If there is a better word for our 2020 zeitgeist, well, I am too tired to think of it. As we creep toward December 31, fatigue has spread across the land. Like a plague miasma in a Gothic novel, it leaves each of us fevered and unwilling to face the hard work of our daily lives, much less the world at large. We do not have enough weak and trembling fingers to point at all of the demons in the mist, even to identify the one who is reflected back to us in the mirror.

Our day-to-day existence seems depressed by the larger circumstances of this crisis year. Friends facing health concerns wait crucial months for treatments. Family evacuate the comfort of their homes from impending hurricanes or wildfires, and still look forward to a long and difficult recovery. Elderly relatives don’t get visited for fear of contamination or because vague distant bureaucrats have issued unclear, sometimes unfounded parameters (Is it better at an advanced age to die cloistered and alone or from a disease contracted while sitting with and holding the hand of a family member?). These frequent short circuits to everyday living — overlayed by the impending elections, imploding civic life, economic uncertainties, and shortages of the small necessities of average life — fatigue our waking moments.

This year even more than usual, the farm has been a refuge. I have had more time for projects, gardens, interactions with my partner, and all the things that have made this life, frankly, pretty special. Even so, at times it seems as if the blue sky is the eye of the storm. I get out and get the work done, I sit on the porch and enjoy the birdsong, but only before the next wave of bad news hits and leaves debris in its wake.

Such as it is for our race and always has been: brief blue skies before war, pestilence, and hunger sweep back across the land. Yet, we moderns have by and large lived our lives sheltered from the worst. And it has made us soft. We complain about the hangnail, not imagining that a cancer awaits us all. Our fatigue arises from our failure to recognize that history is not only a cycle but also a hurricane. A moment of seeming separation from history does not provide immunity from its winds. Ours is the delusion of the moviegoer, that the dynamics outside have been suspended while we sit in a cushy chair, entertained, in the darkness.

I am not afraid. But it is disconcerting to speculate that the blue sky we have lived under for most of our lives will be going away. History has proven it so.

Farming, for me, has been the practical vaccine for what ails. My optimism is tempered by the expected catastrophe. Out of that mix comes whatever happens. Better to stand, no matter how fatigued, and meet it with resolve, even if it destroys what we have loved.

………………………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: Local Culture: a journal of the Front Porch Republic (The Christopher Lasch issue).

……………………………………………………………….

BTW: Brutus, fellow blogger, at The Spiral Staircase, paid us a farm visit. That in turn inspired his next post, broadly about dogs and always about more than the main topic. https://brutus.wordpress.com/2020/10/15/a-dogs-life/