the Sweep of Thrift & the Wired Fire

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch

A few weeks back, I received a long, hand-written letter from a Journal friend. The letter made an impression and instantly I realized there was information in there that would benefit other Journal friends and readers. It certainly benefited me. But this gentleman asked that I not publish his letter for fear that he had maybe said too many personal things. I’m honoring that request. I believe however that I might share the basic thrust of his story while protecting his anonymity.

Over my forty-seven plus years working on this publication, we have received many letters from people that begin or end with the words ‘please don’t publish this.’ Of course we always honor that request. Over the last fifteen years the number of physical letters we receive has dried up to a couple or four a week. Over the first thirty years of this publication, we had literally buckets of mail, a few hundred a week. Way back then email was nonexistent or less pervasive. Then email went down in popularity as so many people opted for social networking. And that as well evolved. Now there is little or no ‘de-facto’ or actual communication via the ‘mimeographed multi-copy family letters’ equivalency that is computerized social networking. Now people are returning to nearby and face-to-face for conversations, dialogue, for new friendships. There are all kinds of paradoxes laced into these new and always changing perimeters of communication. People started dropping the internet networking out of discomfort.You don’t put all that casual personal stuff on Mugbook or Tweeter or Peakagram without expecting, no demanding, that it be passed around to every Tim, Don and Sherry. And then there are the conflictions, not conflicts – yes conflictions. Complete strangers, some of them not even human, are want to come back at any naive ‘blogger’ that wants to…

Ok, enough of that. I’ve already lost interest. I want to think about and talk about that letter I mentioned:

The story of his letter, couched as the sincerest of thank you’s, was that twenty-five years ago or so, when he was still an adolescent, he happened across a copy of this publication and it made a lasting impression. He wanted a subscription but had no money. From infancy he wanted to be a farmer. He had no practical experience, no inherited knowledge, but he wanted to farm and to do it with work horses. Then came that first issue of the SFJ and the discovery that he was not alone. It was like someone was telling him, ‘if he minded his Ps and Qs he could have his dream.’ The Ps were pennies and the Qs were proper questions. Later he came to understand that he had to save his money, work hard, acquire tools and learn everything from scratch. He needed to formulate each question and find an answer, slowly, gradually. That is exactly what he did.

Now fast forward and he is a grown man with a expanding family of his own. He has managed to purchase a farm and work it successfully, though he still maintains an off-farm job to help with expenses. Money is tight but one day perhaps a month ago, he decides that he wants to subscribe to the Journal before its too late, before the Journal becomes just another electronic new age health blog (not on my watch). So he places a phone call to ask about the subscription rates…

Now pause that story for a moment:

About this time, we were surprised when our stalwart office manager gave us two weeks notice. We are a tiny family business but one with a whale of a lot of minutae to our operations. A month before the holiday season is an impossible time to find replacement help and an even more daunting time slot to train someone. Eric suggested perhaps he and I could get us through the season, since our business is a manageable scale. So, after having been a volunteer at the SFJ for decades, I interviewed myself for the position and found myself lacking. Plowing I can do, but data entry? Scribbling words early in the morning I can do, but receptionist? Fence repairs I manage, but shipping?

Still and all, there were no other applicants, so agreeing to a wage of 3 times zero I hired me for office help. I went to work learning the data stuff and shipping while I answered the phone. And, lo and behold, I found it to be incredibly illuminating, even rewarding. I tried not to introduce myself to callers unless asked. I tried to be professional and thorough. I think I have been. But talking to so many enchanting voices from all over everywhere, I kept wanting to allow short conversation to ensue. So, when done with what the caller wanted, I would politely ask, “What’s the weather like where you are? Is there anything else I might help you with, any other questions?”

I remember one Wisconsin subscriber responding, “Ya, there’s one thing I would like to know, is that Lynn Miller guy still around?”

“Yes, I’m right here.”

“No. can’t believe that. You’ve got to be real old. Say, didn’t we meet thirty years ago or so at the Waverly Sale?”

“Can’t say. See, I’m so old that thirty years ago is far enough back I can’t get a clear view. Anyway, if I had met you then I would have been thinner, taller, and smarter. In other words I would have been an entirely different man.”

We laughed and talked and I felt rewarded to hear the voice of another reader, to hear the voice of someone invisible I had been sitting across from all these years.

Answering the SFJ office phone a few days a week this winter has given me a brand new sense of connection. I couldn’’t catch every call, some of them went to the answering machine. But I did try to call back all those who left messages. One young man I called back three times until we finally connected voice to voice. He was the man who, after our conversation, wrote the long thank you letter in which he sent his check to purchase a three year subscription. He also wrote about his life’s adventure to this point. He wanted to share with me the story.

His has been a journey of clear purpose and perfect thrift. It was one of those earnest old-fashioned letters that make you catch your breath. You can’t help but feel like you can see him, in your mind’s eye, sitting by the window struggling to put down the words. And it is apparent that nothing he might write will encompass all that he has experienced. He started out as a proverbial ‘cabin boy’ on the scary ship of his life and by pennies and scars wiggled his way through to find himself in a big, rowboat, or I should say farm, of his own construction, now as captain and commander. My very limited experience on a high sea as a short-term commercial fisherman gives me license to use such a far flung set of analogies. In my own thinking such adventures as his speak of vast and small all at once.

He learned from the get go that he had to accept what the oceanic aspects of his life threw at him, he had no choice out there. But he could have complete control of the oar locks, the pin holes in his boat that oozed moisture, the rigging, the fit of the waterproof bit of canvas tucked over and around his little brick of stored foods, the look in his pet parrot’s eye when the cracker bag came up empty. All of those small, up-close things he could influence. If he was fortunate enough and clever by turns he could swivel adversities round to advantage. And this young man did.

We, with this journal business, feel extremely fortunate to have been a small part of that adventure.

Florid though it be, all of that so far makes sense except perhaps for my use of the term perfect thrift? What am I suggesting? Is there a sly nod to thrift’s first cousin thrive? Thrive as in a message of carefully earned burgeon in spite of the adversities, the short supplies, the challenges.

For us it applies. Our cattle are thrifty right now. Our little business is thrifty right now. Our farming is most certainly thrifty. Our very outlook is thrifty.

Thrift as noun derived from the verb thrive. Pull thrift apart to its myriad pieces and you might see it as a characteristic which ‘just-ifies’ society, allowing it be vastly more prosperous. Thrift does not mean poor.

The opposite of thrift is waste.

And thrive, the verb as in to do well, gives us bloom, blossom, flourish, shine, and increase. Lovely base upon which to build the sweep of thrift.

Back to the young man’s letter: it was all about farming – his definition, his understanding of farming; what it meant to see it first as a magnetic goal, and then to pursue it.

His definition of farming? Are there various definitions? Yes, there are. It wasn’t called farming, not in its beginning, not for twenty thousand years. The word would appear to have been coughed up into common use in the early 19th century when social engineers wanted a way to understand the industrial importance of farming and the future it might attain well away from its origins. Imagine the renaissance when Italian city states would ‘farm out” warfare to professional mercenaries. The word, beginning as a variant of sub-contract, would seem to have stemmed from the growing of crops done by slaves or sharecroppers, or by ‘farming’ out the work to lease holders, but it certainly extended to anything one might possible ‘farm out.’

But today we use the word farming, embrace it, and believe it goes way back in time to those mythic craft-based ages of created and marshaled sustenance. Ya, sure, the rich and powerful, the unscrupulous and clueless, often took unfair advantage but that didn’t mean the culture of growing and preserving foods wasn’t there, thick with the promise of sustenance.

Farming, in its beginning, above ground and secretive, came quickly to some as the complex, skills-oriented craft and/or business of growing food, fiber and fuel. It was embellished by a few generations of trial and error. (I know, I was there. At least the ledger book for my genetic memory suggests I was.) Farming in those earliest days earned humankind opportunities for exalted distinction and genuine stability. (Ok, maybe not for you. But I’m going to hold on to my interpretation because I don’t have a good replacement.)

Today, when we think of this thing called human-scale agriculture, we might conjure up a vision of someone planting seeds in a tilled field. Or we might see a person herding a set of dairy cows to the barn for milking, catch a vision of people on ladders picking tree fruit, or others gathering sea weed. Then there are the images of sheep’s wool being spun into strands, Honey being gathered from bee hives, or fish in maintained tanks and ponds.

All of that would seem to fit right in with that young letter writer’s perspective. But he took me back, all the way, to what it would feel like to be setting out, dream in hand, and little else.

Camels?

Dream in hand? How did mine start? Before I was even born I guess. But, with this holiday season receding I’m remembering something.

As youngsters our Puerto Rican mother treated us to a magical variant of holiday tradition, Three Kings Day. After Christmas, we would each of us put a lidded shoe box full of grass clippings and handfuls of whole oats under our beds. For a few days before Epiphany, January 6, we would anxiously peak into those boxes each morning to see if the camels had arrived during the night. If they had, we would find that the grass and grain would have been replaced by gifts. In our beginnings, we did not see the clues that these gifts were small beautiful hand carvings done by our father and little trinkets from our mother. We were want to believe that the gifts came from the crowned and bedecked camel riders.

This ‘event’ was to commemorate the arrival of the three kings to Bethlehem to witness for themselves the baby Jesus. As the story is told, these ‘wisemen’ rode camels. Believing these lumbering steeds would be hungry upon arrival, an idea was formed that each good and capable child might provide a gift of food for the camels. In the beginning there was no thought of reciprocation, the children did not expect something in return. We loved the ritual and the image of camels nibbling away at the contents of our boxes. It was a genuine thrill to pull the box from under the bed first thing in the morning and find the hay and grain had been eaten. “We did it! We fed the camels!”

For me it was always about feeding the camels. Perhaps that was a first glimpse into what I would become, a man who, in appreciation, fed livestock every day of his long life. Fed them as they gave back to him a sense of defined purpose. At six years old, feeling good about the camel’s visit to the feed box, I was in those moments feeling the enchanted call to farm. I was acccepting a genuine storied link.

Assets

When ninety-five year old Great Uncle Ephraim was forcibly removed to a rest home, he was destroyed by the breaking of such a link. Who would feed his beloved Guernsey cows? As a widower with grandchildren disinterested in his farming life, he had failed to provide for continuity. His cows were hauled to the stockyards as he lay for his last few days in a small nursing home bed, alone in a strange room in a town he did not know. But was it his failing alone? Or society’s blindness to its truest assets?

Assets? When conversations begin with bankers and accountants, and we mumble that we think we can make a go of farming, as if that in and of itself gives us a head start, what do they first ask? “Have you any assets?” Of course they are speaking of anything you might sign over to them as security for a loan. But this conversation should happen without them and long before, or instead of any talk of borrowing. It should happen at the kitchen table, scratch paper in front of you, sharpened pencil in hand. “What will I need? Beyond money, what tools or equipment or skills will I need?” I wish I had a way to communicate that, regardlessof your ultimate role in life, you asking those questions which have been urged on by your dreams makes of you one of society’s most precious assets. You are the raw energy and purest light of ways forward for all of us. And that impulse is what fuels this publication, this community of readers.

And that’s why this letter from the young man has taken holt of me and doesn’t want to let go.

I have been at my form of the business of farming for half a century. I came to it as a clueless city kid, wading through the false promises of higher education with my back pocket, hidden from view, full of picturesque notions of a life on the land. While I can still remember clearly how the smallest of hurdles made my beginnings seem unimaginably difficult, I also revisit those times through the filter of all my failures and successes. And the view is informative. My few regrets are decorative.

A person from a non-farm background, setting out to farm, quickly feels, perhaps with limited understanding, that there are so many things lacking, so many things one needs. Money of course, or the means to secure some modest cash flow. Because to farm means to have access to land we might farm and that takes dollars or at least the means to secure a place on the land. That’s daunting. For hundreds of millions of people today, a tiny chance at access to farmland – no matter how small a piece – seems like the stuff of the disappearing mirage of a promised land.

But simultaneous comes the realization, with or without land, that we might not know how to do the stuff of farming, the work we feel drawn to, the work we feel compelled to make our own. And that realization is a tiny bit of luck, because it diverts us to something we can really sink our teeth into. First off, we find the view of others who give us glimpses as they do what we want to do. And that moves us to figure out that beyond skill there are essential tools. These, also, we do not have. There it is, the map of beginnings, we asking questions, often afraid to show our ignorance, often asking in inaudible whispers. If only we had some inkling of the right questions to ask, wouldn’t that speed things up?

What lasts, what works well beyond the jobs at hand, what serves us and never detracts? It’s not a riddle, or at least it shouldn’t be. Its the framework for those questions. Think tools and skills, communities and values, seeds and eggs,

Going to need saws, hammers, misc carpentery and mechanic’s tools, a wheelbarrow, three four and six-tine pitchforks, shovel, hoe, pick, post hole digger, fencing pliers, a come-along or wire stretcher, a tamping bar, an anvil, a forge, a post vice, wrenches, maybe welding equipment, the will to work and the clarity to see that we are headed straight for work we can love.

For those who were raised on a farm, whether they were pressed to work at it or not, skills, knowledge, appetites, and appreciations couldn’t help but ooze through the pores of their skin, steal right into their brains, stain their memories. And then there is a fork in the road; half those folks carry that good stuff forward, and the other half run off swearing they will never return to the horrible hard-scrabble life of farming.

See, some of these offspring of farmers and farming quickly came to dislike the life and the work, especially those who were up to their eyeballs in the brain drain of confused, inappropriate schooling and the paradoxical disconnect of our wired society. A wired society which, out of twisted necessity, demeans the identity of farmers. For me, that’s one reason why any young person’s persistence towards a goal of a small farm existence is remarkable and worthy of our reassurance and assistance.

Farming, that life of dirt, manure, callouses, exhaustion, worry and worms is also that life of a whole, rewarding and purposeful livelihood.

Over my lifetime I have crossed paths with many people who grew up on farms, left those farms in disgust, only to return hungry for what they left behind. And those people, whether or not they can express it, realize that what they disliked about their youth was not the work so much as the disrespect, was how society made them feel about that identity.

If we look under the specific and immediate edges of individual examples what we find is that notions of balance are both thrift and scale specific. As specific as any given person. As small as each and every moment.

Your part in balance is not always participatory. Your part in balance is often nothing more than placeholder. Or – also, your part in balance is often the incredibly important position of placeholder. How thrift manifests itself in your life is yours to decide but only if you do so, and do so aware.

Horses!

Recently a subscriber called the Journal office from Texas and during the course of renewing his subscription shared the story of how he discovered this, our, his favorite publication. His work in the energy industry had him travel, many years ago, to Pennsylvania. After his work was done, he and his colleague visited an Amish harness maker to shop for gear for his draft horses. It was there that he learned of a Percheron breeder nearby. Still in work clothes, which constituted starched white shirts, black trousers, polished black shoes and black caps, he and his friend drove to the Amish farm and heard sounds coming from a shed. They announced themselves and entered to find a grunting farmer butchering a hog. Fascinated by the scene he and his partner set to asking questions about the butchering process. The farmer looked up only once, then staring intently at his work, refused to utter a single word. It went on like this for a while until the Texan changed subject and said, “We learned from the harness maker that you raise Percherons. We have Percheron horses back home.” As if released from some restraint the Amishman put down his knives and exclaimed loudly “Horses, horses! Why didn’t you say that in the beginning?” With that, relieved, he gleefully ushered them out to the big barn and showed them every one of his Percherons, then took them through the equipment shed and showed them all of the implements and finally asked them to join him in his house to talk horses. Laughing he said “At first, with your clothes and all, I thought you were government inspectors here to shut down my hog butchering.”

Friendships well started, as they set to leave he offered, “Do you know this magazine Small Farmer’s Journal?” The Texan had not seen it before and asked if he could have the example copy. “No, no.” Answered the hog butchering Amishman, “I need to keep every issue. But here you can have this return envelope.” And that was how the Texas Percheron man came to learn of the journal, which he has taken now for many, many years.

Within this innocent small, thrifty, tale of the discovery of commonalities, I get the image of the balancing scale also being a bridge. In the tray on the one side two Texans who seem to be of society’s wider demand and in the tray on the other side one Pennsylvanian Amishman protective of his small well-defined community farming existence. And the scale beam, the bridge if you will, is made of two secretly-held, shared and/or parallel sets of values reaching across for connection. Horses the bridge? I like to think it goes past horses to working relationships with nature.

Sharing a connection with nature, sharing values of work within and with nature, gives an opening, a welcome if you will, and strength to new relations. Maybe it’s because this natural life is so insular. In today’s disjointed modern world, a life in nature insulates and protects individuals from the pervasive, corrosive and even deadly aspects of the cyber age of disconnect. Life in close with nature is molecular and fibrous all at once, always working to draw in the biology of participating humans. Speeds mingle, choices vaporize, slow growth wins out, the centers pool and eddy, even though all around the edges the wired-fire threatens.

Swan

This November, weather doin’ a seesaw, we had some frosty nights and warm days, so when an air inversion set in we’d wake up to a thick and thicker frozen fog which hovered just above ground level and hunkered down below a blue sky like a dirty cotton mass, a choking grey atmospheric quilt. With the first struggling light, out feeding the stock one of these mornings, I noticed that what we call Desolation Pond had a new carpet of mixed wild waterfowl. I could make them out ‘neath the fog because half of the birds were glinting bright white. The remaining were a mix of wild duck. But, in time I would see that the whites were Snow Geese and four white Swans. I raced home like the very young old man that I am and quickly told my bride that we had swans(!) on our pond. Careful not to send them away, we snuck up and confirmed my initial take. The Swans were, are, so sublimely beautiful with their young-girl arm-like necks with posturing ballerina heads. The two pair were like two unisons, two parallels, two halves of companionship. We have never had wild swans visit our ranch, not that I have noticed. Walking back, my old imagination heard the Swans whisper,

Old Farmers? We have never had old farmers visit our rest stop, not that we have noticed.

As if waiting for an event, this curious mixed flock stayed on the pond for days until they were there no longer. And, as if in a Norwegian sorrow, the pond then froze over solid. Two days later my wife out feeding her poultry noticed three Eagles feasting on something on that frozen pond, way out in the center. But feasting on what?

It was a yet another day later that I got close enough to see white feathers strewn around the center of that now vacated iced-over body of water. Vacated except for a few pieces that suggested a dead partially submerged Swan floating in the middle of the pond had been frozen to its surface, only to be torn apart by the Bald eagles.

Conclusion accepted, this recent event branded me once again. Nature left its mark on me. Not in a particularly good way. It left its mark as if to say our small lives, even in witness to the death of swans, aren’t to have simple answers, only examples that add to our wrestle through time and purpose.

Identity

Spend a lifetime within a discipline, within a craft, within an arena of interests, and it says that for you and for this time here’s a thing which held you, it never got old, it never let you down easy, though you may have let it down. And that matters now today because, after all, it is deep within what it means to be a challenged modern human; always first we are ready for something to get old, boring, and tedious because we feel then we have a perfect excuse to scram off to another arena of interest, to join the crowds. That’s the way most active spoiled creative people are wired, and society tends to pour kerosene on that wired-fire. I know, I’m sometimes one of those who’ve spoiled themselves.

In the fifties a hot topic for sociologists was whether or not people would be better off when engineering found ways to do all of the menial work. If people had more free time on their hands some of those social scientists believed we would all be better off. Yikes, were they, we, ever wrong. What society has always and will always require for balance and longevity is for all of us to be fully engaged in work of purpose, work we love, work that loves us back.

Grammas used to observe that this or that delinquent had too much time on their hands. Ever notice how they seldom said that about farmers or farm kids?

Identity and identification tighten the view, draw in the confines, hold the figuration to genuine, hold back the alien subjectivity, the reckless inclusiveness, the composite apologies, the tinny thin-hedged sincerities. Where rests authenticity? Where do we find identities that matter?

What does it mean to be a Spitzenburg, or a Scottish Highland, or a Blue Lakenvelder, or a Morovian, or a Lakotan, or a Peruvian fingerling, or a Loquat, or a Ginger root, or a Canadian? To answer any of those questions requires we limit the view, tighten in around the confines, the regionalities, the histories. It is not about purity, it’s about identification. If you live on Guam, or in Johannesburg, your up close realities have no equal on the shores of Georgian Bay in Canada nor the precarious peaks of the Himalayas. Genetics of the indigenous matter, yes, but so do life histories. It matters a great deal that this Spitzenburg apple tree has all of the Spitzenburgian gene code but it matters almost as much that this tree is third or fourth generation of two hundred years of this family of apples living right here on the coast range of Oregon where tree frogs, spotted owls, mushroom spores, one hundred inches of rain and goose droppings have contributed to the slow growing flavors of the fruit.

With peoples and animals and plant life, identities matter a whole lot. The variety they represent, the diversity, is code central to the definition of all of life. But there are parts to the individuality that come from both environments and livelihoods; parts which escape DNA measurement. A polar bear in the Chicago Zoo is an entirely different beast from the ones of 25 years ago when ice was still king in the arctic north. Specifically how and where all and any of biological life exists goes into the definitions.

So with people, a lifetime of working at a craft – or two or three lifetimes of inherited lineage at the same work, at the same locale – results in a quickening of evolution, a quickening towards balance and thrift. Strip that away, reduce man’s efforts to short spurts of disconnected craftless involvements at various locations and the resultant identity is hollow. Balance and thrift are gone. Three generations of dairy farming in the French Alps, selectively breeding the same lineage of cattle, returning every August to that same blossom-rich high mountain pasture, results in people, plants and animals of supreme interconnectivity. And that third generation Iowa horsefarmer walking quietly with team in hand to the waiting plow, there is a skater’s fluidity to that natured man and partner beast. The easy breathing of mare and gelding while Robert threads trace links onto singletree hooks feels rightfully like a singsong preparation of tools ahead of work. Work at hand. Proximity matters. The best chance at in-close matters.

Especially in agriculture, commerce in the western model holds large scale operations as sacrosanct. When we think about it; even children can see from the windows of the speeding car that the fields go a very long ways to nowhere; no edges, no woods, no hidee holes to see. But should you pass a garden, the impulse is to slow down and look deep into that one small spot where edges and overlaps and make-believe ladders of trees and water sprouts and butterflies or gophers trace it all. At least the child in my old carcass wants to; slow down I mean, and look deep. Interior is small, up close, personal, intricate, fertile with mysteries. Exterior is vast, impersonal, monocultural, sterile with the charred, sometimes poisonous ancient remains of mystery.

Appreciations

One long distance subscriber commented to me on the phone recently that he had been reading my ‘stuff’ for decades and he frequently disagreed with me but that didn’t matter because he was going to go on reading my ‘stuff.’ He said, “It’s like this, I been married to my wife for a lot of years and I love the dickens out of her even when we don’t agree. Don’t mean I’m going give up on what we got. No sir, not for a minute. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I ‘ppreciate what you write more’n I agree with it.” I hung on that word “appreciate.” I felt this reader/friend’s welcome proximity.

Thrift

In the beginning Thrift was about the appreciation of true wealth, today thrift as a belief structure is akin to an abstinent spirituality and sometimes first cousin to stinginess. Either/or, as a way to move through life, it is a creature of simple math. As a floor to economical, it is cement. It is a way to survive during difficult times, a way which wants to spill over and drag the useful romance of it into good times. Thrift is a paradox, it is both warm-hearted and calculatingly cold. Familiar with the cold aspect? Thrift would demand of most of us that we deny ourselves anything which is not critically essential. That’s cold for most people. Too simplistic, all the way around – too simplistic. In today’s world of ‘gimmee all things – all the time – right now,’ I like to think of thrift as a defense mechanism and as a tool for well being. Hardly a family in this country doesn’t wonder if this or that ‘thing’ hasn’t broke the bank or made a loved one sick, or created anti-social behavior, or created a deep well of loneliness or stripped the family of identity.

If it works for you go to the woods in appropriate season and find for yourself Chanterelles or other safe and wonderful wild mushrooms which you take to your kitchen to sauté with onions from your garden, sauté with butter from your Nubian goat’s milk, is that not a story of luxuriant thrift? No out of pocket in that picture anywhere. Thrifty yes. But cold? Absolutely not. This little forage-and-eat tale above is all about romance, adventure, self satisfaction, engagement, empowerment and more, even though it starts and stops with thrift. Or should we have been talking all along about scale and how it comes to define thrift?

Broad scope, yet small scale, considerations of a life of thrift have wide impact today. All around us the profit mantras pervade: ‘Dare not deride the primacy of mass production.’ ‘Consumer advocacy, consumer rights,’ euphemisms for consumers being bilked in more creative ways. “Want that? Need that? Get that!” Blend the three and you continue to destroy the planet. Instead of want and need, a growing number of us cares for and makes, cries for and creates.

The gain of rigor and heft, of repetition and attention, of the fortunes of inertia well met. A gain best measured by grins in the comfortable darkness before a perfect night’s sleep. Enchantment.

Absent answers?

But what, you justifiably ask, of the down and out, the homeless, the poor, the disenfranchised, or worse? Are we talking about Great Uncle Ephraim or the poor kids and their make-believe camels, or about the swan?

I’m just a guy who farms and scribbles. Nothing remarkable in that. I’m not sure why I frequently insist on allowing myself the arrogance to think I understand big ideas, such as why some people are unexplainably disenfranchised while others haven’t a clue what that means. The truly disenfranchised? Who are they, and why do we want to know? Disenfranchised could mean some one or ones who are momentarily down on their luck, or others who never seem to have a stake in the game, or some odd ones with no membership in society, many others with no home, no future, no food for their children, no way to stay warm, no way to avoid incoming rockets and canon fire, no road to health, never a break from endless disaster. That’s a hideous, wide gamut.

Ask me on another day. Today, I don’t know the answers. Sometimes I think I do, and then that falls away. I don’t like how it makes me feel, to say I don’t know. I’m an old man, shouldn’t this be something I now know? And I don’t like how the swan’s death made me feel either. It’s not just a question of feeling helpless, feeling incapable of lending a hand. It about wanting to believe that balance and fairness are possible on the widest scale. But there I go again. I don’t believe there can be balance and fairness and goodness on the widest of scales. Nature does not work with big over small, nor with pretty over ugly, she does not reward gentleness and goodness over mean-spirited or vulgar. We, pretending to be in some sort of control, pretending to know better, we step in hoping to balance it all out. Some times that works, those times are small, tight, and difficult. Often it doesn’t work. These days, its more than enough to drive us nuts with worry. So, realize it or not, we go, perhaps subconsciously, looking for re-enchantment. We need it. We need to believe. Strip that from us and we are not to be trusted alone.

So for enchantment I come back to the thrift and balance available to us in our human-scale endeavors. I come back to good work, done conscientiously and with grace a forethought. I believe balance and fairness and goodness only happens up close, face to face, hands on the tools, breath mixing with energies, concerns meeting offerings. It comes from unexpected magic. It happens when one person, in a single moment, lends a hand to another. Enchanting.

Even so, in those moments it is also always clear, frightening, uncomfortable and undeniable that bad things might happen including loss, destruction and even death. Which requires of us that we hold all things in balance. But does it require that, in all things, we know what is right and what is wrong?

I’m not a moralist. I think of myself as an agnostic actualist. For me most anything is in doubt. And in my art, farming, and word-butchering, I’m intensely interested in the ‘actual.’ I realize the contradiction in that. As an agnostic I am expected to say I don’t know if that really is a strong stand of new alfalfa. As an actualist I am applauding the new legume shoots. I’ve got no problem with the apparent contradiction because I am without membership, there’s no one requiring my adherence. So I can be both things and that suits my need to hold things in close and tight.

But for a second, adding confusion to doubt, I peek back at my thoughts and realize that the ‘actualist’ in me is often a manifestation of a belief in magic.

For my long lifetime I have believed that the answer to so much of what alienates and distresses mankind, rests with having no home place to work on and with.

Give a person a corner or piece of the world to care for and it will care for him or her. Deny them a corner and all becomes the dust of aimless migration. Give everyone a piece of the earth to care for and guess what? The earth then just might be cared for! Not realistic you say? Accountants, might I remind you, are realistic and we might generally agree that they believe in nothing. Children, especially those with full bellies, are frequently not realistic – and they are willing ready and able to believe in magic. We as children believed in those invisible camels. Ask a person who owns a one acre garden which feeds him or her if they believe.

So I wish to leave this seed of a possibility: Imagine with me that maybe a nasty flea-bitten coyote had crept out on the ice that frozen night and grabbed hold of the swan’s tail feathers, yanking a few out, only to find its canine self breaking through the ice, feathers clenched in teeth. Standing in mud in that shallow pond, the coyote holds his head up and feels the night’s ice form around his neck. Next morning, Eagles descended to render the coyote useful. (Possibility? But, at times, oh how gruesome the human imagines.)

Meanwhile, the rudderless Swan, with the help of her three Swan friends, made it into the air where they all floated along just above the carpet of snowgeese wings. These majestic waterfowl believed they would make it to the neighboring lake where time would allow Swan tail feathers to grow back. Just a thought. Just an idea. Likely we can never know what ‘actually’ happened.

Embrace a good, decent, purposeful idea and its hard to see the whole of it. But it’s likely that in hugging it you are ‘actually’ merging with that idea. Believe in something worthy, make it your work, hold on to it tight and find yourself merging with that something, that work, your work. It will keep you healthy, it will make of you a magician of life. It masters you and you master it.

A sweep of thrift to deny the wired fire? Purest enchantment.