Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
I don’t take in news directly, and yet the throbbing sorrow of the headlines has been creeping in of late, clinging to me as I make my rounds at the Farm. Last year at this time I wrote a piece called Aching Beauty—my attempt to describe the excruciating experience of watching the landscape gather herself toward winter, of bearing witness as summer’s green riches bend their heads and feed the ground. Autumn is an act of radical love that the headlines will never report. And yet humans in these parts—even the settlers—used to live with their attention trained upon the landscape in a way scarcely imaginable today. They couldn’t have missed the reckless generosity of life continuing.
Home isn’t a metaphor or a feeling. Home is a capacity to bend one’s head and feed the ground. Home is a shelter woven from restraint and from limit. Home is an act of love that will never make the headlines. Humans are capable of living out this kind of love. If no one says this aloud, how could we be expected to remember? Maybe that’s why you’re taking the time to read this Newsletter: you haven’t given up on humans either. Well, I’m glad you’re here and I don’t take the responsibility of your attention lightly, given the troubles mounting by the hour. Unlike the commercial media, however, your active participation will be required for this Newsletter to continue. In fact, you and the other nine-hundred and seventy-seven people subscribed here are the ones who will either figure out how to sustain the work or not. The kind of love I am describing asks for workers, not spectators or consumers. Let’s see what we can do together, against the odds. » Continue Reading.
Fever Dreams
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
I’ve had a fever dream called Covid. For days and nights on end sleep arrived only as a dream portal, each set of storied images pulling me down and then ejecting me back out into a state of wakeful torpor. I knew I was on the mend the first evening I climbed into bed and felt the sheets soft and dry against my skin—the subtle pleasure of inhabiting a healthy, sensing body.
For someone who has read David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous eight times—and given over large swaths of my waking hours for years to noticing the hundred ways the surroundings might be subtly courting my attention—I have never before had my senses so thoroughly held hostage. I don’t mean to assign Covid a nefarious motive, any more than I am willing to ascribe virus status to myself and my Western human contemporaries, even as we seem hell-bent on pillaging the life-world for every last bit of anything that we desire. » Continue Reading.