Oak Lessons

Splitting some sections of new oak today, out of long habit wielding maul and wedge without too much thought: not hurrying to get the job done, just hitting the wedge a couple of times and pausing, listening for the tiny sounds that are oak's language of compromise, then hitting a couple times more, pausing again, actions my body and mind have learned to do without me... It surprised me enough to ask myself: When had I learned that? 

How had I acquired the ability to dialog with oak? I had often been in a hurry during the early firewood years, so I had to learn that oak yields slowly and at the price of effort, which is the nature of things in general, oak responding perhaps a little more fairly and intelligently than other materials. So I guess by force of habitual listening I learned when to move and when to wait, so as not to do twice the work for half the result. It doesn't pay to be pushy; oak isn't dumb just because it talks in whispers. 

Being wild, oak is also pretty wily, and has its quirks. If you insist on your way, oak will make you wait, one way or another. If in your interactions with that wood grain you try to hurry, in time you'll get angry and lose, because if there’s one thing oak knows, it's duration. If you're angry splitting oak, you're beside the point.

Then some time later comes the big oak lesson: your mind knows more than you do.

Spirit Line

When you talk to yourself - and we all talk to ourselves, especially when we become elders, having improved over the decades into scintillating conversationalists - you're generally after clarity or understanding, working out an idea or seeking resolution, somewhat like traditional prayer in many respects except for one key point: it is not other directed. It is not not a plea for help from elsewhere, but a conversation with the closest presence of what most folks call god. 

When we talk to the god in ourselves, however, we are talking to an entity we know to be extant; no need to conjure faith out of printed matter. It feels comfortable and comforting to talk this way-- it feels natural, and there is a listener; it is also something to do in a tight spot, an action to take, if only to say something. What's better, it can guide us toward a solution that arises from all the tomorrowstuff our bodies in their ancientness know like the back of our hands.  

We spend our early lives asking upward, looking to our elders for such answers as we can find there, and when at last we have no elders but are the elders, we keep on asking upward, though now we ask of the height in ourselves, of the spirit that embodies us, that in every living person reaches directly back to beyond the start of time. 

We can speak to spirit about anything - and without reservations, since it is our own - most often about the lower, immediate emotions that ever trouble the bodied. It is best we ourselves deal with our own problems, to the extent we can, learn from them as we have evolved to do. We grow strongest without leaning.

The strength we have gained of ourselves is of greatest value, worthy of passing on down the spirit line.

SURFING THE LEARNING CURVE

I haven't yet completed my anti-monkey garden Cube Noir, which I will do in a month or so when I attached the nets monkeys hate (or so it says on the label) to the tall fence posts my friend Ian and I put up last fall. At that time I'd already had my rows of winter vegs covered in hoops and nets, so I just left them that way.

After a while, with the growth under the nets not bothered by deer or monkeys I began to think that maybe after all I might possibly be able leave the garden that way (except maybe for tomatoes), rather than carry out Cube Noirization. Then a few days ago I was at home when a horde of monkeys were wandering by on their way to their upmountain fastnesses, most of them youngsters gamboling free range in the natural setting, picking up random thieving skills from their unscrupled parents.

One large male professor of brigandage invaded my garden while the simian university students watched from afar on their big campus. I watched from the kitchen window to see what the alpha guy would do about the nets-- if he would know that they were nets, what was under them and how to get at it. This was the crucial moment: if he noted no onions - monkeys most beloved food in my garden, as chronicled at length herein on several occasions (one of the nets covered three rows of onions) - then I might not have to go all Cube Noir on their simian butts.

The Prof swaggered into my garden like a simian John Wayne into a Dodge City bar, took up a key position and scanned the scene, locked on to the nets, pondered them, hand to chin like the Thinker with fur and a red face, then walked to one and grabbed at it, hefted it, fingered it, ran it through his simian databank, looked though it, tried to lift it (pinned down with logs and rocks), found the edge, found where he could create just enough of a gap to get his hand through and bring me charging out from the kitchen door shouting with a rock in my hand inspiring him to reflexively dash to safety with a handful of something maybe some cabbage but not onions, as I pointed out loudly to his fleeing back that this was my garden, I'm in charge here and he shouldn't forget it, he and his students know what will happen if I ever etc., but the students in their big amphitheater just yawned like this was Economics 101 after lunch, some lessons just get no traction.

So it looks like the Cube Noir for me, but I already suspect it won't work. It sure as hell wouldn't keep me out if I was hungry, homeless, characteristically unemployed and covered in fur. Also, I had seen the beast thinking. But if there's one thing we self-named sapients know for sure, it's that even if we don't know beans at the moment, in one way or another we can figure things out. All we have to do is get out there, get the right perspective and scan the scene, find the edges and give it a try, yes, even Cube Noir the place-- so what if we get a handful of nothing; taking action is the whole point.

Great discoveries lie ahead; the simian life is just one big learning curve.

TURNING MY HAND

Grandchildren, among all their other unknowing kindnesses, point out to us one by one, step by step, all the countless things we ourselves had to learn (or unlearn) to become as and who we are. With our own children there was no time in the blur to note such fine points; this new privilege is another of the gifts that grandkids bring to us in their little hands.

When they come to visit, and out in the garden I give them a rake or a shovel to help me with, I am caught unawares by the fact that they don't know how to use these things (that's not inborn?!) so I have to show them how to hold them and then how to use them (I used to not know how to use a shovel and a rake!), and for example how to extra-hold the rake with one hand so as to pick up leaves against it with the other hand (I had to learn that!), or how to best light a fire (they touch the lighter to the top of the leafpile) so I show them how heat rises, and they feel a new power when they light the pile at the bottom and the fire complies; how to get leverage when using pruning shears (they love the sharp knowledge of cutting stuff into pieces) and how to hold a pruning saw (the branch came off!) and then in the house when I add wood to the woodstove, whatever they're doing the twins run to look through the open stove doorway into the fire, amazed that there's a blazing fire here in our own living room-- in all their few years they've never seen such a thing! Big sister Kaya likes to add some wood to the fire; when I open the stove door she gets a stick from the kindling pile, tosses it in quickly and gingerly, pulling back at the heat, the twins still just watching from a distance that inferno roaring with all its red tongues right here in the room inside that open door, and what amazement it is in myself to behold in the grandgirls the fascination at every single detail of all these things, all these actions and tasks, right down to the heft and weft of the mass of the nature and the gravity, every second of having to learn how water behaves, and ash, and leaves in the wind, and dirt and fire and spark, handle and blade and twig, how to run with boots on sandals on sneakers on barefoot going updown stairs and hills on grass or snow or sand the infinity of it all how ever do we do it, how do we ever learn it all, how ever do we make it to my age, where I stand right now without the slightest idea of how many such things I've come to know, or how I learned them like turning my hand...