Mourning Wendell Berry

It's been a sad week with the passing of several well-known figures, but the most sorrowful to me is the loss of Wendell Berry. His death is not a surprise since he was 92, but the news caused me real grief.  I heard about it from a text message from my cousin whose mother, my aunt, introduced me and our family to the work of Berry some thirty years ago. She met and interviewed him a few times, I think originally at a reading and book signing in a small Kentucky book shop, and she wrote about him for Crisis magazine and The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry. 

Many people have said many eloquent things about Wendell Berry since the news of his passing became public.  He is remembered with respect, admiration and affection.  Well-known but not a celebrity, Berry feels familiar to his readers, like a wise uncle or beloved grandfather.  He wasn't just admired; he was loved.  Long before I started reading his books in college, he was defending agrarian communities and promoting sustainable land use and writing fiction about Port William and beautiful poems about the beauty and complexity of marriage.  At one point, I thought I would write my dissertation about his work, something along the lines of marriage as a metaphor for our relationship to the land, and I once wrote a paper about fidelity to words and place in his poetry and Standing by Words and another about his thoughts on home economics and the impact of stories on family economies. While writing both papers, I remember feeling overwhelmed - Berry's ideas are deeper and more insightful than my attempts to summarize them. 

I am also I sorry that I never wrote the letter I thought about writing to thank him for his work, for the beauty of it and the insights in it and the difficulty of it. Berry's work haunts people. It makes me feel guilty at times for our itinerant military life. I've long struggled to reconcile the way we live with the way I'd like to live after reading Wendell Berry. His vision of life is tantalizing, and some people critique it for being idealistic and for failing to acknowledge the dark parts of country life - lack of access to health care and education, drug abuse, loneliness.  There are plenty of writers who draw attention to the darkness; Berry offers hope.  He doesn't deny the problems - in fact, like a good physician, he diagnoses them and offers the cure: a vision of small towns, family farms, and rooted people caring for one another and the land to prevent the fracturing of lives lived in isolation, whether neighbors are near or far. 

Whenever I find myself struggling to align Berry's vision with my own life - unsettled, urban, a part of the military industrial complex - I remember a quote from Mother Teresa, I think, about doves being needed in the halls of war.  Not that my husband had any input on the foreign policies, but he could be a servant leader for his troops, someone who cared for his people and cared for the land belonging to the military. His building projects and base maintenance plans made space for nesting plovers and breeding fairy shrimp. And as a military spouse, I tried to offer hospitality and community to fellow spouses and neighbors. A good friend was a role model of this to me - and those bonds of community, while not rooted in place, are rooted deeply in spirit. We still are connecting with those friends. The care and connection offered by the milspouse community seems to me to mirror what Berry saw in small farming communities - people who bring you a meal when you are sick, stay with your babies when you go to the hospital to deliver another, who share recommendations for schools and salons, who help you clean your bathrooms before you move again.  I sometimes fear these friendships aren't as strong in the new military as more people turn to their phones for friendship instead of being willing to join a club or go on an outing with current strangers/future friends, but I'm sure it's still happening.  To circle back, I think we could answer Berry's call to be faithful and rooted to a place by being rooted in our community and family - our roots spread wide, but also deep in our hearts.  To know and love a place takes time and attention - something we didn't always have when we moved after two years - but we did try to approach each new place with wonder and curiosity and a willingness to explore and observe what made this place beloved by its people. 

Like fellow mourners, I have been returning to Berry's poetry and essays. I shared some with my classes - starting with the On Being video of "The Peace of Wild Things," but I also love the trailer for "Look and See," which so vividly makes clear the contrast between the technocratic paradigm Berry stands against and the natural beauty he stands for.  I also will always come back to "The Country of Marriage."  When researching last spring for the Marce Catlett paper, I reread some of his older stories - "Andy Catlett: Early Education" being a happy return.  

My prayer is that the love and attention poured out for Berry in remembrance over this week will spread his vision to others and inspire new readers to discover the Port William he created in fiction and the vision of agrarian life he remembered and re-envisioned and hoped to see realized. 

I also heard there may still be a book of new essays issued that was in production. I pray that his family is able to find comfort in Berry's honored memory and to preserve the integrity of his work while continuing to broaden its audience. 

Some links: 

The Wild Rose

 

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,

so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

 

suddenly you flare in my sight,

a wild rose blooming at the edge

of thicket, grace and light

where yesterday was only a shade,

 

and once more I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.

 

Copyright © 1999 by Wendell Berry from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Reprinted with permission of Counterpoint Press. https://www.matthewjolson.com/the-wild-rose

The Country of Marriage is one of my favorite of Berry's poems. It was put to music by Malcolm Daglish and the Oolites, a group from Bloomington, IN, at some point in time in the 90s, but I can't find a recording of it online - my mother had their CD....  Here are a couple stanzas that stay in my memory:

IV.
How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

V.
Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are--
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

Reading Revived!

 All of this winter weather has been good for my reading life.  After a lackluster reading year in 2025, I'm off to a quick start in 2026.  In the beginning of the January, I finished Provocations of Virtue, a book on teaching writing and rhetoric with a focus on ethical discourse by a professor at Notre Dame, John Duffy.  He provides some thoughtful approaches to encouraging the careful composition of words and ideas. I appreciated his focus on an ethical approach to writing - not just that students to persuade their readers to make ethical decisions, but that writers make ethical decisions about the way they treat their audience. By envisioning their audience as readers/listeners who deserves respect and whose trust must be earned, writers and speakers write with more precision and consideration. As a teaching text but also a researched text, Duffy's book was practical and interesting, challenging and motivating. I intend to return to it regularly for guidance on moderating difficult discussions, steering students towards reliable sources, and providing suggestions for addressing different points of view.  

After exercising my brain by reading Duffy's book, I gave my brain some junk food by reading the prequels to the Hunger Games trilogy, Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping.  I have mixed feelings about the Hunger Games books, as do many readers.  I didn't encourage my kids to read them, but some of them did as high schoolers. I see middle schoolers reading them, but unless you have a really mature 8th grader, I wouldn't recommend them for preteens. The themes are dark and the violence is too much, even sometimes for me, but maybe I'm more squeamish than some (I really had to steel myself to remove dead mice - the last two days I've caught mice under the sink in snap traps. After seeing one scurry under the dishwasher the other night, I had to take action. Glue traps weren't working, and I'm afraid of poisoned mice smelling bad. Snap traps may not be humane, but they work. Where there are two, there are probably more - I'll be setting the trap again tonight, to the peril of my fingers! Rodents creeping indoors is a drawback to winter not mentioned in my friend's reel...) A debate could be held about whether Suzanne Collins perhaps could tell her story without descriptions of decapitation and animal attacks.  People make an argument for the value of the books in highlighting injustice and depravity, but even though I tear through these books in a matter of hours, I don't really recommend them. Perhaps they fall into the category of books described by Stephen King in this essay. 

What I would recommend is any book by Wendell Berry. Like many other Berry fans, I love stepping into his world for a few hours. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story is a slim book. It's not so much about Marce, grandfather of Andy Catlett who lost his hand, (although that episode doesn't figure in this text, something that I thought might be included) as it is about the story of a day he failed to sell his crop for what it was worth and about how the story of that day became a mythic part of the communal memory and a driving force in the family history.  Many critics are opining that this is Berry's last novel. However, in some ways, it is not quite a novel. It is a reflection on the power of story telling. It is an elegy for a lost way of life. It is a call to community and to advocate for the land that shapes communities.  It is a recollection of an education in the land and a love story to it. It is not my favorite of Berry's books; it seems slight, although it does have some evocative descriptions - descriptions that might do more to preserve a way of life than an essay calling for just compensation for agricultural products and for people to stand by the land. I'll try to share some excerpts later. I read somewhere that someone thought this book seems to be Berry's concession he has lost his battle to preserve family farms, even though he himself has managed to continue to stand by the land and stand by words. But I'm not so sure the battle has been lost. More people than ever are reading Berry, and in communities like the one where my parents live, people are still farming, helping each other out, coming together for meals, and preserving a small town way of life.  No doubt the creep of suburban and industrial development keeps coming closer, especially as data centers erupt overnight in rural communities, like the one not too far from us.  (I might be a fan of sending data centers to space, as has been proposed.) But if Berry's work continues to circulate and be discovered by new readers, it may yet call more people to return to the land.

But back to reading: a couple other short synopses: The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I LOVED this book when I first read it back in high school. It seemed so foreign and yet so American; it helped formed my imagination of ethnic communities in New York City. Potok's book is full of faith but also maintains a detached tone. It's the story of two young Jewish boys living in 1940's post-War II Brooklyn who become unlikely friends because they are the sons of very different fathers. One father is a Zionist Talmud scholar, and the other is a Hasidic rabbi who is against establishing a Jewish state. The two boys become friends despite their fathers' differing views and their own friend groups who don't overlap. It is a welcome description of the necessity of friendship, and how deep friendships can overcome difficulties. Despite the connection between the two boys, they go their separate ways at the end of the novel.  Readers can hope their friendship endures (and read the sequel, The Promise, which I have on my list).

The  most recent book I finished was The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. This is a different book than Robert MacFarlane's The Lost Words: A Spell Book illustrated by Jackie Morris, which has been in my wish list for a long time. Williams' book was recommended by my sister-in-law. It is another one of those books that are hard to put down, but that for one reason or another won't make my favorites list. This one falls in the genre of "Stories about women in the past who react against their limitations to become unrecognized heroes in their sphere of influence." One of these I just finished at the end of last year - Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink about a Jewish girl in 17th c England who becomes an amanuensis for an old rabbi and then starts writing her own letters of philosophic inquiry to characters like Spinoza. I enjoy the historical settings and the development of the possible lives for intelligent women unrecognized by history, although sometimes the plots seem a little forced and there is always some romance shoehorned in. Williams's book is set during the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary. The main character, Esme, grows up in the Scriptorium where her father is one of the editors for the dictionary, which takes decades to complete. We see her grow up amongst words and become an editor herself eventually. Details about the dictionary and the history of the women's suffrage movement and the advent of WWI are fascinating, and the book seems well-researched. Esme begins collecting definitions of women's words for her own dictionary, some too coarse and some too domestic to be included in the OED.  The developments of friendships and love affairs move the book along. Esme becomes pregnant, even though she is not in love with the father, but the book provides a positive depiction of adoption. Even with these difficult topics and the love affair with words in both of these books, they read like popular rather than literary fiction and don't have the heft of Potok's or Berry's books, despite being much longer. 

Now on to the next thing! I've got several different books going now, but need to take a momentary break from "fast fiction" because it keeps me too late!

So many little things

I have been thinking of many things lately but with little time to process them; perhaps it is time for a quick takes type post?

1. While Northern California is suffering from wildfires, it has been scorching hot down here. School was out one whole day and two half days for heat because temps were in the 90s and the school is not air-conditioned. I was sorry I didn't neglect responsibilities and head to the hills. I have been craving a camping trip this fall, but it doesn't look like we'll have a weekend away after all.  I worried about my new friend I had made because I'm sure she doesn't have air conditioning either, but she called me yesterday out of the blue. I'm glad she remembered me and that now I have her number because a big locked gate surrounds her house, making it impossible to knock on her door.

2. A great deal of thought lately has been devoted to college applications. Our third son is in the thick of essay writing for an early decision deadline. I am once again knocking my head on the wall for not encouraging him to write more this summer.  I vowed this time would be different after the angst and suffering of watching the older boys write and writhe over this process, and yet here we are again with five days until the deadline and essays still needing revision. Life keeps interrupting.

3. One happy distraction is planning for our preschool co-op, which is going well.  About 8 moms and 12 kids (3 of whom are siblings in the 10-16 month range) are meeting Monday mornings at our church for a couple hours of stories, songs, and crafts. I've been having fun picking out activities from cheery online resources, although I am usually the story person and not the craft lady.  The idea is that each mom prepares for a station and that we'll rotate each month. The stations are circle time with prayer, story and sharing, then craft and activity - usually planned by a mom who has an OT background, so she incorporates gross and fine motor skills, then snack, music and movement, free play, and a final story. But someone is always absent, so we have only changed jobs a couple times, which perhaps is just as well because we are getting into a good routine. The kids know what to expect and are happy to be together. We have a good mix of boys and girls.  LC loves it - it is just the right mix of organized activity and unstructured fun. She comes home and asks for homework - coloring pages and letter pages and cut and paste number pages. Then on Wednesdays we have been meeting for a field trip or a park playdate. We were supposed to go to the pumpkin patch yesterday, but with the heat, we just went to the beach.

4. I had an interview the other day to teach at another community college, but I think I blew it accidentally on purpose. At the school where I am teaching now on base, enrollment is way down, so I only have one small class. With another kid heading to college next year, I'd like to add another class to my schedule, although with this pre-school thing, teaching CRE, and managing - or mismanaging - home life, I want the timing to be on my terms. So I filled out some online applications and got an email invitation to an interview. The drawback was that it was at the campus on the north side of the county a half an hour away without traffic.  I liked the dean of the department when I met her and being on a real campus again in a department - as opposed to the little regional office with two classrooms on base where I work now - was invigorating.  But in the interview, I revealed my limited schedule. I haven't heard anything back. I think about emailing to reconnect, but then I think, I don't really want that job anyway. The little one will be in kindergarten in two years. And as much as I think about what I would be doing if I didn't have a three-year-old, I continue to ponder homeschooling again.

5. The class I am teaching is going well. I had a student who actually asked for more work and not just anything - he thought Engl 102 was going to be a literature course, which at other institutions it often is, but not this one. This English 102 is focused on writing research papers. Over the last couple terms, I have trimmed the syllabus because students weren't doing the readings, weren't turning things in. Now should I lengthen it again? I am making up a list of recommended readings and will send him some vocabulary words for discussing vocabulary and a few prompts for paper topics centered around literature. And I'm rethinking my approach.  Meanwhile, I've been frustrated with my daughter's English teacher who consistently gives low marks on writing assignments but gives no feedback or explanation of his scoring. He handed out a rubric at the beginning of the term, but he doesn't indicate how the points he gives correlate to the rubric. In other words, he writes a number on the top of the paper and that's it. No other marks. As a teacher who devotes a lot of time to feedback so my students can actually learn from their mistakes (if they read it), I am almost irrationally irritated. I've told her to go and talk to him, but I also want to send a scornful email accusing him of laziness.d

6. Boy Scouts - Why? Why? Why? This is old news, but if you haven't heard, Boy Scouts of America is now allowing girls to join.  On their website it sounds like Packs and Troops will have the choice of whether or not to admit girls in separate parallel groups or in co-ed "family" groups.  On the one hand, I have often wished that my girls had the option to join something more like Boy Scouts.  My daughter and I both had negative experiences with our one year of Brownies - nothing particularly egregious; we mostly felt bored and we hate to sell cookies.  The challenge to success inherent in the programs offered by Girl Scouts is that the individual leaders determine the direction of the group, and if they are not outdoorsy types, then camping, hiking, boating, and those kinds of things don't happen.  I understand why women and girls are attracted to the program BSA offers.  However, I am skeptical about the success of a co-ed group. BSA already has Venture Crew and Explorers, which are co-ed groups for high schoolers. They haven't really taken off most places. My real fear is that the type of moms who are already involved in Boy Scouts are often the type who take the fun out of things by being bureaucrats and safety police - not that safety and rules aren't important, but the focus on paperwork and what not to do tend to limit what you can do. I am concerned that with more girls involved, more moms will get involved and soon the problems of Girl Scouts will be the problems of Boy Scouts. My first choice would be to continue the program that allows the boys to enjoy time with other boys and male mentors, and give the girls the opportunity to do something similar but different, which may be what happens with these parallel groups. I used to love the program I did with my dad called Indian Princesses (not politically correct anymore) through the YMCA. We camped, carved, burned wood and leather, and learned other outdoors skills. It was super fun and special to spend time with my dad doing outdoorsy, survival things.

The other complaint I would make to BSA is to bemoan the way this announcement was made - a public relations nightmare. Most of our scouting friends were completely caught off guard by this decision. It seems like a tyrannical move on the part of the Board of Directors to make the announcement with little conversation about the change among members. And it feels like a betrayal in a way of their own core principles. Of course, the reason why they did it without discussion is obvious - they didn't want to negotiate.

We are not quitting boy scouts - or scouting. I could be wrong in my pessimistic expectations.  Maybe LC will even be a scout. But I'm not celebrating the change.

7. We went to a dinner the other night (see top photo on the previous post) for the Seabee Historical Foundation.  We were one of the younger couples there. It was a night to honor the Navy's Construction Battalions and Civil Engineer Corps and to thank donors to the Seabee museum. And it was also a night of stories told by retirees about their experiences and about the generation that preceded them and that founded the branch of the Navy that builds and fights. One guy told a story about how during an air raid in Vietnam, the Seabees positioned themselves near the runway. As soon as the enemy finished bombing the runway and had flown off, the Seabees would come in with shovels and dirt and fill the holes. They don't get the glory, but they make it possible for others to do their job without dying.

There was another young couple at our table. The Seabee was from Appalachia, and his wife was from Poland. She had less of an accent than he did. But his hobby is working with programming and 3D printers and the programs he designs in his spare time are so complex I can't explain them here. So he wants to get out of the military soon and work on these models. What impressed me about his story is the contrast of his impoverished youth with his ingenuity and optimism about possibilities. Growing up without running water did not limit his imagination or confidence.

8. I have been missing fall weather and color, missing our older boys, missing having time to go on a weekend camping trip, longing to move away from our busy street corner in a busy city to someplace quieter, more pastoral. Here is link to a trailer for a movie about Wendell Berry: https://vimeo.com/216446791

It's a melancholy time of year, almost November, "no fruits, no flowers, no birds, no leaves - November!"
Remembering that old poem by Thomas Hood (I had to look up the author) reminds me to share a link to an article about Richard Wilbur, perhaps my favorite that has been passed around following his death: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/06/gods-patient-stet. From Mystery and Manners.

A few book reviews

I was excited to see this review of Mariette in Ecstasy, one of my favorite books by Ron Hansen, in The Paris Review. The link was shared from the Image update. Not only is the book good, but the review by Nick Ripatrazone captures one of the reasons why so well: the strangeness of Catholicism. As the culture becomes more and more secular, it becomes harder and harder to live in it without standing out and harder and harder to explain what it means to be Catholic. Reason seems to be a lost art. One of the few ways to evangelize is through beauty - and the strangeness of Catholicism is often beautiful in its union of mystery and doctrine and liturgy.

Also in the Image update: a review of my sister's CD, which is now out!

I just finished Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis - over 1000 pages of reading in two weeks. Read about them via Melissa Wiley's blog.  Too many late nights I stayed up reading until my eyelids couldn't stay open. That's the kind of books these are: you have to race through and stay in the story until you reach the last page, the end of the journey. The books are about time travelling historians stuck in World War II London. At times the pace is slow - an editor might cut a couple hundred pages - but I enjoy long reads every now and again because the length allows time to attach to the characters more.  On the other hand, long books take over my life, and I shouldn't be spending time right now on novels with the to-do list growing.  Reading is a form of time travel itself - the reader becomes someone else in another place at another time during which time wrinkles and passes much more quickly.

I didn't mark too many quotes, but my favorite highlights from All Clear were the characters of Sir Godfrey and the vicar of Backbury and the references to Agatha Christie - makes me want to reread some of her mysteries. It's not a scientific science fiction book - the explanation of time travel is a little sketchy, with "the Net" acting as a kind of surrogate for Providence.   Definite religious overtones, especially with the central role of the picture of Jesus as "Light of the World" in St. Paul's and the repetition of the "All will be well" reassurance, but no overt discussion of God or faith, other than this one part, when the small town vicar gives a homily on hope at a bodyless funeral: "But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, though hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. . . For it is through deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make the better world for which we long. So is is with heaven... By our deeds here on earth, in this world so far from the one we long for, we make heaven possible. We not only live in the hope of heaven, but, by each doing our bit, we bring in to pass."

My spiritual book this month was A Right to Be Merry by Mother Mary Francis, which I read again for book club. (2010 was the last time: http://backbayview.blogspot.com/2010/07/postcard-from-road.html)I love this little joyful description of cloistered life and the remarks on simplicity, which reminded me yet again of the importance of making do with less and the freedom of having fewer choices and a regular routine/habit/rule and the discipline of loving the irritable.  I wonder how many young girls now form such a deep love of Christ that they would consider cloistered life as a way of unifying faith and life?  Or am I projecting my own active charism, which in fact many young contemplatives still are discerning such a call?

The book is a great read for Advent, which we are marking with our same Advent traditions of lighting the wreath, opening the calendar, and pinning up a few Jesse tree items, but most of our Christmas stuff is still in boxes because of unexpected company this past weekend. Last night was the community's Christmas parade with the tree lighting on our main street after Santa's sleigh went by. Some of the kids were in the parade, but it was too dark to get good photos.

From A Right to Be Merry:

 "Laudate, pueri Praise the Lord, ye children!"

"Virginity is not only a giving, but a receiving" : a fruitful, obedient, noble surrender.

An interesting part on education: "Education worthy of the name is built on integration and correlation of knowledge. It has nothing at all to do with the ability to spout facts like a geyser. Real educations brings to flower the seeds of intelligence in the human mind. Intelligence is quite independent of education, it is true,,, but education is a cultivation of the intelligence; and the blossoms it produces are just as fragrant in the cloister as anywhere else, and just as necessary.  ...

"A cloistered nun who has been trained to relate one science to another will ordinarily be quicker to relate the unfolding mysterious of the spiritual life one to another, and also to recognize the superb paradox on which the interior life is built and in which all mysteries discover their integrity: Humility is exaltation, effacement is enrichment, death is life, and all the other facets of the one splendrous truth which is Love. - cultivated mind cuts through the clutter"

"The greatest grace that a man can have under heaven is to know how to live well with those among whom he dwells. - Br. Giles 

A Trappist wrote to Mother:  "When you are convinced there is no fault or sin, no matter how terrible, of which you are not capable, you will just have begun to understand humility." .. St Clare: "For anger and worry hinder charity in themselves as well as in others." 

Mother writes about the mortification of common life - paying attention to details of job - not selfish feelings, "for one may be more enfeebled by a passing indisposition than another by a grave and prolonged illness"  ... "Gertrude von le Fort wisely observed that we love one another across an abyss." -Everyone has secret pains- there is value in the effort to subdue those pains

"To anyone who thinks that the Gospel cannot be taken quite literally today, I can only borrow St. Andrew's words: 'Come and see!' Wild and sweet our Gospel rule of life may be, wild as the world considers voluntary penance, and sweet as the love of the Man in the Gospel" from Margery Kempe.

"All his life long, a man is walking steadily toward the gate of eternity, so he can never truly make an exit ... The joy of the enclosed contemplative life is stout-fibred and enduring precisely because its roots reach down deep into the rich soil of willing suffering. The choir doors are the binding on the diary of each nun's soul" 

And finally: "See what a small, poor, hidden Lord He is Who lay  unknown in Bethlehem, but held the whole world in His beating human heart. This is our season."  

Last month's book club read was Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship in Letters, by Jessica Messman Griffith and Amy Andrews, another good one I think I mentioned already, although our conversation at book club wasn't too in depth about the book. I enjoyed the exploration of Amy's conversion, her struggle with faith and complacency, and Jessica's experience with grief and presence. We were a small group last month, and not everyone had finished the book, and I had read it in the summer, so it wasn't fresh in my mind.  I do remember their letters seeming a bit overwrought at the beginning, but after the both have babies, they seem more grounded, less concerned with self and more concerned with the world and others. What a gift to have a friend with whom to share this thoughts and to be so matched in interests and spiritual inquiry and study!

Some good quotes: Jessica quotes C. S. Lewis: - "How can one be a Christian and remain properly depressed? There is always the threat of resurrection"
and St. Teresa of Avila: "the important thing is not to think much but to love much; and do that which best stirs you to love" Interior Castle.
and The Lord of the Rings : love what you are fitted to love - "you must start somewhere and have some roots"
and Middlemarch  about the fear of living "quiet lives, in unvisited tombs"

Meanwhile, Amy quotes Wendell Berry: "Religious faith begins with the discovery that there is no evidence"
and Steve Martin: "The  young are always beautiful"
and Marilyn Robinson: "Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations"
and finally Teilhard de Chardin "I am afraid of the future, too heavy with mystery and too wholly new, toward which time is driving me."

So many words, ideas, and reflections go unnoted.  Were we able to time travel and relive the small details that color our daily lives, would we do better about appreciating them?

Linkage

Interesting ways to spend time:

First off: Let me plug my own kid's music!  He and a friend have formed a duo, The Righteous Cubicles.  I think I would call their style Americana.  Not sure really. They are their own songwriters and play banjo, guitar and ukulele. The friend's little brother also plays accordion on one song. They just recorded a cd with 7 songs. The quality of the recording is low, but their lyrics and music are good, according to this prejudiced mom.  I love listening to their CD, which is now available for the incredibly low price of $5.  It is priced so affordably because they have only performed live once - at the school talent show - and because they are producing it themselves - and, moreover, because I have bankrolled part of the production costs (Color copies!) Get a preview here:  https://soundcloud.com/righteous-cubicles
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I love my teenagers. I can't believe I was so afraid of having them.  Maybe because my brother and I gave our parents a difficult time in high school. And then my sister went through a difficult time in college.  My younger brother, the quintessential phlegmatic, never intentionally gave my parents a really bad time. He did drive their van into a corn field off a gravel road and got his ears pierced. But he let the holes grow in and is an upstanding father today. Hope for all!

My own kids give me the occasional heart stopper, but usually it is accidental. Like a car accident. Or because I am overcome with pride.  Or because, TIME!  I saw a post from an old friend about her son participating in a senior class Mass. Wow, can he be that old!  But hark! My OWN son will have a baccalaureate Mass in just two weeks!  I am not ready.

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Part of my fear of teenagers is rooted in knowing teenagers who acting like the kids in "Greasy Lake" by T. C. Boyle, always a favorite in my lit class. Well, maybe my acquaintances weren't quite that 'bad,' but they had their sins.  One of my students is writing about Boyle for a research project, so I went on a rabbit trail. He was once a Catholic and counts Flannery O'Connor as an influence.  Maybe someday he'll come back.  Somehow, I got linked to reading about a book about Mormons, always fascinating to me: Latimes review of Elders by Ryan McIlvain, which lead to an article about Marilynne Robinson and her book When I was a Child I Read Books and on to a literary magazine called The Believer I never heard of before.  All interesting.

Needless to say, I didn't get to bed early that night.
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My late night computer habits can sometimes cause a strain in our marriage. I try to keep them to Phase 2, when distance is imperative, at least for now. (Some friends and I just read The Sinners Guide to NFP by Simcha Fischer for an informal book club. Really enjoyed it and the conversation. I left it sitting out in the living room, just in case my teenagers happened to get curious. Perhaps the easiest way to talk about these things with teenage boys? "Here. Read this." End conversation.)

I wrote this about marriage meaning to post it sometime, so now: I have said that marriage is a thing. An object unto itself. Not perhaps a material being capable of being touched, but an idea to be contemplated that is made physical. In the meeting of bodies, love is incarnated.  Here in these bodies of children lolling and lagging about me. Clinging and clashing. Pulling and pushing. A roiling mess of humanity under a roof too low to hold all the emotion and energy that pulses sometimes faster, sometimes irregularly, sometimes in even steady syncopated beats all of one accord.  Not me, not you, not even you and me, but us and it and them. Impossible to decline.  This marriage is not just the two of us, but the household, the furnace at its heart.  Where it is weakest is where the selves attempt to move alone or to grasp too hard.  "Most like an arch"  writes John Ciardi so wisely, falling in when not leaning toward. 

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I love poems about marriage. And here is an article about Wendell Berry on poetry and marriage.  I need to read it more closely, but at first glance it was intriguing.

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And I'm running far again. Thought I'd do a half marathon while we lived here, but can't bring myself to drop $100 on a race I can't win.  Nonetheless, I've started running a 10 miler regularly on the weekends.  It is surprising how easy it is to do this when you have a friend to run with.  Really. An hour and a half of running flies by when you are talking.  Blessedly, one of the Navy wives is right where I am with running, and I really like her. There are certain people you meet with whom you know you have a kinship (also the women in the NFP book club). You see them and know they are kindred spirits even without speaking.  What breaks my heart is when you don't really get to start to know them until it is time to move away. Alas, alack.

Like this quote by Earl Nightingale from seemomrunfar:

"We are at our very best, and we are happiest, when we are fully engaged in work we enjoy on the journey toward the goal we've established for ourselves. It gives meaning to our time off and comfort to our sleep. It makes everything else in life so wonderful, so worthwhile.
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Also like this article on surfing and God by Peter Kreeft. So many good things to read out there, so little time.  

In my year of little reading, my latest novel to finish is a YA book called Here's How I See It by Heather Henson about a girl whose dad runs a summer theater. The main character, Junebug, is having a difficult summer because of her parents' troubles and her own foiled hopes. Lots of Shakespeare and Chekhov quotes. I'd put it as a book for the 8-15 yr old crowd. And it ends happily! Hooray!

I'd read more if I didn't have a smartphone.  In the old days, when I nursed babies, I sat around and read.  Now I read emails and Facebook.  Lots of people who need prayers out there - for comfort and for gratitude.  At least Facebook is good for keeping track of people who need prayers.
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My days of nursing are growing shorter and shorter. Baby can go all day and has gone 1 whole night without it, but she doesn't like milk, and I don't mind using her as an excuse to sit in a quiet room every once in a while. 

All too soon she'll be graduating from high school.

Growing roots

I had to drive to the other side of the island today to pick up a book for my community college class. I was finally in the car by myself after shuttling kids all week to different pre-season practices and play rehearsals. I’ve agreed to teach a freshman composition class in addition to the literature class this semester. I should be writing a syllabus and making plans for the semester, instead of blogging. But my thoughts keep straying back to the drive.  I took Cross Island road, which is one of three roads that go through the middle of the island.  It’s a sparsely populated and hilly road – with lots of chuckholes and dips that made me pray for our recently patched front wheel. (My prayer: for our 10 year old car to just survive until it’s time to move again.) As I crested a hill, the sun was shining from behind a black rain cloud – another monsoon on the way. The interplay of shadows and light on the grassy hills was arresting, the kind of vision that makes you understand why people stay here, why people who leave come back.

I have a friend who says she is suspicious of people who come here from the mainland and stay for years. “They either are running away from something or someone or have something to hide,” she says.  I don’t think she’s including people who marry someone local or who come here for mission work, but she evidently is not adding Guam to her list of potential retirement spots when her husband’s time is up.

I don’t share her suspicions. I can understand why people stay: it is beautiful here, and island time is a nice pace of life.  I don’t mind not having a lot of places to shop. I like the mild climate. I love that our kids play in the street and know all the neighbors. I’ve yet to experience a major storm, so the ocean seems nothing but beautiful, teeming with life, always calling: look at me, look above me, look within me. After growing up landlocked, I now know why people get drawn into lifelong love affairs with the sea.

But as beautiful as the moment was this afternoon, it also made me homesick.  Waving grasses, big sky, sudden storms.  The summer schedule. if not the summer weather, (listening to the weather on the radio is monotonous: partly cloudy skies, chance of thunderstorms, highs near 87, lows near 76, today, yesterday, tomorrow, next month.) is drawing to a close. My relatives are at the Michigan lake house, that restorative place (see the E.B. White essay "Once More to the Lake," which I can't find online...) every bit as lovely as anywhere, where lows dip to the 50s, and highs rarely top 85, and when it rains, it rains all day, not just a bit in the afternoon. Do I feel left out, even though I am in a tropical paradise? Of course. 

It doesn’t help to have read a little Wendell Berry lately - essays about his work from the book, "The Human Vision of Wendell Berry."  He makes you yearn to be rooted like no one else. He makes it seem right to love the places of our childhood as much as we love the people.

Nor does it help to have been listening to an old mix tape – the black car can’t play cds any more, and the adaptor to play the ipods through the speakers is broken.  So I found a box of tapes from high school and college in another box and got them out to let the teenagers listen to REM and U2 – so I don’t have to listen to Eminem or whatever it is they want to play. Why are we still moving these around? For cultural literacy? Just to have moments of nostalgia every 10 years or so when they are unearthed?

The upswell of longing, of the sense that I’m missing out on something in life, that somewhere life is going on without me – I’m missing the party at the lake!, was momentary, although I indulged it a bit. These moments usually are.  Although I was sorry not to get back to the states this summer, the summer has passed much more quickly than I anticipated in between our trip to Japan and the kids’ activities. And since we’ve reached our year anniversary of moving here, I’ve stopped thinking of this as the new house. This is home for now.

As a military family you have two choices: always look forward to the next move, which you imagine to be better, or you can make the best of where you are.  Obviously, we try to live according to the bloom where you are planted mantra.  But there’s always a voice in the back of the mind saying, this isn’t permanent. Don’t get attached.

Then again, nothing is.  And a little pain sometimes is welcome, especially after days that are so busy that you don’t have time to feel much of anything except rushed.  I can fall in love with the drive across the island, love it more perhaps because our stay is temporary, and I’ll feel sad to leave it. The potholes are charming, right?  I can wish to be elsewhere, playing cards with the cousins, or trying to keep warm in the frigid lake water, then trying to catch the warmth of the sun on the float, when the wind keeps interrupting.  And at the same time I can love the feeling of being kept afloat while snorkeling in warm salt water, where every time I look beneath the surface I am amazed at the vibrant world that carries on below.

We’ve said goodbye to some friends we really liked this summer, but we’ve met three new neighbors in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve finally met some of the other community college faculty after being the night owl last semester.  I’m becoming more entrenched in this life, even though our stay is not long.  I sometimes wish I could live a life in a community like the one Wendell Berry describes, but most of the time I’m too busy living in this transient community we’re a part of to dwell on a life that isn’t mine.  

Maybe our roots aren't deep, but they are wide, like a lot of the plants here - shallow but tenacious orchid roots come to mind. They cling to whatever surface they are attached to.

We still have a lot of the island to explore and hope to see more of the Pacific.  After a year here, we are familiar with the roads and our favorite beaches and hikes.  And it is with familiar things that we fall in love. Whether we’re here one or two more years, we’ll make the best of the time we are given. Which is all we can do and all that is asked of us. 

They made a good choice

Wendell Berry was chosen by the NEH to present the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20120206.html

It would be a treat to attend.


from An Embarrassment


 If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party

a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

Poetry Friday

In light of the conversations my sister and husband and I have been having about marriage, here's a favorite poem on that subject.

(at children's author Laura Salas' site)

"The Country of Marriage"
by Wendell Berry


1.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs,
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.


2.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

3.
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

4. 

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.



5.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.


6.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.


7.
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in this ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy—and this poem,
no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.


Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.

Thanks, http://www.poetryfoundation.com/