Prayer as dependence and duty and responsible freedom on a demanding human journey…
It’s therapeutic [splitting logs]. And it’s not a very complex job. Routine, really, but not boring. So many things that happen in our everyday lives bother us and cloud our day. Often, if I’ve been to a meeting and gotten worked up about something or other, I might go around thinking of all the things I should have said. But then, when I’m standing by the chopping block, I don’t think about any of it anymore. My mind is never so pleasantly empty as it is when I’m chopping wood.
—Arne Fjeld, a “small farmer”
in Nordskogbygda, Norway
Harvest moon peaking in and out of the clouds last night. We attempted a picnic dinner to enjoy it, to some success. I’m really not sad that pictures didn’t do justice to what what we could see; that’s as it should be.
Currently Reading: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way by Lars Mytting 📚
Some books you pick up, open, and buy within the span of less than 60 seconds. This is one of those. Fun to flip through, yes, but thoroughly readable, as informative as inspiring — even for a Maine-born Ben-Logger (that there’s Hebrew, fyi… I think) like myself. And Mytting picked a whopper of a poem for his epigraph:
Juvenile Kittiwakes putting on a late-morning show for Will
Finished “reading”: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth 📚
A man after my own heart — even where I have differed from him. I was quite moved by his Erasmus Lecture last year, but I have read and followed very little of Kingnorth, so this was a welcomed collection and update of his Substack writings. And I think — I hope — his is a voice more can listen to, can actually hear, and genuinely and generously converse with.
For now, the useful work seems to be that outlined by Joseph Campbell: to conquer death by birth. Simone Weil concluded her study of the rootless West by suggesting that the best response for we who find ourselves living in it is ‘the growing of roots’ — the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up the exhausted old plants if you need to – carefully, now – but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds.
This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a “West” that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires – fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths – and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.
Consider me simpatico.
