Courtship.

Greetings Friends and Neighbors,

Song haunts the darkening Sheep pasture.  The song descends in a spiral, kaleidoscopic and polyphonic.  Greetings to you, most beautiful evening singer.  And many thanks to you for your song.  They call you Veery when they speak of you.  But what name shall I use when I speak to you?  Sleep comes, thick with dreams infused with the murmuring of an enveloping place approaching high Summer.  Full dark upon waking.  Cool air and Cricket chant fill the house, windows open wide with welcome to a fleeting season.  First light comes not to the eyes, but to the open ears.  The spiraling song—kaleidoscopic, doubled, ascending, polyphonic—charms and coaxes Old Sun from slumber.  They call you Hermit Thrush.  Cousin of Veery.  Good morning, beautiful singer.  Weaver and wordsmith of welcome, of wonder.  Many greetings and thanks to you. 

I write endlessly of other-than-human happenings, and yet I can barely bring myself to type the phrase “Mother Earth.”  Curious.  Not enough juice left in the words after so many pressings?  Not enough specificity, perhaps?  Or poetic flourish?  Maybe a different approach is required.  Have you ever noticed how infants train their attention on their mother, the one who provides them life?  I spend a lot of time working with calves and lambs, and the pattern holds.  When you bottle-feed a calf, the rubber teat itself, the plastic housing to which it is affixed, and the human hands that fill it, become the objects of fascination, even obsession.  And deep attention is the midwife to courtship, it is not?  Infants know, without being trained, how to elicit attention in return.  Sure, there is the decibel-dependent strategy of wailing and whining.  Sometimes Mom is in the other room when hunger strikes.  The Sheep flock employs that technique whenever they’ve determined it is time to move to a new patch of Grass, and I regularly warn them that I will have to start wearing earplugs.  But whining is not the same as courtship, and we have all seen how human infants create a magnetic field of attention by employing sound, movement, touch, eye contact.  By responding to the subtle gestures they ongoingly observe—the mother’s smile, or her song, her movement towards or away.  Their capacity to attract the affection of their caregivers keeps them alive.  Is it actually any different for those of us who have outgrown infancy? 

A self-aware six-year-old said to me once, “I get what I want by being bad.”  The child’s parents, standing nearby, appeared beleaguered and broken down.  Sound familiar? 

So where does courtship go to die?  And what does this have to do with the enchanting songs of Thrushes or the term Mother Earth? 

Here’s another way to approach these questions.  Have you ever wondered how people decided when to mow hay—a process that requires 2-3 consecutive rain-free days—before weather forecasts?  Today, the computer-generated forecast is the most important piece of haying equipment, and the only one that doesn’t seem to cost you anything.  Are you starting to see where I am going?  I am trying to imagine—or perhaps remember—the exquisite quality of attention that enabled humans to cut and dry sufficient hay to feed their animals such that they lived through another winter.  Imagine how that quality of attention must have been taught to the kids from a young age, such that they might provide food for their own children when they came of age—a training that turned their adoring gaze from the supple breast toward the surrounding, sustaining terrain and its many subtle gestures.  And readily-available weather forecasts haven’t been around for that long.  So you would think that there would be someone alive to teach this non-meteorological mode of relating.  Imagine a class in which you could learn to notice the world’s myriad gestures as they register upon your eyes, ears, nose and skin.  The way the songs of certain birds or the movements of Garter Snakes foretell the coming of Rain.  As a child, I remember watching with curiosity as the television news aired the vestigial springtime ceremony surrounding a prophetic Groundhog emerging from his hole.  His name: Punxatawney Phil.  There was something happening there that my young awareness recognized.  Imagine a follow-up class offering instruction on how to hold those subtle sensory observations up to the light of a storied past in which human life was sustained by attention and by memory.  I can tell you that I haven’t found someone who teaches such a course, and so I stare adoringly into the glowing screen.  Like a bottle-fed calf, my attention returns, magnetically, to the plastic housing and its glow-screen teat.  The orifice from which the information that sustains life appears to dribble.  Just a sucker for a good suckle, so to speak. 

David Abram makes a similar observation in his essay Magic and the Machine.  I highly recommend reading the whole piece.  I’ll pull a few lines here in which he wonders about the recent wholesale adoption of GPS, another technology that doesn’t seem to cost us anything.  

Few considered what might be lost if we became reliant upon this technology: our capacity to orient in the world….We’re no longer noticing the patterns of the place we are in, registering the sounds and the smells and the shape of various landforms as we pass them—because we’re synapsed to the smartphone…indeed, we no longer really inhabit our places….

So what about the question of courtship?  If an infant loses the capacity to garner the affection of the mother, how long can life be sustained?  Do you see where I am going here?  In these Letters, I am always writing toward the question, “How did it come to be this way?”  How can it be that we actively destroy the wellspring of our lives as a simple matter of course?  What did we pay for thinking we were getting something for free?  And why is it so hard to wean ourselves from the surrogate teat and its lukewarm, digital dribble?

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that every solution I hear for how to tackle the intractable crises of our time employs addition rather than subtraction.  What if it isn’t actually possible to have it all?  To attend two events taking place in two different places simultaneously?  That word attendance seems to imply this very thing—you’re either here or you’re somewhere else.  What if it isn’t actually possible to imbibe the weather forecast and recover a quality of attention that would allow one to live in deep conversation with a more-than-human world?  Or a quality of imagination that would allow the Givers of Life to leap from the screen and start roaming the landscape again?

But let me be

the first to admit

that this shit

is really hard

to quit. 

Clearly I am enjoying myself, gathering words that carry cadence, alliteration and even, in weaker moments, rhyme.  Remember that this piece is inspired by the vocal courtship acrobatics of Veery and Hermit Thrush and the charming gesticulations of infants.  But the sorrow is there, underwriting the word play.  I never learned courtship and so I have no practiced capacity to live in a way that makes the Mother smile, no techniques for calling her in from the other room when hunger strikes that don’t end up sounding like a demand, or a whine.  Absent courtship, how long can life be sustained? 

The haying efforts here at the Farm are completed for this year, but I still find myself riding my bike down the street to the wifi-endowed Creamery Farm Store several times a week to check the weather forecast.  Just a tool for organizing the work here at the Farm most efficiently, I tell myself.  Or maybe it’s the drip coffee offered there that keeps me going back. 

My dear friends Joe and Emily Donegan just got out of dairy farming after fifteen years.  I drove yesterday to pick up their youngest calf, a beautiful two-month-old Jersey heifer named Maria.  They won’t have milk to finish raising her, so she will find a home here at this Farm.  Here’s the catch.  She has been raised on a bottle so I will have to coax her back onto a real teat.  Topsy’s real teat.  That process will begin this morning as soon as I sign off from the computer.  Patrick, Joe and Emily’s teenage son, helped me load Maria into the back of the Honda Fit yesterday.  He suggested I bring the bottle just in case I couldn’t convince her to nurse on the Cow.  I replied, “I have found that calves raised on a Cow will not switch to nursing from a bottle.  They will refuse, allowing the milk to run down their necks, bawling and hungry.  But it doesn’t seem to be so difficult the other way around, to convince a calf accustomed to cold rubber to take a warm, supple teat.”  I told Patrick I would leave the bottle with him and take just the nipple, a tool to guide Maria onto the real teat.  A finger usually works as well.  Maybe there’s something in that story for us.  I will let you know how it goes with Maria.

Many thanks to you for reading.

With great care,

Adam