Good morning, readers.

The other night, during high winds and frigid weather, I was driving down our gravel road to meet a friend at the local, rural pub. In the pitch black evening, my headlights lit up a figure walking down the road with a headlamp. “Who is out in this weather?” I wondered.

I caught up, pulled over to see if they were okay, and was not surprised to find my neighbor – who shall remain anonymous but who any other neighbor could guess – looking for branches or trees that the high winds might have blown down onto the road.

No one would have known he was doing this had I not stopped. He was simply tending the hollow and his neighbors quietly – not podcasting about it, not Tweeting about it, probably even finding it silly that I’d be making anything of it here.

But I keep thinking of this encounter, and it has become symbolic to me: Despite delusions created by digital technology and political ideology, our actual responsibility is to the small portion of Creation where we dwell. Most saints of this world, and our world must be full of them, walk the path my neighbor walks – humble, quiet, unseen by the eye of the internet.

***

This post will be my last post for a while, as I’m taking a break from Substack. With the essay series on the home burial of my father complete, along with the growing darkness of the season, it feels like the right time for quieting down.

As a reader, I usually get bored of any writer at some point. Likewise, as a writer, there seems to be a natural ebb and flow to inspiration, and the industrial demand of regular production doesn’t match these cycles of creativity.

I’ll still be writing and working to get some writing into print. To that end, check out the Winter issue of Parabola magazine, which published the first of my Home Burial essays, as well as their spring issue on the Mystery of Time coming out in a couple months.

At some point, I do plan to start posting again at The Oar and the Umbrella, though I’m not sure when. For now, I’ll be learning from my neighbor, trying to give better attention to the nearby world – to my family, to the sheep and chickens we tend, to our many building projects yet to be completed, to our local community as well as our community at St. Elias Orthodox Church.

Starting today, I’ll pause billing on all accounts. The site will still be live, so any subscriber will be able to read any of my past essays. But until further notice, billing will pause for those who are paid subscribers. I am grateful to all readers, but as I begin my hiatus, a special acknowledgement to you who support my work with money. In our strange economy, your generosity stands out and is meaningful to my family.

That’s all for now. See you again down the road.

Peace,
Joe

“Artificial light broke the rhythm that the sun and moon had hitherto imposed on daily activities; the clock separated the human mind from cyclical natural processes.”

-Mattias Desmet, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”

“Unless time is understood as sacred, experienced in all its fullness, and so dominant a consideration in the life of a people that all other functions are subservient to it, it is impossible to have a complete and meaningful ceremonial life. Rituals lose their efficacy because they are performed within a secular time which does not always make room for them or give them the status they deserve.”

-Vine Deloria Jr., “Out of Chaos” (Parabola magazine)

When I awake this time of year, it’s still dark. I stoke the fire, then walk out our door and head east. On a clear morning, the stars shine, but if it’s cloudy the hollow is black, the surrounding hills invisible. Somewhere along the gravel driveway I pause to make a brief morning prayer, and if I’m too close to the chicken coop, the rooster hollers at me. Then I walk up to my mother’s house, which has electricity and where I write in a basement office.

Such is my routine.

I make coffee. I write for two or three hours, then head home to start the day with my family.

Before the empire interrupted, the walk home at this time of year would include a lesson in light.

The hill to the north of our house stands leafless and gray, worn out by winter like the rest of us. On my walk home, however, the rising sun would often hit that gray hilltop and crown it with an otherworldly glow, revealing not only the coming day of the hollow but the coming day of the soul.

Or if I’d leave a little early, the sun would not yet hit the peak, and I’d long for it; or a little later, and the whole hill would be bathed in light, with the shadowed land beginning somewhere between the hill’s base and our house.

The days grew longer, and my sense of where I was in the morning and the year was quietly integrating with this play of light on the hill – until the empire interfered. We set our clocks ahead. The mornings got darker, and now my sense of light on the hill in relation to my journey through the morning is totally scrambled.

Artificially, culture corrupted experience.

***

The play of light, of course, continues. Daylight Savings Time does not vanquish experience – it just confuses it.

Light grows, little by little, since late December. By March, the growth of light on either end of the day becomes apparent. Even if you aren’t paying attention, you sense the grip of winter darkness diminishing, the sap loosening, morning and evening light increasing. And then, the light is suddenly altered.

The more than two-hour* gain of light since Winter Solstice remains, but an hour of it is cut out of the morning and tacked onto the evening. For anyone living intimately within the rhythm of light and dark over the seasons – which is basically everyone, conscious of it or not – the body revolts at this time transplant.

Every half-year, the artificial adjustment of time intrudes upon our integration with the natural rhythm of Creation. We not only set our clocks forward or ahead and lose or gain sleep or light or darkness or daytime or whatever happens as we go on and off Daylight Savings Time, we also anchor our hearts to the artificial.

Perhaps this seems a minor beef to bring up. Of all of the blood the industrial powers shed within this holy realm, isn’t Daylight Savings Time a relatively small intrusion?

Yes, but it’s triviality is part of what makes it so intrusive. That empire infects even such intimate experience is a sign of its full dominion.

For me, the twice-annual adjustment of time is a religious ritual, orienting us away from the rhythms of the holy in nature and toward the artificial. It’s a sacramental expression of the mechanical regime’s power to dissociate us from the very light of this world. Such dissociation happens in an infinite number of ways, and in terrible ways, but also in quiet, intimate ways, intruding even upon our varied experiences of light, of day.

Hundreds of millions of us, tired and bleary-eyed, awake an hour earlier, and hundreds of millions of experiences of light become disrupted, confused.

***

Not everyone follows such dictates. The Amish communities around us, for instance, ignore the whole thing, never changing their clocks, so that for half the year two times co-exist: Amish Time and Empire Time.

And then there are those for whom mechanical time itself does not determine experience.

In her book Ancient Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge writes about the people of Ladakh, a Tibetan Buddhist peasant culture north of the Himalayas where “[t]ime is measured loosely; there is never a need to count minutes.”

“‘I’ll come to see you toward midday, toward evening,’ they will say, giving themselves several hours’ leeway. Ladakhi has many lovely words to depict time, all broad and generous. Gongrot means ‘from after dark till bedtime’; nyitse means literally ‘sun on the mountain peaks’; and chipe-chirrit, ‘bird song,’ describes that time of the morning, before the sun has risen, when the birds sing.”

The book was written in 1991, so I don’t know what it’s like there today. I do know that, according to scholar and author Vine Deloria Jr., “measured time which had little to do with cosmic realities” was a primary force undermining North American tribal traditions.

“It is debatable which factor was most important in the destruction of tribal ceremonial life,” writes Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux, “the prohibition of performances of traditional rituals by government, or the introduction of the white man’s system of keeping time.”

Without diminishing the barbarism against tribal cultures, we can say something similar about anyone growing up in industrial culture.

Mechanical time, a system of relentless ticking numbers that you can set ahead on a whim, extracts us from natural time, so that the ebb and flow of light, the shifts in the night sky, the growth and death of plants, the phases of the moon, and on and on, have very little practical meaning to us.

We might notice the beauty of the changing forms of nature over a day or a year – we might observe them as poetically beautiful – but we can hardly imagine what it would mean for those complex, changing forms to shape our daily habits.

Even as I write these words, I’m watching the clock, realizing I need to leave in 10 minutes to wake up the kids to get them to their lessons and get myself ready to get to work on time.

Even when we notice it’s absurdity, Empire Time reigns – at least for now.

*The amount of light gained depends on where you live, of course.

“[T]he seeds we seek are here already, but we are not here. When we are here, the seeds will begin to appear, for we first must make fertile ground for them to want to appear, and to do that there are any number of things you and I can go towards, maintain, and live by if we have the dedication.”

-Martin Prechtel, “The Unlikely Peace at Chuchumaquic”

This old tree stands on a hill with others, branches outstretched like arms, towering above us.

We’ve cut down other trees to burn in the stove or to make mushroom logs, but we’re not taking this one. If it was human flesh, of course, the nearly half-inch diameter hole my daughter is making with my grandfather’s hand-crank drill would bleed horribly. But this is not flesh and blood. It’s wood and sap, and the wound we make is so small. Wood can heal from such wounds.

The hole, less than a pinky deep, immediately starts weeping sap, and my daughter and son take turns licking the wound. I ask them to pause, and scrape the chaff out of the hole with a twig, then help my son tap a spile into it with the back of a hatchet.

Again they take turns letting drops of sap fall into their mouths – as all kids everywhere for all time have done when tapping maple trees. They insist I do the same, then we hang a bucket from the tap, attach a lid over the bucket, and listen to the ping, ping, ping of sap on tin.

We move to the next tree and begin drilling another wound.

***

I’ve heard of weeping icons.

In a church somewhere, a piece of wood, painted with an image of the Mother of God, one day begins weeping fragrant oil that streams down the icon like tears. I’ve not see the phenomenon, but it happens. I imagine that if I did see it, the experience would be similar to the experience my children have with the maple.

I drill a hole, tap in a spile, hang a bucket and lid, and move on.

They wound a tree, eager for the gift that will come of it, then delight in the drops of sap. I am focused on the task while they are lost in wonder, licking bark. I ask them to help me with the next hole and they ask me to taste this one.

I do, and of course I can feel what they feel. Who can’t?

Wonder of wonder this wood that weeps, these children who taste.

***

At the breakfast table the next morning, after our prayer and along with our eggs, we drink cold, uncooked sap from the maples on the hill.

When I was a kid, I tell them, not only did I never taste real maple syrup, not only was the maple syrup we ate fakery – made with corn syrup, food coloring, unpronounceable words and zero maple sap, if they can believe such a thing existed and still does – but I didn’t even know maple trees made sap in late winter. And not only did I not know, but nobody I knew tapped maples. Can they imagine, I ask them, not knowing these things, never tasting sap?

My wife, who is out this morning, is generally the much-needed tempering agent during such lectures. How much of these things do they need to know? How much is even worth writing about? I’m never sure. I think they need to know a little about the factory culture that forgets everything. We need to have some awareness of the current delusion, to remember that little plastic women still sit on grocery store shelves, filled with amber-colored deceit.

But we’re drawn to God through love, not fear, and one taste of homemade maple syrup generates such love. It really does. If only all children could venerate the wounds of a weeping maple in late winter.

***

“Thank you, tree,” says the old farmer, the elder brother of our close family friend who is elsewhere in the woods.

He is holding my four-year-old daughter’s hand. Before them towers a maple, weeping sap into a bucket. My daughter looks up at him and the maple, hugely smiling at both. Hand in hand, they walk to the next maple and he takes the bucket off the hook, pours it into a five-gallon jug, then hangs it back up.

“Thank you, tree,” she says, and looks up at him wide-eyed. “Thank you, tree,” he repeats.

That was years ago. Now my daughter is almost 11-years old, and the old farmer has also gotten older, too old to walk the woods with us anymore. Healed-over wounds make rings around all the maples we’ve tapped. They, too, have gotten older.

My daughter drills the wound. My son taps in the spile. I move on, but my daughter calls me back.

“Daddy,” she says, “aren’t you going to thank this tree?”

I’m not like that old farmer. I feel inauthentic in such things, feel tension with my inner hippie.

“Of course I am,” I say to her, grateful for a family who can temper my complexes.

I walk back to my children, then give that wooden mystery, that weeping revelation that towers on the hill of Creation above our house, a gentle kiss on the bark.

(for Lars)

Whom should I turn to,

if not the one whose darkness

is darker than night, the only one

who keeps vigil with no candle,

and is not afraid –

the deep one, whose being I trust,

for it breaks through the earth into trees,

and rises,

when I bow my head,

faint as a fragrance

from the soil.

--from Rilke’s “Book of Hours”

My time is liquid, sunlight, mud. That other time doesn’t exist in me.

The moon does, the dark, the cold air. Nightly they freeze my body, and there is nothing to do but stand here, let Creation have her way with me. At this point in the season, I don’t even mind anymore. Each night I return to my dormancy, my little death.

It’s not easy. Imagine: All winter you feel lifeless, not terrible, just silent, not feeling much of anything, no liquid pulsing through your wooden body, the only life you notice coming from outside of you, from others walking nearby, occasionally touching you. And then all of the sudden, from beyond you, life flows back into you, its sweet juice emerging from the ground into your roots and up your body. This is what happens to us on the first day.

And then imagine that first night, when the darkness arrives and you freeze again as you froze all winter. You can still sense liquid rising into your trunk, but the movement slows, not reaching your branches, and you wonder if it is stopping. Now that you’ve felt life in your body, wouldn’t you despair even more than during the long winter? This first night is terrible every year. We call it the Feast of the Last Death.

The next day, however, is miraculous, even better than the first day.

The sun that seems so far away all winter suddenly becomes a part of you. On a cellular level, in your body as a whole, you can feel actual sunlight loosening up the liquid. On that second morning, I have felt I am only a ray of light, or the body of the sun on earth. It’s hard to explain the experience. But when the sweet liquid starts flowing upward through my body that day, that Last Death recedes for good, and this indescribable experience of being a body on earth made of sun and liquid becomes unconquerable. Such ecstasy wouldn’t occur without the Feast of the Last Death, but once you know it, you know this second feast day is greater than the first, which is why we call it the Greater Feast of the Resurrection of Sap in Our Bodies.

This greater feast day is so powerful that the second night is nothing like the first. The same thing happens. The body goes cold. The life of the day slows just as it did that first night and all winter. But the knowing that comes with resurrection doesn’t go away. On that first night we celebrate death because it is true. Within Creation lives death. But the greater truth – the truth that every being learns in their own way – comes on that second feast day. We wake up from death. Life is a vessel carrying death, not vice versa. This is no matter of belief when sun-warmed sap has risen in you, but of experience.

My favorite feast day, however, is the third day. It’s not as grand as the second day, not as sensual. If the Greater Feast of the Resurrection of Sap in Our Bodies is a kind of spiritual joy, when a body made of earth unites with a body made of physical light and together we draw up sweet juice from the soil, then the third day is like the original Creation. It all happens again as before, and a pattern reveals itself.

On the third day we learn that experience will be an ongoing ebb and flow of light and dark, of night and day, and that through this pattern, more life is born. What was an ecstatic experience of sunlight quiets down, and another revelation occurs: We are not only living within the vessel of life, but we are vessels of life ourselves. We live in Creation, but Creation also lives in us.

With this revelation comes responsibility, and on the third day we begin to grow upwards. We know the pattern will continue, that leaves will emerge on our bodies, that flowers will grow from our arms making us fragrant to those who walk or crawl or fly near us, that we not only contain thousands of seeds, but the potential for thousands upon thousands — as if we were divine — that while we exist we will follow this pattern over and over, dying, being born, making thousands of seeds. This revelation is somewhat heartbreaking, for while we know the vessel is life, we also see it carries so many deaths. Such is the nature of a maturity that begins on the third day – sun-caused knowing aware of death.

The third day we call the Feast of Patterns. As with all feasts, we celebrate it on one day, but it lasts throughout the year, eternally emerging from the ground in a myriad of ways.

My brothers, Jim and Matt, recorded this song a few years ago. I helped with some of the back-up vocals. It’s titled, “Same Moon.”

Rest in peace, Dad.

“We are this biological caterpillar that is making a cocoon to create the electronic butterfly, and we don’t even know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it.”

-Joe Rogan, podcaster

Story A

The rain fell steady – not a downpour, but enough to get you wet. Slamming the mudroom door, I ran, heading toward the basement office in my mom’s house where I write. Behind me, my son yanked the door open and hollered something.

“What?” I yelled back through the rain.

“Take this!” he hollered again. “It’s a mythical umbrella.”

I turned around and walked back to him.

“What did you say?” I asked, standing on the threshold.

“I said you should take this. It’s a mythical umbrella.”

The umbrella was mechanical, with a metal slide on the shaft that makes it pop up, small spring latches that hold it open or closed, a canopy of factory-made nylon. At six years old, my son was old enough to know this.

“Honey, umbrellas aren’t mythical,” I said to him. “They just keep you dry in the rain.”

“What?” he asked.

“Well you just called this umbrella mythical, but you lied,” I said, getting a little frustrated. “You looked at the umbrella, you felt something, this word ‘mythical’ came into you and you hollered it at me. But that wasn’t true. It was just an experience you were having, something inspired by some random thought in your brain.”

“No it wasn’t.”

I could see this was one of those teaching moments, so I stepped inside and knelt by him, speaking softly now.

“Listen, son. Right now you feel alive and that’s okay. You blurt out things because you’re excited. Most kids do. But as you get older, this aliveness – your inner world, your experience – will recede, and you’ll start to develop an intelligence not clouded by perception. Experiences, like myths, are going to be remnants of primitive people and children. You’ve got to grow up at some point, become more machine-like. You don’t want to be a remnant, do you?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“Well, not to you, it doesn’t. But that’s because you still experience the world as it is, in all its aching beauty. You’re like a talking monkey. But that will change as you spend more time with screens and machines. What seems absurd to you now will someday be obvious. You’ll become a teenager. You’ll start to realize your inner world is unreal. You’ll start to feel cold and hard, like the truth. You’ll start to understand how information is more real than experience. Your great teachers will be artificially intelligent, completely absent experience, the pinnacle of reality.”

He looked at me confused for a moment, but then he shook it off and just smiled.

“Take this,” he said, thrusting the umbrella at me with a tightly clenched fist. “It’s a mythical umbrella.

Story B

The rain fell steady – not a downpour, but enough to get you wet. Slamming the mudroom door, I ran, heading toward the basement office in my mom’s house where I write. Behind me, my son yanked the door open and hollered something.

“What?” I yelled back through the rain.

“Take this!” he hollered again. “It’s a mythical umbrella.”

I turned around.

Before I’d launched this Substack, I’d had reservations. I don’t personally like to read on screens, so why publish in a digital format? I grieve how the factory system infects all aspects of culture, so why submit the creative process of writing to a scheduled, weekly product? Could I even meet such a production schedule? Would anybody subscribe?

For some months, as I experimented with various approaches to the project, these reservations were strong. At some point I had the whole site ready to go, but sat on it for weeks, not able to take the next step and make it public.

I came back to Wendell.

The umbrella in his hand was one I’d mostly ignored over the years, finding it somewhat annoying. At the base of its handle is a top-shaped ocher-colored knob – not the common U-shape – and no little string is attached, meaning we can’t hang it on our mudroom hooks. I’ve never taken two minutes to attach a string, so it always sits awkwardly in a corner or on a shelf, an unmanageable little tool that gets in the way, a vessel of disorder.

“What did you say?” I asked, standing on the threshold.

“I said you should take this. It’s a mythical umbrella.”

I looked at it and saw the umbrella was actually quite beautiful, much different than the other mono-toned umbrellas hanging on the hooks, or really any umbrella I’d ever seen. The handle is bamboo, the canopy’s stripes range from pin stripes to thick bands, and its colors range the full spectrum in tones you’d find under a circus tent – soft and bold at once, magic and earthy.

I took the mythical tool from Wendell and thanked him. With a word, he’d changed this vessel of disorder into something else, helping me see it.

Slowly now, I walked through the rain, thinking the whole time of the umbrella dream that inspired the name of this Substack. Not long after, I finally made the site public — a dust-sized moment in the history of existence, but in our little family, one to celebrate still.

Such is the power of words, or even just a word, spoken by a human, falling in the world like rain.

Picture 1

You know the feeling. Light pours from the sky into his head, and so bright is the knowing that the Ancient One dwelling on the other side of the crack of time becomes momentarily visible, like a meteor: stone become fire become stone again. The mind momentarily flares with the perception of heavenly light, then goes dark again. Somewhere, if the light did not consume it, the stone lands on earth, and we stand alone in darkness, only the longing remaining, a body not knowing anything anymore, just the memory of fire inside the cave of our bodies. The flesh, momentarily light, becomes flesh again.

That’s not quite right. Let me start over.

Picture 2

On a cave wall about 10 miles from my home is a human. No light pours into him. No light pours out of him. He’s just a stone made of carved lines, barely there.

Above his head are four vertical lines, slightly angled left and right. Someone carved the figure between 500 and 2,200 years ago, according to archaeologists. The figure, about the size of a hand, stands in a line of pictures.

“Rock art images that are carved or painted onto rock surfaces,” reads the archaeologists’ website, “are visual symbols that ancient peoples used to convey meaning in the absence of a written language – like children do.”

I defaced that story. The archaeologists didn’t write “like children do.” But that’s how they frame the folks who carved the man with light not pouring into his head. In the rock wall, they find themselves: Figures, absent a language of meaning.

The light in here is dappled, playing tricks on the eyes. It’s not clear who we’re looking at. Let me start over again.

Picture 3

“You’ve got to put snacks in your pockets,” my daughter tells me.

But I don’t want to put snacks in my pockets, and suggest we can eat the crackers and prunes when we get back to the car. My son backs me up, saying I don’t have to bring snacks if I don’t want to, which I don’t.

“But Mom always brings snacks,” my daughter says.

I hesitate. I don’t usually go on these Friday morning hikes with our friend, Chuck. But Adrianne isn’t feeling well today, so I’m here and don’t want to disappoint.

Chuck, 82, stands grinning as I argue with my children, then finally chimes in.

“Sippy’s right,” he says. “Adrianne does usually bring a snack along.”

I sigh, put the bag of crackers in my pocket and we go – down the hill, stopping at the dilapidated barn to poke around, hopping over the stream, crossing the pasture, climbing the steep slope, and up to the cave.

It’s not one of those deep caves around here, with dark room after dark room where you can get lost forever if your light goes out. This is a shelter cave, just a cozy room in the side of the hill. You have to duck to enter. Three or four people could sleep on the sandy ground, but it’d be snug. The light is shadowy, not womb-like blackness but more like the entrance to a womb, if there were such a thing, or like an empty church at dusk.

Four human figures, we sit and look at the walls. Randy and a few others have carved their names, but most over the centuries have respected the stone story.

Picture 4

A local intentional community disagrees with an archaeological description of the carved figures. The anarchists report:

“As for the hypothesis of snow-bound hunters, one cannot help but feel that there is something a bit banal about the idea of cold and hungry hunters carving pictures of – a hunting tale! It’s a bit hard to imagine – rather like office workers stranded overnight at the office and whiling away their time painting scenes of officework on the office walls.”

They see a large, psychotropic mushroom in the “axial position” in the story panel, and the whole thing as supporting what they call their “psychedelic hypothesis” of these folks’ culture.

Picture 5

From right to left: In the beginning, God creates fire. The unnameable Source creates the nameable source. The invisible One creates the visible image. Out of the fire walks a four-legged creature, carrying fire in her womb.

From left to right: In the beginning, God creates light from the heavens. Out of the light flies a bird and out of the bird fly two humans, one with light in her womb handing something to the second one.

In the center, separated from the two beginnings by cracks in the stone, the two stories collide.

Light emerges from the human’s head.

Fire leaps from the four-legged creature’s mouth.

There is a bow – or maybe a directional arrow – pointing from the human to the four-legged, and in the center of the center panel is a five-fingered shape hanging in the air, looking like the shape of the light in the human womb, of the light above the human head, of the fire in the four-legged’s womb, and of the larger fire at the far right of the panel, or the Source.

The five-fingered figure could be a hand hovering in the middle of it all, or fire or light or a hand made of fire and light. But it kind of looks like a plant, too. Maybe skunk cabbage?

Regardless, I can say this for sure: A shape hangs in the air on the rock, in the beginning or end or middle of the story, depending on which way you read it.

Picture 6

I have heard of cave images so powerful that tribal elders won’t go inside.

I descend from people who also made powerful images, but not these ones.

Picture 7

My daughter traces lines on the sandy floor, among cracked acorn shells. My son asks me to crawl with him to the back of the cave.

We all chat a while – wondering whether the ash above the pictures and on the ceiling comes from the image-makers’ fire, if that fire and its remnant might be part of the story the image-makers are telling on these walls, if we are also just figures in a cave where light once flared up, just figures receiving that light from those who came before us, who knew how to speak in stone and fire – then we leave.

Siporah and Chuck are long gone by the time I come out, but Wendell is only a little ways off.

“Hey, Wendell,” I yell to him. “Do you want to come back and venerate the cave with me?”

I want to honor the place, but have no idea how, and know kids can be a great support in such moments.

“No, thanks,” he says and runs off.

I fumble some prayers, then catch up with the others.

In the pasture we come to a multiflora rose bush, a tangly, thorny plant classified as invasive, but that is also just a newcomer, learning how to get along in this soil community. In the branches, some birds have filled their nest to the brim with the bush’s red berries, transforming their summer egg-house into a house of seeds and winter nourishment.

We stop and gaze for a while, then walk on.

Picture 8

As always happens when hiking with Chuck and my kids, the line isn’t straight. We stop to look at water trickling down a cascading slope of black stone, then walk up the watery rock, heading away from the car.

Up top, we wonder: Does this spring come from one hole or many?

Wendell pulls back some leaves and finds the source, and then another and then another.

Dear Readers,

This week I’m pointing you once again to my essay published over at “Front Porch Republic.” You can read the full essay by clicking here. It begins:

I wish I had a cell phone at this moment. The image is perfect and fleeting, and I’d like to photograph it.

Hanging on the museum wall is a painting of a woman standing on a balcony. Beyond her is an open field, flowers, soft pastels. In her hand she is holding something and gazing at it as if into a mirror.

Standing directly in front of the painting is a young woman, around the age of the painted woman. She is standing in the precise orientation of the woman in the painting, holding a smartphone in the same way the painted woman holds whatever she is holding, and gazing into it. The real woman stands by the painted woman like a shadow, and part of me wonders if she is a prop, someone the museum pays to have the experience I am having, or an artist teaching us museum-goers something.

I don’t have a cell phone or any other camera on me, so I can only encounter the moment for what it is and compose this verbal account of it. The unpainted woman walks away, and I go to look at the painting up close. On the little placard next to it is the title: “Pandora’s Box.” (Read the rest here: First Hack: A Techno Myth.)

This week I’m pointing readers to my essay published at Front Porch Republic, which you can find by clicking on this link:

“Feast of the Solstice of God Among Us: On healing the nativity of fake light”

Two notes.

First, I want to express gratitude to our beloved family friend, Chuck, who introduced us to the Solstice site years ago, who inhabits the local Creation with intimacy, kindness and reverence, who is a vessel of stories, and who at 82 years old can scramble down a steep side slope faster than anyone I know. Thanks, Chuck.

Second, I’m going to take a week off from publishing, so look for my next essay here on January 6.

Peace,

Joe

Instead of the usual essay, this week I’m sharing with folks an interview I did for the podcast Doomer Optimism.

You can find the interview here: “Tending Our Dead Ourselves” (scroll down on that page to find the episode).

Or if you prefer Youtube, here: “Tending Our Dad Ourselves” on Youtube.

In the hour-long episode, I talk to death doula Susan Nesbit about the many gifts that come with tending the bodies of our deceased loved ones at home. Our conversation covers home vigils, home burials, home funerals, washing the body after death, and how these practices have historically been done by families and communities, not professionals. We also discuss how death, like birth, has become a highly medicalized experience, in which painkillers and high costs are the norm. Susan, who doesn't take money for her death doula practice, helped found Threshold Care Circle, an all-volunteer organization in southwest Wisconsin that integrates after-death care into family and community life. She and other volunteers supported my family in doing home-based care after my father's death last winter.

Doomer Optimism, the podcast that hosts the interview, is a collective dedicated to discovering regenerative paths forward, highlighting the people working for a better world, and connecting seekers to doers. Their podcasts are definitely worth digging into if you’re interested in folks who are thinking and working outside the left-right paradigms of the Machine. Find out more here.

As always, thanks for your support, and if you like what you’re reading on this Substack, please share it with friends or repost essays to your networks — it helps immensely.

Have a great week!

Peace,
Joseph

John the Baptist sits in a chair and I lie on the couch. It’s 11 p.m. and we’re relaxing at the end of the day when someone bangs on our door. The fist is angry, and John opens the door to find two probation officers, both women, standing on the other side.

We do not welcome them in, but they enter anyway, and begin a litany of questions:

What have you two been doing this evening? Drinking? Smoking pot? It smells like pot in here. (It doesn’t smell like pot.)

(Now looking at me.) Who are you? What’s your name? Whose apartment is this? I know I’ve seen you around – are you on probation, too? Who else is here?

I don’t know if their rapid-fire questions come from dominance or strategy – it doesn’t seem like curiosity. There’s no time to think. We answer each question and another spills forth. With each question, my rage grows.

After about 15 minutes, the two leave, and it’s not that John the Baptist is undisturbed by this intrusion. But dealing with such machinery for so long, he’s used to it, and seems to find my fury somewhat amusing. As I now spew my own litany of anger about what just happened, he smiles and shakes his head as if to say, “What, exactly, do you expect?”

***

“From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it.”

So spoke Yeshua*, as his mother called him, or Jesus, as we call him. But how to hear these words? How to hear any of the words of the one hunted by the empire as an infant, his parents fleeing political violence even while he was a newborn; of the one whose friend, John the Baptist, is in prison when he speaks these words and will soon be executed; of the one who will only speak to rulers in paradox and defiance; of the one who will be executed himself by the empire, not exactly because of his politics, but more because of his renunciation of them, of his rejection of that kind of power.

“From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it.”

John the Baptist goes to prison, his followers come to Yeshua, and Yeshua speaks these words.

And these: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’”

It’s hard to know what to say about the intrusions of empire. The geopolitical theater goads us to make bold statements, to choose sides while numbing us to the actual experiences of people’s suffering. Do we express outrage publicly? Do we quietly beckon the Ancient One in prayer, shed our tears alone? From days of old, this holy Creation has been invaded by empire, countless slaughtered, countless imprisoned. Along with delivering mail and court systems, violence is what empire does, everywhere and always. What, exactly, do we expect?

***

Another day, another intrusion. This time it’s late-morning, and I’m writing from home, as I often did when I worked for the newspaper all those years ago. I hear the door open, and I know it’s not the Baptist, as he’s at an appointment. Nervous, I go to see who has entered our apartment and an old man is in the kitchen, rifling through our cabinets.

I’m severe as I approach him.

“Excuse me. What are you doing?”

He ignores me, finds the peanut butter, the jelly and the bread, and starts making himself a sandwich.

“Hello?! You are in my apartment. Do you know John?”

I do not welcome this stranger. He glances in my direction, but never makes eye contact, and goes back to making his sandwich. The man is not intimidating in the least, the very opposite of those government intruders. He never says a word to me, nor acknowledges I’m in the room, but takes his sandwich and walks out, leaving the door wide open.

I close the door behind him, put the food away. When the Baptist returns home, I tell him about the incident, and of course he knows the guy, and chuckles about this intruder as he did about the others. That sweet old man is harmless, he tells me. He’s drank his whole life and doesn’t know much of anything anymore, the poor guy.

The longer I live with the Baptist, the longer I come to expect intrusions. His circle of friends, most of them in and out of jail or involved with people who are in and out of jail, regularly come to the door. The Baptist tells me who to be careful with, who is harmless. One day, some old enemy throws a brown bag of feces at our door with the word “F-ggots” written on it. The Baptist tells me his own stories of intrusions, of the alcoholism and death he grew up with, of the man he killed drunk driving all those years ago, of his children he doesn’t really know.

But while I come to expect intrusions, I also come to understand not all intrusions are equal. There are the intrusions we everyday people make into each other’s lives. The suffering caused by these intrusions can be extreme, generational. But they are of a different order than the intrusions of empire. Yeshua, at least, seemed to have a very different posture toward the sinners he hung out with and the sins of empire.

***

After dinner a few nights ago, Wendell casually asks a question as he takes his bowl to the sink: “Are governments against God?”

Where do kids come up with these things?

Adrianne and I look at each other – is this a time to shelter or a time to speak candidly? – then I say something like this: Many people would answer your question differently, and someday you’ll have to answer it for yourself. One thing to know is that many holy people work for the government, and you have to remember this when you encounter them. But to answer your question directly, yes, I think governments are against God. Not everything they do is violent, but their nature is to expand suffering through violence. They can’t know God, they are too big to protect the holy, and the greatest harm in this world is always created by them and their collaborators.

I don’t prefer to talk to my kids about politics, nor to write about them, nor to root any aspect of our identity in them. We don’t generally watch the news of the day, nor debate about the latest slaughter of innocents, which isn’t to say we don’t care or feel sorrow. The violence against the holy intrudes upon our consciousness as it intrudes upon other’s bodies, but our posture is unavoidably limited: to pray for those suffering the violence of empire and to make boundaries with the intrusions of empire everywhere we can, including within our hearts and minds. Is this a privileged position? I don’t know. My intention is not to be dismissive of suffering, but humble as we gaze at it, to learn from the Amish, who make very clear boundaries with that kind of power: You do your thing, we’ll do ours, and please bother us as little as possible. We know what you’re about, what entities give you your power, and so we know what to expect.

***

This time I’m not surprised at the late-night knock.

John has cut his ankle bracelet and left town. It’s been several days. I tell the police officers I don’t know where he is, but I’d like to know if they hear anything. They can check the bedrooms, the closets. He’s not here. I have no idea where he went, but I don’t expect to be seeing him anytime soon.

They’re polite as they search the apartment, then leave. I go to bed. John has fled and won’t return. With the Baptist gone, the intrusions fade away from this apartment, though surely they follow him wherever he roams.

* From the preface of Graham Pardun’s book Sunlilies: Eastern Orthodoxy as a Radical Counterculture: “I call the Messiah in this book, ‘Yeshua,’ his original Hebrew name, not ‘Jesus,’ derived from his name's transliteration into Greek. Yeshua is the name his mother gave him, and the name by which his close companions knew him, so to call him by that name is first of all a gesture of respect, an expression of a desire to know him directly and personally, human heart to human heart.

“The Sioux, as well as other tribes, interpreted the scheme of life as leading eventually to the production of human beings. Unlike Western religion and philosophy, however, the fact that humankind had been the final product of the purposeful life force did not make them the crown of creation.

“Coming last, human beings were the ‘younger brothers’ of the other life-forms and therefore had to learn everything from these creatures.”

-Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason, pg. 50

This happens almost every time we go camping. Not long after we set up the tent, our two children and any other children present begin buzzing like bees around a tree. We adults don’t pay them any mind, as we’re busy getting sleeping bags and food and firewood situated. Then at some point a child calls us over.

This time it is Wendell who takes my hand. He’s made a pathway with sticks which leads to the base of a pine. There, he and Siporah have gathered stones and laid them in patterns among carefully placed leaves and pine needles. Siporah comes over and we stand there gazing silently at the elements they have gathered from the nearby world.

“You know, Daddy,” six-year-old Wendell says to me, “these are icons.”

In our home over the last year, we have begun praying before Christian icons. How we came to this way of prayer is a longer story than I want to tell right now, but I often wonder how it shapes our children. At the campsite, in the presence of the stones, Wendell offers a hint.

I don’t know if what Wendell says is theologically accurate or philosophically acceptable. I know that usually if you start talking in a group about prayer and stones and trees at the same time, folks often feel a need to clarify our Western perspective on such things: But you’re not praying to the stones, right? Because you know stones are just stones, right?

Stones aren’t animate, says the scientific part of us. They’re not conscious like a human is conscious. Certainly we don’t worship stones, says the religious part of us. We can see them as expressions of God’s grandeur, but we only worship God, okay?

Okay. But I’m also curious where these defenses come from. Why the need to make absolutely sure that no one is worshiping stones and no one thinks stones are conscious? Does it come from an idolatry of human supremacy over all of Creation? Or perhaps an idolatry of the Western cosmology as an evolutionary progression from the primitive cosmology, in which we imagine people actually did worship stones? Vine Deloria Jr., the great Lakota scholar, challenges this latter notion:

“Polytheism and pantheism most probably represent a Western effort to describe non-Western thought-forms rather than any insights that non-Western peoples have derived from their own experiences. One of the most common assumptions made by the popular mind is that monotheism evolves out of polytheism or pantheism as superstitious people become enlightened. This explanation serves to justify the Western concept of monotheism as a ‘higher’ religious tradition than any other.” (The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, pg. 44)

Of course, when Wendell says the stones before us are icons, I don’t think of any of this. I don’t ensure that he and Siporah are perceiving their holy creation in a theologically acceptable way, or that they are aligning their altar with the altar of Western thought.

“Thank you, Wendell,” I say to him. “Yes, they are icons. I can see that.”

***

While I’m curious where our defenses about stones come from, I’m more curious about what a stone is and how those defenses blind us to this. For instance, if we abandon the idea that we stand near the top of a Great Chain of Being, looming like gods above those unconscious stones far at the bottom of the chain, what might we encounter? If, instead of gods, we imagine we exist as humble travelers with all of holy Creation, what might we hear?

I don’t know the answers, as it’s difficult to get a stone to speak, even poetically. They’re such a hard mystery, silent as hermits. They don’t talk like us, and their age is as old as stars are far. A million years? Though such vast existence through time is inconceivable to a human, it’s not old for a stone. We can pretend to conceive it – Google, ever authoritative, says the oldest known sedimentary rock is 3.8 billion years old – but such an age means almost nothing to us. I can barely remember last week.

Some years ago, I actively tried to bridge this gap between stones and our language. When Siporah began learning the alphabet, I began looking for rocks in the shapes of letters. What better way for her to learn A’s and J’s and K’s, I imagined, than from stones. But I only found seven or eight letters before I gave up. It turns out stones just won’t speak our language, even when you try to force them to.

Whether we can hear their language is another matter. I’m too rational for such a quest. Although I try to hear the voices of Creation, to be present to the world in the way my children are, I’m generally limited by a veil of mechanistic rationality. A rainbow blooms across the sky, and my first encounter is with an expression of the light spectrum. Only afterwards do I struggle to encounter the arc of glowing light as a revelation from God. It’s the same with stones. Luckily, there are those around with more natural wonder than me.

My family hikes most Friday mornings with our friend who is in his 80s, which is embryonic in rock years. Before these folks were in my life, I didn’t really pay attention to stones. But now, on the occasions I join them for their hike, at some point I usually find myself on my hands and knees in some gully or next to a shallow creek bed, looking at stones with them.

Occasionally, as we’re passing around our finds, someone will do the trick this elder friend taught us. Holding the stone in your hand, you show it to everyone and pretend how amazing you think it is. No one thinks it’s very special, but being polite, they notice something beautiful about it. Then you flip the stone and reveal a truly striking feature on the hidden side – a cluster of crystals or the outline of an ancient snail or some collection of colors you’ve never seen before, red and blue swirls that look like Northern lights with flecks of coal-black rain sprinkled among them.

Often on these expeditions, someone finds a stone with a hole in it. My wife collects these, so we always bring them to her. My dad, when he was alive, was the best at finding these. Often it can be hard to tell for sure whether a hole goes all the way through a rock, but one day he started blowing on them, and if he could hear or feel his breath come through the other side, he knew he had a hole. There’s a pile of these rocks behind our house (not the only pile of rocks around our house), and Adrianne has plans to string them up one day.

Most of the stones we set back down, then continue our hike. But everyone always pockets a few. Maybe we shouldn’t, but it’s hard not to take them home because their mystery feels so personal, and you can feel that mystery when you look at them again. Or maybe the kids will use them for rock therapy. It’s a practice Siporah developed when she was five or six. The patient lies on the couch. The rock doctor gently places stones on the body: on the forehead, the palms, the heart, the belly and the thighs, for instance. Then the patient rests under the stones, feeling their cool skin, while the doctor makes a plate of fruit to eat afterwards. It’s a common birthday gift in our house.

In all of these experiences, no one is worshiping stones. Like Deloria said, I’m not sure anyone, besides maybe neo-pagans, ever has worshipped stones. But in all of these experiences, there is a presence – specific, intimate and holy – in our encounters with the stones, just as there is when standing before a tall white pine on the edge of a forest — or an anthill or a mountain or a grandmother or an iconostasis.

***

Again, here’s Vine Deloria Jr., who wrote extensively about North American tribal people’s complex relationships with stones, plants and other aspects of the world.

In the old traditional way, stones to be used in a sweat lodge ceremony were gathered in a special way. When a medicine man went in search of stones, he wandered around telling the stones that he was going to hold the ceremony and asking different stones if they wished to participate. George Tinker told of helping a medicine man to gather stones and said that instead of simply taking the available stones nearby, he had to canvass the whole field to find the proper stones, a good distance from the car in which they were to be hauled. Following the ceremony, the stones are always returned to their original location, since it is their home. (The World We Used to Live In, pg. 153)

In this story, there is not only reverence and respect for stones. Cultural practices and patterns have developed that are both rooted in that respect, and also generate it.

Westerners remain a long way from such postures of respect for the elements of Creation. Even talking about all this can sound hippie-dippie within our rational cultural mind, in which wonder and reverence are not transmitted as mature patterns of perception.

We are taught certain hierarchies as kids, and in the Great Chain of Being hierarchy, stones dwell at the bottom, dumb matter, voiceless. I wonder if this is projection. Having lost the wisdom that tells us this world is holy and alive, maybe it is we who have gone mute, become incapable of perceiving the presence of those we dwell among. How would we change, how would culture change, if we understood our duty was not only to approach scripture or humans with reverence, but as inhabitants of Creation, to encounter all forms of existence this way? This wouldn’t require worshiping stones, but if Creation is actually holy, it would require a more complex relationship than merely not worshiping them.

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This week I would like to point readers to an essay I wrote for Front Porch Republic. You can find the essay, titled “Map-Burning,” here:

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/10/map-burning/

A short excerpt:

Please forgive this descent into the toxic waters of politics. My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial stories kick in the face, deform, and then at election time bury beneath the red-blue map. Aligned with my neighbors, I want to stand in a place off that map, outside those stories. From the world of actual bodies, I want to embody a story outside the industrial story machine.

Thanks for reading. And if you like what you’re reading on this Substack, please share it with others. As I don’t have social media, I rely on readers to spread the word. Thanks for your support!

Peace,

Joe

“There can be no political power without tyranny.”

-Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

“Who’s that poor guy you used to live with?” my six-year-old son asks as we sit in the truck, waiting for my wife and daughter to join us.

“You’re talking about John,” I say.

“Yeah, the one who lived in the woods,” he says. “Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Last I heard he was up north in Fargo. Maybe living in the woods there.”

“Do you even know if he’s alive?” he asks.

“No, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes, but I don’t know.”

***

“My friends call me ‘John the Baptist,’” John tells me not long after we meet, not long after he’s released from jail once again.

The jail chaplain has arranged our meeting. Working as a reporter, I’ll write a long feature about John and what it’s like for him to make his way after living in jail for 11 months.

We meet in the jail basement, chat with the chaplain, then walk outside.

“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last!” says John. He hasn’t stood beneath the sky for nearly a year. The formalities soon drop and we become fast friends.

He starts calling me Joe the Catholic.

Some months later, John sits next to me in church one Sunday. It’s Advent. The priest is talking about a man in the desert who wears camel hair, eats wild honey, curses leaders. Christmas is joyful, the priest tells us. We celebrate God incarnating as a child. It’s a time to be with family. It’s tender, full of sweetness, like children. But you can’t get to Jesus, says the priest, without going through John the Baptist.

John, wearing a monitoring bracelet from the local jail around his ankle, cocks his head sideways, catches my eye, grins and winks.

John the Baptist: the one who calls from the wilderness; the one who taunts authorities when they approach him, “Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”; the one who speaks in a language distasteful, then and now.

John the Baptist: the alcoholic, the one who’s been in and out of jails and prisons his whole adulthood, the one whose life is a story of abandonment and trauma.

“I’m Baptist,” he’d told me, “so my friends call me ‘John the Baptist.’”

This was all a long time ago, before I’d met my wife, before I’d stopped going to church.

***

His story is strange, brutal. It ends with rulers chopping off his head, placing it on a platter, giving it as a gift to a young girl, who gives it to her mother. One cannot forget this image. It leaves an imprint. It haunts then and it haunts now.

The man from the wilderness, standing in a river, preaches no mercy for those in power. He does not taunt them with weapons, just words. But he taunts them nonetheless.

Herod, the ruler then, does not want to kill John. He fears uprisings. And yet he gives the order. Someone chops off John’s head. Someone arranges it like a bouquet on a platter. The mother is delighted, or maybe disturbed. Herod, haunted by the voiceless head, is certainly disturbed. He wonders if the miracle-worker, one whom John had baptized, one even more powerful than the desert preacher, is John the Baptist resurrected.

Can that happen?

When the powerful miracle-worker hears the news about his friend, he goes to be alone. It’s brutal enough for the empire to kill your friend, but to arrange his head on a platter? This is depraved, traumatizing, not an image one forgets. It shapes you.

Centuries later, people tell stories about John’s head. That it was buried in a dung heap. That it was dug up, lost again, found again, lost again, found again. John’s head seems to appear, disappear, then appear again. Like a Jack-in-the-Box. Like a turtle.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” says John.

The head they cut off still speaks.

***

John has email for a time.

“God brung us together for a reason,” he writes to me. “He must have thought you were having it to easy so he brung us together.”

At other times, John wonders if God sent him to me to save me. He shares the Sinner’s Prayer with me regularly. I never take to it, so he tries again and again.

“What do you mean ‘saved?’” I ask him.

***

When John gets out of jail, he spends some time with his ex-wife and kids, then skips town, disappointing everyone.

John the abandoned abandons.

On All Saints’ Day, he returns. He finds me. His face is bruised. The shelter is closed. He has nowhere to sleep so he sleeps on my couch. The next day I buy him a tent, then drive him to a strip of woods between a shopping center and the Mississippi River. Late afternoon, snow is beginning to fall. He assures me he’ll be okay as we set up his tent in the cold, so I leave him there. Walking toward my car, I feel unsure, disturbed.

Empire is so brutal.

***

“What would you do if John came back?” my son asks, sitting in the truck. “It would never, never, never, never, neeeeever happen. But just what if? What if he found us and came to our door? What would you do?”

“I’d want to eat with him before we talked,” I say. “I’d ask if he wants to eat. Or I’d ask if he wants a cup of tea or coffee. And then I guess I’d ask him to tell me his story.”

I don’t know what I’d do.

“Maybe we can go find him sometime,” I tell my son. “Maybe we can drive up north and look in the woods.”

“But is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Now his eyes are open and he is gazing at us from his bed, those big brown eyes made by Italian, German, Austrian and Syrian ancestry. Like coming upon a bear in the woods, his eyes gaze back at us quiet, intense, deep in his own mystery. What he wonders we cannot wonder.

His words had begun undoing themselves long ago, almost twenty years now, when he was young – so young, people say – at only 50. Or not his words, but the world itself, the logic of his life slowly altering, patterns unmaking, creation in reverse. Not free of logic, just off, imperfect, a little more broken than the rest of us, or seeming to be.

My wife found him heating his coffee mug on the stove one day. It makes sense, but it also doesn’t.

Another day, I found him ten miles from home. He’d gone to check the mail, then kept going. Adrianne called me at the farm. He’s disappeared, she said. Everyone’s out combing the roads, but what if he’s gone to the woods?

The cold autumn evening descending, I found him strolling down Highway S, almost to Avalanche, unshaken, content.

And this is how it was, more and more of him seeming to go away over time, retreating into the wilderness, where he couldn’t be known in the same way we are known to each other.

“How much are you doing?” he writes in one of his last letters. “If the people are saying how much are you doing, then it matters. If then, what are the choices?”

Whatever happened to the rest of him, though, never quite happened to his eyes. People note this. People who never knew him before his going away note his eyes to be so gentle, so kind. There’s a lot going on in there, says one of the nurses when she comes to visit him on her day off. He might not say much but you can see there’s a lot behind his eyes. He looks so deeply at you.

And now, a week before his death, he gazes from those eyes one last time.

***

It’s been a long day. On the morning of my son’s sixth birthday, Dad awakes gasping for breath. The episode lasts an hour. His heart rate is off the high end of the charts, his oxygen level off the low end. Mom calls, and we drive to the memory care facility.

Would it be okay if we have Wendell’s birthday in your room here?

Laying in his bed with his head turned to us, he speaks the last words any of us will hear him speak: Mmm hmmm.

When it’s difficult to speak, when one is mostly silent, small words become enormous. His consent fills us with delight. We drive home, fill up the car with decorations, food, cake. We call my wife’s parents and ask them to meet us in Dad’s room. We pack changes of clothes. How long this will last we don’t know.

In the early afternoon, Dad gasps for breath again. The episode lasts around an hour, and it’s painful for everyone. Like a fish in air, Dad suddenly finds himself in the wrong elemental context. We hold his hand. We sing to him. Eventually, he calms again.

His great transition has commenced. We take turns sitting next to him throughout the day, and he lies there with his head turned, gazing at us with his bear eyes. Much of the time, he weeps. Like a Christian icon, the rest of his face reveals no strong emotion, but the tears streaming down fill the whole with a transcendent sorrow. The long mourning has begun, and the one we will mourn has begun the mourning for us.

With him, we cry. With him, we die.

We tell him to rest, but he won’t. It’s okay, Dad. We aren’t going anywhere now. We will be here when you awake. Jimmy and Matt are coming. But he won’t. He gazes at us all day, tears streaming down his cheeks.

In the wilderness of his final years, his emotional world had been as mysterious as the rest of him. Does he feel happiness, sadness? Surely he does, as surely as a bear does, but the experience of it was not apparent to us, invisible. Today, though, he has returned from that unknown territory with a gift.

Another breathing fit comes on. He gasps. It goes on and on. His pain is hard to take. Will he die like this? Please don’t let him die like this.

He doesn’t. His breath steadies, and we return to our gazing. Mom sits by him now, holding his hand, kissing his forehead, venerating her husband.

Rest, Jim, rest.

But he won’t. It’s as if he knows this is the last time he will be able to see us from this way of being, that when he awakes again he will be somewhere else.

I sit, gaze at him and think of my daughter. In the first few moments upon entering this world, she made no sound. I caught her, the midwives spotting me, held her with my wife, and with big, brown eyes she looked around content, silent, seeming to accept the world for what it was. Only then did her crying begin, from the silence.

From the silence, birth, and from the silence, death. In between, we gaze at it all. In between we suffer, we venerate each other, we heal.

From the wilderness, my father cries. From our own wildernesses, so do we. Our tears whisper a silent song all those who mourn know, its rhythm like waves on the beach.

I don’t want to let go, let go.

I don’t want to let go, let go.

Eventually he falls asleep.

Through his heart, his breath, his eyes and his tears, my father’s dying ceremony has commenced. It is Valentine’s Day. My son has turned six. Night has fallen. We straighten the room and say goodbye to Mom, who will not leave his side now.

When Dad awakes again, he will look beyond us toward other wildernesses.

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There is a religion older than religion, not shaped by the machine world’s unnatural suffering. Within the anxiety of industrial culture – within all that has been lost – its old ceremonies still dwell in our bodies. We don’t forget these things.

Behind my mom’s garage, for instance, where the driveway stops and the woods begin, the burial is coming to a close. As none of us have done this before, no one knows how it will end, nor has the ending been planned, thought out, set in stone.

Some quietly wander back to the house and begin laying out food. Others remain in the clearing, watching our friends toss the last shovelfuls over him, making a gentle mound.

I’m standing on a slight incline at the edge of the circle, where I can see the whole. On one side of me is a box elder tree, on the other side, a woman who whispers:

No one is orchestrating this. No one is telling anyone what to do, and yet everyone knows what to do. They are tending to each other, healing themselves without trying. It happens every time.

We stand in silence, watching it all. My nephew, 7, has done more shoveling than anyone today, and piles stones near the head of the grave. When it is done, he would like them laid over the body in the shape of a cross.

The woman whispers the gentlest of nudges:

It’s not necessary, but you might consider how this will end.

I walk over to Adrianne, my wife, whisper in her ear, and she walks back to the house. From the bedroom where friends and family sat vigil with his body around the clock for four days, Adrianne gathers the flowers. When she returns to the woods, everyone is quiet, standing in a circle around the mound of dirt. There is no anxiety here, no concern about what to do or what not to do, about who believes what or who doesn’t. The ceremony simply unfolds.

Adrianne kneels by the mound with an armful of flowers. Momentarily, she wonders: how to arrange the flowers properly, with reverence adequate to the task? The answer comes immediately, looking at Adrianne with wide eyes, smiling, reaching out her hand. Neither speaks, and Adrianne hands our friends’ four-year-old daughter the first flower. The child goes to lay it on the mound, and the rest of the children swarm Adrianne like a hive of angels. She hands a flower to each, and one by one they decorate the grave and circle back for another flower.

Within the circle, beneath the ground and flowers and people, his body germinates like a seed. Within the circle, above the body and soil, the children lay offerings over him, joy beyond joy. Within the ceremony, we who love him encircle him, his death now a seed in our collective heart. Within the circle, the trees encircle us, present as anyone.

Quietly, our neighbor begins chanting. Her tones are clear, simple as birdsong.

Jubilate Deo

Jubilate Deo

Hallelujah

We all join in, chanting the words over and over.

The flowers laid, the children step back into the circle among the adults. The chant fades as naturally as it began. Slowly, the gathering disperses, and folks walk back to the house in small groups, chatting, laughing.

Mom, dressed in black and smiling, walks arm-in-arm with someone.

The ceremony is over.

Nothing has been created, nothing preserved.

Like death, the old religion has simply happened. In death, the Ancient One has simply arrived, beyond anyone’s intention, bound by nothing.

“As far as the farming Tzutujil were concerned, when a person was lowered into the ground at their funeral, they were being sown by the village just like a corn seed in hopes that the person’s spiritual ruk’ux or ‘germ’ would sprout and echo life force back into the world.”

-Martin Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Chuchumaquic

My wife and I occasionally talk to our children about the many things our culture has forgotten: how plants can be medicine; how to pray with ancestors; the old stories from the holy land; basic human skills like sheltering and feeding each other without industrial intervention; and on and on. Remembering, we tell them, is one of the responsibilities of people in our time.

Among these many forgotten ways is the practice of tending our dead at home, with the support of each other, the land and the Spirit rather than industry. As with the other forgotten things, home funerals and burials are culturally rare, but they are common historically and still in many parts of the world today. In the Amish communities near us, for instance, all funerals and burials happen at home.

In the winter of 2023, my father died. He was 69, and for 20 years had experienced what is medically known as early-onset Alzheimer's, but spiritually very little understood.

In the hours and days following his final breath, a community of family and friends helped us tend his body. Some came to the memory care facility where he lived his last two years, helping us sing, chant and bring his body home in a blizzard. Some sat vigil with his body in a back bedroom in my mom’s walkout basement. Some managed logistics. Some brought food. Some helped us dig a grave. Some helped us lay his body in that grave. Some sang while some tossed shovelfuls of earth over his body one sunny Sunday morning in late February, as the sap flowed in the maple trees.

Like all deaths, my father’s was not one thing, but many. His death was his own, but it was also communal. The ceremonies following his death were communal, but they were also personal – a fabric of interior ceremonies happening within the communal ceremony. In this essay series, I will share my own encounter of my father’s death and the home rituals surrounding it. In a culture that has forgotten so much, his death was, for me, a practice in remembering – remembering some of the duties we have to each other as human beings, duties that are at once practical and mythical.

The essays can be read on their own as stand-alone stories, or in order as part of the whole series.

As with all efforts of remembering in a culture as desecrated as our own, there isn’t a right way here. Not everyone can or wants to tend their dead at home. I share these essays simply to tell one small story among millions of small stories through which we are feeling our way, often blindly, toward a more sacred way of caring for each other than industrial culture can conjure. It’s a way of caring embodied by a young friend of ours the day before my father’s home funeral.

After we’d brought Dad’s body home, friends and family took shifts sitting and praying with him around the clock for four nights, three days and one morning. On the day before his funeral, this young woman who was weeks away from birthing her first child came to the door. “I didn’t know your dad,” she said. “But I heard about this and wanted to come sit with him. I hope it’s okay.”

Her arrival – glowing with a child in her womb, coming to sit with my father’s body – was profound.

I approach this essay series with the same spirit she brought to the vigil. I don’t really know where they are leading. I’m not working off an outline or any kind of thesis. Following her, I just show up trusting what will happen, tending the story of my dad with a posture of openness.

One last thing: They say funerals are not for the dead, but for the living. I don’t see it that way. Certainly funerals are for the living, but we are not simply materialist bags of genes, and our soul’s journey occurs beyond the visible realm. Our ceremonies matter to those who walked with us. Our prayers matter to them. Our stories matter to them. And so with this essay series, I make an offering of words for the one who dwells at the heart of them. May the love here, planted by you, go with you, and any imperfections burn away into smoke.

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If there is one place I could escape the machine, it should be my family’s garden. Mythically and practically the potentials are all there. We can save seeds. We can grow our own food, decrease our need for industrial food, be nourished in all the ways a family garden nourishes. I can pray while I plant.

Yet even here, the machine invades my habits and patterns of perception. When I am in the garden, I am rarely with the plants, the spiders, the play of water, sun, air and soil in any prayerful way. Nor am I with myself. I’m there like a factory, to get work done as efficiently as possible so I can move on to the next task of my day.

I know there are other ways. I heard a Mohawk seed keeper and farmer, Rowen White, once suggest people sing while they plant. Even if you don’t know any seed-planting songs, she said, just sing songs you enjoy. Seeds like to be sung to. It’s not about doing it right.

I’ve tried singing while I plant, but the practice hasn’t stuck. Introducing any kind of new pattern into experience is not so simple; introducing new patterns of prayer is nearly impossible to muster by force of will alone – at least for me. I can receive a teaching, let a proper pattern germinate in my mind, but it take something bigger than my mind, like dynamic weather conditions, for a new pattern to sprout.

***

It is Tuesday morning and I have come to the garden to plant carrot seeds. The sprinkler is on the strawberries – a bed of strong leaves but shriveling flowers in this year’s drought. As usual, I am feeling behind in my garden and only half here. As usual, I am mostly not doing what I am doing, my attention anxious and grasping toward other tasks. This week I am trying to get through the rest of my planting so I can get to wood-stacking for a couple days and finally to what I want to be doing, building the chicken-coop-shed, so I can finish that and still have time to build the porch before winter. And maybe get some solar figured out. And maybe take down the temporary shed. And maybe get the woodshed started.

At the beginning of the cleared bed, I stick four sticks into the soil to mark my rows, then put four more every six feet or so to help keep my rows straight. With my forefinger I carve a line from stick to stick and begin planting: Sprinkle seeds, about an inch between. Get it done to get to the next thing. The idea of singing while I plant doesn’t occur to me. And yet from the great beyond, a different prayer arrives.

“Hey, Daddy!” my six-year-old son shouts as he approaches the garden. “Watcha doin?”

I tell him I’m planting carrots, and as this tender child opens the gate and enters the space, the machinery of my mind loosens.

I notice my son. I notice I am planting carrots.

I would never make a good teacher. I am impatient and have a low tolerance for doing things incorrectly, whether that be me or someone else not meeting standards (or at least my standards). Even when I’m aware of this tendency, I can’t help it. I try to be patient, but can feel the tightness of my presence, which can make me a very nit-picky father and husband at times. But as Wendell enters the garden and walks toward me, beyond my will something changes.

“Watcha doin?” he asks again.

“Planting carrot seeds,” I tell him. “Do you want to plant them with me?”

A big smile comes upon his face and he answers, with joy in his voice and a multi-syllabic sing-song answer: “Suuuuure.”

Wendell approaches the bed, and through his smile I perceive my task is not to plant carrots, but to tend this boy planting carrots; not to do anything right, but to love my son, teach him something, support his growth. Somehow, all the conditions are right and I don’t even have to try.

After running in the sprinkler a couple times, he comes over and kneels next to me.

“So what do we do?” he asks.

I carve another line in the soil, give him a handful of seeds, and show him how I pick up a few with my thumb and forefinger, then rub my fingers together to drop a seed every inch or so.

“That’s more than an inch,” he notices.

“Well I know, but it doesn’t have to be perfect,” I say. “We’ll just do our best and the carrots will figure out the rest.”

Kneeling by my son, I enter the garden for the first time this year. With his small fingers, he picks one seed at a time from his hand and places it carefully in the soil. If he wants, I suggest, he can do it like me, and I show him again how to grab several seeds at a time and sprinkle them down the line.

“It goes faster,” I say.

“I like to do it like this,” he says, and continues planting his own way.

“I like it your way, too,” I say.

As Wendell makes his way down the line, the garden becomes a calmer place than it has been all season. Eventually I begin planting toward him. I don’t adopt Wendell’s method, but neither do I hurry. When our lines of seeds meet, I carve another line between two sticks, and he begins dropping in seeds while I hop to the other side of the bed, planting across from him. In no time, we are done. I move the sprinkler to the carrots, he runs through it, then we go play a game of catch before lunch.

Before, if you’d asked me my favorite garden tool, I’d have said a handhoe or a broadfork. They’re simple, functional and gentle on the land. Now I have a new one: Wendell’s fingers, which are not only functional, not only gentle, but have a mythical power. They not only plant carrot seeds, but at the same time weed out my inner machine, making space for other seeds to grow in the garden of my family.

“What I’m really saying is that there is no such thing as Nature. There are simply other entities. We say the Native Americans and other indigenous peoples had a nice relationship with nature, but I suspect the reason they did is because they never had any “Nature.” They had a cosmos, full of other beings, entities, others. But not Nature.”

-Neil Evernden, in conversation with Derrick Jensen, from the book “Listening to the Land”

Where the holy land appears, nature disappears. Nature refers to the undifferentiated green mass of plants, the nameless mass of animals and the describable systems of earth, water and air. We don’t relate with nature. We conserve, manage and visit it on weekends. Nature is predictable, like weather patterns, and documented, like deer populations. Governments, advertisers and bureaucracies talk about nature.

The ceremonial world, the actual world, is unruly, full of beings who won’t be managed, only related with, generally on their terms, not ours.

Recently, for instance, we began our summer practice of dunking in the spring-fed stream at the end of a hot day. Along with the grime of work, any grumpiness gets washed downstream, and we are a better family for the waters that run below our house.

The water is cold. My kids and wife jump right in, but it takes me minutes of mental acrobatics before I can submerge. The water hurts, awakens my fears, and I find no joy in the plunge, only in the refreshment it gives me. If I could turn the temperature up, I would, but I can’t.

Nor can we do anything about the regular attacks that happen on the way to the stream this year. I don’t enjoy them, but neither can I stop them.

He got me first. I’d filled a bucket of water and was walking the path up to the house when, with zero warning, a mini-tornado of wings and air bursts and flapping engulfed my head. I ducked, tripped, spilled the whole bucket. From the ground, I saw the red-winged blackbird flying back up to the willow above the creek.

In the following days, he began attacking us whenever we walked to the stream. We’d wave rakes at him or my son’s cardboard stop sign on a wooden stick. My kids and I would jump up and down and wave our hands as we walked, surely looking strange to any passing neighbor. Sometimes the angry angel would descend, sometimes not, but his threat is now ever-present.

I’ve considered pelting him with rocks. I feel it’s reasonable to make a boundary here, but I also know my family’s disappointment would be far greater even than the bird’s fury. He’s a father, they’d chide me. He has babies. Wouldn’t I do the same?

Ultimately, I agree with them.

This bird, like us, is not one node in an undifferentiated mass of nature. He has an inner world, an experience all his own. He feels the fear and fury of a father. He uses his body, the capacities of wings and air, to translate his feelings to us, to protect his family. He is unruleable and dutiful, unmanageable and free.

And so I do nothing. I walk the path. I get attacked. I plunge into the icy, running water. It’s all very humbling, very liberating. Nature is nowhere to be seen here.

See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.

—Isaiah 43:19

We have left home and are traveling an old, dirt road through the woods. A long caravan of us are traveling: people, pack animals and wagons moving slowly, carrying what belongings we could take with us. We are not going back to the homes from where we came. Those worlds are gone. Nor do we know where we are going.

No one speaks, and the dream is not somber, not joyful, just quiet. Wagon wheels creak, and even the creatures are silent.

Eventually we come to an old village where peasants wear simple, vibrant, earth-toned clothing, as they always have. Then the light in the dream shifts. It becomes gloaming time, and a few of the peasants lead a few of us travelers into another part of the forest. Darkness falls as we come to a glade, and in this circular clearing we can see the night-time sky above the canopy. The villagers have brought us here to show us something, but still, no one speaks.

We look up, and as I gaze at the stars, a new experience emerges. The stars feel exactly like my two older brothers feel to me in waking life. They are not symbolically kin, nor do I poetically imagine them as my brothers. As I gaze upward, a feeling simply descends into me that carries the same knowing, the same resonance, as the bond I share with my brothers.

I begin to weep as a mourner weeps, sobbing from the stomach. Breaking the silence, I tell our peasant guides how I have never felt the stars like this. And yet, I tell them, I know that when I awake this feeling will be gone.

They say nothing, but lead us deeper into the woods until we come to an edge, where the tree line opens to a meadow. There at the transition, an oar is tied to an umbrella. The paddle of the oar is wedged into the ground, and the open umbrella is tied to its upright handle. Beneath the makeshift shelter, a webbed lawn chair sits. The peasants gesture to me to sit down, then leave me by myself.

The woods at my back, I sit awhile, gazing at the stars above the meadow. All is quiet again until the dream erupts with the boom of some violent crash coming from the direction of the village. I get up from the chair and sprint back through the forest, knowing something terrible has happened with the arrival of the rest of our caravan. Abandoning the star shelter, I race toward the crash.

***

The full catastrophe of the Machine Age is upon us, and there is no going back. We live in a between time, and what we knew – or what our ancestors knew – is no more. Those worlds are gone.

A communal sense of place, an intimate relationship with the land where we dwell, a cyclical connection to the holy, have long been demolished by the network of industry industrial complexes. The Machine sits upon the throne of power and within the thrones of our minds. It infects Creation with such extravagance, such intimacy, that no one dwells beyond it. From the political heights to our children’s psyches, from satellites traveling the night sky to GMO mosquitoes, the Machine reigns wherever we look, saturating reality, never far away, its power ever-increasing. Even now, these words between us are conjured by a collective of machines.

The Machine is the myth by which we see. It is the materialist world we encounter through the rods and cones of our eyes. We imagine nature as a living, functional machine. Increasingly, we encounter ourselves this way, too.

In such a time as this, it’s hard to know what to do.

And yet we do know this: Empires dwell within Holy Creation, and despite their best efforts to kill the holy, the holy always remains.

***

This is the context from which I write on this Substack: a traveler between two worlds, walking with many other travelers through the same mythical terrain. In this land are no political yard signs, no solar panels being sold as saviors, no guns being stockpiled, no one preaching we shun our neighbors because of their yard signs. In these woods is just an old dirt road leading away from the familiar and toward what we long for.

Here, people know what they abandon. Here, the dragon has been named, and here and here, here, here and here. In this land, the empire has been unveiled, and it is not a socialist state nor a capitalist state. It is a machine – a machine that cannot be reformed, voted out of office, or overcome. It can only be abandoned. We can only gather our belongings and join the caravan of those walking away from the artifacts of its artificial empire.

In this between world, what we long for speaks to us from somewhere beyond our intellects, even from beyond our imaginations. Here, our ancestors speak, drawing us forward. Here the mystery speaks intimately, like family. Here the Ancient One speaks clearly, its voice present and solid like stars.

Industrial culture can desecrate our experience of the holy, but not this holy voice. It speaks through all of reality, through the heights of the created world as well as through the many small voices of the nearby world.

Holy is the land where we walk, the dirt roads and the mythical roads. Holy is Creation. Holy are we who dwell here, within the desecration, a dimension of Creation.

In silence, we make our way, listening to the many voices of the animate world.

***

At two years old, my daughter in a trembling voice cries out in her dream: Papa Sun, help me! Mama Moon, help me!

I don’t know what she is fearing, nor what she needs help with, only whom she calls upon.

At four, she walks out of the house and not realizing anyone is watching her, says quietly to herself — Huh! I’m a deer! — then prances off into the tall grasses.

What’s a revelation? she asks the other day, now 10 years old.

I look at her, loving her so much.

My son, six, standing on his head on the couch, answers: It’s like that podcast they listen to. “Revelations of modern existence” or “Revelations against modern existence” or something like that.

Adrianne and I have no idea what podcast he is referring to, but his answer is better than ours.

***

Empires come and go and the Ancient One remains, speaking through the many voices of Creation. Shaped by machines from morning to night, from birth to death, these voices are hard to hear. They seem fleeting, like dreams, so I sit beneath the umbrella, trying to hear them.

Within this mythical shelter, within the Empire of the Machine, within this Substack, I won’t seek answers, but will simply gaze upon Holy Creation, or try to. I think many people are sitting here, or they’re in their own shelters, trying to remember the holy land, awaiting for old worlds and new worlds to be born among us, amidst the catastrophe. In these between times, I guess such makeshift shelters are probably everywhere, in a multitude of forms.

Welcome to this one, The Oar and the Umbrella. Please have a seat and rest awhile.

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