This past Sunday Margie and I wandered through five acres of
woods with our good friend, Joe Schwen, organic farmer extraordinaire. The woods belong to a neighbor of his, a place
where he has harvested wood for their furnace to warm their home through the
long Minnesota winter. It was a delightful day, fluffy clouds scattered across
a blue sky, with bright sunshine and about 65 degrees. The reason spring is so
delightful this far north.
Spring is a bit late here this year. We had a big snow (over
a foot) in May, and plenty of cloudy, chilly, rainy days since then, keeping
farmers, including Joe, out of their fields since they’ve been too wet for
planting. The weather has also meant that everything is rather lush with lawns
growing well and lots of underbrush in woods.
We were looking for morels. If you have never tried them,
you are missing one of the great delights of life. Though they look
weird—actually they look appalling, but let’s not go there—they are tender,
light, with a delicate flavor that is hard to describe. They are precious, so
we have them rarely, though we often stop and look longingly at them at
Farmer’s Market where they are usually priced at $28-$35/pound.
Because of their delicate flavor Margie usually makes them
simply, dipping them in a light batter and frying them gently in butter. I have
not been fond of mushrooms, finding them a bit slimy and earthy-tasting, though
I’ve grown to appreciate them. But I’ve loved morels from the first taste.
Margie often when hunting for morels as a child with her
mother, as she tells in The Exact Place,
and Joe often finds enough to sell at the Market, so I was in good company.
I’ve only found morels in the wild once, while fishing for trout along a stream
near Preston, MN. I wasn’t hunting for them, and the trout were not biting, so
I told Joe that if my record held we simply be enjoying a lovely walk on a
Sunday afternoon.
My main task was to try to not get too lost, which I failed
to accomplish. I expected to get lost, since I am so directionally challenged
that I use my car GPS to get around to some places here in Rochester, where I
have lived since 1981. After wandering for a while I texted Margie and told her
I was lost. She texted back that I should look at the sun and go towards 2
o’clock which was the direction of the road at the edge of the woods. The sun
was directly overhead.
Soon after entering the woods I watched Margie and Joe
disappear confidently into the greenery. At that moment I realized that hunting for morels was not what I was
doing. I was wandering aimlessly
around, and any morels I happened upon would be entirely providential. As
providence had it, I happened upon none.
As you can see, I found lots of mushrooms, however, and found each variety
lovely. They seemed to be lurking quietly in the underbrush, surprising in
their uniqueness, always living amidst decay. As if to say that somehow the
process of death ending life would not be allowed to be the final word.
There were also little flowers, often spreading out into
lush carpets and I hesitated to walk through them because I would step on the
some of the plants.
Some flowers seemed to float along the top of leaves, as if
in a subtle, quiet ballet that was in tune with its own music.
And there were Jack-in-the Pulpits, appearing in little
glades between stands of trees and growths wild raspberries whose thorns pulled
at my pants as I pushed past them.
The afternoon was a complete success. I got found,
eventually, or more precisely, found myself out of the woods to the road. I
loved the quiet, listening to birdcalls, the lush green growth, and the
numerous mushrooms peeking up out of the leaf and wood litter. A lovely Sabbath
rest.
Oh, yes: morels. Margie found a few, and Joe discovered a
thick stand of them as he walked back to the car. That too, was a success.
This weekend Margie and I took a day away, to be together,
to talk, and be refreshed. We determined not to hurry but to enjoy the
leisureliness of the time, to let things unfold quietly. Our topics of
conversation were only partially determined ahead of time—including some
speaking and writing we are working on—but that consumed only a portion of the
day. The rest of the time we talked about whatever came up, and enjoyed times
of silence together.
We drove to Minneapolis, and so began talking on the hour’s
drive from Toad Hall to our first destination: Black Sheep Coffee. We ordered
lattes (Margie’s was soy) and as always, found the atmosphere lovely and
refreshing. Then we drove to The Museum of Russian Art to see two shows: “Concerning
the Spiritual in Russian Art” and “Jewish Life in the Russian Empire:
Photographs from the Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia.” Lovely,
poignant, moving. Before having dinner at the Himalayan Restaurant (very good),
we wandered over to Lake Harriet, found a bench near the water and sat in the
sun.
The bench near Lake Harriet was situated between walking and
biking paths, so bikes swept by just behind us and people walked or jogged just
in front of where we sat. All ages were represented, some strolling leisurely,
some walking dogs or pushing baby strollers, others in pairs or little groups.
After sitting there for a while we realized we were hearing snatches of
conversations, so I started jotting down what we could make out.
(boy) …I didn’t know
if you needed a drink…
(woman) …I just don’t
feel like going to work tomorrow…
(woman) …they bought a
new coffee table… (woman) …and they
redid the tile, and they redid the bathroom, and the hall, and it looks
wonderful…
(man) …Triska! Triska!
No! No!...
(woman) …I said I was
definitely concerned about the conversation…
(man) …You can go
boating out there on this lake? (man) Sail
boating.
(woman) …so far my
white sheers go well enough…
(woman) …my friend and
I were starry-eyed…
(woman) …my bike is
really slow. I’ve got it in the highest gear though…
(man) …my flag holder
in front has created…
(woman) …I’m going to
start digging…
(man) …I didn’t really
feel good but I’m doing it anyway…
(man) …is that an
answer? (woman) What?...
(boy) …give me my bike
back, c’mon, give me my bike back…
(man) …I didn’t know
if that was the trade-in value…
(woman) …my shoulders
are sore, but I don’t know…
(woman) …black and
red, black, red dot, red dot…
(boy) …I need to go to
the bathroom (woman) Well right now
we are kind of moseying…
(man) … (laughs) I
should probably creep down (laughs)…
(boy) …faster, Dad…
(man) …and why is
that? (woman) It’s kind of cool. No…
(man) …no, we really
do (woman) I thought your mother took
care of it (man) Yeah, I did too…
(man) …another alternative
is to say to the group…
(girl) …zippity
zippity do…
(man) …I know it is so
annoying (woman) Yeah, Heather
watches people…
(woman) …is she
celebrating Mother’s Day? (man) Yeah,
my sister knows this seedy bar…
(woman) …my cousin
won’t make a dessert…
(young woman on cell phone) …so it is, like, possible, and she said, oh gosh yes, and I was like,
because I told her so, and she was like, literally overwhelmed…
And that’s the news from here.
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life,”
philosopher Dallas Willard
notes, “for hurry is the great enemy of spiritual
life in our world today.”
notes, “for hurry is the great enemy of spiritual
life in our world today.”
By that measure I’m in trouble.
In the days since I read that Willard quote (in an email
from The Trinity Forum), I’ve been trying to figure out the source of our
impulse to hurry. Some of it comes from habit, I suspect—hurry long enough and
it becomes a way of living that’s hard to change. We may not even notice that
we hurry, though your tendency to blow through life seems pretty obvious to me.
I suspect some of it comes from our world. We get used to things happening
quickly, begin to think it is our right not to have to wait, and hurry to get
everything in efficiently. Advances in technology mean we can be more places,
do more things, communicate with more people in shorter periods of time, and
soon our expectations require we hurry to live up to all that potential.
And if you are a Christian you are busy the one morning each
week (Sunday) when secular friends can sleep in, hang out at a coffee shop,
leisurely read the newspaper, eat a scone, and sip a latte. And at church we
often hear appeals to do some task, join some group, read some book or the Bible
more, attend some meeting, fill some need, go on some mission trip, help with
some potluck. We hurry to church and leave having a more hurried week.
So, I wonder just how we can possibly eliminate hurry from
our lives?
Somehow summer doesn’t seem like summer if we haven’t had
the chance to get outside the city for a while. Created from the stuff of the
earth, there is something in our humanity that responds naturally, viscerally
to the created world. Though on the side of personhood we share something that
sets us aside from the rest of creation in bearing God’s image, we are also
creatures and thus fit in creation with our fellow creatures. It is a
relationship both important and deep, and something to be both cherished and
nourished.
Last month Dave and Paula Kauffman once again loaned us
their cabin outside Minocqua, WI—such astounding generosity. The week there,
besides being a time to be with family, gave us the grace of time outside the
city.
Between the cabin and the dock is a massive white pine, one
of the largest and oldest trees on the lake. A red squirrel prowls its
branches, occasionally coming down the trunk to run frantically across the
ground to another tree. Lichens and other parasites colonize the branches and trunks with abstract designs of color and texture. Along the water is a small stand of hemlocks, their
delicate cones and two-toned needles (white on the underside) so different from
the bulk of the white pine.
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Rain has been regular this summer, so the ground is saturated.
Mushrooms sprout, some so tiny that they are hard to spot while others break up
through the leaf and needle litter in the woods like some mysterious white
growth bursting into view. Some were stout and flared, others neatly topped
like a table, and a few tall, delicate and slender. In several places I found
the fabled fairy ring, brownish tinted white mushrooms growing together to form
a circle in the grass. Mushrooms in a ring are connected by a lacey network of
threadlike mycelia spreading out underground, and as I walked around them I
wondered what was lurking unseen beneath my feet.
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At night loons cried in the darkness, their eerie calls
echoing over the water. Bald eagles floated effortlessly in the sky, one
swooping down to skim just above the surface to pluck a fish from the water. A
kingfisher sat on a branch of a tree near the lake over a body of reeds,
occasionally splashing down to catch dinner. One evening we were surprised when
a badger waddled across the grass. When we walked over to look it went under
the cabin’s front steps and froze, almost like it was daring us to come closer.
Instead we looked, and backed away, leaving it to whatever business it was on.
How is it that these things so refresh my soul? Why is it
that stopping to look, and watch, and listen, and be still nurtures our
humanity in ways that nothing else does? And how can I keep the memory of it,
of the glimpses of glory that nature reveals alive in my memory and heart now
that I have returned to my life in the city?
Total 2009 profits earned by the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank:
$46.1 billion.
Of all years since its founding, which was most profitable
for the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank: 2009.
Average number of hours/day a U. S. child spends using some
sort of electronic device (including watching TV): 7.6.
[“Harper’s Index” in Harper’s
Magazine (April 2010, p. 13, 82)]
How many Americans are stressed about work according to the
American Psychological Association: 62%
How many working days are estimated lost each year in the U.
S. due to stress related absenteeism: 275 million.
In the U.S., how much is spent each year on stress related
health care: $22.8 billion.
[“Under Pressure” in Fast Company (April 2010, p. 112)]
When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the U. S. Supreme
Court, the National Archives were responsible to release all documents relating
to her work while in government service. Turns out she had received 50,000
pages of documents from the Domestic Policy Council (where she had been deputy
director) and 30,000 from the Counsel’s office (where she was associate
counsel). During this period she sent 11,000 pages of emails and received
68,000 pages. The estimated total comes to around 160,000 pages of documents.
This represents four years of government service.
[“Politico Playbook Daily Update” by Mike Allen (May 16,
2010)]
I am reading, with two friends, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a novel set in New York City
in the years immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. I haven’t
gotten very far—only about thirty pages, actually—so this more like a report
along the way than a review. I’m already hooked, which is always a good sign,
drawn into the lives of Hans and Rachel van den Broek, and their son, Jake, and
Hans’ friend, Chuck Ramkissoon whom he met while playing cricket in a city
park.
Hans and his wife had recently moved to New York from
London, and then were forced to move into a hotel room when the Trade Towers
collapsed. Their apartment is shrouded in dust, and though their jobs are
secure, life, their relationship, their sense of belonging in New York are all
now shrouded with uncertainty. Rachel tells Hans she is returning to London
with Jake.
I felt my wife sit up.
It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some
perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some
attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone
mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly
over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette.
She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, “It
might even do us some good.”
It is Hans’ voice we hear in Netherland as the narration unfolds. But it was the next paragraph
that caught my attention. In it Hans lifts the veil, as it were, so we can see
more deeply into their lives. And as he provides a glimpse into this tiny slice
of the reality in which they live, he also allows us greater clarity about the
world in which we all move and have our being day by day:
There was another
silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom
of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were
unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings
we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself
overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress
and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove
from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake
for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state
of affairs, yes—but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines.
All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of
women’s magazines.
by Joseph O’Neill (New York, NY: Vintage Books; 2008) pp. 22-23.]
A few thoughts on time, energy, busyness, and the fact we are finite, limited creatures who were made to live and work in 24 hour days, 7 day weeks, with one full day in each week set aside for rest. (God called this arrangement “good,” by the way.)
From bnet business network:
Dr Richard Swenson, a physician who does a lot of work on margin and burnout, is fond of reminding people of Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your accomplishments or how tragic your defeats, approximately 1 billion Chinese don’t know and couldn’t care less.”
From lifevesting.com:
“Stress makes people stupid. Burnout reveals it to the world.”
Three suggestions about how to increase stress, reduce margin, and move towards burnout:
1.) Run on fumes for extended periods of time. Keep saying ‘yes’ to every request, demand, or suggestion that is hurled at you. Skip vacations and days off. Keep going with inadequate sleep. Over commit, believing that somehow, someday your boss and family with notice and reward you. Always be available to offer concern and help, but never place yourself in the position of accepting it.
2.) Continue to spend yourself in ways you aren’t talented or gifted. Keep doing extroverted things with your introverted personality, or vice versa. Neglect what you are passionate about in order to make a living. Never admit your limits or that you suck at some things—keep trying to improve.
3.) Eliminate all margin or gaps from your life. Have two phone numbers, text messaging and email, and keep on top of them all. Keep some sort of noise—TV, music, anything—in the background at all times. Always rush, and always arrive late. Put off everything until you absolutely have to do them.
If you decide to follow these three suggestions, please do the rest of us a favor and pin a note on your shirt where to send the body.
Last night I took a book of brief newspaper pieces by G. K. Chesterton to bed to enjoy before falling asleep.
I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary.
* * * * *
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooner of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.
* * * * *
I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold our European civilization together—one of which is “cigar.” As it was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said “cigar,” and he gave me a cigar. I endeavored while putting down the money to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular cigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill, seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particular article. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, and rushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing them upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the more cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars were brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had already had the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I was rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he was going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take the money and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant keeper (in whose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and I took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. I hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently to that unhappy man.
Source: Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton (Dover Publications: Mineola, NY; 1909, 2007) p. 7, 53.
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” [Mohandas Gandhi]
“I don’t know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest awhile.” [Max Forrester Eastman]
“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” [Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes]
“Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” [“Pooh’s Little Instruction Book”]
“To sleep is an act of faith.” [Barbara G. Harrison]
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under a tree on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water; or watching the cloud float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” [J. Lubbock]
While sitting in my daughter’s home, looking out her living room window at the lake surrounded by trees adorned in their autumn colors, I noticed a small book on her coffee table. It confirmed what I have long believed—that naps are a gift of grace, too seldom received with gratitude and embraced without guilt. Demonstrating this truth in our skeptical world is, I believe, a witness to the existence and mercy of God.
Source: Cat Naps: The Key to Contentment (Portland, ME; Ronnie Sellers Productions) p. 8, 13, 45, 87, 88, 102.
Our wedding anniversary actually came in June, but it was a busy time and a special enough milestone that we decided to wait to celebrate it until we took some time off in the fall. No big party, but the chance to be together for 2 weeks in a special place, in this case a beautiful townhouse loaned to us (more on that later) just outside the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
We even enjoyed the 2-day drive in Pearl Blue from Rochester. It was a chance for quiet, looking at the changing landscape (from gently rolling farmland to open ranch land to mountains), listening to music, and talking.
We’ve gone on several hikes, each memorable. One took us through woods, through two lovely meadows, to a cold stream so clear we could see trout, if we looked hard enough, hovering motionless just off the bottom. The air was full of grasshoppers, so we caught several and tossed them in the water. They would float in the current, then move, and in a flash a trout would rise to the surface and the grasshopper disappeared in a splash.
The chef is extraordinary; the restaurant is the sort of place where in between courses a server appears with something we didn’t order, “complements of the chef.” I suspect Margie will be blogging about the meal too, so I’ll just mention 3 (!) of the courses I had. For a starter I had Warm Heirloom Tomato & Goat Cheese Tart (with peppery greens and caramel vinaigrette). It was presented so beautifully I forgot to take a picture. To die for. My entree was Pan Seared Millbrook Farm Venison (with sweet corn flan & ragout of summer vegetables). To die for.
The last 6 months have been difficult financially, and for a time we did not know if we could make this trip. Income to Ransom has been very low, though opportunities to write and speak have been expanding. We are here, and were able to celebrate so royally at Devil’s Thumb due the generosity of dear friends. You are a grace to us, Henry and Peggy, and we are more grateful than we can possibly express. Thank you.