And Tomorrow The Same

Mid-winter. The snow is laughably deep. We slip and shuffle on the boot-packed chore trails, wallow and wade everywhere else. We spent much of the weekend in the woods, cutting and splitting firewood as the snow fell around us. Not heavy, but steady, almost constant. You could reach out a gloved hand and watch the individual flakes land, held for a moment in suspension, before melting into the work-warmed leather.

In the radio segment I linked to yesterday, the author being interviewed talked about how the human brain has been steadily shrinking for a century or more, the result of our dependence on industry to provide. No more must we understand the minutia of our environment or even how to effectively wield our bodies against a stick of stubborn birch or beech. No more must we know how to erect our shelters, cut the pig so it bleeds quick, sow the seed and tend the seedling, work alongside our children, talk to and learn from them, discern the deadly galerina marginata from the delicious and profuse honey mushroom, entertain ourselves, make soup from scratch, tend our wounds.

I think of one of the paragraphs of the article I mentioned a couple of posts back: Each area of our lives that we dare to look upon with brutal self-honesty and see for what it truly is, through the veil of conformity, and thus take responsibility for changing, will be a significant and imperative key to rewrite the codes that govern our lives. It will not happen overnight and it will not be a global revolution where the whole world will joyously join together in some grand awakening. Instead it will happen one individual at a time, on a one-on-one level, from within the very depths of the system, in the miniscule seemingly insignificant everyday moments of our lives.

I like that paragraph a lot. I like it because it promises little while demanding much (it’s no small think to see through the veil of conformity, after all), and to me, that suggests honesty. And maybe I like it because it mirrors my experience, which is that the “minuscule seemingly insignificant everyday moments” of my life are precisely the ones that form the bridge between the brokenness of this world and its possibilities. I know this is a privilege.

So I guess I take some comfort in knowing that I can do the little things I mentioned above. And I can do them over and over and over, make them so routine as to seem insignificant. The maul rising and falling, the way our porch will soon be a sea of green shoots, even the soup we ate for dinner last night, full of mushrooms from the woods, the onions that grew from last spring’s green shoots, the beef we took last summer, warted carrots from the root cellar.

No grand awakening, and my brain arguably still too small. Just firewood. Just plants. Just dinner.

And tomorrow the same.