today is a quiet day...

Today is a quiet day here in the Berkshire hills. Well, to be honest, for me and mine, everyday is a quiet day here in these Berkshire hills. With the exception of a few late winter romps in the back with our grandchildren, I have not walked around to look at the ground since late October. So on this quiet day, I am simply going to go and see what's happening all around me on the outside of our home. There are twings and branches to pick up for sure - not raking or serious cleaning until we've had a least a week above 50F - and that's not likely to be any time soon. The little critters and insects need this covering to help them prosper. No clearing out our garden beds yet either.

But given the recent winds, there's dead wood that needs to go. Probably a few other types of debris as well. I'm curious if any of the early wild flowers will return this year. It's time to rehang the outdoor windchimes, repair the arbor, measure the new raised garden beds for their soon to be created wooden frames, and slowly and quietly let it all soak in. It is ctime to get out of my head for a spell. Two recent quotes have nourished this notion that I'm about to re-enter a season of incarnation rather than mere intellectual abstraction. 

The first comes from Alejandro Frid's reflection in YES Magazine re: resilence. He writes: "The world will unravel but you will not."

These words reflect the worldview that has overtaken me while working at the front lines of conservation science alongside undying Indigenous knowledge. In a world of accelerating climate disaster, political doublespeak, and horrific colonial legacies, the conviction that we can remain our essential selves throughout the unraveling is what gets me up in the morning. Most entities—biological, cultural, personal, planetary—can absorb shocks and still maintain their essence. This is what we call resilience.We log a forest, but given enough time and a stable climate, a community of trees returns that supports myriad organisms, from lichens to goshawks to fungi. This new community does not replicate the one before, yet the interrelationships that define it advance legacies and adaptations from the ancestral forest. (YES @ https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/personal-journeys/2022/02/16/climate-scientist-indigenous-resilienceutm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YESDaily_%2020220324&utm_content=YESDaily_%2020220324+CID_fe53857eeb44b79d3a9033ef009547bc&utm_source=CM&utm_term=Read%20the%20full%20story)

The second hails from David Whyte's words about courage in the Network for Grateful Living newsletter.

COURAGE is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public, to show courage; to be celebrated in story, rewarded with medals, given the accolade, but a look at its linguistic origins is to look in a more interior direction and toward its original template, the old Norman French. Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

(https://gratefulness.org/resource/couragedavidwhyte/utm_source=A+Network+for+Grateful+Living&utm_campaign=d298942b2dnewsletter_october_2020_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c606570b82-d298942b2d-114377265&mc_cid=d298942b2d&mc_eid=cad6d30e04)

Now that the Vernal Equinox has come and gone, her hint of warmer days still lingers and encourages me to put my winter spirituality to bed. The cold and dark calls us to attend to the inward truths for to everything there is a season. As our extended New England darkness prepares to retire, however, I can feel that my flesh is eager to let it go. I suspect that's part of what our up-coming benefit concert is about: reconnecting to the values, people, and commitments of love in public. So, too, the ukelele class with Conte elementary school children. This small, after school gathering allows me the space to make some music with Andy, meet new people whose lives would rarely intersect with my own, and do so in the context of something I love. Whyte puts it like this:

The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive. We become courageous whenever we live closely to the point of tears with any new possibility made known inside us, whenever we demonstrate a faith in the interior annunciations and align ourselves with the new and surprising and heartfelt necessities of even the average existence.

It will be sloppy, muddy, and damp. There's probably a few piles of dog shit laying around, too. But the sun is out, the rain is waiting, and my soul says winter is dying: long live the spring.