An Invitation and an Invocation.
Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
The mood of the landscape this past week has been decidedly austere, even severe. What we call “Fall” in the North Country amounts to a wrestling match—call it a vigorous dance—between South Wind, or Greening Wind, and North Wind, or Winter’s Tooth. Some call it “Stick Season” to note the brown-gray color scale. I think “Wind Season” gives a better description to those not well acquainted with this landscape. Eventually Winter will arrive to stay, spread out the white blankets, and tuck us in. Until then, Wind.
The Invitation:
Wind Season Work Day at the Farm
This Sunday 12/11. Noon – 4pm.
Fall Projects include leaf-raking, putting gardens to bed, and maybe even work on the old farmhouse: gutter repair and removal of the shag carpet that have caused the basement to mold.
4pm: Fire lit, Soup served, potluck dishes spread out.
What to bring: Work gloves, a headlamp, a rake and a tarp if you have one, a bowl, a fork and a spoon, and a simple potluck dish if you’re so inclined. If you want to help with the farmhouse carpet removal, bring a respirator if you have one.
Last week’s Letter titled Voluntary Impoverishment, the third in a series of correspondences with my friend Sam, may have carried a bit of a bookish, verbose tone. I was attempting to reach into the shadowy corner of my peripheral vision and touch something I can barely see, by using words as symbols for ideas. But the fleeting moments I try to touch with the term animism most often involve no words. Writing about animism is, then, an effort of translation. Some translations preserve the original feeling-tone better than others. This week I offer a very different attempt to reach into the dark and touch something with words. There was a line in last week’s Letter that said, “Perhaps a healthy neighborhood is simply a well-attended web of consequence. And so voluntary impoverishment is also voluntary entanglement.” Healthy neighborhood implies healthy landscape or healthy ecosystem. And yet it seems anything but simple to shed the layers of accumulated insulation that keep us from perceiving ourselves as entangled, as consequential, once again. This is what I meant when I wrote, “Why is the ship constructed in such a way that there is no direct access to the water other than to jump?” The ship’s mission is to preserve itself, not the life it feeds upon and burns as fuel. And then, just a few days ago, the landscape here at the Farm issued a near-deafening invitation to attend the more-than-human council meeting always underway, the neighborhood association potluck I have been pushing off for generations now. Hearing such an invitation is what I mean by animism. Proceeding as if such an invitation might one day be heard—or even hearable—is what I mean by an animist practice. The following is an attempt at translation.
Thank you for your interest.
Many blessings to you and yours,
Adam
The Invocation.
Sleep comes in fleeting fits and starts as South Wind howls the night, passing over and around every trunk, every bump, every body that dares to stand in her path—including this house, a collection of severed and sawn limbs, fastened and clad with melted and molded mineral stones. And yet House, Hedgerow, Stone Wall and Sheep Flock deny South Wind direct passage, and so South Wind sings. Deformed by contact, she finds voice. The landscape is her vocal cord. Dropping from treetops on the wood’s edge and building speed over the open field, she sings by touching the bodies of wispy White Pine, crispy-dry Canary Grass and lanolin-slicked Border Leicester Lamb, each distinct in texture and tone. Each having a unique way of being itself, its own way of bowing and bending to the way things are, to the way life is formed and deformed and renewed in endless cycles of death and birth, pain and pleasure, grief and gratitude. Endless cycles of encounter. Endless cycles of eating and becoming food. I tense as I hear her approaching, building in volume until finally she lays her shoulder into the house’s bone structure, setting pot lids rattling. South Wind remembers the house and the human inside not by singing-to, but by singing-through us. She remembers that these bones—of wood and minerals drawn from stones—were severed and sawn and plucked from the thin zone where she tangles and tangos with Sun and Rain and Ground. In direct contact with one another, they are formed and deformed, and so find voice. Their song is the landscape remembering itself by upholding life. Their song is their invocation. It is Life that they invoke. This life. And so tonight, as South Wind peels back my carefully-constructed insulation, the house walls rumble and then dissolve into the wild and windy dark. Wind makes off with my body armor, my make-believe story. The one I lean on to get through the day. The one that tells me I am not noticed, or needed, anyway. Stripped bare, I stand for a moment in the full force of the gale. The invitation. “A vocal cord in the throat of the Big Story. How long will you continue to avert your listening ears and withhold your speaking voice?” The house shakes again. Pots rattle. I swallow hard. Light begins to bleed from the Eastern horizon. Beyond the window pane, the landscape bends and bows to the way things are. Calling forth life one more time. Granting another day. This day. Alive, I am listening. Longing to remember how to sing with long-forgotten words.