15 September 20XX +1
My Dear Lucilius:
One of the things about writing is that if one is committed, one needs to write no matter what. Sometimes there are events that need to be covered and written about; sometimes time just flows and there is very little to discuss.
It seems I find myself in one of those times.
If there is anything of note, it is simply how little I have seen of anyone in the last three days. Certainly Young Xerxes and Statiera, whether here or at their house, but almost no-one else. The level of the sounds of living seem to have become more drowned out now by the ambient sounds of nature.
Certainly we are contributing to that “non-sounds of living” sense: shovel and hoe, bucket and hands – all make almost no sound at all beyond the individual. And I am finding that even activities that I might generate noise for – threshing grain for example – tend to have most of the “noise” producing activities performed in the enclosed space of the greenhouse. Even I find myself not wanting to make any sound outside.
I asked Pompeia Paulina about it and her response was the same. When I asked her if she could define it for me, she could not other than to say “It feels like the world is shutting down”.
On the one hand of course, that is true: Autumn is upon us now. If the leaves turning colour were not enough, the noisy passage of visitors overhead confirm it. Nature is in the process of shutting down as it does here every year and has done so for thousands of years prior to us being here.
On the other hand, there is a sense that we are shutting down as well.
Call it a realization that whatever recovery people might have imagined has not arrived. Call it the fact that – with one lone exception this Summer and an ugly one at that – we have not heard from the Wide World in over a year. Call it the fact that along with that loss of contact has come the fact that there has been nothing “new” come in during the last year as well: no supplies, no new trends, no new fads.
Like Nature, we appear to be shutting down as well.
Nature of course has the Spring that follows every Autumn and Winter. Will we experience that same sort of renewal, that burst of energy and growth? Or will we sink down to a Winter we never recover from.
People have lived here at least hundreds of years and done that without our fancy technologies and way of life. We shall see if we, too, are up to the task.
Your Obedient Servant, Seneca
Living in relationship to nature does seem to have a profound affect on how one perceives and thinks about the world. I personally tend to think that it is more a reality than the world experienced through multiple layers of technology. I mean, nature is able to survive when technology can't.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, I have to admit that I always think about you and your agricultural seasons at this time of year - perhaps more so than most this year, when we seem to have lurched from a high temperature of over 80 F to a low this morning of 32 F when I went for a walk (in less than 30 days). The trees are clearly responding to this (pleasant as I can view them but do not have to rake them). A comment at my men's group was also made how just the changing daylight makes us all seem to want to wind down even earlier in the evening.
DeleteFukuoka's writings point to nature as the ultimate recycler and conserver. We have also used "technology" to improve our lives, even as simplistic (to modern man) as fire and building a house). My concern is that those layers are peeling away.
Leigh points out a salient fact TB, technology does provide a shield against Nature but it's a fragile one. Nature is unyielding and ever present. A collapse changes all the rules.
ReplyDeleteNylon12, it does - and to your point, it is fragile indeed. Our dependence upon energy to enable most of our life is rather shocking, when one considers it dispassionately. In my business if we have a supplier that is the only one that can make a thing - a "single source supplier", we would name them - we consider that a high risk supplier.
DeleteParts we can stockpile. Energy, sadly, is much more difficult.
I feel Seneca in my blogging patterns. Sometimes I'm prolific and will have a dozen posts written up ahead of time and scheduled to publish sometime in the future. Other times, time simply passes and that backlog diminishes while I await for inspiration.
ReplyDeleteAnother way I'm feeling Seneca this morning is that sense of shutting down. I have been feeling it too though with some sense of regret and some anticipation, a mixed bag.
Ed. how remarkable that you write that. I have been feeling precisely the same way (it may or may not be an upcoming post). There have been weeks where I have all kinds of things to say and I am a week ahead of my "list"; lately it has been a struggle to get something out on a daily basis.
DeleteI find that my postings - especially this weekly serial - often reflect the circumstances I am in or my mood as much as they do a story line. It is does not make the best line for fiction of course, but I do not wonder if it is more reflective of how we live our real lives. If I think about biographies or stories I have read or heard about people living through "big events", it is remarkable how many of them are isolated from the events that they are living through: unless one is in an active war zone, a great deal of the "war" can seem far away, for example.
And yes, I feel like there is an unspoken great shutting down going on in process. Can I point to it and say "Aha! This is it!". No. But I am at least becoming less and less tethered to the time and society I live in, and with that untethering comes less and less an interest or concern about larger trends of the future or the big picture. Part of that, I suspect, is just me getting older, but part of it as well is realizing more and more how little I fit into the modern world.
The rule of threes I've modified a bit:
ReplyDelete3 Seconds without personal security (read assault or home invasion)
3 minutes without air
30 minutes without proper shelter in bad conditions (hypothermia doesn't require freezing temps, malnutrition and a cold rain is plenty)
3days without safe water (day one your feeling puny-weak, day 2 you wish you were dead, day 3 your wish is granted)
3 weeks without food.
Less than 3 months without HOPE, as the Gulag Prisoners could prove.
Faith = hope.
Nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
King James Version
3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Sorry incomplete idea.
DeleteThings change, people with the rule of threes covered generally do well enough to even thrive.
Faith is important.