Category: Nature

Why I love gardening

On By BrettIn Nature, Personal, ThoughtsLeave a comment

I love gardening because it represents hope and future. So often, we are trying to “get things done” or, like Hannah Arendt’s notion of labor, we are doing something that will need to be re-done at some point inevitably and likely in the near future. But gardening is a sort of tactile luxury saturated in promise.

So, currently, I have been cultivating a few herbs the past few months with genuine success. I just have one window, and they have sad days, but in general, they are doing OK.

Side note: anyone with gardening advice, feel free to post. But as you can see, I have a few pots with mostly soil. I decided on a whim to get some seeds and see where they went. I often buy plants, and I may do so again, but here we are. And a few days ago, my pea plant started sprouting.

And, seeing this little pea burst up felt really good. It is likely a bit basic, but I appreciate testing the soil and sun each day and seeing, almost stork-like, if the soil brings new life. And I know farmers have a different situation and that is why I call this “gardening” or even vanity gardening, as I am doing this out of a love growing plants, not out of livelihood. (Side note: give farmers help and support local agriculture.)

As I started, this is about hope. And since it is spring here–hell yeah, more flower pics soon–I always come back to one of my favorite poems, Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet Viii, “To Spring.” It is a mixed poem with the end, but I always come back to that “AGAIN” that starts it, as it expresses a sense of renewal. But gardening represents more than renewal; it represents genuinely new life. Time to get started.

A paragraph

On By BrettIn Nature, Personal, Religion, ThoughtsLeave a comment

Earlier this week, I met with my adviser, and we talked about writing. I have had a hard time writing anything: academic, creative, teachery, etc. And to give some stakes, (1) I have prospectus due soon and (2) I recently failed to write chapter that was due. But we talked about writing a paragraph each day to get better. So here is my paragraph.

I remember once living at Mount Irenaeus as part of an internship. I woke up each day at five in my tent. Side note: the three “companions” lived in a trio of tents on platforms up a hill, near the chapel, while around six friars lived in the buildings below. It was a tradition started in the mid-80s.

In any case, I would wake up, open up my mosquito net, and open the tent flap. Sometimes animal prints etched some nearby soil. I rubbed my tired eyes and started down the trail, and after leaving a small grove, I saw the distant Allegheny foothills, robed green beneath a broad horizon, the sun just starting to inch up.

And I walked to the garden and watered the plants, the hose adding to the dew before the caustic summer. I did not need to do this, but I loved it. I then showered up and meditated. And then rushed to morning prayer, where we read psalms in meditative postures. I was still skeptical of God at the time, but the sing-song peace and poetry of the Breviary and books set a calm. As well as the sitting. And the silence.

And from there with sleepy hugs and handshakes we went down the hill and ate, getting ready for the day, amid laughter, teasing, and tea.

Identifying the Alien in our Humanity

On By BrettIn Media, Nature, Philosophy3 Comments

Look around you. At any given moment, “beings” encircle us from all sides. I’m using a computer on a table, while sitting on chair. Nearby, some window blinds murmur a restless patter and s kettle hisses and whines. Outside, the stirring, purring, scratching, sniffing scuttle of nature persists indefinitely. Indeed, we are not alone.

On the one hand, this is pretty obvious. Humans have always had “tools” or “technology,” and we’ve always been in the environment. But at a deeper level, this intimacy with other beings implies a kinship. Particularly in contemporary culture, people constantly interact with and through technology, like cell phones, buses, radios, computers, or televisions. Doing so, we express our humanity in and through technology, and this technology has an important role in how that occurs.

In other words, humans do not express what we often call “humanity” in a vacuum. To compose the great texts of history, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Sappho, and Sun Tzu needed technology. They needed ink or stylus, paper or tablet. And these texts always grew out of a place. The tablets of Mesopotamia needed the clay of the Fertile Crescent. The cave sketches of Lascaux needed the water and pigment–along with the cave wall.

This is what the scholar Thomas Rickert is getting at, to some extent, with the notion of “ambiance”: we grow out of stuff, express with stuff, “are” through stuff and space. As Carl Sagan said, “We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Humans may like to center the world around our own being, but we are intimately part of the nonhuman, “spoken” in a sense by our environment and the objects and nonhuman beings that compose it.

Continue reading “Identifying the Alien in our Humanity” →

“There was a Boy”

On By BrettIn English, Nature, Poetry, Quotes, Writing4 Comments

Once again, other projects have consumed my weekend. Perhaps, I’ll try to find time in the midst of the week to write, so this doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, here is a link to a beautiful poem by Wordsworth and a picture I took in my own travels around his home in the Lake District, one of my favorite places in the world. Enjoy.

“There was a Boy.”

The trail to the town of Troutbeck
The trail to the town of Troutbeck

Time, art, and negative capability

On By BrettIn Art, Nature, Personal, Thoughts, Writing9 Comments

I found my summers yesterday, in the fall, the whole of them blue-sky bound and strewn with wind. The oak and maple leaves weaved paths like a wandering needle as they settled to the ground, sun-curled and scattered. Meanwhile, the afternoon light shimmered in the shaking leaves like a mirage or a whispered poem.railway-autumn

Legs folded, I sat on a red Adirondack chair, looking at the backyard where I grew up. A few things were different. The white picket fence wasn’t there anymore. My brother and his friends had taken sledge hammers to it some hot day years ago, celebrated with beer, and piled up the boards like felled trees. A wire fence replaced it, rattling in the wind and squaring off the yard like the lines on a chess board.

My grandfather’s old table was gone too. It was old when I was a kid, gray like the weather had bleached the life out of it, while lichen and moss filled the cracks. I used to poke my finger through knotholes and wiggle it, like a worm, legs swinging too high to touch the flagstone patio where the table rested. I don’t know where that went. Maybe firewood. Maybe the soil behind the stand of hemlocks in the back.

There, on that old table, my neighbor and I built planes with computer paper from my dad’s old Macintosh. That’s gone too, or maybe buried somewhere in a dim corner of the basement, beneath rusted wrenches and coffee cans of old nails. Those days, before the wire fences went up, my neighbor would cut through our backyards and knock on our back door. We rarely called. I’d see him on our back step, his hair like a pile of feathers cemented under a baseball cap, and I’d steal the paper.

For the whole summer day, we’d sit out at that table, folding, and cutting, and throwing our planes when the wind blew. Sometimes they weaved, crashed, and tumbled on the ground like drunk pigeons. And other times, the wind caught the frail wings of our creations and carried them up into the blue, blue sky like birds chasing the sun, and we forgot that there were boundaries, forgot that there were fences and time limits.

Yesterday, sitting on that red chair, I found that joy again. I could see the table, the paper, and my neighbor folding planes beside me. Memories pooled in a puddle that never dried up. The images had a deep resonance, like the memory had bounced back from some distant place, bringing echoes as it returned. Time dissolved.

Then, the moment passed, as a gust brought a branch full of yellow leaves sailing down like a dozen paper planes, all weaving, and diving, and settling. I locked back into time again, like a wanderer suddenly brought back to the path.

Continue reading “Time, art, and negative capability” →

Solitude and Loneliness

On By BrettIn Nature, Philosophy, Psychology, spirituality5 Comments

A friend recently mentioned in a message to me that she doesn’t mind spending time alone anymore. As she put it, “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like I’m a loser when I’m alone.” She even described a moment walking home in the rain alone without a raincoat or umbrella. Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog

“People driving by probably thought I was miserable, but I just smiled the entire time like I had a big secret that I couldn’t tell anyone,” she wrote. “The rain was so refreshing.”

I suppose the millennial generation feels particularly pressured to avoid “being alone.” We’re increasingly connected with cell phones and social networks. A “lonely person” conjures images of a Friday-night recluse in a concrete room with cold fluorescent lights pouring down on a clammy floor strewn with old magazines. Meanwhile, everyone he knows–even the smelly kid with the sketchy sweatshirt who sat near him on the bus in third grade–is at some party with Aziz Ansari and David Tennent, having a great time. FOMO, it’s called: “fear of missing out”

We fear being alone because we fear loneliness: the sense of exclusion, the shame, the boredom. But you don’t have to be alone to feel alone. It can hit anywhere, even at a party.

And sometimes being alone doesn’t mean you feel lonely. As my friend realized, being alone can be empowering. Even fun. As theologian Paul Tillich notes in The Eternal Now, “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.“

But what’s the difference?

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Starlight and renewal

On By BrettIn Nature, Personal, Philosophy, spirituality, Thoughts, WritingLeave a comment

Sometimes, when I’m tired or lost I look at old writing. It reminds me where I camestars1.jpg from, what has always mattered, and where I ought to go. Today, as I struggled to write a blog post, I sorted through old files and notebooks.

I found this, a reflection from fall of my junior year. It was a hard semester, as I’ve referenced before, but it many ways, it set my foundation. In the midst of that darkness, I found my passions and insecurities. I found my self.

I think this particular reflection captures a lot of that. It also hits at the seed that inspired this entire blog: the fusion of life and philosophy that makes “backyard philosophy.”

I repost it in full below, only edited for grammar. We all need reminders now and then.

Continue reading “Starlight and renewal” →

A Short: “Fishing”

On By BrettIn Nature, Writing2 Comments

I take my notebook, slide up on a weathered log, and look. The sunlight rising and

After sunset on the Allegheny River
After sunset on the Allegheny River

falling on the river resonates, and a fisherman inches into the water. Running his fingertips along the bill of a stained, weather-beaten baseball cap, he adjusts it. I watch him hold his line above the water with the natural, unconscious care of a mother, peering into the river.

He juggles the line, grips the pole, and catapults the lure out like a lasso, letting it sail skyward and plop in the stream. As it flashes in the sun, being tugged and buoyed by the current, the fisherman reels it in, gathering it up and casting again.

As the quaking aspens shiver in the cold wind and golden air, the sun continues to set. Hills guard the horizon, motionless blinds to the sun’s retreat. The clouds slow their silent shuffling. Nature stills. I cross my legs and wait, resting on the log.

Hearing the husky rhapsody of geese, I look up. A flock rolls over against the clouds and flies toward the silhouetted hills, over the fisherman’s head.

The sun sinks lower and lower, and I shiver like the aspens. The heat evaporates in a warm poem of lush reds and oranges. The tongues on the river cease to sway with the current; the glints against the water cease to blind. The geese calls become eclipsed by distance, and the squirrels nestle into their nooks for the night. Reeling in the bobber, the hook, and the spider-thread line, the fisherman holds the rod a bit and sighs.

Winking over the mountains, the sun vanishes, leaving the residue of its brilliance lingering like a faded photograph. Its fiery hues subside into shades of purple and of blue.

The fisherman comes to life and takes a final cast. In time, he reels it in, wades out onto the rocky riverbank, and leaves without his catch. Closing my notebook in the sinking twilight, I leave with mine.