Category Archives: Essays

Revisiting “The Long-Legged House”

Posted on by
4

I’ve been rereading one of Wendell Berry’s early works, the title essay of his first published collection The Long-Legged House. He describes a camp on the riverbank, built by his great-uncle, and its significance to him over the course of his life. Eventually, Berry rebuilds (partially recycles, using walls and materials from the original house) the camp further up the bank and it comes to be his writing place.

Among other things. Over the course of his life, the camp is a solitary retreat, a place where a confused adolescent gains a sense of stability, a place where he does some of his most important reading, a place where he and his wife spend the first three months of their marriage, a place where he awakens to his sense of calling and purpose, as writer and as human being.

The last time I read this, I was a graduate student. It was different this time, reading it as a wife and mother and home schooler. I noticed different things, and I’m ashamed to say I felt something like envy at Berry’s good fortune in having such a place, and so many opportunities for quiet reflection. But I also felt the sense of kinship that first drew me to his writings.

The importance of Berry’s voice in my life started with the first book I read, The Memory of Old Jack, and the recognition I felt when I saw in Jack Beechum some of my own feelings and values. With “The Long-Legged House,” I felt even more strongly this time that sense of recognition. It’s in this camp beside the river that the desire to know his place is kindled in Berry. He becomes aware that the earth is not simply an “inert surface that man lives upon and uses,” but a whole interrelated network of relationships that he lives more within than upon. “We are the belongings of the world, not its owners,” he realizes. As he reads and writes and thinks there, he looks out at the natural surroundings and begins to notice things he’s never really paid concentrated attention to before.

Carolina wren

It was thrilling to recognize so many of the very things I’m noticing this year too, as our family has embarked on our nature study journey: a squirrel building its nest, who never carries its mouthful of leaves up the tree but takes a complicated route involving many blind leaps instead; the Carolina wren, who belts out his song “as though he could not bear to live except in the atmosphere of his own music”; titmice and chickadees scolding an owl, letting loose “a great backlog of invective” as they seem to dare one another to get ever closer to the owl’s sleeping place; the discovery of the warblers. He learns the names of trees and flowers and birds. He gets a pair of binoculars that “enlarge and intensify” his awareness in much the same way the camera has begun to do for me this year.

One of Berry’s great predecessors in the nature writing genre is Aldo Leopold, whose Sand County Almanac laid out the case for what he called a “land ethic” in terms compelling enough that many acknowledge him as the father of conservation. In “The Long-Legged House,” Berry is writing about the emerging relationship between himself and his place. But he is modelling something I see happening in my family, too. One of the things I have wanted to give my daughters is a few places to love, a few places where we are coming to know what Berry would call “the nonhuman life” of the place. We don’t have a large plot of land or a camp by the river, but we have some preserves we’re so grateful we can visit and explore, and we’ve found within them some favorite niches. That love is the beginning of a land ethic. (Is love the beginning of all ethics?)

Nesting squirrel

Berry has written many essays over the years, but these early ones are my favorites. They have all the exuberance and deep conviction of discovery. Reading them, I feel affirmed and inspired in some of my own much more fumbling attempts to guide my children toward a richer comprehension of the world and their own lives. Berry was a young man when he wrote these essays; I’m in my forties. But I can relate to the delight and sense of gathering momentum that seem to emanate from the pages of “The Long-Legged House.” It’s the delight of awakening to a goodness in the world, goodness under threat and unobtrusive, but still available to anyone who will notice. Somehow, in some way I don’t understand yet, I feel that venturing out into that world is a part of what Berry calls “a journey from the sound of public voices to the sound of a private quiet voice rising falteringly out of the roots of my mind.”

I’m grateful for the hours Wendell Berry spent before his 40-paned window beside the river, writing about what was unfolding before his eyes and within his character. It confirms me as I sit at my kitchen table, taking in the activity in the brush out back and letting my eye wander to the hills across the Susquehanna a few miles away. Sometimes it’s our most deeply held ideals that seem to emerge most falteringly in our lives. (Why is that?) We need authors who breathe life into them by going before us and putting them into words more eloquent than any we could come up with ourselves, and taking them farther than we can currently see. Berry reminds me that something as simple as looking out the window can become a vehicle for the gathering  and clarifying of a life.

An Altar in the World

Posted on by

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith is a beautifully written contemplation on the ways ordinary living can intersect with the divine. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the everyday disciplines that become portals into God’s presence: paying attention, wearing skin, getting lost, encountering others, feeling pain. It was not surprising to discover late in the book that Brother Lawrence is one of Taylor’s spiritual mentors, because in one important way her perspective resembles his: no earthly activity is too humble to be a meeting place with God.

An Altar in the World is an eminently practical book. Each chapter proposes not a theory or teaching, but a practice. I liked this feeling of being anchored in the good world God made. Taylor writes poetically, and with a wit that reminded me a little of Anne Lamott without the shock value. Taylor is an Episcopal priest who left parish ministry to teach college, and though I come from a different theological background I found her to be a delightful guide — honest, wry, and at times profound.

I’ve quoted several passages from the book over the last few days. But I wanted to include another from the chapter on feeling pain, where Taylor discusses the book of Job. She comments,

One night of real pain is enough to strip away your illusions about how strong you are, how brave, how patient and faithful. Who would have thought that a torn cornea could hurt all the way down to the soles of your feet? Who would have imagined that a really bad case of food poisoning could make you doubt the mercy of God? You do not need a torturer standing over you to recognize the direct link between pain and truth. Pain is so real that less-real things like who you thought you were and how you meant to act vanish like drops of water flung on a hot stove. Your virtues can become as abstract as algebra, your beliefs as porous as clouds.

See what I mean? Over and over as I read, I felt the pull to buy the book (I read a library copy) just for the pleasure of owning words like that. The chapters on pain, Sabbath, paying attention, and wearing skin were favorites out of the dozen practices addressed.

The chapter on prayer didn’t resonate with me as well; I felt a little lost. I couldn’t really relate to Taylor’s reluctance to say that God answers prayer:

The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom. Only you can say whether God answered you. If you have any sense, you will ask someone with more experience than you to help you decide what the answer means, but even then the choice is yours. Are you still waiting for God to answer you, or is your life the answer you have been seeking, hiding in plain view?

While I would agree that God’s dialogue with us is personal — a fact that Jesus illustrates over and over in the gospels by answering other questions than the ones people are actually asking him — I don’t think it’s helpful to open up a question about whether he answers at all. Scripture seems pretty plain on that: he does. Even though we all struggle at times with what seems like his silence.

I also think that though Brother Lawrence was onto something in offering his activities and bodily life to God — we are to do “everything in word or deed as unto God” — there is also a verbal component to prayer that I certainly need. I get tired of it sometimes; it’s a burden to be always having to formulate words in prayer, and I will lapse into phases of wordless, rather vague meditation “in God’s presence.” But then I’ll wake up in the middle of the night some night — as happened recently — and realize, “I miss you, God.” It’s my words that somehow form a bridge, a meeting ground. They offer some terms in which God’s answers can be recognized, whether through insight or solution or event or transformed perspective. I need the mundane labor of words, and I need the commitment of words, in my relationship with God — even though temperamentally, I’m someone who seems always to be craving silence.

An Altar in the World engaged me on several levels and I found it deeply satisfying. It sends me back into my life with a heightened sense of its richness. It is full of altars, and full of purpose — something I know, but which seems more real after having read this.

Marvelous luggage

Posted on by

Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. Bodies take real beatings. That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle. That they give birth is beyond reckoning. (Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Practice of Wearing Skin”)

Am I the only one who has to do this more than once in my life?

When I was in high school, I worried so much about my weight that I developed bulimia. In graduate school, I took up running and slimmed back down, but I still bear the aches and pains of my foolish refusal to stretch out those muscles before or after running. Then I went through pregnancy twice — which was really not bad; I liked the fact that my body changed, and was supposed to. (I certainly liked the outcome of pregnancy!)

Now I’m in my forties and it’s wrinkles, fading hair, freckles, slower metabolism, and other strange developments that tempt me to dissatisfaction at least, loathing at worst. It seems to be a lifelong process, this coming to peace with one’s body. I seem to depart into this or that other vision at every phase, a vision of some other Janet with some other body. But my own body never departs. There it is, patiently waiting in the mirror to be noticed and accepted.

Barbara Brown Taylor proposes that choosing to live contentedly within one’s own body can be a spiritual discipline, an act of worship — not worship of our bodies, but of the God who made and loves them. It can reveal knowledge of God, who quite purposefully took on a body himself in the pivotal moment of human history, and he keeps it still. “Here we sit,” she writes, “with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body.”

These are good words. Today I choose again to accept this “marvelous luggage” as God’s gift to me. Let that be a starting point to whatever new knowledge of him he wants to impart.

Learning Curve

Posted on by

I’m trying to learn how to photograph birds in flight. I’ve taken so many pictures, and few if any have turned out. Today I’ve done some reading on the subject and feel encouraged; there are some things I can do, some adjustments I can make, to improve.

Meantime, I’ve been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, so far a very satisfying book about cultivating a sacramental approach to life. She talks a fair amount about nature, and about the need to be willing to stop and pay attention. She sounds a little bit like Brother Fowles in The Poisonwood Bible when she writes,

Like anyone else, I do some picking and choosing when I go to my holy book for proof that the world is holy too, but the evidence is there. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.

Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture.

I have been learning to pay attention with a camera, and it’s strange the hold it has taken on me. Who needs so many pictures of birds and butterflies and flowers and landscapes when we can look around and see them all with our naked eyes? I don’t know. But there is something about the camera around my neck that has improved my naked eyes — or improved the nerve pathways from eye to heart. I believe that God loves it when we admire his world, and I have reaped the benefit in sheer pleasure as I notice things I never noticed before.

It’s a learning curve of sorts — learning to see, and to capture what I see, and to read it. Yesterday I watched this young hawk for awhile, and it seemed to be experiencing a learning curve as well, navigating the breezes and trying to decide whether I was friend or foe. The pictures are not sharp, but even so they give the sense of the bird’s grandeur even in its indecision and awkwardness. Maybe next time, I’ll capture it better. Meantime, it’s a picture of young royalty — a red-tail whose tail is not yet red, whose instincts are not yet wise to humans, but whose symmetry and strength inspire all the same.

 

The Lost Art of Reading

Posted on by

David Ulin’s Lost Art of Reading has been a thought-provoking little book. Described as a “ruminative essay,” this compact reflection on the distinctiveness of reading, and its role in an increasingly networked information age, doesn’t really make an argument against technology or predict the death of reading. But it does acknowledge some ways books and reading are being changed by technology, and makes a case for being proactive about finding ways to preserve the immersion act of deep reading.

This author has very different tastes in books than I do, and when he talks of his own literary autobiography — his experiences with various books that have shaped him in the course of his life — I’m rarely familiar with the authors and don’t relate very well. But we all have our own stories of books that have been important to us, and experiences of reading that we treasure.

Ulin makes reference to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (as well as other sources), a book I read and liked very much last year. But where Carr makes a thorough examination of the effects of the Internet on our brain “circuitry,” Ulin’s focus seems more personal. How should we respond to the distractibility we develop when we spend time online? Ultimately his conclusion is not all that remarkable: “I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read.” There is a pleasure in the journey, though, as Ulin’s observations about why reading matters, and what we come up against as we seek to get lost in a book, strike many familiar chords. I really liked his analysis of reading on the Kindle, something he has mixed feelings about (as do I). It was an affirming read in this sense.

As I neared the end, I found myself paying closer attention to my own online habits, and it’s not pretty. The main thing I notice is how many times I feel the urge to go to the computer for something, and then I tend to drift out into Internet-land for much longer than I intended. So I started to challenge that urge by setting a time for computer work, closing the laptop, and keeping a notebook and pen close by to write down anything that occurred to me to do online: check the weather; check email; see if Jessie Wise has a 5th grade grammar book coming out; track the packages that should be arriving this week; check on some blogs; visit the IEW website to see if my feelings have changed about that writing program’s approach; blog post ideas; et cetera...

I saved these tasks till the designated time, then sat down with my list. It felt good, and it worked pretty well; I closed the laptop again when I was done. I’m going to keep doing it. (Not even New Year’s yet, and this sounds like a resolution.) It was a small thing, a small boundary, but it helped to keep me more fully available to my offline life, which includes important (loved) people and things to do, along with some drudgery — and some reading time. I used it to finish up this book. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read The Shallows. Otherwise, start with that one. Like this one, it’s not a polemic, but it does establish a foundation that makes a more narrowly focused book like this one more meaningful.