The Night Siren

Greetings Friends and Neighbors,

I heard from a couple of you who read last week’s Newsletter you found yourself standing at the edge of the woods with no clear path for entry, the words and phrases forming a theoretically dense, impenetrable thicket. After five days at the Orphan Wisdom School, an immersion in Stephen Jenkinson’s writing and teaching, I was deep in the heart of that very thicket—where the berries are sweet but the thorns draw blood.  This week’s Letter amounts to me trying to cut a path. I failed to state the following last week: “Stephen, I am immensely grateful for your work.  You have pressed and printed upon my way of moving through the world, and particularly upon my practice of holding up thorny questions.”  By way of thanks, I’ll try to put some non-theoretical flesh on the bones of Stephen’s question, How did it come to be this way? 

How did we get to a point where we can be complicit in perpetrating terminal harm to the living world that we will pass on to the young ones being born today and not be undone by grief?  How did it come to be that this sort of violence is woven into the fabric of our ordinary striving after what we’re told are basic necessities, or human rights: food, shelter, clothing, transportation, adequate medical care, entertainment, a warm cup of coffee and a few fresh vegetables?  How do we make sense of the fact that every study describing the imminent collapse of species, soils, waters and weathers does next-to-nothing to slow our forward motion but rather fuels a societal frenzy to invent and manufacture ever-more-water-resistant band aids to apply to the sinking ship?  As a heartbroken twenty-two-year-old, I heard environmental activist Derrick Jensen propose, “We want to have hot showers and Salmon, but at some point we’re going to realize that we can’t have both.  We will have to decide.”  Replace “hot showers” with “cancer treatment” and then replace “Salmon” with “a livable world for our great-grandchildren” and you will notice how quickly the conversation grinds to a halt.  Dead Air.  But, as you’ll hear in the story of the Night Siren, the Air is still very much alive. 

I will offer one simple answer to these impossible, unwelcome questions:  The places where most of us live are looking pretty good because almost all of the stuff we use to get through the day comes from somewhere else.  A few years back, on the afternoon of our first attempt to mow hay by hand using traditional hand tools, I made my way to a gathering in memory of the life of a farmer of about my age who had committed suicide.  Once there, I find myself standing next to one of the organic farming community’s elders—someone whose farming practices are deeply respected and admired.  I describe to the farmer our longing to make hay for our few Sheep and Cows without tractors and the utter humbling that we had received in trying to begin.  It's four years later now and the possibility of making hay by hand—a cultural practice commonplace until very recently—still dangles out there in the realm of fantasy.  Learning that you have no capacity to actually work for your supper has a way of taking you down a few notches.  So this farmer takes in my story, digests it, and then lays out a banquet of grief for me.  He runs a vegetable CSA farm that grows produce for hundreds of families, a farm that many would point to as a glimmer of hope in a time of ecological crisis.  He describes to me how a graduate student from the University performed an energy audit on the farm, whereby he translated the farm into calories.  For example: What is the caloric cost to the world of the sheet of plastic that covers each of the farm’s many greenhouses, the ones that supply shareholders with fresh Spinach during the Winter?  Plastic trays for starting seedlings, propane, the embedded energy in purchased seeds and organic fertilizers, the manufacture of the tractors and trucks and the fuels and lubricants and replacement parts that keep them running, the coolers that keep the lettuce from wilting, and on and on and on.  This was clearly a staggering amount of work.  And the graduate student worked through the research study a second time some years later, perhaps because he wanted to have been wrong.  As the day gathers towards evening, the farmer tells me, with a tone of considerable sorrow—absent consolation—that the farm requires seven calories of inputs to produce each one calorie of food that leaves the farm.  And only a tiny fraction of one of those seven calories is comprised of human labor.  Not much localness in the local food.  Remember that quote from last week’s Newsletter?

Here is the logarithm of progress:  The more you pursue being saved from the drudgery of going through your days, the ordinariness of being around, the venality of physical limitation and vulnerability, the more is taken from the physical world to provide you that salvation and the more remote you will be from what grants you your security. (Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise, p.19)

So what does this story mean?  Imagine a one-mile circle surrounding the spot you sleep at night.  Now imagine that your one-mile circle has been granted, by the grace of those who have come before, a layer of topsoil with a certain degree of fertility.  Also granted to that patch of land is a specific allotment of Sunlight and Rainfall and a number of days each year warm enough for things to grow.  Now think about how many people also live inside that circle.  Imagine that you have to talk with the other people with whom you share that one-mile circle to figure out how to live without taking anything from elsewhere—food, clothing, shelter, medicine, tools, transportation, etc.  Those other places, you are informed, are comprised of circles within which others are undertaking the same work, but in ways unique to their specific terrain.  This is all the word indigenous means, etymologically speaking.  I’ll lean on Stephen again here:

The first part of the word functions prepositionally, and it answers the questions “Where?”  It says, “In,” or “inside.”  The second part of the word describes what happens inside: “to be made,” “to be crafted, or conjured, or born.”  So if you are describing someone as indigenous, you are observing one salient feature.  This person was born and made in a specific place, the consequences of which are considerable. (Stephen Jenkinson, Come of Age, p. 208)

Inside your one-mile circle, the consequences of everything—each decision and action, the health of all of your relationships—suddenly become excruciatingly visible.  And so you begin to undertake remarkable conversations with your neighbors, human and non-human—conversations about how to live honorably, generously, gratefully, and together.  And those conversation, over time, necessarily include “a self-governance of restraint and obedience to limit.”(Come of Age, p. 44)  That conversational, limit-bound way of living would be, in my understanding, what Stephen means by the word culture.

I tell that story, of the farmer and the seven calories to one, as way of remembering how that short interaction had a profound impact on me at a moment of deep discernment about my life’s work.  For years I had been looking for elders—people willing to proceed as if what was happening was really happening who could also offer some guidance on how I might do the same.  I had been telling myself and that they weren’t out there.  Sure, I’d found some authors who seemed to be taking up the task, but what about real-life human beings?  Someone willing to proceed as if what is happening is really happening.  But, as the story itself makes clear, by that impossible measure even the most ardent among us are raging hypocrites.  You’re reading from one of them right now.  What the farmer in the story did for me was remarkably simple and yet terribly rare.  He said, by way of a story, “I see what you see.  We are in rough shape, much worse than they want to believe.  And yet that’s not an occasion for hopelessness.  It’s an occasion for work, and there’s plenty of that to do.  Much more than they want to believe.  I don’t know how to turn this thing around, but I do know how to work and I know how to be honest.  And this afternoon you’re not going to be alone in your sorrow.”  He was willing to speak as if what’s happening is really happening.  Perhaps this is what elderhood looks like in a time like ours. 

The Night Siren

These questions of ecological collapse, homelessness and culture loss can make you desperate for an exit door, the kind with a well-lit sign to help you find your way out of the burning building in the dark.  At least that’s what they do to me.  I first read the following passage from English storyteller Martin Shaw’s book Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia (pp. 10-11) several years back.  Martin offers a unique take on these dilemmas—a set of practices rather than an exit door.  Marching orders, if you will.

Let’s squat down in the gunk. 

So what happens if we try to root?  Rather ironically, the latest addition to hipspeak is a desire to be indigenous.  No work history required.  Well, indigenous is a complicated word….So how do we work with this longing?  Let’s perhaps dial it down a little.  I won’t be so inflammatory as to make an offer to suddenly becoming indigenous.  But I will gamble a little, throw my hat in the ring, and say that I think coming “from” somewhere can be highly overrated.  I’m slightly crazed by the whole conversation….Well, I offer a retuning of intention, a slightly more sober directive—to be of a place, to labour under a related indebtedness to a stretch of earth that you have not claimed but which has claimed you. 

Have you ever heard Whip-poor-will sing rhythmically through the night?  I became acquainted with this remarkable bird for the first time during my four days at the Orphan Wisdom School in the Ottawa Valley of Ontario, a place that seems, in my imagination, to rest on the far Northern edge of civilization.  And by golly that bird immediately entered my dreams.  The first night there, half-awake in my tent, in a state of lucid dreaming, I was certain that someone’s car alarm blared from the nearby parking area and tried to raise myself from slumber to alert the other students camping nearby and see if they had the keys necessary to return quiet to the meadow.  Whip-poor-will’s song carries that kind of haunting siren quality.  Mythically speaking, a siren can sing to you so beautifully that you run your ship aground, can seduce you into sticking around.  If you aren’t familiar with the song, you can listen HERE.  Sleep pulled me back down and I never went rustling tents in the middle of the night.  That would have been quite a way to get to introduce myself a group of strangers.  Last evening I told this story to my neighbor Benji and to my great surprise, he reported that Whip-poor-will sings at his place just a few miles down the road.  Benji had joined me for dinner.  I wanted to thank him for tending the Cows and Sheep while I was away by feasting him from this place: fresh Asparagus and Nettles from behind the old farmhouse, Ground mutton from dear Billie who died back in March, formed into patties and scented with Cumin and Cinnamon, and Rhubarb—planted decades ago as if for this very dinner—cooked with Maple Syrup and Cream from the neighbors’. 

To be of is to hunker down as a servant to the ruminations of the specific valley, little gritty vegetable patch, or swampy acre of abandoned field that has laid its breath upon the back of your neck….To be of means to listen.  To commit to being around.  It’s participation, not as conqueror, not in the spirit of devouring, but in the spirit of relatedness.  I think this takes a great deal of practice.  It doesn’t mean you never take a life, live on apples and peas, or forget that any stretch of earth holds menace and teeth just as it does the rippling buds of April.  You learn from the grandeur of its menace as much as from the blessings. 

We linger at the table refilling our bowls with the stewed Rhubarb and Cream, and so by the time we leave the house the dusking has come on.  I want to show Benji the newly-finished guest cabin.  Without headlamps, we have to pick our way carefully through the hedgerow at the far end of the garden, past the Poison Ivy, and up the hill through the hayfield.  Northwest Wind arrived last evening and so the thin, darkening Air cools rapidly, the breeze keeping Mosquitos at bay.  A pause in our conversation allows room for the murmuring of the place to enter our awareness.  First we hear Peepers pulsing from the low-lying woods to the East.  The avian choir has settled in for the night, and in their quiet absence Big River’s subtle summer song crests and spills over the hill from the West, riding on the breeze.  Turning in that direction, a lone Cricket begins rubbing legs together, announcing and calling forth Summer’s imminent arrival.  The conversation that so occupied our attention over dinner is long gone now, and we’re listening and marveling in a way that was unknown to me just a few years back.  And then I hear a glimmer of that haunting, siren song.  Perhaps just a memory from the far North, I think.  As I turn to face that direction, Peepers in my right ear and Cricket loud in my left, I try to focus my listening straight ahead.  “Cricket, could you be quiet for just a moment?” I ask, only half in jest.  A momentary pause in the band practice allows my hearing to travel North and yes, surely I am hearing Whiporwhil.  Benji confirms in a tone that lets me know he’s smiling in the dark.  “Or is someone’s car alarm going off?”  I am grinning now, too.  The Night Siren sings in this neighborhood as well.

To be of means to be in.  To have traded endless possibility for something specific.  It means that, over the slow recess of time, you become that part of the land that temporarily abides in human form.  That your curvature and dialectical brogue is hewn deep, wrought tough by the diligence of your service to the earthy tangle in which you find yourself.

We walked up here to look at the guest cabin and got distracted—if you can call that sort of experience a distraction.  The cabin will soon be ready for visitors.  A bed, a rug and oil lamps will arrive this weekend in the back of my Mom’s car.  It was just eight weeks ago that I moved my tiny house over here to this old Farm, the one we tentatively call Goose Landing.  And in that short time this place has extended a stunning degree of hospitality.  Stunning is a strong word, I know, carrying the suggestion of temporary paralysis.  Finding oneself on the receiving end of such unearned generosity can leave a swirling impression—a thumb print if you will.  I’ve been pressed upon in this way, and I’m left searching for an etiquette of reciprocity robust enough for such a circumstance.  How would you respond if you realized that you were being not-so-subtly courted by a very handsome non-human suitor?  If you are anything like me, you might begin by wondering what the heck they’ve seen in you and then commence in asking what you have to contribute to the budding relationship.  From what I can tell, this old farm seems to enjoy the sound of human labor—tinkering, repairing, tending, seeding, planting, singing—after many years of wild silence, a silence that may have sounded a lot like the band practice I heard on the hill by the guest cabin. 

To be of means talking, not about a place, but with a place—and that’s not a relationship available indiscriminately, wherever you travel, but something that may claim you once or twice in a lifetime.  It means staying when you don’t feel like staying.  Cracking the ice on the water butt, climbing into your mud-encrusted boots, and walking out into the freezing dark with a bale of hay.  It has very little to do with how you feel, because guess what?  Feelings change. 

And so I’ve begun to stack the projects into a pile that has quickly grown taller than I can see over.  That’s where the guest cabin comes in—a means of extending the hospitality of the place in the form of food, shelter and the companionship of shared labors.  If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got some remarkable stamina.  If you’re getting the hunch that you’d like to come stay for a night or three, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.  If the weather forecast holds, haying season will begin this weekend, and we will be looking for help stacking bales in the hayloft of the old barn as early as Tuesday of next week. 

With great care,

Adam