A beautiful winter day after too many gray skies and wet cold and then, snow! And now the sun is shining. I was able to do all of my favorite things today. I walked in the snow under the sun; read about good farming practice and the alchemy of earth; and this morning sang something beautiful for an anointing service.
Though I am left with pretty unsatisfactory hearing after the surgery and recovery of a year ago, I am still filled with joy when I can participate in music that touches people. My own singing is the clearest I hear now, as my conductive hearing is intact, so the deafness and tinnitus that make a problem for my sensorineural hearing do not affect how I hear my own voice very much. It is a great gift and a mercy, that I can still participate in music in some ways. And that I have many patient fellow musicians who bear with my new difficulties and help me along. We sang a quite late Leonard Cohen piece, Come Healing. Leonard Cohen was a poet/writer and something of a hedonist, who wrote beautiful lyrics- approaching the beauty of the Song of Solomon– about the desire of one human body and soul for another, and the longing of the soul for God. So many lovely lyrics came from his aging frame. And he has had the courage throughout his life to ask questions for which there are no words for answer, only lived experience and wonder.
Behold the gates of mercy in arbitrary space; And none of us deserving the cruelty or the grace. O solitude of longing, where love has been confined, Come healing of the body, come healing of the mind…
In true Jewish fashion, he communicates with God as one who, if indeed humans are imaged in his likeness, is to be encountered more than feared, explored and delighted in as well as worshipped.
O troubled dust concealing an undivided love, the heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above. Let the heavens falter, let the earth proclaim, come healing of the altar, come healing of the name.
In his later years, with voice not so strong or agile, he found a fascinating way to continue to sing, accompanied and supported from background by producer Sharon Robinson who sang alternately in unison and in harmony with him, a beautifully realized strategy.
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The farmer I read about in David Montgomery’s excellent book, Growing a Revolution, is Gabe Brown, a North Dakota grain and livestock farmer who has learned, through setbacks in conventional farming, to pay attention to building soil instead of working for high yields at any cost. He is highly successful, no longer suffering from drought and crop failure as many neighboring farmers do in his cold dry climate. By giving up tillage, incorporating several crops into his rotations and making use of cover crops, he has cut costs for chemicals dramatically and reduced tractor time saving diesel costs and time, and at the same time raised his soil organic matter from the 1% average of conventional farmers to 6-8%, in less than a decade. His results are similar to the results of people around the world who turn from depleted soils, low yields and high costs to regenerative agriculture, which deploys nature’s principles and trajectories to make farming profitable again. These principles are the same everywhere: minimal soil disturbance, continuous diversified ground coverage, and crop rotation. Time and again, these methods improve water retention dramatically and deploy soil microbial life to fertilize crops. There is very good evidence now that this kind of agriculture has the potential to sequester vast amounts of carbon at no significant cost, more than any other proven technology.
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And the walk in the cold and the fresh snow under a sunny sky was, of course, lovely. The dogs were thrilled with this new white world and the plethora of animal smells in the wet cold. We saw tracks of many little and big creatures and a world made new again.
And what thread holds these pleasures together? Only that the world is so full of a number of wonderful things for the interest and enjoyment of the creatures who share it.
A Whole Life 