Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs,
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It’s deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It’s one of the places
The beloved is born.

April was National Poetry Month, which might or might not be a silly thing, but it has prodded me into thinking about poetry and my erratic relationship with it. When I received my two degrees in English, I was emphatically a fiction person. Poetry made me anxious because I could never figure out how to read it or what it was supposed to mean. My poetry textbooks from college and grad school are studded with frantic and useless annotations: cross-references to other poems by the same author, details about textual corruptions or variations, or underlinings directed by the professor that have no meaning for me now. Only rarely did I mark something just because I liked it, and then I worried about having made such a bold declaration. What if it didn’t mean what I thought it meant? What if someone discovered that I just didn’t get it?

I still have no idea what many poems mean, but I more often read poetry than fiction now. I use poetry when I teach and pray. I even read it just for fun. I sometimes write the kind of poetry that gave me brain freeze twenty-five years ago. How did this sea change come about? It began, I think, when I went to seminary and was forced to confront the Bible, a book I had never read and suspected that I wouldn’t like and feared would make me stupid. (I still wonder who was on the admissions committee that admitted me: Groucho Marx?) At first the familiar structure of the classroom allowed me to keep it at arm’s length. Memorize, analyze, parse, criticize. What do you do with a God who smites and punishes and condemns? Who needs his ego massaged with praise all the time? And yet I couldn’t help noticing that many of the psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Jesus who considered the lilies all addressed a force they considered entirely trustworthy, entirely beautiful, the genesis and end of all desire. I could not see what they saw when I read with a lens of suspicion. And, despite my distrust, I wanted to see what they saw.

I began reading aloud, in groups, slowly and repetitively. It was sometimes helpful to have literary and historical information to draw on, but I was more often hobbled when I came to passages like this from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

It was beautiful. I knew that it was somehow true. I had no idea what it meant. Yet over and over, I found myself run through by the language of scripture, knowing I had been wounded but unable to bind or even find the wound. In the company of similarly riven souls, however, I started finding another way, not so much to read as to be read. Instead of seeking experience—that giddy adrenaline ride of a narrative—I found a place from which to see my own experience, my self in relation to a much greater whole. I was like a one-eyed creature that had been given another eye; reality began to acquire a previously unsuspected dimension.

The April issue of The Sun contains an interview with Philip Shepherd, a British writer and actor, whose career has led him explore the implications of the little known fact that human beings have two brains, one in the head and one in the gut. This is not a fanciful or metaphorical claim. Nuerogastroenterology, a new medical field, studies the web of neurons lining the gastrointestinal tract that send signals to the body independent of the cranial brain. Shepherd is not a medical professional but uses the research in the field to examine the cultural and philosophical implications of this “pelvic brain.” Says Shepherd:

Our culture doesn’t recognize that hub in the belly, and most of us don’t trust it enough to come to rest there. Our story insists that our thinking occurs exclusively in the head. And so we are stuck in the cranium, unable to open the door to the body and join its thinking. The best we can do is put our ear to the imaginary wall separating us from it and “listen to the body,” a phrase that means well but actually keeps us in the head, gathering information from the outside. The body is you. We are missing the experience of our own being.

The intelligence of the pelvic brain is not rational, conscious, analytical or abstract; rather, it arises in the way an enormous flock of starlings alters its course like a single organism. Well, you might say, I’m not a flock of starlings. But we all have an astonishing sensitivity—a sensational sensitivity—to our perpetually changing environments, astonishing in its almost invisible routineness and its capacity to integrate multiple levels of information. It’s an intelligence we often take for granted or don’t acknowledge as intelligence at all, but it allows you to negotiate your way through space, to remember passages of music, to understand arithmetical relationships, to love or know joy. Our task is not to privilege one brain over the other but to learn to coordinate them, according to Shepherd. He uses a lovely analogy to illustrate what this coordination looks like: the astronauts who took the first photos of the earth from outer space brought them back to earth, giving us a new perspective on our planet’s fragility. We responded with environmental initiatives. We were sensitized.

Culturally speaking, though, Shepherd says that those of us who inhabit the “first world” are like astronauts who are stuck in orbit around the head, unable to descend back home to the belly, where the gathered information can be integrated and sensitize us to the great complex flow of the world we inhabit:

Our culture has a tacit assumption that if we can just gather enough information on ourselves and the world, it will add up to a whole. But when you stand back and look at something, there is always something hidden from you. The integration of multiple perspectives into a whole can happen only when, like the astronaut bringing the photo back to earth, we bring this information back to the pelvic bowl, back to the ground of our being, back to the integrating genius of the female consciousness. The pelvic bowl is the original beggar’s bowl: it receives the gifts of the world—the male perspective—and integrates them. As you bring ideas down to the belly and let them settle there, they sensitize you to who you are and give birth to insight. Our task is to learn to trust that process.

The belly brain as begging bowl, receiving the gifts of the world. In some Buddhist traditions, monks are mendicants who own nothing but their robes and their begging bowls, in which they receive offerings of food or other gifts from the lay community. These gifts are not considered alms but rather are part of an exchange in which the community supports the monks physically and the monks support the community spiritually. So quite literally, every human being carries a begging bowl to the world, an intelligence that establishes itself in emptiness, in poverty, in suffering, in sensitivity, in loss. Without that bowl, we have no place for the works arising from the cranial brain to incubate and mature before they enter the world. Without cross-pollination from the pelvic brain, the fruits of the cranial brain are stunted and distorted, rooted in the illusion that we are separate from the natural world and thereby at odds with it. Aligning the two intelligences gives us the opportunity to see holistically, with the depth of binary vision.

Given my initial take on the Bible, it seems poetically just that it should lead me to a less literal, more personally demanding way of reading, one that required some self knowledge before I could make any sense of it. Like scripture, good poetry is a gift in the begging bowl, pressing the reader to claim hunger and absence before the equally great gifts of abundance and presence come to view. In his wrenchingly beautiful volume of poetry, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (from which the poems at the beginning and end of this post are taken), Gregory Orr looks at the world with at least two eyes, that trinitarian third eye of the heart figuring somewhere in this body of stern and tender wisdom. I don’t mind that I don’t understand it all; reading it, I find that I have been seen, known, understood.

I guess I’m fine with National Poetry Month.

The beloved has gone away.
Always, this is the case.
Each moment turns on its hinge
And loss is there, loss
Announcing itself as absence.

But that’s because we’re looking
Backward, looking in the wrong
Direction: so desperately clinging
To a last glimpse of the beloved,
As if loss itself is what we loved.

And all the time the beloved
Is coming toward us, is arriving
Out of the future, eager to greet us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

Last week I started rowing again after an eight-month hiatus. It has been pure pleasure, despite the inevitable price of blisters on my baby-soft hands. First, the pleasure of seeing my friends at the dock, including the ducks and C.J. the chocolate Lab, who howled and wagged when he saw me; next, the pleasure of reestablishing a relationship with a boat in the water, negotiating the jostling demands of wind, current, oars, river geography, swans, kayakers, and my own stiff body; finally, the pleasure of being on the river itself, of seeing what has changed and what remains the same. The water changes quite literally with each breath; despite the dams, it’s still a living river. Trees and boulders have grown or fallen. Purple martins have replaced cormorants. And yet something persists, apparently unmoved by the passage of time. I’ve missed being on the river.

In the meantime, I was seeing another river, or at least imagining it. Martin has just finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow aloud to me, also pure pleasure. As have my rowing muscles, my reading-to-myself muscles have atrophied, and Martin reads with accents tailored to the characters and inflections appropriate to the plot. We’ve read like this for about a year now, usually at bedtime. Sometimes we can’t help but sneak-read in the daytime, wanting to be swept downstream by the whorls and eddies of words, characters, and plot like river-rafting thrill seekers.

One of the main characters of Jayber Crow is the river that runs through the valley in which the story is set. Jayber, the narrator of the novel and the barber of Port William, Kentucky, is a river-watcher as well. Late in his life and in the novel he asks:

How many hours have I spent watching the reflections on the water? When the air is still, then so is the surface of the water. Then it holds a perfectly silent image of the world that seems not to exist in this world. Where, I have asked myself, is this reflection? It is not on the top of the water, for if there is a little current the river can slide frictionlessly and freely beneath the reflection and the reflection does not move. Nor can you think of it as resting on the bottom of the air. The reflection itself seems a plane of no substance, neither water nor air. It rests, I think, upon quietness. Things may rise from the water or fall from the air, and, without touching the reflection, break it. It disappears. Without going anywhere, it disappears.

For Jayber, the reflection is an image, so to speak, of the divine, of how divinity is in this world and how it thwarts any logic that would fix that divinity in one place or locate it. It rests upon a condition rather than a location, on a “how” rather than a “where.” How can this condition be in the world? In quietness, says Jayber—a quietness that I think is born when the worlds outside and inside a person are married together. The natural world always carries its own quietness as it moves through time, but we humans need to practice marriage to know this quietness.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say by pulling marriage into this already multi-tentacled discussion, but having just made it to the other side of our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, and given the national discussion on what makes a marriage, I’ve been thinking. (Those three words always fill Martin with foreboding.) If you take Jewish and Christian scripture seriously, marriage is that process by which two people become one flesh. This process requires rending; each must leave his or her parents and cling to the other in order to become one flesh. After this rending and clinging, they stand before each other naked and are not ashamed.

As a youngster I thought that becoming one flesh was merely a reference to sexual congress, the least generative and generous level of meaning in this most profound of texts. As an older-ster, I know that becoming one flesh can include sexual encounter but that the two are very distinct realities. Becoming one flesh may, in fact, begin with the self, with learning to bridge the slippery banks of individual consciousness and the physical body, so often at odds with each other. I’ve come to see cancer as an icon of this struggle, our stuttering inability to conjugate the distinctive languages of consciousness and its endless mysteries and of body and its appetitive requirements. To live as one flesh in the river of the self seems to require an awareness of the reflection that Jayber noticed, the reflection that rests on quietness—a sort of third party that allows the hands of consciousness and bodiness to hold each other, to mingle and flow into the river between them. Of course, to live as one flesh within a single body—to be married to yourself, and thus whole—is a work that flows as endlessly as a river, but that allows those glancing moments of standing naked and unashamed.

To include someone else in the work to become one flesh… well. It requires an endless series of rendings and cleavings from the past, from what has been, to create something new, the way a river changes every day and yet is still the same river. Sex can be a sign of one-fleshness, but is just as likely to be a hindrance. Only when that third party of quietness, that generous generative flow between the banks of two bodies that reflects something beyond itself—only when the three are present can there be one flesh. When the possibility of being one flesh reveals itself—within the self, within the couple—that body begins to grow, including within itself children, friends, strangers, enemies, the world itself. The capacity for stepping off the banks of the self into the river, beckoning those on the other side to join in, might manifest itself just a few times in a person’s life, or never, or every day. A few people barely towel off before they jump back in, married to the whole world and all that’s in it, no time for messing with clothes or shame.

So practicing marriage is not the same as being married. One training ground I’ve found for the practice of marriage has been reading aloud. It’s something children know immediately, that a story read or told aloud is an opportunity for teller and listener to jump into a river of words and ride them together, making a net of meaning that holds them even when they scramble up their different banks at the end of the story. That’s why the practice of reading scripture aloud is so important; it allows people to jump together off the banks and into its great narrative flow.

It’s been instructive to be a child again as Martin reads aloud and I listen, creating for us a net of meaning through both rough and placid rides. Even if we spend the day ignoring the other across the bank, or throwing rocks, we climb together into that river of words, emerging refreshed (or sometimes asleep) or even naked, when one of us is moved to tears or left helpless by laughter.

That’s why, with so many figurative rivers running, I’m happy to be back on (if not in) a literal river: yet another chance to practice marriage.

What we’re reading
Heather: Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still)

Sin is behovely, but all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. (Julian of Norwich)

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

At dinner the other night I managed to elicit a full-brow furrow from Martin and Thea both. Considering the Kohout talent for growing hair, a full-brow furrow is a fierce and fearsome thing. Two furrowed Kohout brows is enough to send the insecure in search of a blankie, a pacifier, and a nice safe closet. I’m glad Lizzie and Tito weren’t there, because they might have furrowed as well, presenting far more furrowing than any reasonable person should ever be expected to stand up against.

The cause of dismay was my claim that sin is a useful category by which to examine human affairs. “You can’t call people sinners!” said my shocked and furrowed daughter. She was entirely right on one level, of course. We had been talking about the horrifying events in Norway, in which Anders Breivik, a thirty-two-year old radically conservative Christian (or perhaps “Christian”), killed 77 people, most of them children at a summer camp, many of them related to members of Norway’s ruling elite who presumably crafted the weak anti-immigration laws that allowed the recent influx of Muslim immigrants that so unglued the shooter.

History tends to support this maxim: virtually anyone who thinks he’s been given the power to condemn his neighbors for what he perceives to be their sins will be at the heart of a tragic, absurd, and/or evil situation. The track record of self-proclaimed prophets is pretty bleak. Thea’s well-taken point was, I think, that if I call someone a sinner, I’m at the top of a slope slippery with the blood of innocents. To many, calling someone a sinner implies that you’re in a position to judge, somehow not implicated in the fray. If you see sin around you and identify it as such, then somehow you remain outside the fire of judgment. You are rendered innocent so long as someone else is guilty. It seems like a good deal, especially if you’re someone inclined to condemn others (like “Christians”). It seems like a very bad deal if you’re the sinner or if you have any anxieties about absolutist legal codes.

Even so, sin is a concept we’re naïve to dismiss, whether or not we identify ourselves as religious. In the broader culture of the United States, there are two gauges by which we measure perceived or actual misconduct: mental health and the legal code. Misconduct is the result either of mental illness or willful disregard for civic order. While these are necessary ways to gauge human misconduct, they don’t cover the full range and depth of human experience. To imagine that they do creates a story about the human person and human culture that’s missing a bunch of pages in the middle. (I’ve cribbed this analysis from Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful book Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation.)

One of the problems in talking about sin is that it’s a word in a technical lexicon. Just as projection is one of those ideas bandied around by people who’ve never studied Freudian theory or its nuances (like me), sin has spilled over its technical boundaries and thereby become diluted, distorted, and generally misunderstood. As far as I can tell, it’s as misunderstood within the Christian community as it is outside of it, in part for the same reason: it’s considered to be a subset of either mental health or the legal system and not its own discrete and rich category.

While Anders Breivik probably has mental health issues and clearly broke all kinds of laws, I suspect that there are many other reasonable people besides Thea who would balk at identifying sin as an important component of his story, although it may be that story’s most salient component. While breaking laws is often a side effect, sin’s primary work is the precarious, discordant elevation of the self above the sturdy, harmonious network of God, self, and neighbor. With that definition in mind, you can be a law-abiding, mentally healthy member of a community and still be a sinner. Indeed, if you’re a Christian, you’re guaranteed to be one; that’s what the story of the Fall is about.

One of the persistent themes in both testaments of the Bible is that God is the only judge of sin because humankind has a severe allergy to identifying sin as sin when it’s tied to self. We have a very long history of pointing a finger at our neighbors and saying, “S/he made me eat it.” In writing the covenantal community’s early history, the biblical writers were uneasy with the idea of kingship. Even when the kings were beloved of God—and most of them were not—the Biblical writers point out time and again that human authority is almost ludicrously unable to judge with any regularity what’s pleasing to God.

I’m exercised about sin because so many critical misunderstandings of it seem to be spotlighted right now, and I’m trying to figure out how it is that I’m right and they’re wrong. The governor of Texas is about to declare himself a candidate in the Republican presidential race, having struggled to discern if he’s called by God to do so. The backdrop of his declaration will be the rally last Saturday in which he and several thousand others prayed for a troubled America. He prayed for the military and political leaders who cannot see the light in the darkness. There was no indication that he thought he might be one of those blind leaders. For all the Bible-reading that went on, no mention was made of the fact that in the Bible God never gives the rich and powerful more power when they ask for it. Instead, God regularly undermines them by granting it to the least or youngest in the community.

In a terrific op-ed piece in the Austin American Statesman, Jim Rigby, a local Presbyterian minister, pointed out the absence of several other key Biblical passages at the rally, like the passage in which Jesus expresses a clear distaste for public shows of prayer. The common thread among the passages Rigby mentions is an awareness of our steady insistence on seeing sin as something “out there” without any indication that it resides ineradicably “in here” as well.

But there’s a problem for those who see sin as residing ineradicably “in here,” who believe that we must struggle constantly to set self-interest under the discipline of a higher and more generous law. Reinhold Niebuhr, whom I always seem to read in the deepest, hottest part of summer, calls these “children of light,” in opposition to the “children of darkness,” the moral cynics who “know no law beyond the self.” According to Niebuhr, the problem is that the children of light are dumber than doorknobs. They fail to account for the power of sin in both individual and collective lives, and even within and among themselves. Children of light tend to think that if they reform, correct, educate, convert, clean house, start over, then human affairs will radically improve. Niebuhr says fuggedaboudit: “no matter how wide the perspective which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.”

Niebuhr identified Marxists as children of light whose stupidity allowed their creed to become “the vehicle and instrument of the children of darkness.” I believe that Perry and his followers are also children of light. Their creed is that eliminating homosexuality and abortion, giving free reign to business, and insisting on Christianity’s primacy will renew America, a creed as naïve as Marxism and as easily made into the tool of moral cynics. Of course, as a self-confessed utopian, I’m a child of light as well. I’m looking for admission to another group, made up of what I’ll call children of dawn. They know the power of sin, they work to name it in themselves and in the world, and their despair or anger at knowing that they can’t conquer it by themselves is overridden by hope and generosity. I think of St. Paul, that proud Pharisee, who opened the doors of Christianity to the uncircumcised and the eaters of unclean foods and invited them to come in, sit down, and eat. More recently, I think of people like, say, Nelson Mandela, but children of dawn don’t tend to be particularly visible until you bump into them in the darkness. The hospice nurses who helped us through my mother’s death were children of dawn. The friend who tells you a hard truth with great love. The artist who brings new beauty into the world. The teacher who gives his students his best work and requires that they return it with interest. The attorney who works on death row. The director of a no-kill animal shelter who cooks Thanksgiving dinner for all the creatures in her care. The soldier who struggles to treat the enemy with respect.

It’s a long list, thank goodness, and unrestricted by any creed or class. There’s no litmus test for joining it, other than the willingness to do the wretchedly hard work of forgiving each other, ourselves, and the world again and again and again. Most of us would rather sleep in than be children of dawn. But when we wake up and acknowledge sin’s destructive power at work within each individual, corporation, and nation (even and especially the ones we love); when we approach each other with the profound humility that this knowledge engenders; when we move ahead in good faith knowing that we may be wrong and need to change course, this is when the power of sin begins to loosen its grip. Furrow all you want, but that’s why I think sin is behovely, and the acknowledgement of sin is our only hope.

What we’re reading
Heather: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Martin: Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

As I dog-paddle through the sea of books threatening to drown not just me but the overwhelmed shores of my bedside table, I found these sentences: “For those who draw near and offer themselves before God, satisfaction of hunger is neither an end in itself nor a wholly ‘secular’ event…. [E]ating is a worshipful event, even revelatory; it engenders a healthful knowledge of God.” When I read this, I thought, “Ah, I am a member of the tribe that believes this.”

I briefly met Ellen F. Davis, author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible and professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, when she spoke at our church about ten years ago, and I immediately developed a helpless intellectual crush on her. The crush is not diminished by the fact that Our Hero Wendell Berry wrote the foreword to the book and is quoted at the beginning of each chapter.

Davis’s basic claim is that the fertility and habitability of the Earth—and particularly of Israel—are the best indices of the health of the covenant relationship between God and his people. She writes beautifully about that stickiest of words in Genesis 1, when mankind is given “dominion” over the earth. Made in God’s image, we are meant to exercise dominion as God does, and in Genesis 1, the way God exercises dominion is to exclaim in delight over the goodness of his work, and then to declare a day of rest for his delightful creation. Reckless topsoil depletion, toxic pesticides, and Confined Animal Factory Operations, among many other current agricultural practices, would probably not pass the Delight Test.

I read all this with a double vision: on the one hand, I underline passages, write notes, and spray exclamation points in the margins. On the other hand, I think about my neighbors in the Hill Country, many of whom are very conservative Christians, and I wonder how they would react to Davis’s scathing comparison of pharaonic agricultural and economic policies (the ones that made God really, really mad) with the practices of American agribusiness. I’m not sure the book will get a lot of traction here. (Well, or anywhere; the book’s title is so unsexy it might as well be wearing a suit of armor.) And yet it seems to me so clear that Davis’s analysis is Right and needs to be broadcast.

So how do you convince someone you’re right? Well, here’s how not to do it: the way the American conservation movement sounded its earliest notes, at least politically. The current issue of Orion magazine carries a feature story entitled “Conservation and Eugenics: The Environmental Movement’s Dirty Secret.” Charles Wolforth, the author, links Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, with its emphasis on patriotism and conservation, to the propagation of “higher races,” as opposed to Native Americans, Eskimos, and other “lower races.”

Wolforth writes, “These ideas had been developed at Ivy League and other universities, at museums of natural history and anthropology in New York and Washington, in learned societies and in scientific literature. When… world’s fairs focused on the West, the link between natural resources, morality, and racism was drawn ever more explicitly.” Pointedly, Wolforth quotes from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech, arguably the launching of the modern conservation movement:

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.

It also, apparently, involved practicing eugenics.

Awash in my sea of books, I am a descendent of this tribe. No wonder it’s hard to convince many people I’m right.

When I walk through my beloved Austin neighborhood, I’m often beset with the same double vision I have when reading the prophetic environmental writing I’m prone to read. I walk through my neighborhood pleased—delighted—with my wonderful neighbors and their well-tended homes and gardens. As I have mentioned before, walking a couple of blocks can take forty-five minutes or more, depending on who else is out and about and what news needs to be exchanged, which dogs need to be admired, whose children are doing fabulously or exasperatingly nutty things. How can this be a bad thing? And yet I can’t help but be aware of the multitudes of cars, the endless whir of air conditioners, the trucks bearing pesticides that fertilize lawns, the lights that are on all night, the sprinklers running even as it rains. (We, too, are guilty of some of these.) How do you convince people without double vision that the goodness they’re seeing in their way of life is resting on something destructive?

In the fruit of the American environmental movement there is a noxious worm: a sense of righteousness that often gnaws its way into self-righteous tribalism. The ways in which we eat and live are often markers of who we are; when told (or bullyragged) to change these ways, it can seem as if something essential in us has been condemned, most particularly when judgment comes from outside the tribe. Like triumphalist Christians who refuse to acknowledge the ugliness and violence that comes bundled with the hope and beauty of Christian history, triumphalist environmentalism will foment ill-will from people whose health and livelihoods could be enhanced or saved by its message.

Every movement must have its prophets. Traditionally, prophets haven’t been the sort of people you want to invite home for dinner; they eat locusts, dress in skins or nothing at all, sit in cisterns, moan a lot—that sort of thing. The true prophets get listened to not because they’re scare-mongering but because they always have an accurate sense of their tribe’s history, an acute awareness of when it has fallen away from its original goodness. They include themselves in their judgments. Despite their very visible eccentricities, there is an essential humility to them. When I pull up behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that says “Drill Here Drill Now Pay Less” (along with a Rick Perry sticker) and my first impulse is to jump out of my car and bash in the windshield, I know I’m no prophet. We’re both driving, after all, and I need that gas as much as the other driver does. I’m not passing that humility test.

So where does that leave my tribe, the irritable non-prophets of the environmental persuasion? As an oldest child, I always like to have the right answer to pass on—and enforce, whenever possible. My tribe is frequently stymied. But here’s one thing: invite someone over for dinner, someone not of the tribe. Feed them something that’s beautiful, that’s grown in accordance with the revelatory economy of food kindly produced. And think about this passage from one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems:

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

What we’re reading
Heather: Thomas Perry, Strip
Martin: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

I spent last weekend at the ranch planning a new garden—or, rather, watching our dear friend Glee Ingram, an Austin landscape designer; Steve Diver, a horticulturist with Sustainable Growth Texas; and Robert Selement, Madroño’s redoubtable manager, plan a new garden as I poked at bugs, stared at the sky, and occasionally said, “Huh?”

Despite me, we made good progress. Using Glee’s initial design, we flagged the perimeter of a beautiful labyrinth-inspired shape. We thought about armadillo-, feral hog-, bison-, and raccoon-proof fencing (ha!); permaculture; gates and traffic patterns; rainwater collection; hoop-house placement; compost systems and leaf corrals; how to integrate the activities of the residents of the adjacent Chicken Palace; planting fruit trees as wind barriers; and soil and amendment ratios. We (well, some of us) got really sunburned. We felt that we’d really earned that cold beer on the porch as we watched the afternoon light turn golden while scores of swallows dove and swooped around us.

If this makes Madroño sound like Paradise and us like laborers in Eden, well, that’s what it felt like. At the same time, however, these things also happened: I watched a hungry red-tailed hawk flying low over the Chicken Palace, hoping for yet another carry-out chicken dinner. I awoke at dawn’s first glimmering to operatic squawking from the Chicken Palace but, unable to find a flashlight, had to wait until it was light to investigate. (Robert has killed more rattlers this spring than in his seven previous years at the ranch combined.) In fact, there was a dead hen, but we’re not sure what killed her; she may have been egg-bound. During my morning perambulation on the road above the lake, a dozen buzzards wheeled just overhead. I couldn’t smell anything dead, nor could I see the focus of their activity, but I remembered the shrieking white-tailed doe I’d heard at this same spot last spring. It was a heart-stopping noise. I glimpsed her thrashing through the underbrush on the cliff below me but was unable to find her again when I returned with reinforcements. Paradise it may be, but Madroño’s beauty is woven with the warp of nature’s potential and actual violence.

A good friend emailed me after my last post, saying, “I have read that if all the ants were eliminated from the planet it would cease to exist. My thought is that if all the humans somehow disappeared the earth would flourish.” I’ve had that thought as well, but I also think that, with or without us, earth’s flourishing has always involved violence and suffering. Predation, disease, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, and drought preceded human enviro-tinkering and will continue once we’re gone.

Given that humans are part of the natural order, it’s also a given that we will engage in violence. My definition of violence is idiosyncratic and personal: I define it as existing on a spectrum involving the imposition of one being’s (or group’s) will on another being (or group). So when you order your lollygagging child to stop staring at the ceiling and put on her school clothes, you are, according to my definition, moving into the realm of violence, albeit at the lowest possible vibration. If, as in this case, the imposition of said will is done to enable or assist the flourishing of the one imposed upon, maybe you get a free pass. I’m not sure about this. Nor am I sure how to word my definition to include violence against self, surely as invidious and terrible as violence against another. And of course violence is not restricted to the physical realm, nor is it directed only against humans. Our species’ casual, thoughtless violence against the natural world is relentless.

Unique to humans in this violent world, however, is the capacity to restrict the reach of our violence. Christians and Jews have been commanded to do so in no uncertain terms (as have the followers of virtually every faith tradition; it’s just that I’m most familiar with those two). Repeated several times in the Pentateuch is the phrase “an eye for an eye,” often misunderstood as an incitement to violent retribution. In fact, the point of the phrase was to minimize violence, not incite it; the loss of an eye could not be redeemed by murder. Leviticus 19:18 is even more to the point: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself….” Jesus thought this a good enough line to use in the Sermon on the Mount, and reinforced it by instructing his followers to rein in their violent tendencies even more tightly: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Human violence against nature is less of an issue in the Bible, as the capacity to inflict permanent damage on our world wasn’t ours at that point. But scripture does specifically address the correct treatment of animals; they were considered part of the community and were to enjoy a Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10).

Restricting the reach of violence requires recognizing its ubiquitous footprint. I see its size 7 1/2 tracks all around me: in my sarcasm, in my imperious demands that things be done my way, in my constant consideration of my own comfort, in my need to have reality ordered in a particular way. Having spent the last couple of weeks in my garden at home, I’ve become aware of the arbitrary nature of life and death: what have those cute little flowering clovers ever done to me that they should be so unceremoniously yanked up? And don’t get me started on pill bugs.

Gardens are great places for contemplating unsolvable mysteries. How else are you going to keep your mind occupied when pulling weeds? But I think there’s a deep and distinctive link between restricting our carbon footprints and our violence footprints. When we accept that our flourishing always comes at the expense of someone or something else’s flourishing, it’s hard not to be humbled. What better place than a beautiful, infuriating garden to watch such a serious drama play itself out?

What we’re reading
Heather: Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Since we’re in the early planning stages for our first Madroño Ranch bison harvest, I’ve been reflecting on issues of carnivorocity, which my spell-checker tells me isn’t a word. It suggests “carnivorousness” instead. But I prefer my neologism because it retains echoes of the ferocity that undergirds all meat-eating.

I have been a happy meat-eater all my life, with the exception of my senior year in college, when I chose to be a vegetarian for financial and life-style rather than ethical reasons. Although I still eat meat, I’ve grown increasingly troubled by the system that produces most of it in the United States, and no longer eat meat at most restaurants or from supermarkets.

In some ways, I think that vegetarians may be more evolved than meat-eaters. According to Genesis, all creatures—not just humans—were vegetarians in the beginning. God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in it for fruit. And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food’” (Genesis 1:29–30). Thus modern vegetarians are hearkening back to their Edenic roots, to a human dominion over nature that reflected the aboriginal harmony and mutual respect among species—unless, of course, you happened to be a green plant.

But the story became more complicated, as good stories always do. As punishment for various transgressions, God sent a flood that only Noah and the passengers on his ark survived. In thanksgiving, Noah built an altar to the Lord and made of every clean animal and bird (although this was before the laws differentiating clean from unclean) a burnt offering. When God “smelled the pleasing odor, he said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…’” (Genesis 8:21). From that time on, humans were given animals for food, with the stipulation that they should not eat flesh that still had blood in it.

Complicated? My goodness, yes. Eating meat is God’s concession to the fact that something in the original balance of the world has been thrown out of whack—and that the smell of cooking meat is profoundly satisfying. Those who can resist the lure of barbecue are made of sterner stuff than God! The line between vegetarians and meat-eaters is the line between self-identified utopianists and realists—or between utopianists and people who don’t think about the issue. I tend toward the utopian end of the spectrum. So why do I eat meat?

In his fascinating book The River Cottage Meat Book, British chef and farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall points out that scripture has been used to justify the most heinous acts, including the abuse of animals for human consumption. He finds the “commitment to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals at the hands of humans… to be morally superior to the commitment to ignore it.” But he also finds the pro-vegetarian argument based on the desire to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals unconvincing. Animals inevitably suffer, even without human intervention. He points out that “dying of old age” rarely occurs in nature, and that wild animals are quite likely to end their lives as food for something.

Eating meat is a reminder that we belong to the system over which we exercise dominion. We are not above the law that ordered the universe; we do not lie outside the natural order. Not long ago I took a cooking class from Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, one that took a chicken “from gallina to pollo,” as our daughter Elizabeth put it. We started with two live roosters, which we were to kill, pluck, and clean. After Jesse showed us how to hold a rooster upside down—which disorients and calms it—he put it headfirst into a lopped-off traffic cone and slit its jugular. The whole business took ten seconds or less per bird and was strangely intimate, giving me an insight into some of the labyrinthine dietary and purity laws in Leviticus. Surely we are meant to eat meat with a profound awareness of the sacrifice that doing so entails. As usual, no one has said it better than Wendell Berry:

What we’re reading
Heather: George Johnson, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order
Martin: Richard Price, Lush Life