Old River, have mercy on us.

Garden assemblage by Annie Bingham. “Of Sleep and Spent Flames.”

This week’s newsletter arises from three glorious, sleep-deprived days living as a roadie on Dougald Hine’s American book tour. I wholeheartedly encourage you to sustain him and his work by purchasing his book At Work in the Ruins or subscribing to his Substack newsletter. Here’s a link to one that I particularly love:

Helpless Growth

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Old River, you wash away the sweat of the day.  Have mercy on us. 

Old River, you haunt us with promises of dark, earthbound embrace.  We hear your call. 

Old River, you send us off renewed, alive, singing a new song.  Grant us your peace.

Ahead of the frost comes one more chance to remember that summer truly and properly arrived, and stayed for a good long while, here on this sandy hilltop above a lazy bend in Sand River.  I say the words shyly, unsure where and how they will land.  But there is something right about them: Indian summer.  Warm Sun and wind on bare skin.  Blue sky for weeks.  Dust underfoot.  Purple aster, goldenrod and the first leafy signal fires of sugar maple.  Summer stores herself as squash sugar, as drying corn and beans, as fat on the back of a lamb.  The fattening comes, full of mercy, before the long and leaning nights. 

Darkness falls by dinnertime now.  Swimming season shakes hands with candle season.  Wicks soaked with the melted fat of these fields from summers past, fat from grass and clover and patient, dark soil.  Fat from rain.  Summer’s light released into the winter house by flame.

Tomato season reaches out to kiss the arrival of evening chill, lending her sweet reds and oranges to a simmering pot of smoky lamb shanks.  Sprigs of thyme and sage.  Crushed cloves of garlic.  Cornmeal cooked in milk.  Salad studded with flowers.  Bright day, dark evening.  Cold river, warm supper.  How could we be so blessed, to live through yet another turn? 

The gift presses gently upon our still-tingling skin, rests heavily in our filling bellies, and on our tongues.  By the flicker of candle light, the words come.  Unrushed.  Deepened by care.  Bound by blessing.   

Any attempt to describe a modern, monied imagination must eventually find its way back to the grail of gratitude—the kind that un-frees us.  The kind that binds an adolescent imagination to the ones who ask for no payment.  To the ones who ongoingly enact such ruthless and unfair generosity. 

The doctrine of fairness might be our way of keeping Life at arm’s length.  Armor for a fearful heart.  Metal cladding for a monied imagination. 

Perhaps you’ve heard someone say the following phrase: “It’s mine.  I earned it.”  The ingratitude of the statement stings more than a bit.  Causes one to backpedal.  “Well, if I didn’t earn it, no one else did.” 

I stood once in the presence of these very words, spoken in regards to a piece of land.  In regards to a property and its attendant right to exclude.  I stood and listened, silently.  I could hear the sound of my heart breaking. 

When the words or actions of another hold up a mirror to unresolved or unbearable pieces of our own story, we might notice the person transforming into a monster before our eyes.  If we notice the monstering, as I did that day, we have been granted a chance to learn.  But learning the grasping nature of the culturally-endorsed ingratitude we carry can be terribly costly.  Dreadfully lonely-making.  I write this morning from that lonely place.  Consider this a signal fire for others willing to be broken open by the way things are. 

The patterns of thought we call “the market” rest upon a set of largely-unspoken assumptions.  Money is the universal key to every locked door.  The transfer of property from seller to buyer resembles a hostage negotiation; the handoff must be simultaneous.  Any lag time begets the dark and unseemly magic of indebtedness.  The doctrine of fairness serves as a peacekeeping border guard. 

The word price hails from the same root as praise—so long it has traveled from that hallowed home ground.  Gratitude marks a foot path from price-paying toward praise-making.  From the consumer marketplace toward the greening meadow, the ripening garden, the river’s edge.  Such foot paths must be trodden together, in company and in conversation.

I found myself in good company and praiseful conversation last Sunday at an event that I helped to organize for one of my mentors, author Dougald Hine.  The group numbered nearly sixty by the time we finished singing the opening song.  Dougald invited us into conversation by reading a bit from his book, At Work in the Ruins:

As I listen to those who have more experience than I do of the ways life has been made to work in other times and places, one theme I hear is how much work goes into making a grown-up.  It’s not something you become by virtue of surviving childhood or sitting out enough years in schoolrooms and lecture theaters.  When the time comes, it takes a work of initiation on which much of the life of your community is focused. 

Any attempt to describe a modern, monied imagination must eventually find its way back to the grail of gratitude—the kind that un-frees us. 

You have to be cooked in the flames, I’ve heard it said, and the frame of initiation which your culture builds is the vessel that gives you a chance of coming through the fire. 

Gratitude offers to bind an adolescent imagination to the ones who ask for no payment.  To the ones who ongoingly enact such ruthless and unfair generosity.  To the ones whose lives we end in order to build the one we call ours. 

To be a grown-up, it seems to me, is to live alert to consequences, to know the cost of your living.

To be a grown-up might entail counting, and recounting, by way of storied speech, your many blessings.    

It is hard to be a grown-up in the world that we have made.  The cost is almost unbearable. 

To become a grown-up might entail allowing the weight of your blessings to press upon you, and then figuring out how to pass them to others before your allotment runs out.  Under the influence of gratitude, blessings feel more like hot potatoes than hard-earned possessions. 

Allowing gratitude to have its way with us risks ruining the party—smashing the plates and spilling the cups.  It risks lifting the veil on the crushing ingratitude that may prove the most unbearable cost of modernity. 

If I insist that we have a lot to learn from the ways in which people have made life work in other times and places, this is not to romanticise the lives of others.  There is no way back, nor would we want one.  The lives of our ancestors were hard in ways we do not like to think about—for this reason, they could not afford the kind of carelessness to which we have been accustomed.  Cushioned on millions of years of fossil energy, veiled by the impersonal logic of commodity exchange, and the Emerald City magic of the shop window display, the level of detachment form consequences which has been normal, even necessary, for participation in our death-fuelled societies of consumption was until quite recently the preserve of mad emperors.  Our ancestors could not afford this carelessness—and nor, it turns out, can we. 

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll try to tell the story of what happened after Dougald offered this grief- and gratitude-filled invocation to those gathered in a rough circle, at an event with no price tag. 

Many blessings to you and yours,

Adam