules and rhythms of our daily lives, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.
The sunrise this morning is glorious, again. I ambled out barefoot to catch the deep red light, past the old maple with the scattered shells of clams raked and eaten. The early November light reminded me of those I have loved and who died anyway..
The clams are a reminder of two things worth being reminded of as : we are part of something larger than us, and we are mortal.
The dead are among us today. The dead are among us every day.THe
The rich dirt still gives the way it usually does–a slight resistance before the earth yields to my finger, poking a hole into the garden ground again. I’ve done it thousands and thousands of times, and each time brings me joy.
We eat from the garden–last night it was frozen tomatoes and fresh basil. (The basil is under lights in the basement, sitting in pots filled with dirt from the garden, which will be returned to the garden.)
Decent dirt has a heady aroma, difficult to describe if you do not pay attention to dirt, but a smell any gardener will tell you is enough to get us on our knees. Soil is complex, it is alive, and it is grace.
We are in trouble, partly because of a virus too new for us to handle, mostly because we’ve forgotten we come from the garden. The story of Adam and Eve (and it is, of course, an old story, told by humans about humans) is a cautionary tale for our times.
We fool ourselves into thinking we can control the garden–our “economy” is based on consumption, on lifeless dirt fertilized with synthetic chemicals produced in a furnace in a process invented by the same man who developed chlorine gas for warfare.
Heaven is found not in the empty sky but in the teeming loam under our feet. If we remembered where we come from, we would not be dumping milk down the drain and crushing tons of beans for mulch as suddenly destitute families face hunger and empty shelves.
A couple of days ago the peas I dropped into the holes my fingers poked into the ground (I did nothing more than that) broke through the earth. The leaves are headed heavenward, but so are the roots. The earth, the air, the rain, and the light will coalesce to form more peas.
I can eat the peas, I can sell them, I can let them fall to waste, but what I cannot do is make them. I pray a lot in the garden, sometimes out of desperation on a bad day, but in recognition of grace on the good days.
And bad days are rare in the garden.