Hawthorn Hill Journal by Dick deRosa
Mid-summer Musings…
It feels as if we planted the two crops of early potatoes we like just a few days ago. But it’s the same story every summer. Looked forward to for so long, now almost over. Yet, there I was yesterday afternoon cutting back the foliage as I have done for many a summer. The virtue of cutting back foliage is that the spuds can stay in the ground until needed. We scoop them up as needed, finishing the final harvest in late fall. Should a blight visit the neighborhood, there is little to worry about. Anything that obviates worry is welcome up here. Besides, there is plenty of worry food out there to chew on. Unfortunately, even when doing mundane garden tasks unpleasant aspects of one’s non-gardening life tend to wheedle their way into consciousness. I suspect it is a sign of the times that the cultural inanities that characterize contemporary life in these United States hold greater sway than they should.
While chucking an armload of spud greens into a compost pile, I thought of an observation that a close friend made a few days ago. She pointed out the disconnect between incessant news reporting about how divided we are and what she finds as she travels about— both at home and in different regions of the country. Wherever one goes, people are going about the business of getting through the day doing what they must for themselves and their families. For the most part, she observed, everyone is really quite nice. Granted one does not get into (or should not) heated ideological discussions with casual acquaintances. The reassuring reality is that in the conduct of our daily lives we get on rather civilly with one another. Strange as it might seem, thoughtful superficiality might just help us out of this mess. A democracy is messy by nature. We seem to have morphed a lovely messiness into a quagmire. A common theme running through most of my writing is the conviction that we have much more in common than we take credit for. It is just that we allow ourselves to get tangled up into counter-productive cultural knots that prevent those better angels from taking wing.
Most of my gardening time is mindless. Being mindful is quite the craze these days. Books abound and those who need more than a book can choose from a plethora of costly workshops. There is even paddle boarding yoga and goat yoga. Guess one would have to be especially mindful riding either. I don’t get it, but as my wife points out, I am befuddled by most aspects of contemporary culture, especially those aimed at bettering one’s being. If the road to psychic contentment leads through the goat yard well, so be it.
I was pretty mindful yesterday while hanging the last of our garlic crop. A professor wrote a neat little book about the virtues of wasting time. It turns out that so-called wasted time is not at all wasteful. But I knew that. I am a lifelong mindful time waster. These cerebral down times can proffer solutions to the most elusive of our personal and cultural challenges. None of this is new. We just have a sort of funky name for it. Doing nothing, e.g., wasting time, strikes us as counter-intuitive.
This could turn out to be a memorable, if not depressing, summer. A former president, twice impeached, might be running around the country courting votes for his rerun while under indictment for various alleged crimes, several of a serious nature. It appears that quite a few voters, at least at this point, seem untroubled by the nature of the allegations and appear ready to vote for the man. Perhaps I should ride a goat or a gnu, or maybe even a kangaroo (that might jostle my mind pretty fully) in order to understand how this is possible. It occurred to me yesterday down at the barn, just sitting after hanging the last of our garlic, that mindfulness, however exercised, requires one crucial instrument—an open mind.
Dick deRosa’s Hawthorn Hill essays have appeared in “The Freeman’s Journal” since 1998. A collection, “Hawthorn Hill Journal: Selected Essays,” was published in 2012. He is a retired English teacher.
