The Great In Between

One day last week I awoke to see a skim of ice covering the pond behind our house. Happily (for me) the ice melted before noon and the days have been mild for November since then. Though I know that this is simply a respite before winter arrives I am full of gratitude for these warmer days.

We are in

The Great In Between

seasonally.

And in other ways we are also in the great in between. Humans have choices to make that will affect all of life on this planet. What will we choose? I live daily with a sense of purpose seeking to reduce my consumption and live more sustainably. It’s hard to feel like my efforts make a difference. It seems that my actions are but a drop in the bucket. But I keep thinking that if enough of us make similar choices we can bend the arc of climate change.

I look back to my childhood on the farm when we had far fewer material comforts and things. It didn’t feel like a sacrifice then, it was a necessity. We didn’t have a lot of money and things were not as easily obtained. I can remember the early days of television and the changes that wrought. And the big wooden telephone box with a crank that hung on the wall, the party line that we shared with several neighbors. Now most of us carry our own telephone with us wherever we go and watch movies and videos on them whenever we want.

Waste not, want not!

Though we had indoor plumbing at our house in my early childhood, the houses my cousins lived in had no bathrooms (only outhouses), no hot water, and the only water was obtained from a pump at the edge of the kitchen sink. I remember my aunt heating water on the stove to add to a big wash tub in the kitchen. Then one after another each of us took baths in a big round wash tub. My parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents used and reused things, wasting little.

My grandmother told me a story of when they were planning to harvest hay one summer day. She got up at 5:00 AM to bake banana cream pies (using milk and eggs from the farm) for dessert for the crew of men that would help harvest the hay. About the time the big crew of workers arrived it started to rain so they could not harvest the hay that day. This was in days before they had refrigeration. So all of the food my grandma had prepared for the crew of workers needed to be eaten that day or it would spoil.  “There I was,” she exclaimed, “with three banana cream pies that wouldn’t keep for more than a day, and no one but the family to eat them. We had banana cream pie for breakfast, lunch and supper that day.”

That world is long gone

Somehow as I grew up things became ubiquitous. Instead of seeing ourselves as citizens we began to see ourselves as consumers. Instead of connecting with one another, we connect with our stuff. Or we form false connections on social media that really don’t nourish us.

And that led to them talking about social media — he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.

“That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,” he reckoned. “Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends.”

   — Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

Though connecting on Zoom during the pandemic has been a blessing, it does not take the place of face to face contact. We long for real connections with people we care about. And we are nourished by spending time in nature. I want no part of a virtual meta-verse.

What Matters Most to Me

Give me time in nature, hugs, time with loved ones and friends, and good books to read and I will call my life complete. The older I get the less stuff or exciting experiences I want and the more real connections with friends, family and nature I crave.

“To be a part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

When you stay too long in a place you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”

— Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

I’m about halfway through reading the book, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and I’m enjoying it immensely. It took me a little time to get into it but I highly recommend it as a thoughtful, interesting fiction book.