To Every Thing, There Is a Season

Looking up Nagonaba from marina

The shift from Saturday’s heavy traffic, in Leelanau County and all around Grand Traverse Bay (my sources report), to empty parking spaces all up and down the streets of Northport comes accompanied by a change in the weather. Balmy, light-filled, summer-like fall mornings have given way to leaden skies, blustery winds, and whitecaps on the water. Zip the liner into your trench coat. Go outside. Test the temperature. Go back inside and look for a vest to wear under the coat. Even knitted cap and mittens are not amiss. But the color goes on, and I saw a shaggy mane this morning by the side of the road. Autumn is not over. This shift is not as sudden as it seems, either: it’s been in the works for a while, caterpillars and birds on the move and plants making and scattering seeds.

Black walnuts on the ground

If last weekend was peak color, how quiet will the bookstore be this week? When I couldn’t get Sarah an appointment with her regular groomer on Monday, I threw caution to the winds and set up a session on Tuesday morning, and while Sarah was being made prettier than she already was, David and I took in Jean Larsen’s show at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City. Yes, I had three days off in a row – Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday! And look at the improvement in Sarah’s appearance! Can you say “criminally cute”?

Before

After

Inspiration struck on Monday, thanks to clouds that kept interfering with the sun, discouraging me from committing to projects in the yard, and instead of digging up the garden I did a major overhaul upstairs, from clean sheets on the bed to moving furniture. The old mission desk (missing center drawer) on the upstairs landing had never done anything there but collect junk. I never had used that corner as a writing studio, a fond dream when we first moved into the farmhouse. So now the desk is in the back bedroom upstairs, looking out over the meadow in the direction of the sunrise, and it’s set up as a permanent drawing station, inaugurated with a session that very afternoon. I tried it out this morning for an hour, too, and it was dandy, even before sunrise.

Flowing lines, object contours, contrast of light and shade – so wonderfully wordless! No, I certainly have not given up reading! What I have done in the last few days, however, is to shift over to books that focus on nature, re-reading Tom Brown, Jr.’s The Tracker (one of my old favorites, and I have his book The Vision close at hand to read next) and an equally inspiring book I discovered more recently, Forest Gardening: Cultivating an Edible Landscape, by Robert Hart.

The essence of life should be continuous creativity: in working out creative and comprehensive solutions to one’s problems, one rises above them. They become smaller, less tormentingly insistent, until, perhaps, in time, one realizes they have just faded away.

Are problems tormenting you? Wouldn’t you welcome a meditation practice or a book that let those problems fade into the background, even if only temporarily? Forgive me for repeating myself – I’ve recommended the title before – but Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation combines both approaches. If you never pick up a pencil, simply holding this book and turning the pages slowly as you take in the author’s words and drawings is a calming meditation.

I draw a leaf . . . Still it is moving. Still the birds are on the wing. Still I can hear the silent falling of the snow . . . Some of the grasses are long, others are short . . .

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The noisy campaigns will not last forever.

P.S. Another good idea is music, so if you are free on the evening of November 3, come get a ticket from me for Tristan Eckerson's live performance in Suttons Bay. I also have a few of his CDs left, "Leelanau Night," his original compositions on solo piano.

In the Sands, the Dust, the Snows, and the Mud of Time

[A] track is a temporary thing. Unless the mud goes suddenly hard and turns gradually to stone, tracks do not last. They fade, and as they dry, the wind sweeps them relentlessly level to ease its way across the ground. Tracks exist at the interface where the sky drags along the surface of the earth. They exist for a relatively brief time in a narrow level near the surface of the ground where the wind and weather move across, changing the temperature and building information into the track. Nature conspires to steal even the traces of passage. Most tracks made in the world go under unseen. I try to follow every one I can.
- The Tracker: The true story of Tom Brown, Jr., as told to William Jon Watkins.

One of the many glories of an unpaved road is the way it holds tracks. On our morning walks, Sarah sniffs the grass and weeds at the side of the road: that’s her morning newspaper, her nose telling her who’s been where and what's gone on. While she uses her nose, I depend on my eyes to note the patterns made by a tractor, trails of another, earlier walker, the narrow, winding path of a snail, tiny bird footprints, a place where a deer leaped or stepped daintily across the road or where a coyote trotted or strolled, or the surprise evidence that sandhill cranes have been in the neighborhood. 

Until the rains come, that is, washing the slate clean until the next round of news is printed.

Noting tracks, following trails gives me an anticipation for winter and reminds me of the year I spent an hour a week just sitting outdoors, being in one place.

The more we learned to let our attention wander and come to rest on the thing at hand just often enough to catch the disturbances, the better we became as trackers and as observers of the woods.

I was reading those words one morning out on the front porch, before sunrise, with many different messages coming to me through the window – tapping of a woodpecker, crow’s call, screech of jay, rustle of linden leaves, my attention wandering easily and seamlessly from the words on the page to the outdoor sounds and back again.

Our intrepid Ulysses reading group will be getting together next week to discuss Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories and to propose our next reading adventure. Now that summer is over, we will probably return to “challenging” books, books for which we feel the need of “a support group,” as one member called it when we first came together to read James Joyce. But first we’ll be talking about Hemingway, and I’m still sorting through my responses on that score. Never mind separating the man from the myth – it’s separating the writer from the myth that concerns me.

A recent New York Times “Bookends” piece asked, “Do We Mistake Inaccessibility for Brilliance?” In other words, if a book is very, very long and difficult to read, do we think it must be a work of genius? Hemingway does not force us to that question, especially with his short stories. His style can hardly be called convoluted.

Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

Does the simplicity of Hemingway’s style mark it as as a work of genius? Did he, as has often been said, as he himself seems to have claimed, give us a new way to see the world?

In a way, it seems, every writer with a voice of his or her own cannot help giving a new way to see the world, for despite our commonalities and connections and dependencies, despite the cultural grids through which we perceive, each of us must perceive the world for ourselves. I cannot see through your eyes or hear through your ears: what world do I have to offer except the one my own eyes and ears, my own hands and feet and nose and mouth and skin and muscles give me?

So that can’t be the question. The question has to be, instead: Do I see the world differently for having read Hemingway? Do you? Or can any of us only read his work through the myth of Hemingway the writer? 

I’ll leave the questions there for today, but please feel welcome to leave your two cents' worth. It's a quiet, rainy Friday. Sarah and I are at the bookstore. What are you doing with this only September 18, 2015, of your life?