Second Stacking

"In reality, this despised drudgery is one of the constants of life, like water only changing its form in response to change of atmosphere. Our aversion to the necessary work that we call drudgery and our strenuous efforts to avoid it have not diminished it at all, but only degraded its forms. The so-called drudgery has to be done. If one is ‘too good’ to do it for oneself, then it must be done by a servant, or by a machine manufactured by servants. If it is not done at home, then it must be done in a factory, which degrades both the condition of work and the quality of the product... "

From "What I Stand On" by Wendell Berry

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Dear Alex,

Today I stand on stitches and stacks more jumbled than last entry's mythology of deer and dearest in storied taxidermy, our drama unstitched and unstacking.

"What I Stand On" is a new 2-volume behemoth of 1,674 pages derived from Wendell Berry's 1969-2017 essays. His themes are as expansively intense and intently intimate as the agricultural and rural landscapes he has preserved as sacred and relevant to modern lives. Earlier this week, I started reading and re-read his intricate layering of concepts that confront contemporary conveniences.

Berry is too much for me, his words too blunt and brute, compelling me to pause in my escalating compulsion towards novelty. I dare to merely pause because a full halt, I fear, may not be honest in how I can effect changes now in my feeble "life style". Berry challenges the term, "life style" as if style is inherent in defining the climate of our hearts, as if our core values were commodities when we are designed for immortality.

I must admit: I am not an earnest reader of nonfiction unless obliged. The last I have read was an instructional manual about using a high-pressure cooker. In guilt I read it because I needed to cut down on ordering take-outs for my family. I had to adopt in crude, messy ways the sort of hands-on food stewardship and thumbs-up dinner-table conversations nurtured by Eugene Peterson in "The Pastor", the first of his books that rattled my assumptions and trashed my ego.

The fact is I have rarely read until more recently and more so out of despair in search for wisdom beyond the profiles of my SUV and career upgrade. Berry's crisp words imposed more than a few scratches on the veneer of my world. He clawed off a layer of my outer shell, the showpiece in me, my illusion of a good life.

The "despised drudgery" is in truth the work of the wise, the ordinary and the obedient behind the desk, beneath marbled sink, plumbing through clogged canals, wiping off drooling mouths of the less abled, carrying the load of another, plowing on land of injustice, awaking to another monsoon, trudging on the road less traveled, enduring the unbearable lightness of being human, straddling between prose and poetry of good bad things on stacks.

We are the workmen and women in daily drudgery stacking for us in tiny or fat stitches the sorrow that always comes with joy:

Second Stacks

Inch by stitch
on denim tinged
the Workman’s paint
over unknown terrain.

Past cleats and reeds
his jeans in stacks
thumb unhinged
from crag unseen.

Second stitches sown
nails on rugged bone
once then twice the load
heaved on road alone.

Inch on foreign niche
22 years young on stacks
Workman and blue denim
Stitched freshly on tracks.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Last night I worked on fixing up an old gate opening to my backyard.

I've done much of the work, the pondering and resourcing, mostly in my head and heart, over the last two weeks, so when I finally put my hands to it it's really to give flesh and blood to a vision that demands my flesh and blood.

Turned out it was the blood of my son.  (No, this is not leading you to any atonement theology.)

I asked him to help with the final step, the ultimate putting-it-together that would speak either of the folly or the genius of me.  It's how I felt like, that's all.

My son has a lot of muscle power in him, but not much he knows how to muster for a graceful metering out of wise portion, nuanced and just-right for the task.  I drilled a nail through a plank thinner than the adjacent ones and it went right through to the other side where he laid his tender fingers.  I warned him beforehand, but he believed the risk was only fabled as they were in all of this father's warnings over the years.

So there's a boy with his trust.  Now here's a man considering his blood.

He felt good about it.  I can tell.

Yours, Alex