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
No comments:
Post a Comment