The Norm Report - Month #80
August 1, 2008 E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee's website: http://www.nopunish.net
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The greatest danger of all
is to allow new walls to divide us from one another…
The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least
cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes;
natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand.
These now are the walls we must tear down.
- Barack Obama
When I was attending Syracuse University in the Fifties and the tumult of campus life became too much to bear, I loaded up tent and sleeping bag, and Rex and I withdrew for the weekend to Letchworth State Park. It's a little-advertised park south of Rochester, on past Seneca Falls and Canandaigua. There the dog and I enjoyed a respite from campus clamor and tensions of classroom discussions and the incessant threat of exams and papers due.
We did nothing there but reconnect with the stunning natural beauty of that place, and absorb the quietude, the relaxing atmosphere of peace. No serious camping, no cooking fires or taking hikes or identifying from field manuals. We did not make work of it, or "a merit-badge learning experience". Some Cheddar cheese & crackers, a jug of water, and a can of KenL Ration, and we were content to just take in the pleasure and privilege of being a resident of this awesome planet. Returning to course assignments on Sunday evening, we were renewed and clear-headed, fresh again.
We sometimes forget we have gradually become trapped in the "rat race", accelerating on a "treadmill to oblivion", as radio comic Fred Allen expressed it so many years ago. People I talk with on the phone seem to be only partially there, and then I discover that they are doing the dishes or frying fish or driving the freeway or riding their bicycle. Multi-tasking makes human connection difficult if not impossible. One can't "be here now" when multi-tasking. That would be as foolish as practicing mindfulness breathing meditation while watching "As the World Turns".
The short essay below is one that I wrote in 1982 for "Homesteaders' News", the self-reliance magazine Sherrie and I founded and published. It expresses, to some extent, the spirit of our friends who sought to withdraw from the hurley-burley and pace of modern living, drop out of the competitive lifestyle, acquire an acre or five, built a cabin, raise their food, and live the Good Life.
THE BOTTOM OF SUMMER
© 1982 Norm Lee
There are always several remarkable days at mid-summer when everything in nature seems to come to a stop. It happens midway between Mayday and Halloween. Or count off equal days from the last frost in spring and back from first frost date in fall. There you'll find a few days - rarely a week - when nature stands perfectly still and quiet. The early garden has sated our hunger for greens and peas. The tomatoes are small and green and the corn is just going into silk. The plants seem to stay the same height for too long, yet you know they are growing. If you listen you can hear them stirring, ever so subtly, during the pauses while weeding.
It is neither the beginning nor the end. During the soft gray misting of dawn the lush wet jungle testifies to the richness of the earth. The brooding foliage manifests the silence of space. Daylight, having crept to its longest length for half the year, stalls at the prospect of shifting to reverse, seems reluctant to begin the trek toward winter.
It is the bottom of summer. The birds, delirious now with joy, talk of nothing but this hinge in time. This is, after all, the season earned in the struggle during the rest of the year. Half-grown rabbits hop by the hundreds in the brush by the back roads. Deer happily nibble tender leaves from apple trees, their tails switching furiously, signaling their intent to stare at us again to see if we have moved. Soon banks of wildflowers, having leaped through the fence into the garden, will blossom progressively into yellows, reds, whites, purples and blues, then bow out in shades of brown, with their stage-struck march toward fall. And the fireflies, now not nearly so numerous, continue still to blink their beacon way into the blackness.
All of nature seems to know that this is but a pause preceding the beginnings of the preparations for fall. An intermission, if you will, before the curtain rises on a drama that will climax with the outrageous colors of October, and finish with the falling of the December snows. But for now we can draw in long deep breaths and relearn how to see. How to smell, how to feel and to taste. In relaxing, we begin to feel human again, in touch with other humans. It is a time when being in a hurry feels like a crime against nature. Because nature itself is taking a few days off, and will not be disturbed. It is as Ogden Nash said about the ocean. Tiring of the demands of civilization, periodically it withdraws for while and hides. "And that, my friends, accounts for the tides."
In a silent walk among the spruce and oak in the warmth of a crimson evening, we become aware of the knowing among flora and fauna that we all ride this earth-boat together. During those moments when we aren't pushing and shoving each other for our "right" to tear up the plank that has our name on it, we might glimpse on a fast-forgotten fact: If we check the compulsion to fill all the time and all the space with divisions, diversions and distractions, there remains the perennial truth that, in reality, there is no separation. We might then wish to tape to the mirror the reminder:
As we do unto others,
we need to be mindful that
we are the others
- Norm
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