True Ancestor

Time to Grow Your Own

From a young age, I fantasized about living on a farm. I decided at about age 5 that, in the summer before I turned 17, I was going to work on a farm. It never happened, so I still dream about it, even though 17 is long gone.

I loved the sight of farms from a young age. I adored the orderly rows of crops, ridged like corduroy, zipping past the window of our VW bus as it made its pokey way along  the highway on long trips. I loved barns. The smell of hay. The idea of coming in exhausted at the end of the day and having a huge meal.

I was idealizing farm life, in a way, but I was a kid. I worked harder at understanding farm life than any other city kid I knew. I got up early every morning to watch the Farm Report on Channel 9, and hear the orotund orations of Orien Samuelson as he read and analyzed the latest commodity prices, and I loved the fact that farmers were watching right along with me.

When I was at summer camp, at around age 13, I told a counselor of my yearning to work on a farm.

"Well, my aunt and uncle will put you to work on their farm in Virginia anytime," Dave said. "But you'd better be ready to work your ass off about 12 hours a day, hurt over every inch of your body, and sit around in the evenings, drinking stuff you shouldn't be drinking and shooting cans and road signs with a shotgun."

I never worked for Dave's aunt and uncle, or any other farmers, for that matter.

I regret it more than ever after reading about the nascent movement of "energy survivalism." It features learning the skills to cultivate energy and food independence, or at least self-reliance, and removing oneself from the collapsing grid of modern excess. The pioneers of energy survivalism may tend to the wild-eyed prophetic types: some anticipate having to fend off hordes of starving disoriented urbanites -- folks who can't grow an herb or make their own latte but who might use their GPS systems to head to the country in search of food, or a least a B&B at which to weather the storm.

I find it pleasingly ironic that, at the possible onset of global upheaval, I'm heading to Divinity School -- and facing a 60-mile round-trip commute to school. A less practical choice could hardly be invented, especially by a person who's been the primary breadwinner in a family with three children, two of whom will be in college next year; especially in a time of rising oil and food prices.

I still can't believe I made this choice. I quake in bed at night and curse myself during the day.

And yet I can't shake the notion that on many levels -- including the practical -- it's a choice I won't regret.

Tomorrow, however, I'm digging a hole to begin a compost heap in the back yard. More vegetables are going in this year.

But face it: I was a city kid, now I'm a suburban dad. I couldn't build a cabin out of Lincoln Logs, much less the real thing. And I couldn't grow a weed without fertilizer.

But farming life, on a smaller scale, may be the wave of the very near future.

--T.A.

Incremental Apocalypse

Middle Daughter arrived home on Sunday, after her five-month volunteering jaunt through India and Africa. A few weeks ago she was diagnosed with malaria. She immediately upped her anti-malarial medication, and yesterday, a battery of tests showed no sign of the disease. Either she eradicated the malaria with the increased dosage of medicine, or she never had the disease at all. We'll never know.

As I write this, she's under the knife in the chair of an oral surgeon, getting skin scraped from the roof of her mouth and grafted onto a small portion of her lower jaw where, for some reason, she's suffered an almost total loss of gum tissue. She'll be in a lot of pain and a drug-induced swoon for a couple of days; then, we hope, she'll begin to heal in earnest.

From the minute we picked her up at the airport, stories have been tumbling out of her: the fall she took into a ditch in Tanzania, leaving, on the back of her left thigh, the largest bruise I have ever seen; the terror of crossing a street in Delhi, and learning the trick of crossing next to a cow, whose sacred status means it musn't be harmed (and whose size almost guarantees that it won't); the site of a black rhino at the Ngorongo Crater (hey: there's one now!); learning to sleep on trains clutching all your belongings; the deep bonds formed with the kids in the schools in Delhi and in Moshi, Tanzania, where she worked (that's Moshi in the other photo).

And coming home, she was at first delighted, then somewhat stunned at the ho-hum opulence of American life. A bathroom -- all to herself?! A toilet that wasn't a hole you had to squat over?! Heat, and lights, and big, comfortable cars, and television? And sushi?!!

The other night, before Middle Daughter got home, the One True Wife and I went out to dinner with friends who have the largest and most opulent house of any family I know. The friends built this house about five years ago. They told me that their kids now run through the house turning off lights in empty rooms, and scolding their parents for their excesses. It's more than just the cheerily correct PR of the classroom. Kids intuitively understand what their parents cannot or will not grasp: we're on the point of no return. The next little burst of energy into your flat-screen TV, or the switch that illuminates that room full of recessed lights, might be the end of the beginning of the end.

The latest science is clearly suggesting -- and in unusually frank terminology -- that the tipping point in global warming is happening right now.

The will to survive exerts itself spectacularly against spectacular threats -- but when the threat is creeping and gradual, the will may arrive too late.

Our kids know this in their bones. Middle Daughter fears that India will become one giant traffic jam when the bargain basement Renault/Nissan/Bajaj joint venture car begins to pour onto the market at the rate of 400,000 per year. She thinks even cows will become roadkill. And then there's the huge increase in demand for oil that the new cars will instigate.

Gabe is appalled that my Honda Accord Hybrid only averages about 25 miles per gallon. You call this a hybrid? And when are they going to hurry up and produce the Chevy Volt?

Oldest Daughter, she of the Washington, DC, internships and political perspective, thinks the Prius will look like a dinosaur within 18 months, and we should all hold out for better, more environmentally responsible technology.

Two nights ago, at Middle Daughter's craving's behest, we bought sushi from Whole Foods and sat around our ancient analog TV set, watching awful television and enjoying being together again. I thought about where the fish had come from, and the Burmese who could really have used that rice, and the electric meter spinning like a top; I loved having my whole family together again, and stopped, for a moment, wondering when the other shoe would drop.

--T.A.

Season of our Liberation --or End of Days?

When, within the space of a few days, in the thawing Midwest,a wild cougar appears and people are rattled in their beds by an earthquake, it can be safely be said that we're living in interesting times. Need more proof?

• When the Cubs and Sox have near-identical records -- and sit at or near the top of their respective divisions;
• When an African American man and a white woman are vying for the presidential nomination of a major party;
• When the announcement of dismal financial results is deemed by the markets to be good news because the results aren't as dismal as they could have been;
• When a baby with two faces is born,
• And a woman survives a gunshot between the eyes;
• When a man, living with a transplanted heart, kills himself in the same way as the heart donor did;
• When the Pope meets abuse victims face to face,
• A praying passenger is removed from a commercial flight,
• And Jimmy Carter meets with leaders of Hamas;
• When a blind woman makes a hole in one
• And a deaf player scores in the NBA,

well, then, my friends, these are interesting times, indeed.

Chag Sameach/Happy Passover and a season of liberation to one and all --

--T.A.

"The Arctic is screaming."

That's what a senior scientist says after reviewing a record melt of Greenland's ice sheet this past summer -- a melt that exceeded the previous record by 19 billion tons.

Scientists don't yet know whether this is a momentary blip in an overall upward trend, or the climate having rushed horribly past a tipping point. What they do know is that the Northwest Passage is navigable by boat for the first time on record. And that "the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press."

How serious are any of the Presidential candidates about this issue?

How serious are we as a nation? The answer appears to be "Not so much:" I came across this story on AOL's home page, which scrolls through several stories of topical interest. The story after this one was:

Celebrity Headlines 2007.

At least the Arctic ice melt story came first. That would never have happened in a pre-Al Gore world.

--T.A.

Life, Death and Meditation

I've been offered the chance to teach a 5-week course in Jewish meditation at a local synagogue. I'm scared. I'm about to be outed as a poseur.

Truth is, I am surrounded by -- I spend my days with -- people for whom spiritual considerations are just a goofy, dreamy form of self-indulgence. Of course, many of these people take their religious obligations seriously. But any kind of serious spiritual searching or discipline evokes from them the dime-store stereotype of the meditator, thumb and forefinger making a little "OK" symbol, OHHMMM chanted loudly with a blissful pseudo-smile.

That's begun to rub off on me. I am antsy and cerebral again, mind stewing with doubts and have-baked real estate deals. I am, as me True Ann-Sister once said, sounding "terribly actual." Gone are the days when I could sit for 35 minutes without getting uncomfortable; when meditating was like exercising, a solid habit that left a void or cast a cranky pall over a day that went by without it. Now, I want to get things done. I don't want to talk about it. I want to do it.

Of course, meditation (contrary to popular perception) is doing by not doing. It's being 100% focused on being, which is always doing itself (I'm starting to sound like that old Sinatra - Nietzsche joke, whose punch line is "doobeedoobeedoo").

So teaching a meditation class will give me the chance to -- require me to -- revive my meditation discipline. It'll be interesting, to say the least, to try give both an overview and the foundation of some sort of practice to a roomful of curious (and probably a few suspicious) Jews, for whom meditation has until recently been a lost art. The Shema, the aleph, the Tree of Life, the Divine Name; guided meditations; we'll experience it all, albeit in small doses.

Sitting still is hard, but it's more important than ever. I see, and researchers note, a connection between our lack of stillness -- or, perhaps, a lack of perspective on busy-ness that only Nature can provide -- and our unhappiness. Is it any wonder we actually get happier when thinking about our death? Death -- the ultimate stillness! The freedom from wonder about the Abyss! The end of obligation, of pain, of loss!

Sometimes I see death as the ultimate form of meditation: the stillness that doesn't jump off the pillow, the soul's release from the weight of obligations and orifices. The end of one kind of wonder, the beginning of another.

Teaching meditation means as little talking about it, and as much doing it, as possible. Do you notice how much talk there is about spirituality, but how little work there actually is? These people are going to sit down next to me, and they are going to get some work done.

At the end of which, ironically, we'll be the exact same people we were at the beginning.

Only more so.

--T.A.

Rosh Hashanah and Nature

We Jews need to get out more.

I sense (but have no objective proof for) a connection between our history as the "people of the Book" and our tendency toward fevered and fussy, high-flown intellectual intensity. Well, maybe I have some objective proof: there's that study that me True Ann-Sister points out, which says that what you think affects the structure of your brain. After millennia of reading, arguing, cogitating and studying, we may be wired to miss the connection between the Immediate (aka the Divine, the Immanent) and the Now (aka the Moment).

So here's my prescription, as our High Holidays loom ahead of us: spend some sacred time outside. In Nature. Or as close as you can get thereto. Some people find God in Nature. Some just find a break.

There was a rabbi back in the 1970's, Everett Gendler by name. In Journeys: an Introductory Guide to Jewish Mysticism, Rabbi William E. Kaufman describes Rabbi Gendler's concerns:

Gendler maintains that Judaism has allowed itself to become so historically oriented that ties with the  natural world have been broken, and that therefore the natural world has ceased to be a source of wonder to the Jew. 'To be sure,' Gendler indicates, 'the break with paganism was vitally necessary for the development of Judaism. But the break can go too far,' he contends. 'It can become a chasm, an unbridgeable gap. We are at a stage now where we must begin to redress the balance by renewing our contact with nature. And furthermore, there originally were nature elements in Judaism, which we must revive.'

These nature elements included the significance of the rhythms of the moon, which Gendler sees "as a symbol of our connection with the rhythms of the cosmos. Whereas the sun is always the same, the moon waxes, wanes, and disappears." The moon is thus symbolic of the human condition: human life is subject ot the universal laws of birth, becoming, and death.

Rabbi Gendler saw God as Chei Ha-olamim, or "life of the Universe." God, then, becomes a pulse, a rhythm, perhaps even the will between the beats to continue the pattern. God is growth, but also the growth toward death. He suggested that, while out in the natural world, one should chant a prayer or use a meditation, like this one from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav:

Master of the Universe, grant me the ability to be alone; may it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grass, among all growing things, and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer, to talk with the One that I belong to.

Rabbi Gendler was interviewed by Kaufman for his book almost 30 years ago, but this much is still true: We may have a Jewish homeland, but we find, to our dismay, that we are still exiled from ourselves. This is because our deep relationship is not only with the land, but with land, with ground, with Nature and with the cycles of Nature as reflective of our own cycles -- not just birth-growth-death, but learning-mastering-forgetting, transgressing, doing teshuvah, and starting again.

(Some have made a booming business out of reintroducing Jews to Nature, but you have to wonder: does that really transform the participants? Does it really connect them to anything? Or does it just make for great video?)

And that must go for everyone, not just Jews.

Be outside more. Start again. Anytime now.

--T.A.

God or No God, It's All Good

Does God exist or not?

Does God care or not?

A lot gets said on the topic, but little gets said as clearly, as concisely or as sensibly as this (h/t: RLC).

Shabbat Shalom--

--T.A.

From the Middle East to the Wild West

Two weeks ago, the One True Wife and I were watching the Sun come up in the Negev. This evening, we're fresh back from five days in Montana, visiting a family of three that knows how to have fun -- and taught us a thing or two.

The friends are unusual people, not only for their love and stewardship of the natural environment but their ability to have fun in it, too. The five days included hiking, fly-fishing, wake-boarding, target shooting, parade-watching, a festival celebrating a small Montana town's logging culture -- and shooting off a homemade potato cannon (hairspray and a flame introduced into one end of a PVC tube, with a potato jammed into the other end). While our friends felt the contradictions inherent in burning fossil fuels (and hairspray) in the pursuit of fun, they also devoted themselves to creating an environment where wildlife could pass freely across their property, with nothing more than the occasional sonic-booming potato to startle them.

In the process of this latest trip, the Wife was transformed from a Nervous Nellie into a sharp-shooter of Annie-Oakley-esque proportions, and Gabe wake-boarded behind a boat for almost a half-mile at a time. He clambered up steep granite rock faces, and did everything that an 11-year-old could dream of doing in an entire summer (including many things he's begged me to do, for which I had neither the time, the patience nor the aptitude).

The vacation was more than just an excursion with a beautiful backdrop. We got something of a feel for the battles that shape life in the West. The Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where we cavorted, is a culture at war with itself. Ranchers and loggers use a great deal of water from the local streams and rivers -- reducing their flows in summer by almost two thirds -- but they also provide work in one of the most impoverished states in the union. Fishermen and -women have almost no water to fish in -- and rapidly dwindling stocks of fish to catch. Non-native weeds and plants are wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. All these problems are exacerbated by weather that has been remarkably hot: the sunsets and moonrises are blood-red, and the air was hazy every day from one of the worst fire seasons in recent memory.

The people of this valley want to preserve their way of life, a life that leans heavily on the land. They have and proclaim faith that the land has the ability to provide for human consumption and to rebound from heavy use. Depending upon what lens you look through, they are either right, or they're deluding themselves.

All we knew was that both white-tailed deer and mule deer came by our friends' house every morning and evening; that one morning, a herd of more than 100 elk moved slowly by, like some Lascaux cave painting come to life. The larger females stood on their hind legs to pluck juicy leaves from deciduous trees; and Nature seemed grand and omnipotent and unperturbed.

But we drove through valleys whose encircling hills were completely denuded by previous fires; we rafted and swam in a river we dared not drink from; and we attended Darby Logger Days, a festival that proclaimed the unending and unerring right of Western men and women to maintain a way of life whose economic and spiritual basis is the cutting of timber. 

Many stretches of forest we drove or hiked through were strangely uncluttered; ominously pristine. This, our host told us, was the result of the Healthy Forests Initiative, which promises, among other things, to "reduce dense undergrowth that fuels catastrophic fires through thinning and prescribed burns." What we saw, however, were forest floors opened, because of this thinning, to the heat of the Sun; and where before thick undergrowth had retained moisture and allowed for undergrowth, now there were only swatches of tinder-like grass and enormous piles of chain-sawed pine and larch -- perfect kindling in the perfect setting for the next forest fire, or so it would seem.

Be that as it may, we forgot ourselves. We played in the open air, got burned in the sun and bitten by bugs, fired potatoes over the horizon, and fell exhausted and contented into our beds at night, knowing that the next day, we would still see, out our window, a seemingly endless world of beauty and harmony that soldiered on in spite of us, and would one day right itself, with or without our help.

--T.A.

The Back-Yard Ecosystem

With the One True Wife out of town for the weekend, and the week ahead featuring no rain in the forecast, I thought I'd better turn my attention to the garden this morning.

And the lawn. Over the decade or so that we've lived here, we've removed about one third of the lawn and replaced it with annuals, perennials, ground cover -- everything native and hearty and esthetically pleasing that we could find.

Today is almost as beautiful as yesterday: a little warmer and more humid, but still a benign day, with a gentle breeze, a light cloud cover, a softening of the heat due to the cool waters of nearby Lake Michigan. What's different this summer is the eerie, intergalactic hum of the 17-year cicadas. They emit a sound like a ray-gun in a '50s sci-fi thriller. They also chew into delicate branches, so they can lay their eggs in the cracks. As a result, dozens of twigs have rained down on the lawn, the streets and sidewalks.

I watered everything and stood there, smelling the grateful exhalations of the green grass and the black earth.

Then I watered the dozens of plants in the house. They, too, seemed to sigh with relief.

Sometimes I feel as though I can sense the personality of every living thing. Every animate object proclaims itself, all the time. You just have to pay attention.

There are whole metropolitan areas of insect life, made up of intersecting neighborhoods of different kinds of ants, moths, flies, bees, dragonflies, mosquitoes and beetles. There are quirreling squirrels and solipsistic chipmunks and dozens of different kinds of birds, passing each other on their way to work. I dodge a pile of poop from -- what? -- a skunk, a raccoon, a possum. A burgeoning family of rabbits lives under the big pine tree just off the patio. With few foxes and only the occasional desperate coyote in the neighborhood, life is good for rabbits in these parts. (I accidentally typed "rabbis." I suppose that's true, too.)

Last night, Gabe, Middle Daughter and I watched Freedom Writers. I highly recommended it for those who have no hope for our inner cities. OK, it's a Hollywood take on a real story -- but there is a real story behind it.

And also medicinal for those feeling hopeless is a walk in the yard. Any yard will do. Life is almost as omnipresent and tireless as death. If you despair, get out there, and water something, and listen to the sighs of relief from the lives you've nourished. Enjoy the space you've carved into the world for yourself. Enjoy sharing it with the tiny sparks of life that fly and scramble by.

Then gird your loins. Tomorrow is Monday.

--T.A.

"Truth springs forth from the Earth."

This eerily warm winter is making the Midwest seem like the mid-South. The days are mild. You can see your shadow. Daffodils are even blooming in places, fooled into premature celebration of Spring by the warm, moist earth.

The Earth, she don't lie. Or as the Psalmist says, "Truth springs forth from the earth" (85:14). As the land and the oceans warm, the irresistible forces of life will find new ways to express themselves.

If Truth springs from the Earth, then what is the Earth saying?

Truth may spring forth from the earth, but it also waits within. An enterprising bunch of archaeologists has used what is known of Essene culture and hygiene, and gone in search of ancient latrines some distance from the caves of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Historians still argue about whether the scrolls were the work of the Essenes, or if the caves were just inhabited by a bunch of misanthropes who left Jerusalem because no one would invite them to bar mitzvah parties.

Some think the caves of Qumran were not a refuge of the Essenes. But finding latrines at some distance from the caves would help lend credence to the theory that Essene life did center there, at least for a time.

The enterprising archaeologists (whose findings are being published in the scholarly journal Revue de Qumran) mentioned above theorized that, since the Essenes were a sect devoted to extreme ritual and personal purity, their toilets would be a good hike from their settlements. And in fact, some nine minutes by foot from the caves inhabited and used by the Essenes, the archaeologists found evidence of buried human fecal matter. 

The archaeologists used the writings of the Roman/Jewish historian Josephus Flavius to zero in on the ancient latrine. Josephus documented a great deal about Jewish life under Roman rule. Josephus knew of the Essenes and their practices, and wrote in some detail about the distance and direction they would travel to do their "business" in order to keep their community's purity intact.

I wonder: what if Josephus had been banned? How much would we not know about the Judaism of the Second Temple and period and the Diaspora that followed?

Or would banning his books have made them that much more widely read?

How much wiser would Judaism be, if Judaism did not ban books, as some of its sages have so recently and ironically done?  (Fortunately, this irony is not lost on some Jewish leaders.)

The works of Nosson Slifkin have been banned by some Orthodox authorities as being heretical because of their active engagement with the discipline of Natural History from a Jewish perspective.

If we continue to refuse to acknowledge the truth that springs from the Earth, the Earth will smack us upside the head with it.

That daffodil in my front yard may be the sucker-punch.

--T.A.