Proposal – A Day without Light (but one)

Posted on November 17, 2016 by | 2 comments

In this season of disturbed day and night, I’ve found necessary reading, stories whose thin lines keep reaching toward the world I want to live in, the one I do, even as the news and those who make it try to wipe that world away. The stories are the poems of Kate Barnes, and I have come to them through recommendation from the Gulf of Maine, our local bookstore, itself a kind of kin to the fish that keep swimming upstream to spawn. “Try this,” the owner, a poet himself, said one day, and handed over Crossing the Field. I looked at its handsome woodcut cover, weighed its thinness, and thought, I might even finish this.

For some weeks it sat where most new books do – on my desk in a stratigraphy of enthusiasms. One recent morning, as I sought my coffee-reading to prepare my mind for the day’s words, I saw its blue cover peeking out of the pile, and I unearthed it, carried it to table. I noted, as I always do, its birthdate – 1992 – and turned to page one:

Coming Back

Coming back to my own countryside, I find
the farm again. It is night. Under this wallpaper
of willow leaves and birds, I know there is
an old one with loops of small roses…

No pyrotechnics; rather, a quiet insistence on what return allows, how knowing is layered, and that we live there too, below its surface. Barnes, the daughter of poet Elizabeth Coatsworth and writer Henry Beston, isn’t after easy narratives in her poems; she is 60 when they are published and worn by life’s abrasions, not the least of which is her father, who, fittingly, it seems, renamed himself Beston, by the stone, when made fun of for being “a mick.” But reading her poems is akin to coming on a clearest stream in woods you thought you knew, and then, looking up and seeing with washed vision.

All of this is prelude to a proposal: recent poems I’ve read have been lit – in this corner or that – by fireflies. Yes, they are out of season, but winking light, easily construed as hope, is not. So here, in a spirit of rising light that Kate Barnes and Henry Thoreau might approve, is my proposal:

On January 20th, 2017, when we pass into a new government that I see aligned with darkness, let’s turn off all the lights but one in all of our houses and workspaces. A Day without Light (but one) would recognize and protest a president who seems without spirit and compassion, and it would leave burning resolve and hope to see and then work through this period to a different day. It would be quiet, real, and yes, if enough of us did it, effective.

I don’t know Barnes as well as I know Thoreau, but I think each, both, would nod, yes, and go about that day as a single light.

Added note: I don’t do this, but I’d like to see if this seed-idea can grow, so please share widely if you too would like to see that. Each one of us can be that single light too.

"There is more day to dawn." Thoreau, Walden

“There is more day to dawn.” Thoreau, Walden

“There is more day to dawn.” Thoreau, Walden

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Old News

Posted on November 14, 2016 by | Comments Off on Old News

All summer and far into the fall I unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now I find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to me. My walks were full on incidents. I attended not to the affairs of Europe, but to my own affairs in Concord fields. Thoreau, Journal

It took more than the Concord fields to lever me away from the news, but recent national “incidents” were enough.

After the election, we went away to the mountains. The old, blue route there was still lined, in places, by signs, mostly the victors’, but even they were bent and wind-battered. As we drove, a cold front blew in, tearing even the resistant oak leaves from their branches, and it caught drifts of brown leaves, chasing them in waves over the tar; at times it looked as if we were crossing a river.

We bought days of food and drove up the right wing of the valley, crossing finally on to the last mile of dirt road, and, once we’d unloaded and set the heat to warm, we put on orange hats to distinguish us from deer and walked farther up valley. The wind racketed in the bare trees; a few small-grained snow flurries coursed through, speckling our dark coats, melting like little points of winter on our hands. We wouldn’t climb the mountain, but our walk brought us closer to it.

Day #1 -Sunrise on the mountain.

Day #1 -Sunrise on the mountain.

That night November dark shut down quickly, the sun gone behind the ridge just after 3:00, some remnant clouds blotting up its after-light. Before the moon – nearly full – rose later, the dark was absolute, the only news was the cold front’s still-rising winds. Part of this mountain valley’s appeal lies in its modern remoteness. Yes, a road winds to it, but no signal follows – phones don’t work, e-mail can’t chirp and all the instas go mute. Perhaps because there are more cellar holes than cellars on this road-going-to-trail-going-nowhere, forcing coverage in here is low priority. It felt good to out-distance connection and comment.

Day #2 - Sun sets behind the mountain.

Day #2 – Sun sets behind the mountain.

Late that night, the moon rose, arcing up over the mountain, bright enough to paint shadows across the open ground; you could see the dark, flying leaves lifted by the wind. Not remembering its proper seasonal name – surely it is beyond harvest – we called it the Selection Moon and watched its light and dark fingers point and wave, picking out possibility, suggesting the way the fronts keep coming over the ridge, scooping up what’s left, sorting it briefly and laying it down again.

Still, even under the racketing wind and the juddering moon, a little peace took hold. This valley is a sort of Walden.

We have, of course, returned – we have work; we have a place too in the current turmoil. That’s as it should and must be. But the mountains are and have a place too, a place where the shapes of ridges admit only the oldest news.

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Times

Posted on November 10, 2016 by | 6 comments

I am thinking today of people who live in terrible times, when whatever good we summon or create in our daily lives gets threatened by the bile we and others also harbor. And so it’s no stretch to think of Henry Thoreau living in the 1850s a decade crawling with evil and aimed surely at civil war. And I think of his huge, complex mind and attendant spirit and wonder how he rose each day to work to write to walk without being washed away by sadness. He could see so much. What sustained him?

I ask myself this question on a day similarly riven, when I feel split from country and future, when my imagination’s gone quiet before despair, when my quiet belief in innate decency fails. I didn’t go to work today; it seemed so beside the point. But after a day of sitting here, I’ll have to get up and go…where?

Well, yes, there to the work I’ve committed to and I’ll keep at it as compact with self and known others. Its daily motion will be salve of a sort.

These few days in and on, I know I will also return to personal struggle with despair. How to go at it? Thoreau sought both to address his time’s evils and live a life with joy at its center. He did not turn or hide away – he looked directly at slavery in its many forms, from primary evil to enslavement of self. In many ways, he even tugged apart some of the nature he revered – to know it, understand it, perhaps, sometimes, to change it (at least the human part). And still, as he walked out into the world each day, he brought and found reverence.

Afoot in the forest

Afoot in the forest

Early in his writing, in the essay, The Natural History of Massachusetts, Thoreau set down what sustained him throughout:

Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leap in the ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by attrition is reflected upon the bank.

It is no small feat to be a keen analytic intelligence, stern moralist and giddy walker. So much encompassed in one being.

I am no Thoreau. But I must try to walk like him.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote