For once, I'm of a mind to write a more narrative post. We've lived here at the farm for a couple of months now, and the stories are starting to pile up.
One theme that has emerged so far: we are not alone among the living. Most people will be accustomed to sharing their homes with various so-called pests,
maybe rodents and surely some insects and arachnids. But here we are all sharing our lives with new sorts of neighbors. And I have more than a hunch that some of the proximity we enjoy is due to the fact that I haven't fired up an internal combustion engine for any work here on the farm. At all. That makes us the quietest humans for a few miles around. And here are some of our related adventures...
First of all, as soon as we took residence, the boy noticed that a robin had built her nest in a hanging planter on the front porch. The skittish bird did not exactly welcome the addition of four children and myself to her otherwise well-scouted hatching area. However, you might say we worked out a sort of de
tente. She'd fly out of the nest whenever we used the front door, and she'd land twenty feet away and scold us. But I taught the children the importance of respecting her zone, never touching or getting too close. And while they were curious and often made visits, they were pandemically-appropriate, and socially distant visits. The hatchlings grew to maturity, and as far as I can tell, all of them survived to fly away. This doesn't exactly make us expert farmers, but I was impressed with how fulfilling the experience was for everyone. Just to observe the cycle of life for oneself is a wonder, and the gratification speaks for itself.
And then the children discovered another nest! This one was under the back deck, which is actually raised up about eight feet, so the house finch had built the hatching roost just under the floor slats, next to a supporting joist. In such a location, the children could lie face down and peer between the slats, and the birds beneath felt safe enough to stay while under observation. This has led to weeks of screen-free fun. I also get the joy of look out the window to see them randomly prone for minutes at a time.
When I'm not laughing at my children, a lot of my chores involve reclaiming the homestead from a few years of neglect. That means turning a field back into a lawn, and rehabilitating gardens that have weeds so well-established, they probably have a country club membership somewhere. No one can fight a battle like this without weapons, and I've discovered that the 'free market' doesn't supply effective tools unless one wants the latest technology being sold by corporations bent on burning every last drop of fossil fuel.
In my ongoing--even Sisyphusean--efforts to escape the gravitational pull toward machines run by imported energy, I have found that I often muse on what humans did before the twentieth-century. Or in this case, the answer can be found even within the early 1900s. I alighted on my solution when I serendipitously opened a collection of Robert Frost poems. There I saw, published in 1915, his verse called 'Mowing'. Some choice lines, that confirmed for me that this was fitting:
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
...
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
I hadn't heard that whisper for myself, but I knew the wisdom in this quiet affirmation, namely that hard work is its own reward, or 'the sweetest dream that labor knows', and not to be missed by replacing sweat with combustion engines. Through experience, the poet can attest to that vital connection between the relentless practice of a craft and the quality of the product. If you read the whole poem, you will see how he rejects the idle dreams of the indolent and the illusory gold of magical thinking (in this case: thinking that machines can do a job better than humans, while ignoring that the widespread use of these is ruining the land, the ecosystem, and even the financial viability of farming).
So I had my tool and a totem of sorts: a scythe. Actually, it took a while to arrive, because the good folks at the Scythe Supply were backlogged, owing to pandemic (In a future post, I'll give a full description and review of the kit I ordered. It definitely deserves a post of it own). Here is an instrument suited to careful, even prayerful, labor. One can mow tall grass into windrows, softly felling sheaves for hours, and remain in contact with the ground, in close touch with any beasts or birds of the field.
Since the use of this tool lends itself to meditation, I've been musing a lot while I mow. The thought keeps circling me: this tool's association with death. It's a killer, to be sure. But I've come to the suspicion that the obsolescence of the scythe--its supposed out-dated status--coincides with the loss of a more ancient idea of death. Modern death noisily chews up everything indiscriminately, leaving behind homogenous, flattened expanses behind it. Clean, uniform, inevitable, as the green deserts we call lawns and golf greens. Death during modernity is no longer personified by a grim reaper. Now, death is merely the final result of a mechanistic and determined process. We are all leveled, surrounded by noisy machines, in an antiseptic, monochromatic bed, no different from anywhere else.
Death moves otherwise with a scythe. The reaper, while grim enough, is also gentle and even generative. Wildflowers may be left to blossom. Cuttings may be left behind to nourish future grass and miniature fauna. Etc. The work of a scythe doesn't produce a flat, unvaried, perfectly replicable result everytime. It's purpose can't be to keep every living thing down to the determined measurement. Rather, the one wielding a scythe enters, often enough, a tall and teeming sea of grass, at its fullest height and maturity, at the end of its life cycle. And the scythe merely removes what is ripe in order to make room for the next phase. With this as an image for human death, the notion lives comfortably alongside natural, organic processes.
Here at the beginning of our farm adventure, I realize that my decisions often hinge on choosing life or death. Obviously--in an abstracted sense--this is no different from other vocations. We all must choose how to cultivate the life that is ours, and upon reaching the end, our death will be the culmination of those choices. But what I'm discovering is just how near I am to death even as I try to nourish the living ecosystem of the land around us. Do we chase the birds from our porch and deck, or do we make room for them? (No.) Do I want a groundhog living in my lawn? (Another story, but: No.) If I am to be a reaper, I hope I can keep from being too grim, and remember to take only what is enough and only in a way that will leave the natural cycles thriving.
By way of conclusion, let me merely append some quotes that rise to the surface of my mind when death is near. First, here is a lasting one from Tolkien (from the scene where Gandalf admonishes Frodo for wishing to kill Gollum):
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?
Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise
cannot see all ends.
And let me part with a chorus from Wilco, paraphrasing none other than Jesus Christ:
It's a war on war
It's a war on war
It's a war on war
There's a war on
You're gonna lose
You have to lose
You have to learn how to die...
You have to die
You have to learn how to die
If you want to want to be alive, okay?…