Cura

It is after six, and the heat is finally on enough to kill the chill of my fingers and nose. The afternoon chill cramps blog writing, cramps sitting still, cramps thinking. I forget this -I want to forget this, until it happens the first time in winter, and that is now. It is winter in NYC. I returned just 36 hours ago, and I've already slipped and fallen on the ice. Oh, it's been a long time since I've done that, but I have a tender foot and knee to show for it.

Prospect Lake, morning.

I have been reading Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens. Any one who considers themselves a gardener of anything -life, love, plants, soil, should consider picking up his book of essays.  He examines our relationship to the garden in order to see ourselves, and does this through the lens of literature, poetry, and gardens. His epilogue, appendices, and notes are delightfully (how often can you say that?) rich with additional insight.

I would love to quote his essays here, daily, but I've felt that way a few times, and would rather absorb those ideas into my thinking than present them ad pedem litterae. My particular favorite essays are The Vocation of Care, Eve, The Human Gardener, Men Not Destroyers, and The Paradox of Age. 

A tunnel with morning light.

Imagine that Eden is the curse, that God forces Adam to stay in the Eden that he secretly hates -but of course God knows this. Eve engineers an escape from Eden, and through it, man and woman are doubly cursed by God, and are now Godless, but are able to mature, to discover responsibility, to find care as a way of being, to fulfill themselves, instead of being passive receptors of the abundance of Eden. 

Imagine marriage within Eden, careless. Husbandry (I tried to deal with this ten years ago) is both to wife and world. Gardening is care, but not for the work at all, but for the love of that which we garden. Which need not be a garden, although the garden is possibly the most visible expression of it that we have, outside of love for another human being.

I'll always remember the older man, smiling broadly, while polishing the stainless steel escalator, at the Mitaka subway station near Musashino, Japan. That is an attitude of care. It builds a better world. I think we, as a society, have forgotten care as a way of being, see it as an expense, payable by exploitation of people. No matter how much care is present, it is not always seen -care is not always cared for. And we become less human for it.

Trash pail frozen into the lake ice.