Saturday, April 05, 2008
Being grounded can be a good thing
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
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Some people’s American Dreams have become nightmares for other people. I think one’s “dream” ought to be limited to what one’s place can sustain indefinitely and by the requirements of stewardship and neighborliness.
— Wendell Berry of Kentucky, interviewed by Jim Minick of Speedwell
Late last Thursday, I climbed up to the mountain spring, drank some cold, rock-flavored water and leaned back in the sand road, looking up through the bare trees. Joy!
After a complicated day, it was a moment of sweet quiet, the mountain holding me up like a gritty boat to the sky, the little birds approaching for an evening bath.
Overhead, a jetliner appeared — a tiny glinting arrow, then a faint roar. Where were they all going, I wondered? West, into the sunshine. But they would miss the lovely shadows down here, in this particular place!
I felt an absurd pang, realizing the passengers, in that dry, sun-hammered container so far overhead, would not likely have time today to sit down on any quiet, gritty ground. I’d been one of those passengers, so I realized they wouldn’t WANT to sit on the ground. When one needs to fly, being “grounded” is a negative, like a mistake.
We’re going to meetings, conferences, funerals, reunions. It’s all useful and necessary, but the bright jet overhead gave me a feeling of fatigue. I felt exhausted for all of us — our whizzing selves, the slow, beleaguered Earth that must fund all this travel, our busy commuter age in which sitting quietly on some dirt comprised an unusual event.
That night, on a “Marketplace” radio broadcast, I heard this exhaustion in two British voices interviewed near England’s busy Heathrow Airport, which had just opened a new terminal.
A frazzled Margaret Thorburn, one of 2 million nearby residents who hear jet engines all day, tried with brave British gentility to converse at her house, between the roar of takeoffs . “I’m afraid there’s one every minute, at least,” she apologized.
The report noted that the newly activated “Open Skies” pact would allow direct flights between any American and European airport. More airlines, more flights — expansion everywhere. But could already-crowded airports handle more traffic? Retired businessman Michael Riley said that scheduling more flights into Heathrow would amount to “putting a gallon into a pint pot.”
“That’s what Mr. Lytle would say,” I thought.
Andrew Lytle had been coming to mind this spring, as pea-planting days arrived. He’d been my English teacher at Sewanee, many springtimes ago, the last living agrarian writer. He “dwelt” (as he put it) in Monteagle, Tenn., in a rambling old log house, flanked by mountains of student-chopped firewood and oft-occupied porches.
Already in his 80s then, Lytle wrote every morning and then went out to work his garden in a straw hat and bare feet.
Lytle believed it was essential for people with “interior” vocations to feel the soil underfoot. A mindfulness of our “place,” he felt, would temper the arrogance of human intellect — the pride of separating one’s interior world from the outer ground that sustained us. Humankind was called “to dwell” between the inner and outer realms.
Our uprooting from “place,” our need to be where we weren’t, had essentially killed the old South — the small farmer, the small town, many rivers, woods and kinds of wildlife, Mr. Lytle believed. Like John Milton’s character “Eve,” we’d been convinced by outside voices to feel discontented of our own paradise, to abandon it for something else.
Coupled with this restless discontent, the growing ease and rapidity of travel had scattered the extended family — and could eventually imperil the family of humankind, he told me one night at his crowded supper table.
“Your generation will experience a crisis,” he said. “I don’t believe it will be the nuclear thing, but this other,” he nodded toward the dark open window, through which the spring peepers had been heard in the post-blessing silence. I knew he was speaking of the land — water, woods and wildlife.
Last week, I read that the word “dwell” also meant “to dig deep” — possibly explaining its fall from common usage. I pondered it, getting peas in the ground, and wondered what Mr. Lytle might say about “Open Skies.” Likely, he would merely have gotten a wicked spark in his eye and made some dry remark about the success of Icarus.
But other writers who carry on his “grounded” tradition — like Bill McKibben, Jim Minick and Kentucky farmer-poet Wendell Berry — have certainly called us back down to mindfulness of the Earth’s limits — and its infinitude.
After all, if we could only dig deep, cultivate a rich interior life and roots in the place, we might find — without going anywhere — the entire Earth underfoot, the infinitely open skies above.
