Hello, readers!
Welcome to all of you who are new to this space. In this Substack group, we love to talk about place, books, and community. Topics range from regenerative agriculture to the glories of walking, Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry to Simone Weil and Jane Austen. The goal of Granola is to explore what it means to be a good neighbor and a good steward, and to remain explorers of rich books and beautiful things.
I’m a writer, mother, baker, and haphazard runner/hiker. As a child, I was sort of an Idahoan Anne of Green Gables, making up stories about pansies and aspens, picking wildflower bouquets and poring over Dickens, Austen, and Audubon nature guides. In the past few decades, I’ve lived in Virginia, worked in Washington, D.C., and studied at Oxford University. My book is titled Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind. After living away from Idaho for years, my family and I moved back to the Treasure Valley last August. I still love hiking into the Idaho mountains, looking for wildflowers, and learning more about the ecosystems and communities we call home.
This summer, we are reading through Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I hope you’ll join us, even if you are a bit behind on the reading. Alongside our reading, we’re exploring an “Outdoors Challenge” that pushes each of us to think a little more deeply about the worlds beyond our front doors. This week, we’re reading Chapter 5, “Untying the Knot,” and half of Chapter 6, “The Present.”
Cheers,
Gracy
I’ve often wondered at the ebb and flow of tides, the dance of water and moon that characterizes the sea.
What with tide charts and Google searches and Wikipedia articles, it’s easy to forget the mystery and beauty inherent in these intricate motions, in and out, every day. But as Annie Dillard wonders in Chapter 5 of Tinker Creek, how long it would take for the first human to figure out the seasons, I am curious how long it took for us to track the tides.
Turns out in 150 B.C., philosopher and astronomer Seleucus of Seleucia had theorized the moon had something to do with the tides. Ptolemy wrote this beautiful passage about the moon in his Tetrabiblos:
"The moon, too, as the heavenly body nearest the earth, bestows her effluence most abundantly upon mundane things, for most of them, animate or inanimate, are sympathetic to her and change in company with her; the rivers increase and diminish their streams with her light, the seas turn their own tides with her rising and setting… "
This past weekend, my family and I hid away in the Sawtooths for a camping trip, away from cell phones, city lights, and internet. I was excited to spend the evenings stargazing.
That first night, however, the sky maintained a bright, rich tinge of blue past midnight. We had a full moon—huge and brilliant—and the stars could not compete. We saw a few familiar constellations, but not much more than normal. “The moon… bestows her effluence most abundantly upon mundane things…” I don’t have the deep knowing and deep synchronization that the ocean waves share with the moon. I am not “sympathetic to her,” no longer “change in company with her.” She surprises me.
Dillard’s very short chapter on seasonality prompts me to consider not just the changes from spring to summer, summer to fall, but also the movements of the moon, or the 24-hour cycles of our days. How do these seasons shape habit, perception, and work? How has our perception of these seasons changed over time?
For example: In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), Roger Ekirch reports that humans have not always slept in one long, continuous block. After studying and reading historical documents from past centuries, Ekirch recognized “countless references to ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleeps,” a once-common pattern of sleeping and waking lost after the introduction of electric lighting. As Karen Emslie puts it in Aeon Magazine,
Before electric lighting, night was associated with crime and fear – people stayed inside and went early to bed. The time of their first sleep varied with season and social class, but usually commenced a couple of hours after dusk and lasted for three or four hours until, in the middle of the night, people naturally woke up. …
…[N]ight-waking was used for activities such as reading, praying and writing, untangling dreams, talking to sleeping partners or making love. … After various nocturnal activities, people became drowsy again and slipped into their second sleep cycle (also for three or four hours) before rising to a new day. We too can imagine, for example, going to bed at 9pm on a winter night, waking at midnight, reading and chatting until around 2am, then sleeping again until 6am. Ekirch found that references to these two sleeps had all but disappeared by the early 20th century. Electricity greatly extended light exposure, and daytime activities stretched into night; illuminated streets were safer and it became fashionable to be out socialising. Bedtimes got later and night-waking, incompatible with an extended day, was squeezed out. Ekirch believes that we lost not only night-waking, but its special qualities, too.
Having pulled some all-nighters back in the day, and woken early to nurse babies or to work on manuscripts, I can attest to the sweet quiet and wakefulness of 2 and 3 a.m. The world is hushed, but still alive. There’s a special feeling to the early morning hours. The hush inspires a different kind of attention, a different mode of thought. Reading Ekirch and Emslie’s observations make me wonder what seasons of being and creativity we might inhabit if we dimmed the lights and turned off the screens. What would we notice? How might we “wake up,” figuratively if not literally? Would we live more attuned to the tides?
Dillard emphasizes the fact that seasons are always unseasonable. They’re changeful, unpredictable, and surprising. “There is a bit of every season in each season.” But like shadows and tides, like moons that wax and wane, there’s beauty in the tangled web. If we’d only wake up, or look up.
This week, read Chapter 5: Untying the Knot (pages 73-77) and Part I of Chapter 6: The Present (pages 78-86). Consider the following questions as you read:
Where do you notice change and seasonality in your place/community? Is it hard to track the time or seasons, whether of days or months? Why?
In Chapter 6, Dillard is concerned with our ability to inhabit the ‘present.’ Do you find it difficult to simply sit still and be? What insights (if any) do you find in this chapter?
This week’s outdoor challenge: track your ‘season’ in a new way. You don’t need to track the passage of summer. You could pay attention to the phases of the moon. You could try disrupting your normal 24-hour day, somehow. You could watch the ripening of fruit on a tree, the growth of flowers in your garden. Somehow notice time differently, and see what happens. Does your sense of time and seasonality shift as a result?
While we were in the mountains, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about shadows, as per last week’s challenge. My five-year-old is especially attuned to the intensity of summer heat here in the Mountain West, and tends to complain about direct sunlight. (I, in contrast, am a human succulent. I will take all the sun, all the time.) With her help, I began to notice the blessed cool and loveliness of shadows. The way they slip across mountain trails, or peer over our shoulders as we walk. The patterns they make on leaf and limb as the sun slips sideways in the sky. Shadows create alternate worlds: pools of shade and coolness that exist alongside bright sun-kissed realms. Each world serves as home to different plants, trees, and creatures. And even in those places that switch back and forth between brightness and shade, I notice different details as light and shadow dance past.
One afternoon, while my children played in the creek, I skipped back and forth from a pool of light to a pool of shade. It was extraordinary how much my perception of the time and place shifted as I moved from one spot to the other. One was all warmth, splendor, and sparkling water. The shade was softer, quieter, more contemplative. I noticed sound more, and light less.
You might notice light and shade in an entirely different way. But it was a fascinating thought experiment for me.
Reviewing Book Club + Outdoor Challenge Goals for this week:
First: read the entirety of Chapter 5 and Part I of Chapter 6.
Second: spend some time noticing the seasons around you.
I was discussing the "bug-eat-bug" chapter of this book ("The Fixed") with my son-in-law last week and he thought of this quote from atheist Richard Dawkins: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
I have had that quote bouncing around in my mind as I have been reading the current chapters. Dawkins' idea bothers me because I see design, purpose, evil, and good in this world. I wonder if Annie Dillard (at least when she wrote this book) would agree or disagree with Dawkins? And I also wonder how you in our reading community react to what Dawkins is saying?
I live in British Columbia (originally from Nebraska) and I love so many things about each season. BC is beautiful and there is so much outdoor adventure to be had. Each season is special to me because of the types of activities it affords, and also...the local food!
Now that we're in summer, I look forward to getting local strawberries and blueberries, and make homemade strawberry ice cream. We only eat it in the summer, because the berries are only ripe for about 30 or so days, and the store-bought just do NOT taste the same.
We also do a lot of lake and/or ocean swimming in the summer to cool off (not many people have AC here), and of course hikes and bike rides, SUP & boats of all sizes are popular activities, too. The evenings stretch because the sun just stays up so much later here (it's 9:40PM as I write and it's a lovely dusk out), and because we have so much rain at other points in the year, you feel like you have to *use it* or you'll 'loose it'...there's almost a guilt to not being outside this time of year as much as possible, because you know it will not last!
One thing I've been doing for almost a year now is visiting a dyke trail about 10 min. drive from my house, every Sunday at sundown with my dog. It's an out and back trail that follows a little creek, and from the dyke, you get a gorgeous 360 view of mountains, berry bushes, creek, and forest. My Nebraska 'eyes' become calmer and more relaxed when I can literally see wide open spaces. There aren't many here because the trees are everywhere! The amount of nature I get to witness every Sunday evening (in the winter - about 3PM!, summer - 10) makes me so happy, and I take a picture or two each week. I've created a little folder that I keep just for me. If you were to look at the photos, you'd always think it was of a different place...but it's the same 3.5 miles just one week apart for more than 52 weeks: herons, eagles, hawks, ducks, geese, starlings, owls, bats, etc., and fish jumping for bugs in the early summer are just some of what I'll see. It's just a silly little open-air pebble/gravel trail that I love, and my dog loves romping around there, too. Sometimes there's a person fishing, and I've gotten to know a few of the 'regulars' I might see week after week, but we all generally go there to be left alone. If I could figure out how to post a picture here, I'd find a good one to share it :)
So, after a very long explanation, no, I don't find it hard to track the seasons where I live, because they all come with their own gifts, whether that's activities I love to do, or just the animal/fish/reptile behaviour of a place I visit each week for about 75 minutes and get to visually and aurally soak up.