The Sky is Falling

The earth is pivoting towards winter and an autumn shift in the world's water is taking place.

In the summer sweat almost steams off our bodies in the fields, heat mirages shimmer off the asphalt, and above the treeline in the distance there is a bluish haze of forest breath licking its way up into the deeper blue of the sky. As the world heads towards the Summer Solstice, everything ascends: peas climb, foxgloves rocket up, sunflowers grow almost visibly. By summer, a world of water has filled the sky and coalesced into massive towers of cloud. Like a flywheel whose momentum slips past the force that set it in motion, thunderstorms erupt and downpours within a day steam back up into a muggy saturated atmosphere only to break again and again like waves against the surface of the earth.


But for the past month the wheel is slowing; the summer sky is falling to the ground. The nights have chilled and in the mornings frost brocades have adorned the ground. By 10 am they're gone with the sun, but each morning they have been appearing and remaining with more insistence. Today there was a long drenching rain, and though there was some thunder it was limpid and resigned compared to its summer cousins. If summer is the high time of cumulus, autumn is a descending time of seeds scattering to earth and leaves falling, and winter is the low time of morning frosts and snow drifts.

                                                  
In a zendo a suspended wooden block is struck with a gnarled branch and it rings out over the course of several minutes in a series of quickening hits. This is the han, used for calling practitioners to meditation and in the evening struck again as the Evening Gatha is chanted:


Let me respectfully remind you.

Life and death are of supreme importance.

Time swiftly passes and opportunity is lost.

Each of should strive to awaken.

Awaken! Do not squander your life.

The han's strikes are like the cycle of water rising in summer and falling in winter. There is rising and falling energy, and the striking of a balance along the course of change. The han has three rounds that read like a ledger or an abacus. In the first a lengthy round of 15 strikes lies on one side of a crescendo and one lonely hit lies on the other. In the second, 8 strikes are paired with two hits. In the final round, three short strikes balance on one side of the crescenedo with three short strikes on the other.


Everything ultimately quiets into balance. The activity of this life seems long at first but it, like the summer world of water in the sky, ultimately rests in equilibrium and in the ground. The water cycle pivots and while working in the fields at the farm, I find myself seeing in the collapse of all the elaborate structures of summer life (in June fireflies filled the night air, now crickets hug the ground with song) an analogue of the pivot in the rest of the world right now.


What is "permaculture?" It combines two concepts: permanence and culture. On the one side is stability, on the other activity. How can we create a realm of activity that can sustain itself indefinitely. Not in some determined, dead way but dynamically, creatively. Like the han's progression from imbalance to balance, I find myself hopeful that the economic turmoil we are lving through is really a slowing down into balance, into a permaculture.

How else to understand pears from Argentina in January but as a version of summer thunderclouds? The pear rises up in an airplane from the foothills of the Andes and comes down again to earth in New York City or Oberlin, Ohio into a supermarket. The amount of energy needed for that trip is like a discharge of lightning in the summer sky. But can we live in an eternal summer?

I come home from the farm where I work listening to NPR and there is always this curious contradictory tension or unease in a lot of financial reporting. The United States and the rest of the world finds itself in such precarious straits because people have been living beyond their means and not saving -- living from paycheck to paycheck. We are like little heat mirages on a summer road, evaporating away in a shimmer of consumerism. And yet in the next breath the radio reporter discusses the recalcitrance of the economy, unable to return to its former glory because no one -- not individuals, banks, or corporations -- is spending. No monumental thunderclouds of activity fill the sky because water (read "money" or even better, "wealth") everywhere is hugging close to the ground, near to home.

Economists everywhere decry this situation but could this be the beginning of true local economies? Rather than a summer world of extravagance, are we heading into autumn and winter? And why would that be so bad after all? Like an excited atom's electrons falling back to their ground state, or like the han in a zendo reminding everyone to wake up to "this" life -- of this human body in this moment in this place -- and live in balance, my hope is that the world is not collapsing but rather settling into billions of nooks and crannies like frost in kernels of soil. There is great work to be done there, each being at work in their own little sphere of activity.

The farm this year has been poor indeed, a model of what is happening in the rest of the world. We've struggled to make ends meet. But as I've written elsewhere, I've devoted a lot of time to harvesting wild foods and expanding the repertoire of what my small community thinks food is. We've dried herbs and dehydrated vegetables as a way of extending the harvest. An open eye allows artichoke leaves and mugwort stems to be transformed into beautiful holiday wreaths laced with cayenne peppers and garlic.

Hunger is a powerful motivator for living a full life and waking up to all that is around you. Summer can often be a time of drowsiness, but the bite of winter sharpens the senses.