The Other Growing Season

Moving silence from despair toward delight

There is a profound silence here at the top of this mountain. It is a quiet so absolute a faint hum emerges from the vacuum of sound. It’s an internal sound, I think. A static generated by the vibrations of my own fleshy being. It’s an artifact of my life scanning the airwaves for signal - a point of reference. Anything to get my bearings.

Quiet like this is purely a winter phenomenon. In summer every inch of grass, every puddle of water is a riot of fecund companionship. Day and night are a chorus of life becoming. So in winter when I step out into the snowy fields under the enormous bowl of sky and hear nothing? See nothing move? It can be eery. An absence. A lonely abandonment.

Loneliness isn’t new to me. I occasionally felt lonely when I lived in Boston. Even though I was surrounded by people, the intensity of individual striving there (mine included) left little time for connection outside the efficient circles of work or family. Mostly I had a creeping sense of cultural loneliness - a dis-ease I experienced as I looked around at so much of our endeavoring, mine included, and knew its fragility. I gradually felt like an outcast in its midst.

It’s one of the reason’s my family and I live in Vermont now. To question some of the knowing we’ve inherited from the man-made world. To delve deeper into a sense of connection with the non-human world. To make our home among eternal things. And to seek that which, in spite of our brokenness, is unbreakable.

That search for me, revolves around soil and the daily davening of tending to it. The word humus, for soil, shares it’s root with the word homo, or human. And in the work of this place that relationship is ever-apparent. In fact, I’m so constantly covered in soil that the boundary where it stops and I begin blurs. During the growing season, surviving the farm is mostly a test of how much work a body can accomplish in twelve hours of daylight. When the sun sets, it feels like flourishing as Dina and I revel at the kids, cheeks stained with berries, growing up among the crops, dirty and blessed.

But that work is largely absent now. The potatoes and squash in the root cellar are starting to look sad. Surviving the farm this time of year requires a different skill set. Something more internal but none the less about growth.

Shut into our home, sheltering from the wind and cold, alone on the mountain to make peace with this big silence my days easily tip into loneliness. As the quiet surrounds me, an abyss yawns in my mind and in rushes a flood of family sadnesses, the immensity of our collective human despair and the dreaded, ‘Which of these aches in my body is cancer today?’.

Unless…

One way I’ve been trying to manage this silence better is to visit frequently with all the things that prove my aloneness is untrue. Chickadee and titmouse are here with me, busy at the feeder as always. I read the daily news of vole and rabbit in the snow. I feel the air flowing from porcupine’s hollow log, moist and warm on my skin. I touch the icy water at the brook and listen to its centuries-long conversation with stone. And under the snow, I imagine the garlic bulbs we planted last fall as they hold on tight to last year’s sun. Waiting…

Each moment I am able to focus my attention purely on the life unfolding before me feels as much like a prayer as anything these days. And each prayer invites a stillness in me - one which, as Mary Oliver describes, “leaves room for another voice to speak”. When I can quiet myself down enough to sink below the sound of the silence here, a signal emerges from the vacuum. A whisper speaks straight into the center of my knowing. My abyss becomes a portal and the inescapable white snow transforms into a blank page on which a different story emerges. In this story my feelings of loneliness and distance are concepts that don’t even apply. My edges blur. I and what I behold are indistinct, equal parts of an infinite whole.

Those moments are the foundation of my best days. And I build my routine around them. But there are days when I can’t escape the ache and noise of this life and I, like the garlic, have to wait - to trust that eventually this season will change. I tend the fires. I work on our crop plan. I practice making music with my family (though it’s debatable whether it’s an improvement over silence.) I remind myself over and over, that sun and birdsong are on the way. The snow-dusted sugar maples will break this dormancy and the embodied joys of our life in relationship with this land will soon return.

In spite of the wisdom of winter’s quiet, I still miss my human kin! I’m so curious. How are you finding your deeply connected moments? If you’re so inclined, I’d love it if you’d share in the comments below so I can know you’re close by.