Blog

Once a month, I sit to write Haiku. It is the closest I get to the practice of meditation in my media mediated life. I turn off all my normal tools of writing and just stare out of my little office window until something happening “out there” works its way into my imagination. Yesterday, I noted a few reddening leaves blazing in the still-green silver maple, I recalled the field-corn stalks withering in the sun, heard a few walnuts bounce off a nearby steel roof, thought about harvesting a ripe butternut squash for dinner. As predictable as these things are when I think about what early October should look like, to just sit and take it all in felt simultaneously surprising and comforting – and a little alarming given the preternaturally warm weather we’ve experienced this fall.

Kevin and his son worked here two days, preparing the rusted deck of tractor mower. Twenty years of me neglecting to wash wet grass from its underside caught up with me and the thing practically broke in half the last time I took it to the fields.

Two days and a pocket full of cash and an inspiring amount of inventiveness and hard work later, it’s good as new. Watching Kevin figure out what needed to be done, watching his experience our into an idea multiplied by 16 hours of tedious labor seemed like I was watching a hero quest – as a good ole boy and his troubled adult son healed the world, right before my eyes.

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After picking blackberries in the heavy morning dew (my feet are still soaked from the walk to and from the blackberry patch), I tuned into the Westheimer Peace Symposium this morning and heard the incomparable George Lakey speak about the difference between demonstrating ones commitment to a cause and mobilizing in support of that cause.

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