Encountering Atrophied Capacities

Another beauty from Nikita.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Cold silver moonlight catches on a long line of deer prints in the day-old snow. The puppy pushes her sniffing snout into each hole, captivated by the faint scent of deer fur. Such subtle smells elude these human senses, so I navigate instead by the lingering glow on the western horizon and the cool silver light pressing against my back. The moon shadow may yet lead us home.

No matter how the present terrors are passing through your awareness, the need for nimble navigation might be one point that many can agree on. The way by which we’d grown accustomed to charting a path into the day seems suddenly unfit for the gathering firestorm. Most of what appeared worth doing and caring about, the methods by which we constructed meaning and renewed our sense of agency and trust—all of it feels so terribly flimsy as the foundation cracks beneath our feet.

Last week I found one of the matriarchs of the Flock rolled on her back and tangled in the electric fence, bloated and frothing at the mouth. Running, desperate, I freed Gwynn from the pulsing fence, rolled her onto her stomach, and sat with her while she gasped for air. She didn’t regain the strength to stand for hours, but Gwynn appears to have survived her ordeal.

The impotence I felt on that day has helped me to wrap my heart around the impossibility of the current moment. Like many of my fellow moderns, I was raised on a story that the government is ultimately responsible for providing aid to people in life-threatening distress. When the bandage of that story is suddenly ripped away, I am invited to notice that my capacity to attend to the suffering of my neighbors has badly atrophied. Atrophied leg muscles will be painful and awkward when asked to bear weight again.

If I’d waited another hour to walk through the flock that day, Gwynn would have died. Had I arrived an hour sooner, I could have prevented immense suffering.

When I dropped the Farm’s soup cooler off at the library last Saturday morning, my friend Robyn the librarian clearly needed a listening ear. An unhoused man had been disturbing the peace on main street. “I have a hunch he’s trying to get arrested so that he can spend a warm night in jail,” she told me. The bag he was using to carry his belongings ripped, leaving the floor of the library looking like a yard sale. She was waiting for the thrift shop to open so that she could find him a large backpack for his things. The situation was clearly stretching her much-larger-than-average capacity to a breaking point.

As I listened, I started running through the list of urgent tasks back at the Farm: twenty-five gallons of soup ready to go into quarts before it froze solid, seven thirsty cows waiting on water, and thirty-five sheep to whom I had pledged my care. Plus, I’d borrowed a neighbor’s car to drive the soup to town, promising her I’d have it back in half an hour.

I finally told Robyn that I had to leave her. The impossibility of the current moment was tugging me back to the Farm where I have carved out a bit of comfortable remove from the hustle of town. In the fall, I pulled back from serving hot soup downtown every Saturday in order to finish writing a book on the food gifting practices I’ve been involved with. As I drove away from the library, I thought to myself, ‘Frozen soup won’t be of much use to someone living outside, no matter how nourishing the ingredients.’

Perhaps the nimble navigation that’s needed in this time begins by encountering our own atrophied capacities in the face of such onrushing and overwhelming need. It can be tempting to find someone to blame. The self can make an easy target, especially once we realize that we could have prevented untold suffering if we’d returned sooner to our posts. In order to reclaim our agency, I have a sense that we have to collapse into one another, gathering solemnly in the presence of our collective complicity and incapacity. We may have to trade a threadbare victory story for a humble grief ritual.

I have been finding inspiration over the past weeks in the exquisite language gathered by

David Benjamin Blower

in his new book The Messianic Commons: Images of the Messiah After Modernity. David offers a different kind of road map, one that refuses certainty as a prerequisite for the work ahead. In order to set down the old maps, however, a sober assessment of the current moment may be necessary:

Modernity was inclined toward separating things out for the purposes of categorization, use and control. The etymology of ‘empire’ leads us to the language of ordering and systematizing and categorizing. Empirical knowledge was the stuff of Modernity, and Modernity was the intellectual climax of empire.

The current political firestorm could be imagined as the unapologetic and grotesque climax of the project of American empire. In David’s words, “Enlightenment Modernity has reached its point of despair and self-betrayal.” Acknowledging this betrayal without collapsing into impotent rage or self-hatred will prove no small task.

I also found myself surprised, buoyed, and heartened this week by essays from

Dougald Hine

¹ and

Vanessa Chamberlin

², each one offering a fresh take on the work of navigating the impossible current moment.

Many blessings to you and yours,

Adam

1. The Wild Chatbot

2. Two Women & a Song