Dying into Gratitude

On writing and speaking ourselves back into the world.

Photo by John Hadden.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

This week’s letter turned into a long-winded introduction for an event that has me trembling with excitement.  For this month’s Peasantry School Community Call I will be speaking with Kathryn Edwards about her work as a funeral celebrant.  She doesn’t cremate or embalm bodies; she walks alongside the grieving friends and family, helping them to craft a ceremony with as much Life-feeding gratitude as they can muster.  She works as a ritualist in rapidly-rationalizing England, which can feel like swimming upstream.  The marketplace is a poor fit for the culture work she labors to uphold.  The same could be said for the neighborly farming and feeding practices I write about in this newsletter—that’s the segue. 

How will culture workers be sustained if the society in which they live suggests they go find a real job? 

There will be an opportunity for participants to join in the conversation, but feel free to show up simply to listen. 

Peasantry School Community Call

Monday 3/18, 3:00 - 4:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time

Zoom Link: click HERE.

Having found the market an impoverishing framework for my work, I offer this newsletter as a gift instead.  But it isn’t free.  My personal stipend request of $6K/year has been generously covered through August 2024 by about 100 of your fellow readers.  So please don’t send any more money until the pledge drive begins again.  If you’re left with any residual gratitude upon reading, you might consider instead sustaining the work by commenting, sending an email, pressing the little heart icon in the top corner, or sharing this post.  Many thanks, Adam. 

If you press your ears and eyes to the cracks, the world still sings and dances.  Already geese fly high overhead in long honking arrows, wind at their tails, pointing north.  Already Rhubarb’s red fist breaks through recently-frozen ground, waiting to open into an outstretched hand.  Garlic lifts a green finger skyward from beneath a heavy blanket of hay.  This landscape sings with the push and pull of winds this week, their rip and roar, their tear and tatter, the percussive roll of empty plastic buckets with tapping metal handles across soft earth, the whistle of North Wind--Winter’s Tooth--through the slit between boards, the groan of Greening Wind as she presses on leaf-bare branches, causing trunks to bow northward, wishing geese well on their marvelous way.  If not for the love of Life, why on earth would they keep going when the news is so dreadful? 

When the gloom settles down upon you, find a crack and press your attention there, as winds do this week against the sides of every one of our well-built edifices.  Allow your attention to gather there, applying a steady pressure.  Eventually a part of you will slip through.  If not for the love of Life, why on earth would you keep going when the news is so dire? 

I wonder sometimes about the ordinary folks who lived in Rome as the nightmarish dream of bringing the world to heel frayed from the outer edges in toward its center. Even as they could feel the fall coming in their bones, did they still dance and sing? 

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.  Uncivlization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

I am increasingly convinced that the world loves to be admired aloud.  Try writing her a love poem, or better yet just open your mouth and let words come, shaped only by your listening ear, the borrowed breath in your lungs, and the movement of your mouth.  Press lips together to make “M.”  Lips open and tongue to the back of the teeth make “L.”  Slide the tongue back a bit and send air through the nose to make “N.”  Touch your fingers to the skin between your lips and nose and make the sounds again.  Notice how the soft organ of your body vibrates differently with each shaped note. 

Without equivocation this time: Life loves to be admired aloud.  Human speech-making mouths might have been her best idea yet.  Another wind instrument for her orchestra.  In grade school, when the time came to decide, I chose the trumpet.  A musical metal tube lubricated by a steady mist of saliva-laced breath passing through pursed lips—this marvel came to me not as a purchase, but a loan.  Whether my parents had to pay a rental fee I can’t recall now.  But I knew clearly at the time that the instrument would eventually be given back. 

Imagine when these bodies came to us with a similar set of understandings.  A non-ownership clause.  A bundle of responsibilities rather than a bill of rights.  An ancient covenant may have been heard on the wind: “Eat from this well-laid table, build shelter from these hills and valleys, clothe your body from the skin of this place.  Take a portion this landscape’s aliveness into yourself so that you might also live for a while.  As you go, let the instrument of your body participate in the song of its begetting.  Allow the instrument of heart lament the lives it has ended in order to become itself.  Turn that lament into an exquisite love song.  By your way of living, set the table generously for those who will come after you.  That is how things got to be as they are.  That is how this marvel came to you.”

I’ve heard it said that humans are unique among the world’s multitude of beings in that we have the capacity to forget how to be ourselves.  I’ve heard it said that a healthy human culture serves Life by functioning as a mnemonic, or memory aid.  I’ve heard it said that the work of being human is to help one another find gratitude for the gift of Life, and then figure out how to live gratefully, together.  It can almost sound simple when you say it like that.  But if the work of making human culture was simple or easy, the news wouldn’t be so dreadfully dire. 

En-titlement seems to be awfully hard on gratitude.  I stagger under the weight of my accumulated entitlements every day here at the Farm, fumbling in the dark for a gratitude that always seems to lie just out of reach—a sense that this life is enough just as it is.  Climbing an endless staircase of deserving and wanting is downright exhausting, and often incredibly disheartening.  Perhaps you struggle similarly in the place you call home. 

But de-entitling ourselves will be long, slow, and deeply collective work.  In her potent book, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls this process Hospicing Modernity.  She doesn’t mean so much handing over our cars and cell phones, but rather allowing ourselves to weep together for the psychic homelessness that has made such escape-mechanisms desirable, then necessary, and ultimately highly marketable.  Within the imaginal confines of modernity, unearned gifts become marketable commodities and then human rights.

You might try allowing the soft instrument of your body to sound out Vanessa’s phrase as you read along: “hospicing modernity.”  But watch out; speaking is not a safe activity.  Vocalizing written words sets them free to join in conversation with every other non-written sound riding on the wind.  Picture the release of captive wolves.  Landscapes are not literate; they are oral.  Life will always elude capture in straight rows of tidy text.  The world is actually woven from a whole host of locally unfolding, songful events—overlapping sound-sheds.  Local could be re-imagined as “within earshot.” 

Until the advent of writing, all human language emerged as oral utterance, or mouth-shaped breath.  Until the invention of the printing press, all writing had to be read aloud, and thereby released back to the wind of its begetting.  In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong offers the following provocative possibility: “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”  Writing may have laid the psychic groundwork for humans to begin looking upon the world as property, and upon the human body as a separate self.  Writing may have allowed “Life” to become “my life.”  Early on, Plato warned that writing would weaken the mind, causing humans to become increasingly forgetful.  In The Phaedrus Plato’s Socrates suggests that writing allows human thought to become thing-like, external to Life, a manufactured product.  And thereby ownable. 

Hospicing modernity doesn’t asks us to abandon writing, but rather to shape our written and digitally disseminated words into catalysts for locally-specific human memory rather than more potions for globalizing forgetfulness.  Remembering could be a remedy for dismembering.  We might still write ourselves back into the world. 

“The end of the world as we know it is also an end of a way of knowing the world,” says

Dougald Hine

.  To his fine phrase I’ll add, “The end of the world as we know it will be an end of a way of writing and speaking about ourselves as separate from the world.”  May that it be so.

With love,

Adam