The Thought of Nature

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch

Once shared a wooded homestead with a handful of creatures all of which wanted to be as close to me as I would allow, or so I thought. In my early twenties and new to the wilds of Oregon, having fled San Francisco and an intense short time as bartender to dark souls, that scarring servitude had me glory in the freedoms and belonging of the turnabout. There on the forested ten acre edge of a pond with goats, Bantam chickens, two Belgian mares, and a few Toulouse geese, I lived in a ten by twelve one room tar-paper shack my father and I had erected one weekend. Completely ‘off-grid’ as is said these days. A shaded spring, source to the pond and my drinking water, an outhouse, an old wood cookstove, a candelabra, one window, a smattering of non-threatening wildlife — except of course for the neighbors over the hill — I was supremely happy even as I was poor and impatient.

My impatience came of society demanding I quickly make something of myself. Ah, youth. Wasted on the young, say the tired and old.

“I” — “myself.” Traps, that push forward as explanation. Uninteresting. Is it because today, more than half a century later, there is a wonder; what would have come of ‘me’ had ‘I’ chosen to accept, in that moment and place, that there was something malleable and worthy in me? Or, as I now know with worthless certainty, it is the ‘I’ that was the best ‘me’ that ‘I’ would ever be? And this wondering has a sound. It’s the whisper sound of muted dreams. What might it be like to fill a long life in service to diverse nature and the daily complex rhythms of artful self-sufficiency; to study slow and deliberate the interconnections of human well-being with soil health? Does that reasonably compete with what it would be like to succeed in industry, medicine, law, technology, any form of commerce? Succeed by outside measure? Functioning in those plastic worlds as just another tiny number for accounting’s massive dumpster of collateral damage. (Me muttering; accounting can be a most evil reverse alchemy.) Here’s an answer: allow that there be no choice but to follow the union with nature. Is that an answer for the wider currents of mankind? Is society to decide?

Society Demanding? Isn’t that what got us to this point? These Days? Society’s leaders, at the end of the nineteenth century, awakening from a bad dream, sitting up en masse and blurting out “there are fortunes to be made from assembly lines, and the chemical ‘corrections’ of nature!”

And recognizing that, instead of horrid slavery, we could pay a small amount to millions (then billions) of dullards of every color to do the puke work, and we could draw up the oils and gases from the earth as if we were draining the bellies of dragons and distilling the poisonous stuff to slowly make of the magnificent planet earth a steaming, coughing, flaming, sore-infested, moldy hot tragedy. Yes, the portfolio managers insist, there are fortunes to be made and anyone who hesitates loses. But what do the hesitant ones lose actually? No time to think about that, we were/are busy, we small-minded people of low, mid, and high birth empowering each other, in the names of the gods of accounting, to rip at at each other’s throats and those of any additional creatures standing in the way of profit. “Stand down!” Breathe. Nod in apology…

But back to that young soul wondering after his choices…

Some of us ask ourselves these questions about what shape our future should take, and in the asking we define ourselves. Some of us ask ourselves these questions when we are young and formative. And if we answer them, our lives take some form of deliberate. Fewer still ask themselves these things as they age and the questions sometimes fill them with terror. And a handful of us ask all of this of ourselves when we are fully mature with the risk that the answers will stop us in our tracks, sadden us, curse our past, over-inflate our inadequacies, and sour the milk of our reveries.

Get on the merry go round or walk past it to the insular quiet garden of nature’s allure? “I could learn to take care of myself, maybe even a family. I could go to the woods, grow asparagus and raise quail, and haul water in buckets. That’s what I want, a simple life of un-demanding craft.” Yes, it is perhaps one of life’s supreme secrets; you as human creature, biological to the core, you have it within you to be successful at a handmade life. Accept that you belong in and with nature. That’s the good and golden secret, the one which ‘society’ wants to protect you from.

There’s a trap within all of that, down at the actual bottom. It comes if we believe self sufficiency is synonymous with living a simple life. Those two things, simplicity and self sufficiency are not co-dependent, they aren’t ‘connected at the hip,’ so to speak. As a young man it took me a very short while to realize that the life I sought, one of self reliance, was a long ways from a simple existence. A good life? Yes, if you have the stuff. But simple? Nope. And is that part of the problem, or does it aggravate the challenge? Today when I think of a wide public notion of simple life, it is one FREE OF entanglements, responsibilities, complex challenges, care-giving, breakdowns, slow-food, deep thinking, problem solving, repetitive workings, big families, mathematics, heavy lifting, needful others. I do not want to be free of “those” things. They are who I am, they are the core of this sensibility I wear. I don’t think you want to be free of those things, either.

As self-sufficient farmers we are reminded every single working day that our lives are wonderfully complex and potentially frustrating to the nth degree, especially if we are successful at it. To attain any self-sufficiency, whatever individualized form it takes, is for the resourcefully-inclined farmer, a true measure of earned success.

We separate successful from masterful because the former may be attained without the latter. You as the owner of your self-sufficient operation might realize success without ever arriving at mastery. Mastery only has value to old people as the ease it can bring to the work. Mastery is a most difficult thing to define. And is escapes accounting.

But our wish for you IS to attain that impossible to describe ‘mastery;’ That slow, quiet, generous, postured curl of Fred Astaire or Annie Dillard or your favorite farmer just before the defining next step. Nonessential and yet defining. It’s that ‘sensibility,’ that fully dressed manner, which, through observed enchantment, gives us permission to imagine we are of the same species and have within us the capacity to dance and write and sing, garden and even pitch manure as though floating on air.

At that ten acre wilderness homestead of my beginnings, I quickly learned to pay closest attention to the livestock in my charge. I knew myself to be their protector and provider. Amongst them was a small pair of Mille Fleur Bantams, hen and rooster. Mottled brown speckled feather base with a thousand flecks of flower-like colors, hence Mille Fleur. This pair were inseparable. The proud rooster stood straight up to reach his full 12 inches, his little bearded head rotating and watchful, occasionally cocked to the ground at his feet. Always near, the sweet, plump feather-footed hen was bent over constantly on the watch for bug or seed. When he would see a surprise treat he would dance around clucking ‘over here, come here, look at what I’ve found! Hurry now.’ And in she came, head down, pecking at wonders. This pair had free range of the little homestead and never ventured into the encircling woods. They had a favorite tree limb they roosted on each night, huddled so close together you might think they were one creature. And from them, evening and dawn, I heard such cooing as would put doves to shame. They had refound one another, there’s really no other way to explain the depth of their feeling for each other except to allow your imagination to see them in many previous incarnations.

Silly though it may seem, those two chickens fit in with early experiences of nature, the thought of nature. As in the ‘nature’ of all things. All of that goes into what makes stories compelling, at least to me.

Now, these days, there are bluebirds, in sevens and elevens, joyously tumbling in light rose-tinted jewel-escent cerulean blue, as they artfully avoid worrisome starlings and thuggish brown-headed cowbirds. There are buzzards patient as owls, waiting for that juiciest moment of dead abandoned carcass in first decay. There are majestic-appearing iconic bald-headed eagles with the personality of river rats. But these Yellow-headed Blackbirds announce themselves apart and without lilt, even to the others. From cadmium lemon shades anchored by blackest eyeliner, to red-edged apricot hued heads that rival a zen master’s argument with cloisonné. A stand alone genus? Here on the very western edge of their range we are fortunate to see a handful, while in Montana nature welcomes them by the thousands.

Last evening, I was called back out into the dusk by the screaming peacocks and Canada geese, stallions racing, peahens in tree tops, peacocks on the ground walking and watching. Everyone else moves slowly, carefully, quietly, listening with their feet and open hands or claws and necks. Listening for the thought of nature, for that is what you get when you mix all the messages, you get to hear nature thinking through her plants, weather and creatures — through changes in the balance. Wind in the trees, owls questioning, coyotes yapping, moonlight whispering; if you cup your ears you can hear the wolves listening to you listen. They listen to hear their next meal announce itself.

And I remember back more than half a century to the Mille Fleur banties, wondering if their dark times cooing be a sound to draw in predators? Predation in nature, we fear its manifestations, or are intrigued by them — I suspect because it mirrors how humans are with each other and nature. Because it shows us ourselves? And because we do not want to know that we are no match for nature, not the weather, not her creatures, not her diseases, not the very ideas she manifests in her elegant and unfathomable diversity. You have to dig deep, but down under the moist floor of forest and desert you will find nature laughing at our frail arrogance. How can we be both no match for nature and at one with nature?

Growing up in Alaska, our friend and helper Eric speaks of riding his bike as a child ‘neath the Alaskan powerlines. And then looking one way “Oh, moose!” and the other way “Oh, calf, Oh gosh!” And then racing through, past the sound and warning glare of Moose. The sound of Moose? Kind’a like deer only an octave lower? Does anyone ever hear deer? Does a goosey moose bellow? Bull elk trumpet in season but any moose, by reputation, doesn’t need to make noise, he or she is noise.

I then remember how it was that on my visits to cities I would listen often to know what to avoid. In New York City, fifteen – twenty years ago, I overheard a piece of conversation and my imagination connected the missing parts.

Thoughtfully, desperation set aside for the moment, the frustrated replaceable office technician, with a small hard-shelled nest egg tucked safely away, peaked through the low crack in the Greenwich Village iron-barred wall and got a glimpse of tangled vines, flower petals on the moist rotting leaf bed, and a single pigeon preening and thought to himself ‘that’s what I’ll do, up north, I’ll head up north and have a go at nature.’

And I insert: Nature as though she be an entity incomplete without his ‘go?’

And then from the left, another voice an hour later: “Not precise enough an idea to constitute a plan, or a goal, now is it?” This offered by the ram-rod straight unpleasant personnel manager over lunch.

And I insert: A lame attempt by management to dissuade her charge?

“Well it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, the time is right, so I’m going to do it.”

“You’re in denial. You are avoiding the obvious, so here it is as a direct question. What does this lame idea of having a go at nature mean? Actually mean? What are you going to do or try to do when you arrive in New Hampshire or Maine or, heaven help you, New Brunswick? You going to become a lobster fisherman or a moose wrangler?”

“Doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll do a Thoreau thing. Find a pond and a shed and grow beans.”

“Grow beans? You mean you, who’ve never spent more than 48 hours out of the city, you are going to be a subsistence farmer? The thought of farming… oh my God! Have you any idea what that even means?”

The words as insult were an invisible catapult that lifted him up, with his satchel, and tossed him into a train car. He was off and smiling at how easy the change had been. One life left behind the next one waiting for him to define.

And me? I’m remembering a half-century earlier, my cabin by the pond and the Mille Fleur pair. This and that, all from me listening? Yes listening, listening in and allowing my thoughts to wander. Like in a Jerry Jeff Walker train song.

When you’re out of doors a lot, fixing things, plowing, herding livestock, setting up irrigation, mowing, building fence, planting seed, you are in a mostly quiet world. It’s a world where safety requires you be observant,I mean really look at things to see what’s right and wrong with this setup, to be aware of what’s coming at you, to ‘see’ the chains and gears and understand the risk they pose. To FOCUS. When you do, so much shows itself. Same thing with hearing. You can wander aimlessly, zoning out, not listening to this farming world but you put yourself in harms way. You need to LISTEN with focus, it protects you. Sound protects you if you allow it to. And sound also rewards you, it enriches the construct of your memories. Farming has sound.

Sound Farming? As in the jangle of trace chains, the breathing of work mules, the cows calling their calves to nurse, bees on apple blossoms, small motors at labor, the clatter of the sickle bar mower… ? Do we imagine we might orchestrate those sounds? Do those sounds inform and even define us?

Perhaps “Sound Farming” suggests ‘good’ farming or a ‘healthy’ farming? But right now I am thinking of the actual sounds of farming.

For just about every human on the planet the wider world is loud and harsh. For gardeners and farmers however — those of us who work outside and directly with the land and nature — away from machinery it is often blissfully quiet.

The screeching, exploding, hammering noise of commerce and war, of emergency rooms and paid entertainment, of arguments and disease, of policing and eating out, of jurisprudence and transportation — they are deafening. By comparison the sound of gathering livestock, eggs, green beans, mown hay, grapes, lambs, seed sacks, cilantro, yams, okra, blueberries, guinea fowl, wild rice, — the sound of watering plants, of gathering work horses, of ripening apples and pears, watercress, cranberries and squash, the rambling burble of a two cylinder tractor, the sour sound of mulch straw and compost, the turning slicing noise of a plow’s soil, of gathering answers and plans, appreciations and cautions, even the jabbering gather of family around the table for a meal — all of the sounds — they are akin to the sound of our own beating heart; it is music. And it can be clearest evidence of healing.

What do you hear?

You hear things. I hear things. They hear things. Like the destructive constant acid etch of modern gossip machines? Here, not interested is those noises, instead I’m concerned with the oft-hidden manifestations of ‘ambient’ sounds, those murmurs which both protect us and sometimes drive us a little nuts as they work to affect in nagging ways. It’s the contest, or the separation, between words and noise — what those words mean versus how the sounds blend, what the noise would indicate.

I confess to a casual fascination with barely decipherable background conversations, people talking over and under each other in clatter and mumble, where what is actually said — difficult to make out — is less important than the hoarse or applauding timber of the aggregated sound. All ambient, or background, until and only if my mind switches gears to catch a word or phrase or interchange of words. flips the switch in my brain allowing me to focus hard on the meaning that might be there. It’s like looking wide at the view and then tightening your focus to concentrate on one thing in that wider view. The impact and import are very different.

Talk talk talk talk talk. Like rolling glass and steel marbles over a drum head. Amongst us there are those who back away from that drum roll, having been affected, and then setting out to make a change, for us all, or for themselves, or for a target?

Talk talk talk, the sound of it less than the intended meaning. Burbles, clangs, whistles, beeps, wood chime voices, the mumblings of the tragic homeless, struggling motors, yells, laughs, barks, and bellows. Cities talk; the sound of traffic, mushed conversations, construction rattle, emergency-vehicle screams, radio blasts — it’s constant. Cities talk, what do they say? Is there meaning or intent to the sound? Or perhaps more important, what are the consequences? And does the sound change as much from context as from source. A city is a context. A forest is a context. And sound capture of auditoriums is a context. Environment is certainly context. And woven strings of consequence? Those contextual worlds, circles closed, become oceanic-like fabric of context.

But a city is also a source, many jumbled-together environments are sources of sound like a sea in a storm’s wind — just as a farm tied in with nature, that farm is a source of sound. It could be a monumental source as it urges forward all manner of crew for the farming’s trajectory, but it is always no more than the sound of nature breathing.

What does sound tell us? What is the sound of a sunrise? What is the sound of danger? What is the sound of appreciation?

Leading arguments are ‘dog nods.’ There you go again suggesting a nod has sound. Well maybe not but it often delivers a similar consequence. One dog trainer whistles twice for a dog to sit. Another nods his head. Same outcome, different signal, different room.

Horrid sounds of consequence, deceptively soft like baby monkeys falling from the trees in Africa, dying from heat exhaustion. The cruelest thoughts of nature. With that observation I am flung back to that morning decades ago when I first heard the old Mille Fleur’s sad soft song. He stood bolt upright on his, their, tree limb, beak barely open and softly waving the softest plea to the dawn. Where was she? Where was she? It was probably only for a few weeks or perhaps even just days, but for moments such as these I choose to remember his sad soft song going on for an age.

It is this same day when Kristi, my wife, took a photo in the dusty road around our hay field of the largest cougar track anyone has ever seen. A track mingled in with her and Scout’s tracks, so fresh it is hard to discern the exact moment it was made except to know it was within hours.

And within days, Aaron Bott, the state wildlife biologist, sends us this photo,

of a male wolf the night before, within a few hundred yards of that road where the cougar and my ladies take walks. I look at the burning eyes in the photo and for some reason I close mine, thinking of the old Mille Fleur’s song.

Mustn’t dwell. Avoid the self hypnosis and the fear, worry and depression. Instead put your arm out, hand flat and forward into the wind as if you are a child again, riding in a vehicle and feeling out the window, the melody of the moment. Remind yourself of that balancing ride and pulsing rhythm. For out there, even on the worst days, when static understanding evades us, there is always evidence; there are those joyous symphonies of sound nature would keep to herself if only she could. Bird song in spring when dozens of species flit about with the business of establishing nests and feeding rituals. That in and of itself forms a carpet which forces a patient reverie, you must sit still and LISTEN to see if you can separate the call of the Redwinged Blackbird from the dove (that one’s easy) or the Cowbird from the Starling, or the Finches from the Sparrows, the Meadowlark from the barely audible Bluebirds, the Kestrals from the Kites, the windfiltering wings of the thrumming Northern Harriers compared to Red-tailed Hawks. But why bother you ask? Because the sound is notice given. And, if we are to be healthy functioning members of the biological world we need pay attention to such sound blankets. In these moments at this time the carpet of mixed bird calls assure us that we are in the presence of nature in balance. When that sound stops, or changes dramatically, we are being offered, along with all of the creatures of the natural world, warning of change and possible harm afoot. Oh, the very thought of nature — how she would insist balance to guarantee life.

Society has sound. And long, long ago it shifted to offer caution. Very few paid any heed. Now the sound is less a warning than evidence that we find ourselves in a time of wholesale decline. The prides of loft have left. Journalism everyday now finds itself with new small sets of compromise that allow it might remain barely solvent as a function let alone as a service. The larger and largest institutions of profit-defined higher learning are in full intellectual molt with the threat that their purposeful re-feathering may never come; that their most recent cranial bare patches will never regain pigment let alone follicles. Colleges of the future have no chance of survival if, in spite of all the competing rude-ities, they are unable to hold to their stuffy pettiness and meaningless rituals — for such is the fluff of deniability mixed with snobbery. Odd, colleges, you see, chased churches as a model and now share the loss. Those two institutions, when at their best, served to keep humans straight up and down, and now would seem to be courting the cancer of commerce. And we are to be forgiven in our apathy? It’s not worth our effort to care? Do we hide our heads?

Hidey holes, where varmints, insects, small predators (weasels and badgers), snakes, lizards, insects and worms wait their turns. Our industrial agriculture has all but wiped those areas out, those margins, sterility and monoculture being their goals, but those little creatures are more than indicators of biological health, they absorb, secrete, and stir the seeds, juices, particulates, and tiny curling moods that give vitality and life-force.

Speaking of force; storms are ferocious, we are seeing that every day all across the globe. They are a force of nature to be sure, potentially destructive beyond imagination, perhaps ultimately a corrective force? But so also are insects. An angry swarm of hornets or bees are an undeniable force of nature. A plague of locusts can alter the course of a landscape and a people for quite some time. But who are we to know how such ‘corrections,’ such shifts in the pattern, such change will ultimately play out. If we are deaf to the ‘thought’ of nature, we may never know. If we are tight with nature, we know with our every breath.

Three weeks ago my wife admonished me to find the time to fix a leaking water hydrant. Puddles were forming there at the barn-pen edge. I made a mental note as I hurried to a half-finished irrigation pipe change. Then, busy me, something else bumped into three other things and… Now today my wife offers, with a lilt to her voice, “I’m glad you didn’t fix that leak, please don’t.”

And I figure I’m being subjected to a soft, reverse psychology — but there I go again in a Walker Train Song lyric, assuming I read the truth behind the evidence.

“It’s the swallows! They’ve come back. There! See? There are two of them. They are making a mud nest.” And she looks up at the rafters cooing to them, welcoming them home. And she turns to me with moist eyes, and says Scout was telling her a short while ago that everything would be ok if the swallows would just come back. “The swallows need that mud for the nests. So, please don’t fix that leak, not for now.”

For tens of years, decades, we had every spring and summer a carpet of magnificent little swallows. They would join us when we went with teams to the fields. They loved the mowing in particular because it caused carpets of bugs to float up from the lay of the crop. The birds would swoop and flit and duck and dive all while eating. It was one of those daily experiences we took for granted even as we promised ourselves we never would. And then one day, a dozen or so years ago, the swallows did not return. We kept on, occasionally wondering where they, and the carpets of butterflies, went. We didn’t want to know the answer. All those years ago where did the little Mille Fleur hen go, I didn’t want to know the answer.

But today we will cling to this brief moment when a pair of swallows returned because just maybe…

Now most definitely mature, I’m easily ‘touched’ by small things. The swallows return touched me. As is so often the case, I set out with this writing with the hope that I might share a few things that would touch one or two of you in a good way. I didn’t figure that the process of gathering these thoughts would touch me so dramatically. I should have known. Talking about such things, writing it down, even drawing and painting pictures of things that I love, it all enhances for me my life and living. The cautions inflate. The joys glow. The humor sputters. For you see, I have escaped society’s demands, and have somehow merged with nature’s alluring force. I stand once and yet again so eternally grateful for the union.

Our work horses respond to touch, sight, sound. The best ones respond in learned ways to circumstance and situations. That is my wish for all of us, that capacity for beneficial response. And just as with the best of the horses and mules, the routines, the rituals, they put us there, equipped and ready for the circumstances.

When I was growing up — during the fifties — every Sunday our entire family would wash behind our ears, put on our squeaky clothes and go to church. There were several over the years but I fondly remember the First Christian Church of Fullerton, CA. Because we were a reasonably handsome (Rockwellian even) family, and because my father taught Bible Class on Wednesdays, the front right (Pastor’s left) pew was reserved for us. Reserved because it was expected we would walk down the aisle after most people were seated, kind of like a processional. I remember the pastor’s wife saying, over a fried chicken dinner at their house one Sunday afternoon, that it gave her and many others a great deal of comfort when we Millers walked in, shortest first then to me the tallest of the children, then my four foot ten inch mother followed by my six foot plus father, Marine straight. And the pastor would lift his head over his chicken drum stick and offer “rituals are important, they keep us together.”

That’s what I’m looking for, ways to keep us together. Together with each other, together with nature. May I ask that you consider being a force in nature, with nature and of nature. Actually you do not need to choose such a path, for it chose you at birth. There’s no need to go away. Stay and learn to be what you already are.

I have wound my farming
‘round my fingers,
my eyes,
up into my nose,
‘round the back of my neck,
backside of my knees,
into unlit corners of my mind,
along the sides of every limb,
out ahead of me on snug leash,
into my midday soup,
and out again from my waking eyes.
What is left for me to do
but hold snug and allow
this coil to slowly
release me forward
into the next delirious
winding of precious efforts?

LRM

//captions

“On Again Off Again Orchard” at Singing Horse Ranch

One of Kristi’s excellent cows with our bull Creed, and their twin calves blending into our rough and wonderful grasslands pasture.

Can you ‘see’ the ‘sound’ of a tree’s long struggling life to grow out of rock? Oh, the very Thought of Nature.

And do you read the sound of a different Juniper’s life with wire?

Sounds in the margins, out neath the blanket edge of nature’s embrace of our farm.