28 ~ Welcome back

These have not been easy days since my brother’s death a few weeks ago, and one thing I can do for my soul is return to the slipstream of writing.  It is good to be back.

My brother found peace in this life elusive.  His was not an outlier of the human condition, and I have found comfort in some words of wisdom from ancient China, which go like this:

When a child is born, everyone is smiling and only the baby is crying, because the baby knows the suffering of human life it has been born into.

Later, when death inevitably comes, everyone is crying, and only the dead is at ease, because the dead one knows the peace they have returned to.

Welcome back to peace, Buzz.

I’ve also discovered healing solace in trout fishing - in pulling on my waders, stepping alone into a Driftless stream and, beneath the shade of late summer trees, feeling the cool water flow around my feet and legs.  And given that one generally works upstream when trout fishing, the small clouds of silt and debris flow behind and away from me - while I look ahead, upstream, searching for the next miracle, the next blessing of trout.

Perhaps stream trout fishing is more than just a wonderful metaphor for healing from loss.  Maybe some of my sadness is literally, and not just figuratively, washed downstream, to be cleansed and metabolized on the long trip to the Gulf of Mexico.  Einstein, afterall, showed us that there is no fundamental difference between energy and matter, and it is increasingly understood that trauma is held energetically in the cells of our bodies. 

The more we can lean into life, be open to its miracles, and not confine experience solely to metaphor, the deeper our experience of life and its mysteries can be. Maybe, the bluebird isn’t just a symbol of our happiness, it is our happiness, carried aloft on its wings as we watch it.  Or as my teacher Martín Prechtel put it, “Everything is a divination”.

Despite the pain and confusion of my brother’s passing, I don’t believe he died ‘early’ or ‘prematurely’.  He died exactly on schedule, for the unique arc of his life.  “Punctual as death”, as Dylan Thomas wrote.  But that doesn’t mean grief is absent. It has still entered without knocking and set down its suitcase. Yet it is a guest I must honor.  Grief, afterall, is praise for the one we loved and lost.  There is a way, and only one, to have no grief in life: have no love.

Grief is integral to the flow of our lives.  At times our waters will be roiled by violent flash floods of loss and grief, and at other times our streams flow easily and clearly, the riffles murmuring old folktales and Norse sagas.  It’s all the same stream, which, after a storm, returns to calm - if the flood is not resisted. And the miracles, the trout, are always there, ready to be found again when the time is right.

This morning I started a charming book, Trout Central: 50 Best Wisconsin Driftless Trout Streams, which I picked up at the Viroqua farmer’s market, from a table manned by the book’s white-bearded author, Jay Ford Thurston.  I came upon this passage, on page 2, regarding stream gravel beds that are essential to trout for spawning:  “[W]hen we have a flash flood, the gravel beds are cleaned of silt to provide another good hatch of trout.  Two or three years after a flash flood we have excellent trout fishing.” 

Grief, too, properly honored and experienced, can paradoxically restore us in the same way.  The key is to turn it to beauty, and not allow it to stagnate into fixed regret or anger.  This requires letting it move, and to flow around us – wading into it deeply, rather than retreating or trying to dam it up. 

I hope to heaven my own funeral (and my brother’s) will be one with lots of tears, and not just an anodyne ‘celebration of life’. The latter is fine, and has a place – but only after moving into, through and returning from the deep pools of loss and grief.  My guess is that if in we shed more tears for our losses in this country, we’d be making fewer demands on opioids and alcohol.

Here on the farm front, in honor of and alignment with today’s full Corn Moon (and staying a step ahead of the raccoons, inshallah), this week I harvested the first of my Mayan blue corn (the seeds came originally from Martín Prechtel), which I’ll eventually grind into cornmeal.  And yesterday I made 14 lbs (6.4 kg) of red cabbage kimchi (second batch of the season), nearly all of the ingredients from the garden, including a collection of beautiful peppers.  The mix is now quietly fermenting in my stone fermentation crock (the gift of a kind, good soul, whom I believe prefers to remain anonymous).  You can find the excellent recipe I use here.

As we make this turn from August, the final whole month of summer, to the first month of autumn, I’ll leave you with a wonderful poem, by Philip Larkin.  It is one of my favorites, and hits my bullseye. 

Happy Corn Moon, everyone. I hope you can get out this evening to greet her in all her glory.

Mother, Summer, I

 My mother, who hates thunder storms,

Holds up each summer day and shakes

It out suspiciously, lest swarms

Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;

But when the August weather breaks

And rains begin, and brittle frost

Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,

Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born

And summer-loving, none the less

Am easier when the leaves are gone

Too often summer days appear

Emblems of perfect happiness

I can't confront: I must await

A time less bold, less rich, less clear:

An autumn more appropriate.