Agricultural Meditations

There is a compelling attraction to the graphic qualities of cultivated fields - of roadways, railroad tracks and rows of crops converging at a distant focal point on the horizon.  Driving cross-country, the infinite rows of repeating corn draw the eye and imprint themselves in our neural cortex and with a permanence that seems destined to last longer than our very flesh and bone.   The rows of corn represent a compact made with the world and with posterity, much like the compact that earlier Pilgrims made at Plymouth Rock.  Iowa is a focal point - geographic center of the the American breadbasket and heartland. When the center holds, all is good.  While it grows corn the center holds.

Reminiscent of calligraphic verse or musical score, the corn evokes images of hard-working, healthy, rural people.  There is a bittersweet message here in the lyric beauty of these rows of grain, whose promise is of an end to world hunger -  but whose quiet whispered cost lies in the ruination of native prairies, scarcely appreciated by immigrant farmers as they plowed them under - my people - land-hungry farmers escaping the social ravages of a foreign aristocracy that withheld the land and the benefits of their own labors from them - until one day they were done making wealth for others and left for emptier places - places they could plow and sow, yes, but also reap.   I see the drawings here as songs or poems – borrowing from calligraphers, the flourishes and ligatures of a practiced hand but adapting them to cornstalks.  These pages are dedicated to something elegant and wholesome – a bounty which is not without substantial cost.

Healing begins at the soul level, when sick at heart with unrealized potentials and loves unexpressed, we look to that which we might have been.  We crave the unspoiled and search for the roots whence we sprang.  No longer willing to overlook the needs of another, tired of hurting and denying our fellow creatures, we gently allow them a place in our lives, learning to see the grace of their motions and taking pleasure in their pleasures.  We let go of the edges of our environment, cease controlling the periphery and come back to our centers. We release the non-essential; we rest and allow the grubs, spiders and dandelions to re-inhabit an earth quietly benefiting from their life-giving presence.  In every field and abandoned outbuilding lies the potential for untended space to go wild, to become reinvigorated with the smells, sounds and sights of other creatures going about their business.  Life, given a reprieve, begins immediately to heal itself.  Relaxing into that primordial rhythm, we can take solace in the original order and join in its regeneration as well.

Maize or Corn is one of the great agricultural gifts of the New World. Here it is offered to us in the universal gesture, coming from extended open arms - from those of great open-grown Bur Oak. 

In its ancient roots the traces of biologic memory  extend far beyond any individual memory  -   into the dimly remembered mists of oral history and to the indigenous cultures that first found the native grasses of central Mexico and  from them cultivated the corn we know today.

The Native corn spread slowly across the continent and arrived in the Great Lakes only a couple of centuries before the colonizers from Europe.   The progress of corm cultivation can be traced and used as a cultural marker because the entry of corn  into the general food supply of native cultures, triggered greatly increased levels of tooth decay.  Old archeological sites contain human remains with worn but healthy teeth and newer sites contain human remains with decayed teeth.

This corn depicted here is not the modern hybrid grown in uniform biological deserts and kept alive through continual chemical interventions, but the individuated plant with a rich genetic variety we rarely see today - each row of seed a little different.  Variations in color and misshapen cobs speak of breeding by millennia of Native Americans to achieve food plants adaptable enough  to grow in a broad variety of soils and environments.

An orchard, once abandoned, is soon reclaimed by the Sassafras and Milkweeds.  The cycle of life comes around and the accumulating debt begins to be repaid.  The apples we once borrowed from the field are now feeding deer – their recycled nutrients then also entering another food chain.  and eventually  becoming Monarch caterpillars on Milkweed stalks - soon to be reborn and transfigured into the reigning monarch Butterfly –  surveying her domain in the reclaimed orchard. 

The injured or ailing creature instinctually searches out the solace of dark and quiet places, the hidden nest where it licks its wounds.  There it hopes to be overlooked, to regenerate beyond the reach of mercury vapor lamps -outside the human concern for property lines and ownership. With a loss of energy and health goes the appetite for maintaining order.  The night, with its fleeting glimpses of dimly perceived creatures, the quiet fluttering velvety caresses of moth wings, is there to receive one who after decades spent holding the subconscious at bay, surrenders control. Instead of producing frightening chimeras from the subconscious, the dreams of the sleep of reason often release long-suppressed memories. An ancient abiding order becomes apparent once again.  It’s an order, which we need no longer fight in order to maintain. It just is.  We need only surrender and allow it entry-- the life force we’ve so long suppressed and at such cost.  The dark and quiet become allies and help us to heal in our time of crisis.

The displaced white pines, in whose remains our potatoes and oats are grown, live on in the soil and in myth – their progeny in adjacent forests continue to broadcast seed each year.  These little packets of genetic potential lie ready to sprout and reclaim the land, whenever we allow it.