Seeds of a Fruitful Endeavor

Kamala Visweswaran, citing Leila Ahmed, cites women writers' tendency towards metaphors of seasons, growing, and nature. Here I give in to the pull of this tendency, as the turning of the season to autumn has sparked more contemplative reflection.

Fall inherently turns us to thoughts of preservation, to thinking about saving things, plans for harvesting, and the natural cycle of life- things grow, they die, the earth turns again. Loss, quiet, renewal, exuberance and abundance. Watching the leaves turn in my neighborhood in south Brooklyn has shown me visually how fast the fall is flying by and I feel unprepared for the heavy cold season approaching. The air is still brisk, with jackets becoming a necessity only recently - and as this year has tended, the fleeting season hasn't wanted to depart on time. Last week, we had days at 75 degrees that were anachronistic of two months past. I remember the end of February this year, when we were so ready for spring, and looking to March for salvation, and the final week of the month brought a record-breaking blizzard. Perhaps this is the legacy of 2010.

I can see many intersections that come together around questions of saving things: whether it's harvesting and preparing for the winter, saving our country and the upcoming elections, and questions in my job about documentation and preserving in material form the work we do. I have also recently explored the work of professors Fred Myers, Haidy Geismar, and Craig Campbell, who all focus on art and material culture and how it is represented or deployed. And most concretely, my parents are packing up their house in Virginia for a move to Nebraska, sifting through their belongings and making decisions about "what stays and what goes." Sifting and sorting seem to be the order of the season.

The criteria we use in saving things is important, I think - I imagine, perhaps naively, that what we choose to save reveals something about who we are. Collectively, as a nation, but also down to the familial level. Perhaps that's why this natural cycle is so beautiful - it clarifies what is important, what is worth being around, in, keeping. It is sobering to look at friendships, jobs, habits, and belongings and evaluate what is helpful to us, and what can be discarded - getting rid of what is no longer useful does not mean the act of discarding is not painful.

I have read, between Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle & other literatures about the crisis in farming and especially around seeds. Producing heirloom vegetables has become difficult, with corporations like Monsanto putting patents and prohibitions on farmers who have grown similar crops (see Vanity Fair expose here). I came across a local "seed bank" - like a library, but for seeds - a way to keep a record, reproducible if and when needed and desired, to promote and sustain generations of natural diversity. Here is a link to the Hudson Valley Seed Library, folks who are saving the seed legacy of the possibilities for growing plants in our area.

Seeds is a lovely metaphor for fall, the idea of something with explosive and powerful potential locked away underground, that something can look like nothing but then surprise us with its bounty, that the surface doesn't always tell the whole story, challenging us to look - and to dig - more deeply. John Butler wrote a song called "From Little Things Big Things Grow." Here he relates the story of an Australian who fought the government and big interests for his land, sitting in his struggle for 8 years, in a simple environment - waiting for the seeds of justice that he had planted to grow. The song is a great exhortation to plant seeds, however small - but to realize that change takes time, and that everything beautiful, good and true takes time to root, to flower, to reach full glory. It requires patience (not my strong suit), but ... nothing is possible without the seed. So we should plant seeds of hope in our speech, in our everyday lives, in every manner we can, striving for what we believe in, knowing that every small act is potentially the genesis of something deeper, wider, and more vibrantly beautiful than we can possibly imagine.


from The Airlie Center
Warrenton, VA
11.1.2010

Coming Up on October

"October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight." -

Thoreau, "Autumnal Tints"

Another year is closing, we are forewarned by the crisp breeze, the leaves, the squash, the apples, the pumpkins...Parker Palmer writes that times of deep rest are necessary for us, but there is so much to accomplish before that deep rest can set in, so much I'm trying to build that must be finished, metaphorically and physically, before winter sets in.

Times, they are a changin'...

The summer is burning herself out here - a few days ago, as I came down my bike on our street, I looked up to see the leaves on the trees lining the brownstones turning shades of burned red and brown, the first glorious harbingers of fall. The heat wavered for a minute, giving us two days, before returning to show that summer wasn't quite spent, not quite yet.



Without intending to be a seasonal reader, I finished Jeffrey Lent's In the Fall, a novel about three generations of a Vermont family grappling with its own history. The first thing I noticed about Lent's writing is his use of fragments. All the time. On purpose. I think. I'm not sure if this is his writing style generally, as this is his first novel and the first (if there are more) of his that I have read, but it is a style well-suited to a novel with this subject material. The story of Leah, a runaway slave whose sad history included being gang-raped and mistreated by her white slave-owning father, is tragic but unfortunately believable; less believable is her marriage to Norman Pelham, a northbound Yankee soldier. Norman and Leah return to Vermont to start a family; their children and grandchildren's lives are recounted to the steady metronome of the passing seasons. The novel ends with Foster Pelham's discovery of his grandmother Leah's origins in Sweetboro, his own ancestry, and the despicable cause of Leah's catastrophic suicide. Lent makes one thing clear: that through the years, many things come to pass and many things change but the sourest parts of human nature - its predatory instinct and the young child's cruel tendency to exclude, construct hierarchies, and inflict pain for the simple fact that he can - remain. These insights are timeless in their relevance; the focus on family, ancestry, marriage and children struck me particularly as I am learning to articulate these things for myself and from the new position of fiancee. I have already learned that weddings are stupidly complicated and arrive with a set of nuanced politics all their own. Families and lineages blending creates quite a stir, and everyone has at least one opinion on the way "things should be" that renders it impossible to please anyone, accomplish anything, or celebrate one's own life choices in a way one sees fitting. I am calmed only by the knowledge that this fluster, too, shall pass.

It seems ironic to read a book called In the Fall right as fall begins, but perhaps it can offer a gentle harbinger of the delights to come, and a lesson for the churning negotiations of the moment. Living in New York has been a lesson in patience and the acceptance of the natural world's insistence and cyclical nature, but having weathered a few seasons I feel now excited for the particular joys of the next: scarves, windy streets with fallen leaves dancing down them, pumpkin lattes, cider with cinnamon sticks, squash, the last crisp fall apples, and those glorious sharp icy blue days before the chill sets in for the winter. And then, there are months of dormant grey-white, snowballs, stews, boots, hats, and empty streets, beaches, yards...perhaps the wisdom being to appreciate where I am, fully enjoy the blessings and treasures of the moment while quietly laughing at the elements of the ridiculous that manifest themselves, and to absorb it all for what it is, not trying to change it...but just, to ride the seasons of life with a good sense of humor, a voracious appetite for life, and an eye for the beauty in it all, loving it, just for what it is.