Simple Pleasures

“I nurture simplicity among the gardens and fields”
                         —Chinese farmer and poet, T’ao Chien, 365-427 C.E.

These days, many of us have no choice but to bring simplicity into our lives. Many of our favorite activities have been taken away whether this means no gym workouts, no visiting with friends and family, or no shopping at a favorite store. We scrounge through the pantry shelves for something to cook, making do with what is on hand. Or go outside like I did the other night to gather parsley and a bit of coriander that overwintered, new shoots of spearmint, and a large bowl of stinging nettles, to add to some sad looking basil leaves in the back of the fridge. The greens, smushed into the Cuisinart, along with oil, garlic, lemon juice, and pecans made a hearty pesto. Our creative meals can bring us great delight.

Simplicity can also mean living more intentionally, with more discipline and purpose. It can be unburdening our lives as well as decluttering our minds. Usually our minds flit from one thought to the next, from one sensation to another, moving quickly and erratically, but there is the silence when all distractions and desires fade. In many spiritual traditions, one sits in meditation to calm thoughts in order to experience deep silence. Sitting still, not moving, is the aid to find the stability of simplicity that allows for an opening to that great Silence.

For me, the concentration required by sculpting, painting, and writing creates the fertile ground for merging with the work, and within that merging, I find stillness. A musical score gives structure to mark periods of sounds and rests. The German-born pianist, Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) wrote,

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.”

The great jazz musician Miles Davis said it this way:

“Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.”

Lao Tzu, the Chinese sage advises, “Become empty of yourself and realize inner silence.” It sounds straightforward, but who knows how to empty themselves. I can’t sit myself down on a meditation cushion and say, I’m going to find silence: I only find myself in the midst of a great amount of activity. That’s why cultivating the earth always feels like cheating, the back door: the simple act of weeding as the antidote for the anxiety of our present times. But even weeding can be a challenge. I was talking to a friend yesterday and said,

“You know, weeding is not always that easy. It’s not just pulling the long white weed thread. Some weeds like vetch are impossible, impenetrable. It’s exhausting to dig through their density of roots. And when it’s that difficult, there’s no quieting the mind.”

Meister Eckhart, the Christian contemplative wrote,

“It’s not what we do that makes us holy, but we should make holy what we do.”

Ariel, grafting Olympic Asian pear scion wood onto rootstock in the Asian pear orchard.

So I return to the words of T’ao Chien: “I nurture simplicity among the gardens and fields.” I remind myself that he is surely weeding the gardens and plowing the fields, and he is nurturing simplicity. When I only concern myself with getting the work finished, checked off the to-do list, I take no pleasure in it. When I forget the to-do list, then the merging that I so love takes place. We can make holy everything we do. We can nurture simplicity everywhere.

Baby snapper turtle Ariel found when we were moving a pear tree to plant new peaches. The turtle stretched and then we quickly dug it back into the soil.

Weeds and Other Gifts

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”                        —Abraham Lincoln

When I am anxious or out of balance, which is often these days, I turn to weeding. I can always find weeds on the farm. The weeds are tenacious; they want to grow. One definition of a weed is a plant growing in the wrong place. We have lots of plants growing in the wrong places. Most of them need to be dug up. On the farm ‘to do’ list, weeding sits in almost every category: blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, asparagus, around the apples, pears, and peach trees, the hoop house, and the kitchen garden.

Sitting on the ground, along the rows of blueberries, as if at a banquet table, each of us brings our favorite utensil. Ariel’s preference is the triangular Korean hoe, Holly prefers a claw, and I use a pink-handled small trowel.

Holly weeding young blueberry bushes on a cold and windy day.

We yank, we pull, we dig, leveraging our tools into thick mats of grasses, and tug some more. Grass clumps lift out—these get a hearty shake sending the worms and the soil attached to the roots back into the row, while whatever is left finds new life in the compost pile.

Frederic G. Cooper, 1917, U.S. Food Administration

My mind is occupied by thoughts of farms and food. The largest apple grower in our town depends on two migrant workers, but he has yet to hear from the embassy about their arrival. The commercial vegetable market in California doesn’t know how they will manage not only because of their dependence on migrant workers, but the chain of supply, the connective system, the trucks, the transport, the weigh stations, the middle places where all the packaging happens, are facing their own challenges. Farmers in Florida are plowing under vegetables, and in the Midwest, dairies are dumping fresh milk, though stores limit the amount customers can buy. Small farms feel the pressure, too. The restaurant that bought fifty pounds of greens a week is now closed, and many farmer’s markets have been canceled.

Abraham Lincoln promoted the cultivation of land after the bloodshed of the Civil War. During and at the end of World War II, the American Victory Garden movement created sustainability and health. England had their own movement, Dig for Victory. Maybe the restoration of the world’s psyche after times of great suffering was in part due to the return of our connection to the soil, to food. Maybe, it is a time to build more resiliency into our communities. Food is basic to our needs along with water, clean air, and shelter. We need to return to the basics and provide this for all people on the planet. Let’s give up fighting for causes and beliefs that only divide us. Let’s rally around what truly supports us.

I think about these things, and obviously oversimplify them, while I grab a small clump of grass, and ease out its long root system, pure white and thick, from among the blueberry’s dark, thin roots. Pull too hard and the root snaps. Only by teasing gently but firmly, can I coax out a foot-length root, with grass nodules every few inches, to release its hold. Of course, some weeds will quickly regrow, we don’t get them all, but if we don’t weed, the mass of growth under the blueberry plants will rob the bushes of nutrients. We weed in order to ease the competition for resources, to encourage a bountiful crop.  

Weeding is not glamorous work and It doesn’t save lives, but it offers a connection to something trustworthy that helps keep me balanced. I know not everyone has access to weeds, but even in a city, we can break for a moment, see a bit of earth or touch a tree, and know this is all part of us. Amid slicing an apple, or washing salad greens, we can pause within our anxiety, and connect to this gift from the earth, the ground that sustains us. 

This morning’s surprise: blown by the wind from a pile of old materials outside my studio.

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Remembering the Seeds

On this cold April day, many seeds still wait underground, but with a few days of warmth, they will crack open, the tiny rootlets will poke out, find their way to sustenance, and their first seed leaves will appear. A seed at birth is already programed to be the fullest expression of itself. It arrives on the planet with all the knowledge it needs. The seed knows when to grow and how to respond to warmth. As it develops leaves, it takes up nutrients, drinks in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. The seed is a storehouse for a great reservoir of knowledge, of shared history, and experience. As it becomes a mature plant, it knows what to give another plant struggling nearby and to send out warnings to its tribe of approaching danger. The smallest seed only needs to find itself in a hospitable environment to flourish. For it will respond to whatever it encounters. The influences of the outside environment affect it, be it toxins, or a great flood, hail, a heat wave, or a blessed perfect growing season.

I lived my first seven years in a row house in the industrial city of Chester, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know about seeds, but I was always attracted to one plant. When I was about six years old, I remember walking alone into the alley behind our row house, carrying a metal kitchen bowl. It was the insert from the classic Revere Ware double boiler. Then, seating myself on the concrete near a patch of weeds, I gathered the seed stalks of this plant that grew in abundance. I rubbed my fingers up the stem against the grain, and the seeds, small, elongated, and soft, fell silently into the bowl. Myriads of individual entities.

In my world were my parents, my younger brother, Jon, Albert, a boy who lived across the street, Charlene who lived a few doors away and whose mother was always home when we came home from school, our housekeeper, Louise, and somewhere, further away, my parents’ drugstore where they worked every day. My world was small, but this bowl was filled with the largest number of anything I could imagine. So many small bits all neatly together filling the bowl. When it was almost full, I lowered my fingers into the bowl and trailed my fingers through the perfect seeds. Moving my hand around and through and under, the seeds shifted and tickled my fingers. Soothing and sensual is how I remember the experience. Even at this young age, or perhaps because of it, my hand in this bowl of seeds connected me to something peaceful and true.

Later, after I became an apple orchardist, I learned that the weed was plantain, an herbal remedy for insect stings and other skin abrasions. You only have to pick a few leaves, chew them, and rub them or poultice them onto a wound and they withdraw toxins and soothe. The taste is not sweet, not bitter, not pungent or sharp, just a mash of green leaves.  

Sketch of Plantain Seed Stalks and Leaves, Linda Hoffman, 2020

I am allergic to bees. When I am stung, which inevitably happens several times a year, I know exactly where to find plantain. It grows on the side our farmhouse near the back door. Growing in this most unglamorous place, it doesn’t announce its presence, but it is tenacious enough to grow despite other weeds and grasses. It even survives the mower. In cities, plantain grows in vacant lots and in cracks of the sidewalk. Plantain seems to be totally nonchalant about its closest neighbors or the soil chemistry. It grows both where soils are poor and where they are fertile. It forges a home in forgotten nooks and crannies.        

Plantain beginning to grow along the driveway in front of the Farmhouse, April 4, 2020

Plants offer their unique gifts. For example, poison ivy grows in disturbed areas. It also flourishes in unstable ecosystems like on the dunes on Cape Cod, appearing as if to say, “Keep off of this fragile bank.” When a friend recovering from chemo treatments, mentioned poison ivy had sprung up outside her front door, I smiled and said, “It wants to protect you.” And when I am feeling tired, I lean my head into a tall clump of mountain mint, and its strong menthol scent enlivens my spirit.

 I no longer live in Chester, Pennsylvania, but on a small farm where I can plant seeds and tend the earth. I think of the billions of people who can’t do this, I think of my stepdaughters in their small apartment in Brooklyn, listening to sirens, eating rice and beans, and my grandchildren who have been told not to go out because there is sickness outside. I long to bring them to the farm and show them the rows of seeds growing, to listen to peepers and wood frogs, to share the plumping of the apple buds, and see plantain, the healer, poking out. But for now, this is the way it is.

The myriad seeds in that long ago bowl connected me to something outside myself, to something far beyond my immediate world. As I sit alone now in isolation, I think about this world with more people than I can conceive of—almost eight billion people. Every single person on the planet born a unique and perfect being. Like a seed, we must grow in this imperfect world. We, too, have much innate wisdom, we know what needs to be done.

Catalpa Tree, watercolor, Linda Hoffman, 2019

Blow on the Embers

Fire is sacred. Fire burns. Fire transforms.

The poet, Rumi, says:

            Love is the fire and we are the wood.

Blase, my partner, adds:

            And therein lies our freedom.

On Wednesday our fire blazed. Our household quintet, Blase, my partner, Ariel, my daughter, Ethan, her boyfriend, and Holly our housemate gathered, and burned heaps of apple prunings.

The prunings fall from the orchard trees in February. They’re lopped, snipped, and sawn off the trees over two weeks. We prune to vitalize the trees, direct their shape, remove dead and diseased wood, and most importantly, to let in light. We open up windows for sunlight to penetrate the tree, making sure all branches have a sky view. When one them doesn’t get enough light, they start to shrivel, even more shaded, become smaller, until they die back.

The pruned apple branches winter on the ground under the trees, providing healthy food for voles and mice who chew the bark. Then, when the snow is gone, and the small creatures have plenty of other foodstuff, we collect all the prunings and burn them. Fire blight, a bacterial infection is dormant in winter, and hides in the branches. Burning all the pruned wood help keep fire blight out of the orchard.

Holly and I gathered the tools, throwing them in the back of Blase’s old pickup truck—rakes, a shovel, a box of newspaper, kindling, matches, a portable gas water pump, and long hose. We also grabbed the canister of kerosene. Ariel and Ethan hopped into the bed of the truck. 

Around this mountain of prunings we made small fires with newspaper and kindling. We had a Christmas tree dropped off by a friend. Ariel jammed it into the pile above my small fire. It took. Whoomm! Whoosh!

Ethan and Ariel lighting the fire.

The flames licked through the tree, disappearing the needles and small branches. Then there was quiet. We tried to whisper our small fires into blaze until Blase arrived. He took the container of kerosene and started pouring throughout. With his blazing instincts, the fire caught.

The apple wood is green so you need a hot fire to really get them to take. But they did and the fire burned. More wood caught, whirring and snapping, and the flames grew. Menorahs of little flames on sticks, candles on an altar, a pyre. Fire warming our hearts.

With the forks attached to the bucket of the tractor, I rumbled along the apple rows. Our bonfire contained only a small portion of the orchard prunings. Holly had piled the rest at the end of each row. I teased the forks under a pile at the far end of the orchard, lifted, and scooped, held the massive tangle high up in the air and drove back to the fire. Blase and Ethan were tending with pitchforks. Putting the tractor in low gear, I pulled as close to the flames as I dared. With the bucket held high, Blase signaled, and the bucket dumped. Flames leapt, Blase and Ethan teased out the caught stragglers, and I reversed, to circle back to the next row for another pile pick up.

Meanwhile Holly and Ariel gathered blueberry prunings and white pine branches from across the road in the berry patch. We had little traffic jams on the cart road, but everyone has more patience these days: we’re in no hurry, we’re just here.

In only a few hours, we managed to burn what we needed to. As the fire ebbed, we listened to the last cracklings, and stared into the black sea of charred wood. Some embers transformed into white ash. With the breath of wind, snowflakes rose and fell.

In the final lines in Archibald MacLeish’s play, JB, his retelling of the story of Job, Sarah says to her husband,

Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling,
It’s all the light now.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in the churches are out.
The lights have gone out of the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by . . .

Strength, even in darkest times, can be found in a whisper. The dark and the light, the suffering and joy, have always been and will always be the human condition. We can choose to kindle the fires, to breathe love through it all. The photo below is from a women’s Full Moon Fire we had on March 7, 2020. It’s hard to believe our world has changed so much in less than a month. When we can be physically close to each other again, we will celebrate with a great bonfire. You are all invited!