Mycorrhizae

With each new book about nature that I read, I find the story of competition for limited resources less and less compelling. The understories and overstories of trees are generous spaces, in which sick trees are nourished or dying trees send forth warnings of infestation that others may prepare against the onslaught. Stromatolites exist as a community of bacteria and other microorganisms, each contributing in its own way and reliant in its own way on the activities of others. We live in networks with one another, and we live and die by the strength of our community. If I lose, it is your loss too. If you lose, I grieve with you. Individualistic Western society embraced the model of survival of the fittest, but communalism recognizes that though this story has been explanatorily useful, it is not the final word.

A Long Overdue Meditation

"An so we've wrestled the cup out of Jesus's hand, and we've replaced it with a chalice, because who doesn't know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup? Never mind that Jesus didn't use a chalice, because if it's gold-plated and jewel-encrusted, it is more sacred." - Gregory Boyle

I don't know if I accept this without qualification. I can see a scenario in which love motivates the giving of the chalice into the hand of Jesus, not because it is more sacred, but because the crafting and purchase of it would have entailed sacrifices on the part of the followers. Is it so bad to wish to give something beautiful? I will not give offerings that cost me nothing.

But I think there is a lovely, quiet nugget of truth in the statement, which is that the humble everyday can be sacred. It does not take great gifts or great lengths to find the sacred into our lives. We can cherish what is small too: the blessings that don't cast a large shadow except in our hearts, the moments of generosity in friendship, the beauty of the natural and the mundane (taking a moment to give thanks for so much that we have the privilege to experience). The humble becomes sacred in how it is used, with gratitude, generosity, compassion, and love. And, since Boyle mentioned it, the same is true of the chalice.

Books of 2019

As is traditional, here is the list of books I have read in 2019. I was on quite a roll up until August, when to the surprise of no one, including but also except myself (what the conscious mind grasps can still startle the subconscious mind), it turned out that it was very hard to read much over and above my homework assignments. Still, I was please in reviewing the past few months to find that I had actually managed a fair bit, either through going to the Shakespeare Free Read-Aloud Group (yes, that counts) or through reading shorter works associated with the topics of my courses.

I don't have enough time or energy to go through and highlight or comment on the list as I've done in recent years, so formatting will have to suffice: Entries with an asterisk are those that most profoundly impressed or influenced my thinking or left me feeling intangibly richer for having read them. Entries in bold are ones that I read at the solicited recommendation of a friend. And a word to Dan, Kim, or Eli if you are reading this: your books are carrying over with me into the new year.

*The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World - Andrea Wulf
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Postliberation Eritrea - ed. Tekle Mariam Woldemikael
*Chesapeake Requiem - Earl Swift
*The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O’Conner
American Fascists - Chris Hedges
A Feast of Snakes - Harry Crewes
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
They Thought They Were Free - Milton Mayer
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories - Mark Twain
The Enchanted April - Elizabeth von Arnim
Finding God in the Waves - Mike McHargue
Labyrinths and Other Stories - Jorge Luis Borges
The Last Hours - Minette Walters
Oblivion - David Foster Wallace
*The Overstory - Richard Powers
The Concept of Law - H.L.A. Hart
The Country Girls - Edna O’Brien
Black Leopard Red Wolf - Marlon James
Known and Strange Things - Teju Cole
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
*Hadji Murad - Leo Tolstoy
Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Machado
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Munnu - Malik Sajad
Sula - Toni Morrison
The Mark of the Grizzly - Scott McMillion
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - Gabrielle Zevin
The Control of Nature - John McPhee
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
*War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia - Elizabeth Catte
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne - Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Circe - Madeline Miller
Sea Grapes - Derek Walcott
The Life and Death of King John - Shakespeare
Death and the Maiden - Ariel Dorfman
*Dopesick - Beth Macy
Five Moral Pieces - Umberto Eco
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Days - Salman Rushdie
Who Fears Death? - Nnedi Okorafor
Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare
States of Inquiry - Oz Frankel
*The Songs of Trees - David George Haskell
The Archivist Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order - Kate Eichhorn
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell
The Stone Building and Other Places - Asli Erdogan
*The Dark Fantastic - Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

What will I be reading in 2020? Currently, I'm halfway through The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, with The Science of Cheese and Underland on deck. My guiding selection principle for crafting a list of books to read is "books that are under 180 pages or over 500." It was only "under 180" until I realized that I need to read Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman this year, and the only way to get it on the list was re-drawing some inspired boundaries (or I guess I could have claimed that it was actually 5 180-page books in one volume, but I'm uneasy with universally applicable rules). Who knows? Maybe this will be the year that I finally read Gone with the Wind! I am still accepting suggestions for books under 180 pages, though if you've already mentioned one, it's already on my list.

In Praise of Winter

Everything goes away.

I’m never ready for this. It comes unwanted, sometimes expected, sometimes unexpected. I have embraced the beauty of autumn leaves: that which goes is beautiful in its going. But I have not embraced the beauty of their absence.

This has been a long year, a mad scramble to reconstitute my life in different spaces with different people, at home, at work, in my personal life, and now school, again, at long last. My personal upheaval was in large part a secondary effect of everyone else’s. Roommates getting jobs in New Hampshire, supervising attorneys leaving the firm and being replaced by unfamiliar people, close friends and family moving for school or for work or just because it was time. Each one feels like another pillar of my small, but happy life plucked away.

But I have survived, and so have those relationships. The going away is not always a death: or if it is, it’s merely the death of how things were, which opens up new possibilities. I now have an excuse to spend all of my vacation days in the Pacific Northwest (sisters, can we please plan a backpacking trip?), I’m getting to know Baltimore, I was “forced” to travel to Dublin where I met some lovely new people. I’m still in touch with the roommate, who keeps me apprised of all of her goings on, even though I forget her birthday every year. I’ve endured the separation of distance before, and yes, it may weaken some connections. But not always.

And into the vacuum created by all that has been removed, I discover something like perspective. Beneath the elegant draperies of autumn, the verdant glories of spring and summer, I hid the branches that, bound together, make up the bare facts of myself. To be fair to the flowers and leaves: we are social beings and those are no less a part of us, but they are the part that exists in dynamism. Beneath them, there is slower growing wood, which does not flaunt its transformation but shifts slowly, in secret, unrecognized until the abrupt removal of its cover reveals all that has taken place in the intervening seasons.

The birds will return in their time - indeed, not all have flown away, or if they have, they’ve been replaced by winter migrants: dark-eyed juncos, standing out against the snow. For now, I will look to the inner parts with the gardener’s eye for the shaping, the shifting, the pruning. I will love this tree that is my own, and tell it all about spring, but also tell it not to waste the winter, to let the cold sweeten its sap as it sends its roots down deep into the earth, and there perhaps find that there is still warmth in this world of white.

Second Lesson

This is the season of the autumn leaves. Clearly this is no literal accounting of time, when the snow outside my window, resting heavy on the porch roof, belies my words. But the leaves fall from the mallorn trees in Laurelindorinen, and Arwen lies down beneath them, and an age passes with her passing. The saddest scene in all the books was relegated to a paragraph in the appendices. The end after the ending. For first there were many goodbyes, and we, good readers, know of course that life goes on - happily ever after, we hope, but usually with more bumps, we suspect - and on until its ending. That many friends passing will eventually leave only one, the last one, with none to mourn, or at least - none who will understand the meaning of it all.

There is a being alone that brings life and light and gives the spur to creativity. Then there is a being alone that is a being left, alone, behind, the very last one. What to do when the leaves are falling, save to bundle up for the winter and say your prayers?