John S. Bell

We are now well into Lent as well as Spring, past the halfway point with the Paschal celebration in sight. As usual, I have accomplished less than intended, kept the fast less well than I wanted and live no less comfortably with my many faults than I did before. Still, without the annual discipline, what state might I be in? I don't have any deep thoughts about the season. For that I would recommend a work like Alexander Schmemann's Great Lent. There are great treasures in the services and the disciplines of the Fast. Still, for me it is more like one of our more mundane chores here on the farm, walking the fencelines. Sheep, like my thoughts, tend to wander off from their own pastures with small respect for boundaries or even their own health and safety. We fence them in with posts and fence rails, mesh wire, barbed wire, old stone walls, whatever is available. Some things work better then others. Even the best fence fails sometimes. Tree limbs fall at inconvenient places. Gullies wash out under wire fences leaving escape tunnels for fugitive sheep. Every so often, we need to walk the fencelines, repairing a tear here, removing a fallen tree there, piling rocks or logs to close a gap under the fence. It won't keep the sheep from trying. It won't even keep a few from succeeding in sneaking through. But, with luck and a little grace, it does keep us from waking up and finding the entire flock chewing it's way to town down either side of the blacktop. Likewise, the disciplines of Lent may not have made much of a dent in my own wayward nature, but they do remind me of where the fences are.

We had a bit of wind yesterday . . .

Saturday Morning 10-19-03



There is no mistaking it, autumn has arrived. The first batch of leaves that turned were stripped down by wind and rain last week and scattered around the pasture. The survivors are turning more slowly, as if made cautious by the fate of their more impetuous brethren. We have had our first big frost, the fields white again, bringing back memories of last Winter's snow, and perhaps prophesying about the Winter to come. In between the extremes, we have had a few of those warm days where you wish for nothing more than to stretch out in the slanting afternoon sunlight. There is so little time to sit and watch it all. I have an election just over two weeks away, and mixing work with the campaign gets me out of the house at sunrise and keeps me away until after dusk. Our town and county may look small on a map, but they expand to continental proportions when you are traveling through one door at a time, talking to folks. Knocking on doors and asking for support is not something that comes naturally, but I do think that if you want your fellow citizens to vote for you and provide you with a living, you should at least have the courtesy to stop by and introduce yourself. It is at once invigorating and exhausting. Sometimes I think I have learned more about our hometown in the last month than I have in the last fifteen years I have lived here. Great works could be written on the different ways people decorate their front walks alone. So much love and effort spent to make a place in the world. I have talked to more people, shaken more hands, and spoken more in public these last few weeks than I have ever done before in my life. I will be glad when it is over, but I will also miss it a little. It is too early to predict the outcome of the election, but win or lose, the leaves will still change. Win or lose, it is time to get the barn ready for Winter and the lambs due to arrive in December.

Isabel passed through our hillside farm Thursday night. The overall damage is not as bad as the last big snowstorm, but we are still pretty impressed. In the field next to the house, the wind picked up a three-sided shed big enough to hold a dozen ewes and turned it over on its roof. The sheep who were in it are fine, apparently all having escaped safely before the big flip. A few looked a bit bewildered though by the unexpected change in their accommodations. They were standing in the inverted shed, hooves on the tin roof, casting uncertain glances up at the open sky. The rest of the purebred flock weathered the storm snug in the barn, which held up much better than the shed.

We lost electricity at half past eleven, about an hour before the center of the storm came through, so I am writing this from my office in the Courthouse in town. This morning, after checking the livestock and helping the in-laws get situated on the other side of the farm, I fired up the generator and ran extension cords to the chest freezer and the refrigerator. We got the Coleman stove off the camping supply shelf and moved the gas grill back out of the basement. The water supply is whatever is in the bathtubs supplemented by three cases of bottled water for drinking and food preparation. We should be good until the lights come back on, though a hot shower would be awfully nice right about now. I will upload some pictures when home internet access is restored.

I had not intended to go weeks between updates, but the end of summer has come quickly. Oh, the days are still hot enough, but the signs are there. The tadpoles in the seep from the pasture spring are gone, replaced by the voices of frogs in the tall grass. Birds fly in crazy connect-the-dot clusters before dropping into the big sycamore, pausing as they congregate for the flight south. I duck under spider silk as I walk into the barn, looking for egg sacks, and any last messages written into webs. (Bambi never made me sentimental about deer, but Charlotte's Web has stayed my hand from many a spider. Foolish, I know . . .) I can't understand how I ever thought that rural life moved slowly. There are days I feel like I am in one of those time lapse nature films, and the projectionist keeps pushing the speed control. We are in that last rush of nature to get business done before winter, and every day looks different in some great or subtle way. Each day, this small piece of ground I pretend to know shows me new possibilities, many good, some bad, almost all unexpected. It brings to mind the truth of what poet-farmer Wendell Berry says in "Travelling at Home":

Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.

I have been reading lately in Powers of Heaven and Earth; New and Selected Poems, by John Frederick Nims. Here is a new favorite from the epigrams interspersed between his longer works:

Avant-garde

"A dead tradition! Hollow shell!
Outworn, outmoded--time it fell.
Let's make it new. Rebel! Rebel!"
Said cancer-cell to cancer-cell.

Reading Nims, whose published work spans from the forties until 1999, when he died, I realized that he has a characteristic that I miss in most of our contemporary writers; wit. In our post-modern age we have sarcasm, satire, and irony, but, rarely, wit. Wit shares in post-modernity's delight in word-play. Where wit parts with post-modernity is that wit assumes the existence of standards, of ideals, and skewers our failure to live up to them. In our post-modern days we, by contrast, seem to have come to the conclusion that, since no one lives up to an ideal, it is hypocrisy to hold one. Cleverly pointing out the gap between the real and the ideal is pointless, if ideals themselves are fictions promoted by the dominant class structure. Holding firmly to the existence of standards, wit plays in that gap between our actions and our best intentions. Here is another example from Nims:

Contemplation

"I'm Mark's alone!" you swore. Given cause to
doubt you,
I think less of you, dear. But more about you.

Here the poet makes a double-play, skewering both the narrator and the lady in question, as both fail to live up to the ideal of fidelity. The play of wit, of course, is not the same thing as actually repenting of our sins and hypocrisies. What use is it then? Perhaps it is as close as some of us can come to humility; recognizing our own sins as we smile at our neighbor's. As Nims says in another epigram, directed to

You Pious People

Most any sin--read Scripture if you doubt it--
'S forgiven sooner than righteousness about it.

Easy-flowing brook,
Hushed--till root or rock impede.
Then it learns to sing.

Ragdale Haiku, John Frederick Nims

Redsox, the sheep pictured above, was a bottle lamb, born half-dead and brought back to life by my wife with "mouth to snout resuscitation." She spent her first few weeks being bottle fed in a box in the basement intensive care ward. To our amazement, she survived and thrived. When she was older she used the children's small plastic playhouse as a barn, growing strong enough on a diet of front yard grass and Susan's back yard roses to rejoin the flock. She adapted to life as a regular sheep quite well, though she still comes up to see us, her first flock, when we are out by the pasture.

This year has been hard on the sheep flock. A harsh winter followed by the wettest spring in recent memory has stressed lambs and ewes alike. The pastures, while green enough, are getting choked with weed and thistle who have formed a kind of vegetable mob, rioting in the wet fields. The ladies pictured above picked their way across the cattle guard, filled in with gravel wash from the latest downpours, to get at the more well-mannered grass in the yard. With all the labor and losses we have gone through together this spring, I didn't have the heart to chase them out. I left them to their breakfast as I went to pour the morning coffee.

Bishop Seraphim has been passing out questions over on his livejournal. I held out my hat and caught these five. After a quick look, they were set aside while I took some time away from writing to get my name on the ballot this fall. I am now an official candidate for Commonwealth's Attorney here in my neck of the wood. (For you non-Virginians, that's the same as District Attorney.) With the opening phase of the campaign over, I have a little breathing room and time for questions:


1) John the Balladeer comes to stay the night and says he might could have a song of blessing for a need in your heart just now...is there a song you would ask for (perhaps not a title but the kind of work the song might do)? I would like to hear several songs. Some sad ones for things lost in life's changes. Some funny ones to lift the mood and remind us of small blessings and humble pleasures, and finally, a song that leaves the listener filled with joy and courage

2)I have asked a couple of others , and ask you also what childrens book do you remember teaching you the most about life? I learned to read at a little school on a Naval base in Sasebo, Japan. The one room library there had no space to divide books by age once you got past the big board books with pictures. I ended up reading a lot of things that were not necessarily age appropriate. Imagine a seven year old interested in Robin Hood puzzling over Childe Ballads. I was interested in mythology and somehow found an illustrated verse translation of the Odyssey. The part about the Cyclops had me frightened for years. I didn't get around to many of the children's classics until I was in high school and read them on my own. I loved them all, but my favorites then (and now) were the Narnia books. Lewis wrote better books, but none wiser. All a young man needs to know about faith, courage, loyalty and hope are found there. I don't know that I will ever outgrow them. Now, well into my middle years, I still hope to grow into them.

3)when you became Eastern Orthodox was it originally more a leaving behind or a drawing towards? It was a drawing toward. I was raised as an Episcopalian, spent my late teens and twenties in charismatic renewal communities, and returned to the Episcopal church in my thirties. I still love the cadences of the classic Book of Common Prayer and the deep sense of worship in the best of the renewal communites. Nonetheless, an exposure to Gregory of Nyssa and the Desert Fathers started a hunger for something I found still living in the Orthodox Church. I converted some nine years ago, not so much fleeing the Episcopal church, as trying, like the children in The Last Battle, to go "Higher up and deeper in!"

4)You have the career in the city I understand as well as on the farm ,do they go together well for the most part? By way of reply, here is an excerpt from my weblog, written last April: Our life is "pastoral" in the most literal sense, but that does not mean that it is easy or gentle. If I had to pick fitting soundtrack music, it would be one of those pieces by Charles Ives where bands are playing in different keys in each corner of the hall. The academic year, the calender of the criminal courts, the needs of two growing children and the biological cycles of livestock all make seemingly irreconcilable demands. Nonetheless it is a life with beauty and its own sometimes inexplicable satisfactions.


5)Do you know fr Gordon Walker? in Tennessee? if you should see him give him my regard. Actually, I live closer to New York City than I do to most of Tennessee. I've never had the pleasure of meeting Fr Walker, though I have met an old classmate of yours, Fr Stephen Plumlee, who is attached to Holy Spirit Church in Venice, Florida, which I attend a couple times a year while visiting my parents.

6)a favorite Bible verse? Romans 8:26-28

Last week on my Hillside Farm weblog, I wrote about the approaching death of one of our sheep. A reader left the following question in my comments box: "[W]hat does the Orthodox Church teach concerning the eternality, if any, of animals?" It is something I have thought about myself. The Scriptures and the Tradition are not overflowing with information on the subject. The great vision of the New Jerusalem in Saint John's Apocalypse is strangely silent on the fate of these companions of ours for whom we struggle and pour out our care, and who, sometimes, provide our sustenance. For a vision of animals and the Kingdom, we must go back to the Prophet Isaiah:( Click here for more )

I have been remiss in cross-posting from my weblog to this Journal lately. For the most recent farm pictures, please go to Notes From a Hillside Farm. I have some longer entries in the works when time permits, but in the meantime, here is a favorite quotation from Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, in honor of Bishop Seraphim's recent trip to celebrate the Liturgy with the shepherdess nuns of the Holy Myrrhbearers Monastery:

Sheep are nourished with what is from God, but you are men, intended to be nourished with God. If men were also to be nourished with the nourishment of sheep, why would God have created both men and sheep?

What are sheep except grass -- the nourishment with which they are nourished. But you are invited to be gods, therefore God offers Himself to you as nourishment.

From Prayers by the Lake

At midnight the congregation walks slowly around the darkened Church, candles in hand, singing softly. Outside the doors of the sanctuary, the Gospel is read. Father knocks loudly on the closed doors; "Lift up your gates that the King of Glory may come in!" The doors open to a flood of light, flowers, and candles, as we proclaim, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life!" We stand shoulder to shoulder as the choir and chanter sing, proclaiming the joyful paradoxes of the feast. At the end of matins, before the start of the liturgy that will take us past two in the morning, we hear the words of St. John Chrysostom, John the Golden-tongued, inviting all to join in the joy of the day:( Read more... )

We Orthodox will celebrate Pascha, the great feast of the resurrection, a week later than our western brethren this year due to differences in calendar calculations. The Lenten fast continues for a few more days, but even now preparations and foreshadowings of the joy of the coming feast appear. This past Saturday was the commemoration of the raising of Lazarus, and, as if to join in the foretaste of the Resurrection, the redbuds and dogwoods burst into blossom at the foot of the mountain. Here is a photo from this Sunday of three of our guard llamas, keeping watch in the midst of it all.

had not intended to take a twelve day break from the weblog, but time passes quickly in Spring. Every day the scene outside changes, green where there was brown, leaves where there were skeletal branches. Too fast to capture in a daily slice of words. I can understand why the haiku poets loved this season. Things will not stop in their rush to sit for a full portrait of words, but a quick seventeen syllable sketch is just barely possible.

Last week it rained. Not just for one day. The whole week it rained, cold and continuos showers. Down at the sheep barn there was mud above the ankles, sometimes up to the boot top, grabbing and holding on like an insistent drunk at a party -- "Have you heard this one?" The joke, it seems, was a good one, as the Lenten grey and gloom of the rain has given way to this week's riot of sunlit green.

As the saying goes, what a difference a day makes. A sudden cold front, moisture in the air, and we have snow again. The first flakes fell just after sunrise, precursors of those still falling outside my window as evening approaches. It is a wet snow, falling on to ground warmed by a week's worth of spring weather. The gravel road is mostly clear, but the pastures and trees are covered, the snowflakes temporarily winning the see-saw battle between freeze and thaw by sheer force of numbers. In sheltered spots, the new grass still shows through, looking almost emerald green by contrast. On the lower hills, the dogwoods are in bloom, white flowers bending under white snow, springtime delayed until the storm passes.

For today's view of Buck Mountain, ( Click here )

The latest farm reports and today's photo of Hogback Mountain can be found over at the Notes From A Hillside Farm weblog.