Tag Archives: Stoicism

Harvest Time

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the harvest from this morning

I sit at my desk, this mid-August afternoon, listening as a three-gallon carboy of perry mead gurgles in the corner of the library. The steady baloop of escaping carbon dioxide in the fermentation lock is as good a signal as any that it is harvest time on the farm. Pears and apples are at their peak in the orchard, bending their tree branches low. As each branch is picked clean of fruit, it springs back skyward. In the hoop-house, the crowder peas climbing the sunflowers mimic the orchard fruits and weigh down the sturdy stalks with their vines and pods. Meanwhile, one row over, the eggplants and peppers … well, nothing stops their magic until Jack Frost pays a visit, and the postcard from Mother Nature says his arrival is going to be delayed this year.

The scuppernongs and muscadines are clamoring to be harvested; already, there are easily a couple of hundred pounds of fruit waiting to be plucked. Figs are coming on and the chard and turnips need to go in the ground for fall and winter. As the produce piles up on the counters and the porch, our kitchen goes into overdrive. Chutneys (sweet and savory), hedgerow jellies and herbed jams or preserves, meads and wines, compotes and sauces, dried fruits and leathers — all will be made within the next week or two. More buckets of peas to shell, pack in bags, and store alongside the blanched slices of eggplant in the chest freezer.

So much to do, so much to eat. Harvest time remains for us a season of satisfaction and joy, even after two decades. All the pleasures of a robust household economy married with a bountiful table. Nothing really matches, does it?

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Reading this weekend: Letters From a Stoic: the 124 epistles of Seneca

The Experiential Life

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Recently, a young woman I met was explaining her job to me. “I provide an ‘experiential approach’ to shopping malls,” she said. The “experiential approach” is one of the current hot terms in business. From what I’ve read, it works like this: “… experiential retail turns the boring experience of browsing, trying, and buying into something fun and exciting.” Many millennials, I’m told, do not wish to simply purchase pants; they want an immersive activity that makes the purchasing experience more authentic and engaging.

Last week On Point’s Tom Ashbrook interviewed a millennial who spoke about the transcendent benefits of adults’ spending all of their free time playing video games. Callers phoned in eager to justify their electronically engaged evenings. They talked of the many “friends” they had made, and they said that gaming had allowed them to have victories, providing a framework to “experience” life as a winner.

So, what does it mean when a culture needs to spend time and wealth conjuring the means to experience life, when our viewfinder on this world consists mainly of ways to see it as a consumer and a spectator?

I think it’s safe to say that my 89-year-old father hasn’t spent much time immersed in a technology-generated experiential life. No instant status updates or sharing of memes from the deck of a WWII destroyer in the Pacific. No existential worry on how to connect his existence with life: he worked hard every day, raised a large family (seven kids), spent several nights each week volunteering with service organizations, served as a trustee for his church, and regularly visited shut-ins. And, for all of that, was a strong presence in our lives. No need for him to purchase an experience to be a winner.

The Stoic Epictetus warned us to avoid giving over our minds to others, but instead to experience life on our own terms. Quaint advice these days, as many now live the totality of their lives merely as consumers and commodities, careening across the fluorescent-lighted landscape in a desperate search for the authentic experience to purchase, never realizing that they are the purchased. Our species has gone through billions of years of evolutionary struggle to reach this experiential moment … blasting alien invaders from a computer screen or hanging on a rock wall at the local mall.

Yesterday my day was spent planting strawberries, tilling potato beds, making kraut, feeding bottle lambs, and preparing a venison roast. It was not a planned gaming experience to evoke a sense of activity and purpose; it was genuinely experienced, unmediated by apps and digital connectivity. My days and nights engaging in this life may not offer the thrilling victories of a well-played Warcraft game. Yet I’d still maintain that a full day’s farm work, capped by a fine dinner with friends and a good book at evening’s end, is sufficient.

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Reading this weekend: The Agricultural Fair, by Wayne Caldwell Neely (1935). Letter to a Young Farmer: how to live richly without wealth on the new garden farm, by Gene Logsdon

At least our farm isn’t in Boston

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“Winter is beginning to lose its grip.” What clueless chump wrote that bit of wisdom last Sunday? After penning those wishful words, I’ve watched our world here in East Tennessee fall into the deep freeze.

Our average high at this time of year is 53 degrees, with a low of 31. That comfortable range is one of the reasons living in Tennessee is such a joy. Each of the four seasons has a clear character, none too extreme, and about the time we tire of one, the next arrives. There are, of course, on occasional years, the extremely cold winter or the miserably hot summer. This is clearly one of the former.

Last Saturday we had a teaser of above average temps, which prompted the above bit of optimism. That was followed by a very cold week here on the farm. Yesterday, we had a brief respite, as the mercury climbed into the middle 40s. We spent Valentine’s Day thawing hoses and refilling stock tanks; we set posts in concrete and drove T-posts and stretched woven wire on the new horse paddock.

While we worked to complete this project, Bonnie, our newest work horse, eyed us from a neighboring corral. Pregnant ewes stuck their noses through the gate to conduct their smell test on her. Roosters chased hens under her feet, and Delores moseyed about her paddock next to the corral with piglets in tow—new experiences all for a horse that had spent her days working on a dairy in Minnesota.Bonnie 003

We completed the back fence on the new paddock around noon. Cindy began setting up the propane burner and chicken-plucker for our friend Sara. She had called earlier in the morning with a surfeit of male birds vying to be cock o’ the roost. Sumptuous dishes like coq au vin and dumplings lay ahead, but first the killing, plucking, and cleaning of eight bloodied and bruised roosters.

While Cindy helped with the butchering, I sneaked off to buy a late Valentine’s card to present during our evening dinner (Cindy having done the same earlier in the morning). By mid-afternoon we had settled down in the house, she for a nap and I to finish a mystery by Martin Walker. Coffee at four and then we headed out for a couple of hours of chores.

We fixed together a dinner of roast leg of lamb, mashed potatoes and “squishy greens,” and cheesecake for dessert and turned in early for a well-deserved rest.

This morning the low registered 13, with a projected high later of 29. Four to seven inches of snow are in the forecast for this evening and tomorrow and a low of minus 3 for Wednesday night. The cattle need to be moved to a late winter pasture, ice will be broken on troughs, and there is a bit of fencing I need to repair in the back forty. The sheep are bawling for hay—three ewes were due to lamb last night. I hear Delores snorting for feed. It is time to call the dogs and do the chores.

With the week ahead calling for another significantly cold week, I wonder if my ancestors had some ritual, besides sipping whisky, to bring on the warmth of an early spring. God knows I’m ready for it. At least our farm isn’t in Boston.

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Reading this weekend: The Crowded Grave by Martin Walker, Our Only World by Wendell Berry and A Guide to the Good Life: the ancient art of stoic joy by William Irvine.