"Great good is done while we're asleep."
The author of a book I recently finished grew up on a Midwestern farm. He wrote lovingly of his father, a man whose difficult work didn't keep him from maintaining a steady rhythm of effort and rest. His was an unhurried pace until, the author remembers, the wheat was ready for harvest. Then the pace changed; the hours of labor were long and the window for a good harvest was short. It was only after the fields had been cleared and the grain shipped that the farmer could rest. Ahead of him laid late autumn and winter when the hours of daylight were fewer and the seasons themselves invited his rest.
Here in the northern hemisphere we are making the turn toward fall. Though the autumnal equinox is still a few weeks away, already the quality of light has shifted. The native grasses and wildflowers are at their peak; some tower over my head during my sabbath walks through Jackson Park. There are the beginnings of yellows and reds in the canopy of trees which tunnel our street and those leaves which are still green look tired- wilted, cracked, and browning around the edges. Our days have been hot this week but, unlike the earlier summer months, the nights have cooled pleasantly.
I didn't grow up in places with four noticeably distinct seasons. My childhood was spent near the equator: in Venezuela it was hot and dry or hot and rainy and in Ecuador, from Quito's almost 10,000 feet above sea level, it was either mild and clear or mild and cloudy. High school was spent in southern California where the foothills turned green in the winter and the skies were less smoggy but that was about the extent of the seasonal change. It wasn't until I went away to college in western North Carolina in a small cove tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains that I finally experienced the four seasons, one sliding slowly into the next. The mountains blazed in the fall, the creeks held ice along their banks in wintertime, and red buds and rhododendron let us know that spring had arrived. It was a revelation.
People would come from miles around to experience those Appalachian seasons, especially autumn and spring, and I understood why. I joined the tourists on the Appalachian Parkway and friends on hikes up to spectacular vistas, waterfalls of bright hardwood canopies tumbled beneath our elevated gaze. In the winter we'd borrow cafeteria trays to slide down the steep and narrow roads freshly packed with snow and in the spring my suite-mates and I would head up a nearby trail for a weekend camping among flowering dogwood and other signs of life. You'll have to excuse me for romanticizing these memories but it was romantic to someone for whom the seasons had previously only been a notion.
For a while my experience of the seasons was mostly like those gaping parkway tourists I so happily joined. They were something to observe, to photograph. (Social media didn't exist in the late 90's, but if it had my posts would have been annoyingly seasonal.) "Have you been to the Great Smokies in the fall? The colors are incredible!" "The Grand Tetons in January are spectacular." "You really must visit California's high dessert in late winter when everything is flowering." Seasons as spectacle.
More recently I've thought about the strangeness of this way of experiencing the changing seasons. Not that people in previous generations didn't appreciate the beauty of these changes. Many of our not-that-distant ancestors lived far more exposed than we do to the calendar and the beautiful and strange ways their places responded to specific days and months. But I have to imagine that most of those people didn't only or even mostly think of the seasons as something to observe; there was something more.
That more, I think, has to do with that the urgency that farmer felt toward the beginning of each autumn as he walked into his wheat, feeling and tasting, waiting for the perfect moment to harvest his crop. His pace was determined by the season. While the work may have always been unhurried, its tempo responded to the possibilities and limits presented by each season.
In his collection of Sabbath Poems Wendell Berry writes about the way the agricultural life reminds the farmer of the rhythm inherent to life.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.
Berry's farmer realizes that while there are times for urgent work, there must also be times where the work that is being done is accomplished without us, while we're asleep. These are the boundaries imposed by the seasons and they are protective and creative. The slowness of winter protects us from turning our work into toil while also creating the conditions for new life beneath the soil.
I wonder if the low-grade exhaustion so many of us contemporary people experience has something to do with refusing seasonal limits. By reducing them to nature's performance, we miss what the seasons are primarily for: organizing time for creatures to be restful and fruitful. Of course, many of our technologies have successfully insulated us from recognizing these limits. For us, darkness and cold are little inconveniences to manage, not a cosmic invitation to a slower and more restful pace.
In 1978 Berry wrote an essay, "Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems," about the tendency he observed to impose mechanistic solutions onto what are fundamentally biological problems. While a mechanical approach to farming is undeniably efficient, it leaves in its wake the destruction of agricultural cultures (and the humans who comprise them) and incredible waste, including the soil itself which, rather than being nourished by traditional farming practices, is rapidly being used up. Berry is interested in the way that the mechanical metaphors imposed on agricultural practices end up reducing not just the land to a disposable resource, but people too. "Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as 'units' as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts... And the body is thought of a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as 'fuel;' and the best workers and athletes are praised as being compared to machines."
Could it be that the fatigue which seems inevitable to many of us is exacerbated by our search for technological solutions to human problems? We meet the problem of community with always-on electronic connectedness. We meet the problem of work with constant availability to the demands of our job via phones and laptops and tablets. And we meet the problem of rest with... what? Entertainment? The promise of a vacation? My sense is that most of us, having so deeply assumed the static nature of an always-going society, have mastered the skill of distraction such that we don't really know the depths of our fatigue. We are fields left bare to the wind, seasons celebrated or bemoaned but not honored. Our technological solutions have left us thinking that we alone, of all the creatures, can live inharmoniously with time without consequence.
We can't, of course, and each season the creation itself testifies to the truth found in Ecclesiastes, "For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven." Choosing to honor the wisdom of a seasonal life doesn't have to be complicated. In a basic sense it is a choice to live in rhythm with our place with the rest of creation. We might welcome the slackening autumn light by only turning on the absolutely necessary lights in our homes, allowing the longer hours of darkness to slow our pace. We could to choose to turn off and set aside our devices early enough in the evenings so that our bodies can feel the tiredness we've been carrying through the active summer months. Looking to the fields which will soon lay fallow, we could consider what in our lives deserves to be dormant for a time.
The wisdom of seasons is not only for our personal benefit. In his writing over the past few decades, Berry has borne witness to the devastation wrought by our attempt to transcend limits, both agricultural and human. The land itself and the communities it has supported suffers under our hubris. The decision to live honorably within time, to accept that each season requires a different way to thrive, is good for our entire community. This pattern of life opens our eyes to the neighbors who've been deemed, for whichever unholy reason, to be unworthy of regular rest. It reveals those whose value comes only from their production. It slows us enough to notice whether the plants and animals and watersheds which share place with us are benefiting from our presence. Accepting our creaturely limits by refusing the temptation to outwit time is one way we can walk humbly with creation and its Creator. And this, friends, is a much better way to live than the tiresome pace we've been made to believe is inevitable. As Berry writes in that same poem, "When we work well, a Sabbath mood / Rests on our day, and finds it good."
(Picture: Looking north to the Museum of Science and Industry from the Bobolink Meadow in Jackson Park during my slow walk on Tuesday.)
If you're near Chicago later this month, consider yourself invited to our church's annual Faith & Race Workshop. I'm especially excited about this year's themes and speakers. More info and registration here.
