Life On (and Off) Schedule
by Wendell Berry
Feast of St Joseph the HymnographerAnno Domini 2020, April 3
ON THE MORNING
of February 28, I got up while it was still dark, dressed and kindled a fire. I fed the dry milk cow, put out hay for her and turned her out, then fed the other cattle and the horses.
That is the way most of my days begin, and the way I prefer to begin them. But after breakfast the day shifted out of the ordinary pattern. I shaved and put on good clothes, Tanya and I finished packing, and we got into the pickup and headed for the airport. We were going to spend a week in California—to do some necessary errands there and, we hoped, to get a little rest.
I have traveled a good deal in the last several years, and ought to know better, but now and then I am still visited by the notion that one thing you do on a trip is “get a little rest.” It rarely happens—at least to me. And I am beginning to understand why.
The trips on which I did “get a little rest,” and that I remember with the most pleasure, were leisurely trips by car or train. Those trips were good, I think, because their stories were always about the places I went, and the places I went through to get there. Traveling by car, one had only one’s own schedule to follow. Trains were better than cars, because on a train one was freed of schedules altogether; one simply resigned oneself to a schedule that other people were following or worrying about—as untroubling to a mere passenger as the schedule of the seasons.
Now the stories of my trips tend to be mostly about traveling—about the busy-ness of getting there, and about schedules. One goes to an airport which is like all other airports, boards a plane like all other planes, flies at a remote and diminishing height above the countryside to a city that is apt to be remarkably like all other cities, sleeps in a hotel or motel that is virtually indistinguishable from the last one slept in. And one stays on schedule.
The California trip was different in a couple of ways: we were staying in a lovely place belonging to Tanya’s aunt and uncle; and San Francisco, in spite of massive efforts to overpower it with skyscrapers and freeways, is still unique and beautiful. Nevertheless, we were living on schedule. From the schedule of the airline, we moved into the schedule of the city. We were waking, eating, talking, sleeping on schedule.
I thought again and again of the change that we went through on the morning of our departure. We had begun the day as people who order their lives—or try to do so—by necessities, interests and responsibilities, by times and seasons. We care for our animals’ needs, for instance, as we care for our own—because it is time to and because we want to. And then, as our departure approached, we began to live by schedule; we needed to be in a certain place at a certain time, not or not only because of the convergence of time and need, but because we were expected. One does not make an appointment with a milk cow or a garden, and so one’s care for those things has a kind of margin of convenience: doing the work a little early or a little late makes only a little difference. But the penalties of getting off schedule are immediate and direct: one misses one’s plane or insults one’s friends. Most of us nowadways cannot earn a living except by meeting someone else’s schedule.
And that led me to think how vulnerable schedules are. It is the awareness of their vulnerability that makes us so uneasy. By definition, a schedule can’t deal with the unscheduled. The past winter caused so much trouble because it was unscheduled. The country was prepared to deal with the winter it expected, not the one it got. In traveling from Kentucky to California, we were traveling from the coldest winter on record to the driest winter on record. It was a bad winter in our part of the country for one reason: a few years ago nearly all the coal furnaces were converted to use natural gas. In making this change, householders had unknowingly made themselves helpless—dependent upon a schedule that in unscheduled weather could not be dependably met. Californians had a bad winter—and will have a worse summer—because they have set up their economies on the assumption that the weather is scheduled, that a certain amount of winter rainfall could be expected like the morning paper.
“The Weather’s Just Fine!”
The evening we arrived in California I asked a friend if he was much worried by the dry weather. He replied instantly: “The weather’s just
fine! Plenty of rain for the native vegetation. Not enough for the exotics and the people. But that’s all right with me.”
It was hardly a conventional response, but I thought it a very instructive one. By people, of course, he meant the exotic
people—those, for instance, whose normal average daily use of water is 160 gallons, and whose abnormal daily use during this dry time is still something like 40 – 60 gallons. Such a squandering of water in such a climate is not merely exotic. It is, in all senses of the word, strange. And it is dangerous. It is of a kind with the squanderings of topsoil, fuel, human energy, and other resources that are characteristic of our present life.
And so my friend’s comment referred to a truth that is exactly as important as it is unpopular: these so-called crises of the weather are no such thing; they are revelations of a crisis of culture. An arctic winter in Kentucky, a two-year drought in California confront us, again, with the question: Is our life native or exotic? Or, to put it another way, do we belong where we are? That this is a question of the greatest seriousness is also suggested by what my friend said, for he was alluding to an inflexible natural law that is only a little less inflexibly a law of culture: the native species survives; the exotic parishes. The native thrives by adaptation to its place. The exotic lives on a schedule. That is to say, people can’t survive in California on the assumption that they live in a rain forest. People can’t survive in Kentucky on a fuel supply that would be ample in Georgia. Finite supplies cannot support infinite appetites. And it must never be forgotten that this question is political. Exotic people are dependent people. Dependent people are by definition unable to help themselves in times of crisis. And when people are helpless, what does it matter if they are free?
Toward the end of our stay in California, Gary Snyder took us up to his place on San Juan Ridge in the Sierra foothills. The drive up there, after the superficiality of airplane travel, gave us the sense of deepening into the continent. We went from interstate to state road to back road to track, and stepped on the ground finally at Gary’s beautiful house in the woods—a place made human by care. And here began the second theme of our trip: the possibility of responsive and responsible local life, a life that lives by looking around where it is, discovering what is available there, and making appropriate
changes in itself as well as in the place. The other life, the life of freeways and airlines, never looks where it is. It imposes
its exotic schedules and demands, and expects the place to conform—rather like Simple Simon, who went fishing in his mother’s pail.
Our arrival at Gary’s place—welcomed by his wife, Masa, and his boys, Gen and Kai—was an emergence from schedules. It was like coming out of a tunnel. We were with the people we had come to see, and for a day and a half had no appointments. Natural and human events took place around us because of their own necessities—a kind of generosity in that, permitting rest. We had the deer stepping unafraid through the clearing, the windy light shimmering in the pines, good food, fire, laughter, the company of friends. Later, we slept in the new guest room in the barn.
In the morning, Gary and Masa took us on a walk around the neighborhood. We followed a path through the Manzanita to a place from which we could look down into a long, forested valley. A golden eagle was circling high over the ridge tops, the sunlight flashing off his wings as he tilted on the air currents. He soared awhile on the updrafts, loafing in the sky. And then purpose seemed to come to him. He began to slide swiftly down the air on a long straight slant to our left. It was only when he was almost out of sight that we saw his mate in the air beneath him. She dodged as he came near, and they disappeared together. The unscheduled! There is really nothing else to expect: “Doth the eagle mount up at thy command . . .?” A little later we heard geese, and looked up to see a large flock flying over us, heading north. The unscheduled—and the necessary.
But we were also walking through a human settlement, coming at intervals into clearings where there were houses, outbuildings, fenced gardens and fruit trees. Here in a region until now only cursorily used by white people—partly devastated by the hydraulic mining of a century ago, logged, randomly grazed—are finally the substantial beginnings of a settlement.
The houses are small, built so far as possible out of local materials, of excellent design and construction. They combine modesty and excellence in a way rarely seen in our civilization, and that I found extremely attractive and moving. In the face of public values that have customarily held modesty in contempt, this association of modesty and excellence can have come about only by great intelligence and seriousness of purpose, and by an understanding of ecological limits that, among us, is new. Here is a sizable number of Americans living by choice in a place of narrowly limited resources. The valuable minerals and the best timber were taken out long ago; the ground is not fertile; the summers are dry. These circumstances made the place available for settlement, and they have forcibly imposed modesty upon the settlers. One must garden intensively on a small scale because that is the only ambition the water supply will support.
This is a settlement still in its pioneer stage. Large ecological, economic and social questions hang over it. What insights, skills and materials will it need in order to survive? How will it acquire them? Intelligence, vision, several years of experience are already there, awaiting the issues of time, endurance, weather and luck. But I see in what is already there a substantial gain in what one could call the refined national product. These people are living off schedule. They are learning to live within limits that they have troubled to understand. They will never again be silly about the weather. The whole country needs to know what they are learning.
*Originally appeared in Organic Gardening and Farming (August 1977), 44-51.
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Inside the head of my three-month-old granddaughter, Lucy, said G.K. Chesterton is, "a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation...a new system of stars, new grass, new cities...and new seas." And this is because, he adds: The gravity of astonishment at the universe...dwells in the eyes of a baby three-months-old [and] the universe is put upon its trial and forces us actually to remodel our conduct...we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope...[with] delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body. But Chesterton's central thesis in this essay is not that babies are so marvelous, but that our treatment of each other as adults, in contrast, is so broken. "It is our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong," he writes, because we no longer see each other with astonishment and wonder (unless, that is, we are falling in love). But babies remind us that humans really are astonishing, and this "revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things" should force us to "remodel our conduct" toward everyone we meet. A baby seems to be a necessary icon for us, correcting our eyesight which grows old and struggles to see "the weight of glory" in each other as teenagers, adults, and perhaps especially, as old people. Even though he did not reference icons in his essay, we seem to drift very easily into what could be called a type of iconoclasm, an inability to see each other as image bearers of God Himself. William Wordsworth describes us as "trailing clouds of glory" when we first arrive here "from God, who is our home." But soon, he says, "shades of the prison-house" begin to smother us, and we forget. "We bow to grown people," says Chesterton in this same essay, "take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly." God speaks to us, like we are working through in St. John of Damascus , through the "cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology," or literally from the spoken word (cataphatic) or unspeakable word (apophatic). Apophatic I noticed has the same root in Greek as Infant does in Latin. Both mean "unspoken." God has given us both bibles and babies, speechless wonders through which He means to unglaze our eyes and fill us with astonishment. MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College
"God became man, so that man might become God." St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation (54:3) These words from St. Athanasius may sound, at first blush, provocative. However, St. Athanasius is restating, perhaps more simply, what St. Peter says in his second epistle: the promise of being united to Christ is that men and women made in His image will partake in His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Paul Kingsnorth's latest book, Against the Machine, inverts this idea and opens our eyes to the world emerging at a rapid rate, the world dominated by what he calls The Machine. The new mantra of The Machine age is, instead, this: Man will become God by Man's own self-creation. Reading Kingsnorth is not for the faint of heart. It's easy to be overcome by despair. The goal of the Machine age is "transhumanism", to be liberated from the constraints of the body. For the transhumanist (self-described), the future is disembodied. The future is limitless. But this is not liberation. Because the Machine is not limited to the physical world, it follows naturally there is a spiritual nature to this lifestyle, what he ultimately identifies as a manisfestation and/or manipulation of the demonic. Whether or not you agree with his ultimate conclusion, we can see its effects. An entire generation, and many across generations, addicted to screens. Disintegration of communal life, most disastrously in the breakdown of the family. Increasing rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide, especially among children. It's clear we need a Savior, and the Machine isn't it. Instead, Kingsnorth encourages us toward a revival of community, men, women, and children living embodied lives in the same space and time: working together, eating together, worshipping together, loving each other, carrying each other's burdens. If this sounds like Eighth Day Institute...if this sounds like what the Church is meant to be, it is because this is exactly what the Church is. We are saved together in Christ. MICHAEL SIMMON currently serves as the Secretary of Eighth Day Institute Board of Directors and Coordinator for Hall of Men. He resides in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and four children.
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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