To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature!

—Thoreau, Journal, 8 March 1859

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun. . .

—Wallace Stevens

I must confess that I have been hibernating. Though no words have taken flight from these old hands, I trust you, dear reader, have continued the good work without me, just as the garlic continues to grow in the silent January soil.

In my soul’s cycle of the year, January is the cruelest month. I don’t have “the mind of winter” as Wallace Stevens recommends, nor do I wish to be “cold for a long time” (no doubt, the poet had just walked to work in Hartford in January when he composed these lines). Our Connecticut grandchildren would scoff at Georgia’s modest moments of cold and snow. Yet, these moments still paralyze my soul, tip me into the slough of despond, nudge me, groundhog-like, into a burrow. I miss the sun on these too-short days. My bees bury themselves in each other, as it were, and shiver to keep themselves collectively warm. I am more Bee Man than Snow Man; the best I can muster is to shiver by the fire, embracing the sun sleeping in the oak splits.

We had an entirely unreasonable January, in my humble opinion, with three winter storms. I can tolerate a single snow moment, one that graciously melts by afternoon. It does make for a lovely morning, highlighting the contours of the land, crafting sharp silhouettes of the trees rising against the background of white. And yes, we did indeed have some lovely snow moments, though not to Stevens’s standards, moments that our Great Pyrenees Zen loved, casually curled in the snow as if born to it.

How far am I from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature!

We did have a collective moment of winter dread here in the Georgia Piedmont. All the best meteorological prognostications pointed to a bad ice storm, one that would surely leave our remote community without power for days. As our property is located south of sparsely populated (thank God) farm country, down a dirt road at the edge of the national forest—at the literal end of the line—we know our power will be among the last to be restored. So we prepared pots of food and baked bread. We filled buckets of water (our well pump, of course, powered by that which we feared we would lose), and we renewed our provision of fire wood.

Let me digress briefly here on cutting and splitting firewood. I have for all my life enjoyed the hard work of cutting wood. In high school, my brother and I cut, split, hauled, and stacked firewood as part of our summer work; there is truth in the old saw that wood warms you twice, though these days I prefer to be warmed by the wood in the cooler days of the year. For many years now, the work has been made more pleasant by the help of my dearest friend Andy. With the threat of an ice storm looming, we planned a day in the woods. The joy of that day lingers like the smell of freshly split red oak. The thwack of an axe on oak gives a special joy, the straight grain giving way to the well placed swing. Such physical work is always immensely gratifying, and though we indulge in some twentieth-century technology (a chain saw is an amazing invention), I always feel somewhat more connected to lives lived back when firewood was essential to life. With a good load for each of us stacked, we concluded our day as we always have by exclaiming, “We are rich!”---a sentiment I know our forebears would share. A good fire warms the feet and the imagination; it is a pleasure deeply embedded in our genes, having been part of our experience as a species for nearly as long as we have been a species.

On the eve of the promised ice storm, my wife and I ate well, took showers (another nicety predicated on electricity), and went to bed, reasonably confident in our preparations. I slept fitfully and rose early, elated that coffee was still possible as the sun came up. With a cup in hand, I reviewed the weather radar as the faint light of morning began to illuminate the dusting of snow on the garden. Thus fortified, I made my usual morning rounds. Zen, indifferent to the cold, was quietly curled and sleeping after her night of guarding the farm. The cats who live in our garden house greeted me, just roused from snuggling together. The greenhouse, warmed by propane, sported a balmy 60 degrees. The chickens, a bit slow to rise, carefully pecked the oddly white ground. As the sky lightened from battleship gray, I saw no ice on the trees, the predicated source of our fears and the true hazard.

With all well on the farm, I lit the fire I had prepared the night before, made tea, and picked up a collection of Billy Collins’s poems about dogs, a gift from our neighbor whose downed oaks now warmed the room. The day itself was a great gift, a day of reading and musing by the fire, a day I could give myself to listening to the flutters, ticks, and cracks of the woods as it moves from split to warmth. It was a day, as Stevens mused, that offered “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

On Life in the Garden

As the prophet Aldo Leopold says, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

I have always known, as if born to it, as if I had germinated in the warmth of a spring day in the damp soil, that however the bills were paid, however I managed the business of money, my life’s meaning and truth would be found in the garden.

My writing offers insights on the life I find in the garden and celebrates the glories of the natural world as I work toward an ever greener mind. I hope you will subscribe.

Subscribe now

In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, A Book of Seasons offers a year of meditations on the holiness suffusing even the humblest parts of creation and reflecting on its implications for ourselves and others of all kinds.

Published by Mercer University Press; available May 5th.

Pre-order Now

Truth to tell, in this season, I need Handel’s Messiah. I need the reminder of the prophetic imagination. I need the explosions of joy.

Here, in the Georgia Piedmont, we have just entered the Persephone Period in the garden cycle of the year, the season when we receive fewer than 10 hours of daylight a day. Persephone has left for the underworld, as the ancients understood it, taking hours of daylight with her, leaving her mother, Demeter, behind to mourn. Most of our gardens wear her brown cloak of grief. Our fall/winter garden still sports an array of greens for salads, some hardy root crops, broccoli, and cauliflower, and these plants are mature enough to manage the short days and cold nights, but their growth has slowed to near stop. Though I greet them each morning, sometimes admiring the frost that heightens their sweetness, there is subdued joy in our communion. It is not the exuberance of summer. All of us seem only to be marking time till longer days return.

There seems to me a certain wisdom in the church calendar placing Advent and Christmas in the bleak midwinter. We need at least a star’s worth of hope in the dark night. We need some wild words from the prophets. We need the promise of a messiah.

I don’t know how the Hebrew prophets ever came to be thought of as foretelling the future. Rather, I find their prophecy is about creative persuasion; they are metaphor makers and performance artists, and they are truth tellers in ways that force us to pay attention; they are an incarnation of hope. They, in a turn I much appreciate, often draw on the natural world for poetic insight.

From the despair of the Babylonian exile, Isaiah writes,

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,

and rejoice with joy and singing.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

They shall see the glory of the Lord,

the majesty of our God.

Crocuses are delightful early bloomers here, certainly avatars of hope and joy as spring approaches. They are native in Palestine and grow wild and common in the cooler, wetter corners. Famous for their winter whites and spring yellows, they are a marker of abundance. Isaiah calls on these beauties to proclaim the promise of restoration of the land and the people, a restoration so abundant that all will “rejoice with joy and singing.” The poet offers a dramatic memory of home for his people in exile. Isaiah plants seeds, or bulbs in this case, for a spring bloom, and thus conjures hope. For me, in the bleakness of Advent, in the darkness of the Persephone Period, the passage inspires me, enlivens me, and it makes me want to plant crocuses.

Surely as Isaiah is a poet, Jeremiah is a performance artist:

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?

When I was young, I had an overly earnest faith, a faith that was regularly searching for, listening for, longing for the voice of God in my life. And when I would read such a passage, I knew that God was indeed (preferably in the voice of James Earl Jones) speaking to Jeremiah in a very real and literal way.

These days I hear a very different voice of God. In my mind, I see Jeremiah absent-mindedly knocking his favorite coffee cup off the shelf and breaking it. Much in need of caffeine, he stumbles down the street to the potter to get a replacement. While there, he watches the potter take a botched project and turn it into a beautiful new pot. Having purchased his new coffee cup he heads home. Then stimulated by the caffeine but still cranky about breaking his mug and the shekels he had to pay the potter, he says to himself, “Isn’t that just like God.” After a few revisions it came out, “Thus says the Lord…”

Now don’t get me wrong. In no way do I mean to suggest that God’s hand and God’s voice are not in the prophecy. Quite the contrary. Rather, Jeremiah stumbled upon a metaphor, a metaphor that helped him see in a new way and that gave voice to what God was saying to him. This clay is not ruined; this people can be reborn.

My favorite performance artist of scripture is John the Baptizer. Scripture tells us he channels Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord.” He is the wildest character of scripture, a performer in the mold of Jeremiah, a great truth teller and a vehicle of promise. He is fearless, and he knows how to draw a crowd.

At the beginning of Advent just weeks ago, I heard our bishop preach on John. Bishop Wright is a bit of a performance artist himself and powerfully speaks the truth. He loves John! In his soaring rhetoric under the Gothic arches of St. Philip’s in Atlanta, he called us through John’s story to encounter God. The bishop, a man of the institution, called us to hear the message of the man of the wilderness; the leader of our church in north Georgia called us to listen to the most revolutionary voice of first century Palestine.

Come to the wilderness. Change your mind. You will find God.

Such an encounter with God, the bishop proclaimed, transforms our relationships, calling us to see all of humanity as a single, global family with inherent worth and dignity.

His words have lingered with me in this dark season. They remind me of my favorite American performance artist, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is now most often seen as an early environmentalist, a proto-ecologist, and an advocate for wilderness, one who lived in the woods by Walden pond. But in his day, many considered him an arrogant crank, an oddball, a Massachusetts Jeremiah. I see him as a 19th Century John.

Laura Dassow Walls in her wonderful biography of Thoreau opened my eyes to Thoreau’s time at Walden pond. She argues persuasively that though he indeed went to the woods to live out an experiment in simple living, he very quickly realized that his experiment had become the buzz of the community. Folks often came by to ask him about his experience. What started as an economic experiment became performance art and fodder for his writing. He stumbled into the metaphor that would become his prophetic work Walden.

I don’t think I do damage to John the Baptizer or Thoreau to note that their messages align.

Come to the wilderness. Change your mind. You will find God.

For me, such an encounter transforms our relationships with more than merely our human family; it calls us to a larger global family, one that includes the more-than-human all around us. Come to the wilderness, indeed. It is a message we need to hear in this dark season.

We have a small greenhouse where we winter over a variety of plants and get a head start on the summer garden. This week, in celebration of the solstice and the lengthening of the day, I will plant peppers. For the past month, we have cared for the Poinsettias that will honor the church altar for Christmas. Poinsettias are native to Mexico and Central America where they are known as nochebuena, “good night,” in a nod to Christmas Eve. When we agreed to keep them, I never imagined the joy they would bring. I have checked on them daily, making sure they have enough heat and water. On sunny days, when the green house warmed, I lingered with them, enjoying a rather tropical moment in the midst of winter. The color, the warmth, the smell, like Handel’s Messiah and Isaiah’s crocuses, like the radical voices of John and Henry, bring me great joy in the midst of this dark time.

Tomorrow and for the next six months I will celebrate a bit more light each day in our half of the world, and each seed that germinates will, for me, serve as another green Bethlehem star.

On Living Well

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a Thoreauvian by trade, and will most happily be attending the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in the summer of 2026. The theme for this year’s program is “Living Well: Thoreau, Health, and Flourishing.”

As I prepare my proposal for the gathering, I’d love to hear what you think living well means. Please offer a note on this essay and your thoughts on living well in the comments.

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On Life in the Garden

As the prophet Aldo Leopold says, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

I have always known, as if born to it, as if I had germinated in the warmth of a spring day in the damp soil, that however the bills were paid, however I managed the business of money, my life’s meaning and truth would be found in the garden.

My writing offers insights on the life I find in the garden and celebrates the glories of the natural world as I work toward an ever greener mind. I hope you will subscribe.

Subscribe now

The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season, which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for information on how to order.

A Book of Seasons

I have fallen in love with beech trees (Fagus grandifolio). I was always fond of them, but over the years my affection has ripened into something deeper—something I’m not afraid to use the “L-word” to describe.

—Joan Maloof

The American beech, a common tree in the eastern United States, prefers cooler, wetter northern slopes and can often be found along streams. Though it is sometimes found in pure stands, it happily lives with any number of other trees from poplar and gum to maples and magnolias.

I’m sitting in a small mesic forest dominated by beeches on the Beech Bottom Trail in the Thomas Farm Preserve in Watkinsville, Ga. The day is spectacular: warm enough in late November to bring out the honey bees in search of late pollen. The variations of breeze trigger successive generations of leaf fall. Time slows as I watch the acrobatics of the leaves’ descent till they gently land to join their siblings. The sun, over my left shoulder, shines on my tablet as I write, my shadow indistinguishable from those cast by the young trees behind me. An occasional cloud interrupts the sun and obscures the bright blue above the trees.

I say that the trees behind me are young, but that assumes my all-too-human perception of time. Time is remarkably different for trees, especially slow growers like beeches. One of our own young beech trees, just now twelve or so feet tall, has grown near our home for thirty years. It patiently waits for the crown to open up for its day in the sun. As Maloof notes, their gradual growth makes them a poor investment for those who look only at the money to be made, for those who see a human lifespan as the defining factor. As we Georgians know well, fast growing pines are the preferred arboreal crop of the land. Beeches, to my mind, have a far greater value.

The gentle slope on which I sit marks hundreds of years of gradual erosion. A creek, bound by granite gneiss, trickles by in the bottom. The water spills over the rock into a pool, its song just audible over the sound of the breeze. Newly fallen leaves circle the pool till, like kids at play, they slide down the mossy stones to circle yet another pool. Cardinals add their percussive cheep to the creek’s sibilance. Crows now and again caw.

The hundred acre preserve was only recently made a municipal green space, and it has been embraced by the community. It was a family farm for some generations, and the family’s love of the land is apparent throughout, certainly here in the beech bottom. Mr. “Hot” Thomas, the patriarch in our lifetime, was famous for his BBQ, and he took orders from us over the years at the cement block general store transformed–by his facility with pork–into a restaurant. The shelves of the store held an array of odds and ends, more or less useful to the local farmers. Thus, your order could include a pulled pork sandwich with vinegar sauce, slaw, white bread, pie, ice tea, and a crescent wrench. It was the closest restaurant to our 10 acres in south Oconee County. From there, anyone in a touristy mood could swing on down Highway 15 to the river to take in the Iron Horse, the modern art that found its home in the middle of a corn field after being rejected by the fine young students at the university in the late fifties.

On the hundred acre homestead of the Thomas family on the outskirts of Watkinsville, just past the cemetery, the family lived and raised cattle and grew pecans. The woods where I sit must have been left alone for a very long time. With trunks 14 to 16 inches at the base, these beeches could well have watched this creek run for 150 years. With a lifespan of more than 350 years, the parent of the trees around me could well have germinated before the Pilgrims sailed for Plymouth. How the world surrounding this quiet corner has changed!

The botanic name of the beech is Fagus grandifolio, fagus from the Greek “to eat” and grandifolio meaning “big leaf,” as the American beech sports larger leaves than its European cousin. These trees, no doubt, have fed multitudes of the more-than-human world for generations upon generations. Their seeds are high in oil, making them a fine meal for squirrels, chipmunks, deer, foxes, and birds. This year has been a mast year for the oaks, with acorns aplenty, but the beechnuts have also rained down in abundance. The etymology of “beech” shares a common heritage with “book” as its smooth blue-gray bark served as an early form of tablet. The smoothness of the bark still attracts young folks who feel compelled to announce their love with a knife. Though I haven’t snacked on beechnuts as I sit beneath these beauties, yet have I been fed in so many lovely ways. Though I haven’t defaced the smooth bark, these trees inspired these words.

In my lifetime, I have seen an array of species with different life-cycles, each with their own time frame. The periodic cicadas are most famous for their long slow development and their striking emergence. At the intersection of ecology and systems theory, we find the delightful concept of “emergence,” the notion that what the parts of a system do together, they could not do alone. Sitting here, I begin to wonder what has been lost by our insistence on the short-term cycle, the immediate payoff. What, indeed, might have emerged from the slow development of an ecosystem like the one here anchored by beech trees. Joan Maloof notes, “I have come to believe that the only moral solution to the paradox [that living on earth requires harming other organisms] is to strive to minimize our impacts and to be utterly clear about the impacts we are having.” Though we will never know what we have lost, we can be utterly clear that we have lost much by interrupting the complex systems that are found in old growth forests.

I breathe in deeply, the air suffused with the sweet smell of fall. What wonders might emerge in this beech bottom if we continue to minimize our impacts? What words might find their way to the young minds sitting here under the next generation of beeches?

Let Me Know Your Thoughts

I’d love to hear about your favorite spot among the trees this fall.

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On Joan Maloof

Inspiration for this essay and the quotations above are from Joan Maloof’s essay “Beeches” from her book Teaching the Trees. For more about Joan Maloof, please visit https://www.joanmaloof.com/

For more information about old growth forests, check out The Old Growth Forest Network, an organization that Joan founded: https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/

On Life in the Garden

As the prophet Aldo Leopold says, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

I have always known, as if born to it, as if I had germinated in the warmth of a spring day in the damp soil, that however the bills were paid, however I managed the business of money, my life’s meaning and truth would be found in the garden.

My writing offers insights on the life I find in the garden and celebrates the glories of the natural world as I work toward an ever greener mind. I hope you will subscribe.

Subscribe now

The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season, which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for information on how to order.

A Book of Seasons

Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone & hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence & prompting.

– Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857

As explored beautifully in Kristen Case’s new book Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar, near the end of his life, Thoreau began to collate, in a kind of proto-spreadsheet, the phenology of his hometown: the bloom times and bird migrations and dates for leaf fall that he had meticulously kept for years in his journal. His Kalendar tracked not just weather-related phenomena, she notes, “but also the hidden relations between them—between the skies of June and skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, stuck as we usually are in our own brief moment of linear time.” In this practice, Thoreau began to craft a kind of ecology, thinking in terms of nature’s complex interactions over time in his contemporary version of the wheel of the year.

The Celtic festival Samhain, the precursor of All Saints day, marks the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, a fixed point in the cycle of the earth around the sun. In my temporal imagination, Samhain is both a season and a moment, both wonderfully now and ancient, and it suggests relations in the more-than-human world and in my soul. We have already celebrated All Saints Day at our church, but the season hangs on in my heart. The tone and hue of All Saints for me stretches in all directions. The farm now lingers in this liminal time. The poplars are mostly bare, the sweetgums, maples, dogwoods, and sourwoods have embraced their true colors, but the oaks, hickories, and beeches are reluctant to let their summer green go. Me, too. The opulent leaves of the figs now blanket the soil beneath them.

The garden’s season was fully represented in our homely All Saints feast. We ate the very last of our zipper cream peas, great lovers of the Georgia heat now letting go of life, and the very first of our sweet potatoes, their abundance hidden till the November digging. The beautiful deep green of our fall crop of kale graced our white plates as well. Planted in the heat of summer, kale thrives now in the cooler days. The fall honey harvest, product of 10,000 blooms of asters and goldenrod in the gloriously sunny days of September, sweetened our soul cakes, the predecessor of today’s (much degraded, in my humble opinion) Halloween candy. Soul cakes were All Saints gifts offered in appreciation for prayers for the dead, a tradition we are happy to repeat in our own way. We ate them by the fire, the best gift of our generous neighbor’s oak trees, burning last season’s sunshine as we remembered our ancestors. We raised a glass of mead to honor them, the first of our latest brew, as our bees wax candles lit our altar of family pictures.

Season: Meaning One

The word “season” carries with it the stories suggested by the etymology of the word. Ultimately, our “season” derives from the Latin “to sow,” and thus it suggests both the broader sense of time—the seasons of the year—and the very particular, the moment when the conditions are right for sowing. In Spring, we have moments when temperature, moisture, and length of day all conspire to inspire germination. For my agrarian forebears, the time of planting was a cause for celebration as it is for me, the true renewal of hope for a harvest, for a coming season of abundance after a long winter. In the Celtic wheel of the year, we celebrate Imbolc in February as the promise of the coming of the season of planting with a blessing of the seeds. In that moment, we anticipate the spring equinox when we will begin planting the summer garden here in the Georgia Piedmont. Though we stretch the season with indoor seed starting and a small greenhouse, we are still fundamentally at the mercy of soil temperature and sunlight. And with every seed I plant, I imagine the fruit that is promised. The lexicographers tell us that “sow” and “seed” are ancient cousins with no predecessors and with cognates in most northern European countries; they, you might say, have always been part of our language, part of our culture. They define us as a species, we now having been about the business of sowing seed for 10,000 years. Little wonder sowing seeds defines our seasons.

Season: Meaning Two

Even as there is a particular time to sow, there is also a season of harvest, and each fruit telegraphs its perfect ripeness in its own way. You might call this the kairos of gardening, the fullness of time. Blueberries bulge when at perfect ripeness. Tomatoes wear green for all but their last days and show their final beauty gradually. Once fully in their glory, they still require a day of ripening in a kitchen window. Cantaloupes are most generous in letting us know they are ready to be picked, for the fruit pulls away from the stem. Watermelons require a percussionist’s ear as the right thump is the best clue. Figs at their finest will be moments away from ferment, and the bees will let you know that they are ready to pick.

There is, however, a second kind of harvest required not by the ripeness of the fruit, but by the fullness of the season. A blustery afternoon yesterday ushered in the first cold air of the season to reach the Georgia Piedmont. We will have a hard freeze tonight. Thus, Samhain marks the death of the summer garden. I have encouraged the tomatoes to persist through to the fall, and we have many of various sizes, though still green. I will pickle them, a tradition passed down to me from my brother’s father-in-law. Our tromboncino squash have fed us throughout the summer, and we have one last bountiful harvest, enough to share with the neighbors, a summer treat in November. There are a few bell peppers and plenty of habaneros that will join the tomatoes in pickling. I have potted up and moved to the greenhouse one of the pepper plants, for it has come too far to let go of now. Finally, I shook the branches of the pear tree and gathered the remnant fruit. Having picked tomatoes, peppers, okra, squash, and pears for the last time this year and having stuffed all the plants we cannot bear to lose into the greenhouse, we are ready for the cold. There is a kind of grieving in this work, a last goodbye to plants I have greeted every morning since April, some since January. Marking the death of the summer garden is melancholy for me. I know I will wake to a very different place.

The rest of the farm has been preparing for this moment for some time. With short days and thus short time for foraging, the chickens have all but stopped laying for the season. The honey bees have long since stored their winter food, some of which they have shared with us, and have stopped rearing new bees. They will huddle together through the winter until Imbolc when they too will claim the promise of Spring and start their increase for the nectar flow. Our Great Pyrenees guardian dogs have put on their winter coats and are most ready to welcome the cold.

Season: Meaning Three

Salt seems distant from this discussion of planting and harvest save for the savoring of the later. But if we consider seasoning as bringing our food to its fullness, then this use of “season” makes sense. Salt ripens the flavors, bringing them to completion. Perhaps this is true of our souls too, as Jesus would have us be salt and bring the world to its fullness. Perhaps this writing needs a touch of salt as well.

At its simplest, an altar is a table, a placeholder for the sacred. Our All Saints altar held a black-and-white photo of my father’s family when he was in high school. My grandmother sits between my two aunts, both some years younger than my father and his older brother. My grandfather, his eyes shaded by a straw hat, stands between his two sons, behind his wife and daughters. My grandmother’s arm is around her youngest, her head bowed toward her.

I never knew my grandfather or my uncle. Both died the year before I was born, my uncle just a few months before. I lingered with this loss as we sat before the All Saints fire. I am well acquainted with grief at this point in my life, my parents and siblings having gone on before me. I can only imagine that my birth was a marker of hope in a terrible season of grief, a bit of light in a very dark night. I wonder now if I was also a reminder of that loss, of the grief my father and his family carried. I know my father loved and admired his older brother, as I do mine; I am reminded of this loss almost daily.

Just before All Saints this year, we received the happy news that my brother’s younger son’s wife had given birth to a beautiful girl, the latest Balthazor to enter this world. We celebrate that birth even as we wish that her grandfather were still with us to join in the celebration. Similarly, as we enter the dark time of year, my heart and mind turn to seeds and the expectation of the beautiful green of germinating plants.

Let Me Know Your Thoughts

Please Share your All Saints/Samhain reflections. I’d love to hear from you.

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On Life in the Garden

As the prophet Aldo Leopold says, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

I have always known, as if born to it, as if I had germinated in the warmth of a spring day in the damp soil, that however the bills were paid, however I managed the business of money, my life’s meaning and truth would be found in the garden.

My writing offers insights on the life I find in the garden and celebrates the glories of the natural world as I work toward an ever greener mind. I hope you will subscribe.

Subscribe now

The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season, which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for information on how to order.

A Book of Seasons

In the darkness, fishing boats mark the water, tiny stars at the edge of sight.

A thin line of the clouds emerges on the horizon, indistinguishable from the pine tree tops on the dunes of Cabretta Island. Overnight, the sound of the surf has shifted south; I hear the distant breakers fall on Nanny Goat Beach. Venus rises mightily from the sea while clapper rails “kek kek kek kek” in the dark marsh before me.

The chill of the dawn sends me for a sweatshirt and socks. When I return, the earliest light finds its way to the salt marsh, a ghostly reflection amidst the black. Now that I am still, I see the earth turn.

Cardinals and wrens call out for the day. My mind drifts back 18,160 sun rises; I find myself on East Beach on St. Simons, a young man with notebook in hand, praying the sun up, with hopes of meeting God there. So it has always been. . .

Venus has faded, overwhelmed by a greater light. The pines and live oaks now stand in silhouette against the ice white water, and once again the sound of the surf shifts north. Six herons flap south.

An amorphous ball of pink and orange sets off silver waves lining the clouds on the horizon. In a breath, the sun appears. Too soon I must look away and when I return my gaze, it sits entire on the ocean. Another blink and it is partially obscured by clouds. Kinglets and wrens and blackbirds sing to greet the day.

The sun now owns the horizon, ocean, air, marsh, clouds, all consumed by its might.

Good morning, Sapelo.

The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season, which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for information on how to order.

A Book of Seasons

The Tuft of Flowers
By Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
 
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
 
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
 
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
 
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
 
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
 
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
 
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
 
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
 
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
 
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
 
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
 
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
 
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
 
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
 
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
 
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
 
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
 
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
 
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
 
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

With its [Purple Grass (Eragrostis pectina cea)] beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place, of the Rhexia [Meadow Beauty], which is now leaving off, and it is one of the most interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above the edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to swing his scythe; for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his notice. Or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know that it exists; for the same eye does not see this and Timothy. He carefully gets the meadow hay and the more nutritious grasses which grow next to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the walker’s harvest,— fodder for his fancy stock.

–Thoreau, Autumnal Tints

I first discovered this Frost poem shortly after I had gotten a scythe. Scythes are elegant tools, bespoke based on height, hip to ground, and cubit (elbow to fingertip), with the fundamental expectation of long use in the field and the need for precision. I have two blades, one long and light for mowing grass or grain, one shorter and more stocky for mowing ditches. It is my preferred tool for mowing around my honey bee hives; truth to tell, it is the bees’ preferred tool as they hate the noise and exhaust of mowers. When I mowed the apiary with an internal combustion engine, I was without fail chased away by angry bees. With the gentle whispering scythe, I can mow right up to the hives and not disturb the bees. I can leave behind, as well, the array of plants that I and the bees love to have about. The apiary now grows a number of lovely beauty berry shrubs, all saved by the scythe.

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I have never known a world in which industrial mowers didn’t manage the roadsides. It is not their calling to indulge in the serendipity of saving a bloom. This poem captures a moment all but impossible to imagine today: a tuft of butterfly weed purposefully left behind by a mower, its bright orange blooms calling the migrating monarchs. The grand interruption the poem offers is predicated on the communion of narrator and butterfly: with butterfly as guide, the narrator, here turning the cut grass to dry before bailing, sees with new eyes, hears with new ears, his eyes and ears now one with this humble beauty, a beauty that inspires a new level of human community.

In like manner, Thoreau’s Autumnal Tints calls us to turn our eyes and minds to a beauty redefined by wildness, by that which is left behind as too little or of too little value. I have been stalking beauty this September mostly in the ditches where the mower “does not deign to swing his scythe,” along the fences graciously left in their wild estate, and in the abandoned railroad cut left to its own devices. The blue mist flowers tucked back in quiet corners can call me in for meditation and demand an extended visit. I linger with the small white asters too. Most of all, it is the goldenrod that owns my fancy this season; it is this walker’s favorite harvest and fodder for my fancy stock.

The particular beauty I seek is counter to the culturally cultivated, foreign to the civil and hybridized, decidedly un-exotic; rather, it is native, common, and wild. Many would say I, like Thoreau, am unduly infatuated with weeds, and I suppose they would be correct. This September’s beauty will never grace the covers of magazines or be sent out old-school on postcards to friends and family; it will not be the stuff of viral Instagram posts, for it is essentially an ephemeral beauty, of the moment, in the fullness of time, outside of insistent clocks and tyrannical calendars. This beauty interrupts time as it interrupts me.

The beauty I seek this fall is in the avatar of goldenrod on sun-soaked afternoons when the honey bees are abuzz on these wonders, happily taking a touch of sunshine home to the hive in the form of pollen and nectar. It is a seasoned moment, a perfect ripeness like that of a cantaloupe letting go of the vine.

I have a young friend who is practiced in the art of herbalism. I have regularly quizzed her since she first began her study of potions and have tinctures of her making in my pharmacy. When I asked her about goldenrod, she bloomed like the plant itself, glowing with enthusiasm. “Its nature is counter-intuitive,” she noted, “as many think it causes allergic reactions when it rather serves as a cure.” This stubborn ditch weed that most folks purposefully mow, she cultivates, her yard gloriously exploding in September gold. She has placed it in bridal bouquets so that the bride carries sunshine and wholeness to the altar. I’m quite sure her young children, raised to be one with the soil and sun, know goldenrod by name and dance about their favorite patches of lance-shaped leaves topped with long arms of sunshine. They reenact sun rituals intuitively. They have been well seasoned.

As I do, she places vases of goldenrod on her table to bless the household; my writing desk currently wears a dusting of pollen and a dotting of tiny seeds beneath the declining plumes. She encouraged me to add a tuft of goldenrod to my daily cup of Tulsi tea so that I might regularly imbibe its gifts, a practice I have begun. Along with the dose of sun, the two stems of goldenrod add a hint of the bitterness of the season to the tea that reminds of the end of summer, of loss and death.

Goldenrod, as my honey bees know well, is a keystone species, one essential to the health of the ecosystem, perhaps the most important plant in North America for pollinators in fall. There are generally two nectar flows for honey bees in the Georgia Piedmont. The primary flow is in April and May when it seems the whole world is in bloom. The secondary flow comes, if at all, in September and consists mostly of asters and goldenrod. The smell of the hive is distinct; the returning bees’ pollen sacks bulge with yellow-orange goldenrod pollen. The fall flow is the season where I most regret the county’s mowing of the ditches on our dirt road—so much bee food laid to waste.

This year, September has been delightfully sunny and thus a delightfully good season for gathering pollen and nectar. I have spent many afternoons watching the bees come home with their bounty. I have lingered by patches of goldenrod and aster, the bees busy on the blooms. As Thoreau notes in his “Natural History of Massachusetts,” “Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.” Thus I lay my eyes and see a kind of ecosystem beauty, an abundance found at the margins of our cultivated life, of endless miniature blooms on flowers found in a ditch, embraced by bees with their hairy bellies dusted gold. At the end of the season, I will take from the bees a modest portion of this abundance; thus, with each taste of honey I enjoy in winter, I will remember these bees on these plants in this sunshine on this wonderful September afternoon.

The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season (https://www.abookofseasons.com), which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for information on how to order.

A Book of Seasons

I wonder how in the long slow evolution of words this liminal moment became known as the equinox. It is accurate, this “equal night,” in a messy and ephemeral way. The earth’s tilt and its spin around the sun brings us into a curious balance of night and day, of light and dark, twice a year, if only for a moment. If I were asked, I would have voted for equilux instead. Though we will pass into fall today, into the season dominated by darkness, the poplars have long since anticipated it, have already begun enacting it, their green engines run down. These harbingers of the coming season lie about my feet. For those more than human, whose blood runs green, with a more intimate awareness of the length of day, the equinox is not an abstract holiday.

Though merely an astronomical moment, the autumnal equinox, marks a threshold in our seasons, marks the beginning of aptly named fall, and marks for us in the garden the transition from summer to fall planting. Though “threshold” no longer denotes the processing of the harvest (etymologically, to separate grain from chaff by treading on it), for the purposes of this essay, it is more than apropos, for the equinox is a day to celebrate the harvest.

Once a very human and homely event, threshing now occurs primarily in industrial agriculture in monstrous machines named combines for they combine the business of cutting and threshing. Our experience of harvest is, to say the least, remote. I have grown and scythed winter wheat and rye for a garden mulch, but I let our chickens manage the threshing. I can only marvel at the earliest agricultural empires when I consider the labor of the harvest. I have read that a good man with a good scythe could mow an acre a day. Today, a good combine can cut and thresh 18 acres an hour. It makes for a very different threshold. No wonder we no longer see the harvest in the word.

On this autumnal equinox, I will invest in the still point of the turning world by harvesting our faithful high summer crops (peas, okra, squash, corn, and melons) and by transplanting the fall seedlings, now ready to go in the ground. Our humble celebration tonight will be delightfully simple: we will enjoy our harvest meal (the very crops noted above), close to the land that grew it, on our screen porch that overlooks the garden, with homegrown, homemade bees wax candles and a glass of home-brewed mead (from the honey of our bees). Thus we embrace the moment, we honor this threshold and make the work of our days sacred; we will bow in gratitude to the earth and sun, to the air and the water embodied on the plates before us.

Today, I will surround myself with a sacred green, I will honor the passing of plant to food, will linger on the harvest threshold as I shell peas, and will see the glorious sun gathered and stored by the bees shine in a second life on our table. I will find anew the balance of new life and old as I invest in the culture of our agriculture.

May you too enjoy all the blessings of this threshold as you celebrate this equinox.

An Equinox Garden Update

As with so many years, the garden has had its share of glorious successes and a few dismal failures. We are grateful for five plantings of corn coming in throughout the summer, though the ears from some of the planting were small (still delicious) due to unfortunately timed periods of gray skies. We will enjoy the very last small ears tonight, a sweet bicolor that we simply love. We will also have a lovely yellow watermelon and cantaloupe salad as their vines turn to the end of life. In contrast, the resilient Tromboncino squash vines still run, and we will roast their nutty fruit tonight. Late high summer always brings an endless harvest of okra and zipper peas, great lovers of the Georgia heat. The sweet potato vines are rampant, though we will not dig them till All Saints.

The great failure of the year and greater because of our love of them was with our tomatoes, for we have had very, very few. I confess bad placement for one planting, but another planting failed because of the weather. The cool, constantly gray and wet days in May and then the constant rain in August (conditions tomatoes simply hate) stunted growth and clotted pollen. Still, I persist. As we passed into September, I prayed and pruned and trained the vines up eight foot stakes and now have a promising number of fruit set. Time is short, and we shall see if the harvest will be red, yellow, and purple, or simply green.

As a true marker of the day, I will be transplanting the fall garden. Started in the heat of August in the comfort of the cool basement and artificial light, the kale, lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower are ready to go into the ground. If all goes well, we will have a good fall harvest, though some might sleep with Persephone and then produce in early spring. Planting on the autumnal equinox is a great grace of the Georgia garden, a bit of spring at the end of summer.

Our neighbor’s roosters crow up the day just begun; they remind me of the epigraph of Thoreau’s Walden: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” The bravado of the line nods to Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” a poem that celebrates imagination drawn from the sublimity of the natural world. Like Thoreau, my morning, far from Coleridge’s sublimity, begins with barnyard beasts singing the light, and thus, Thoreau’s clarion call calls me. How might I sing this morning? How might I wake the neighbors up?

It is early and I am on the east-facing porch of our home, a little delta-shaped deck that looks over our kitchen garden. Light and shade play as the sun rises and shifts, a dance I imagine the trees love, willing partners to the sun’s lead. The dance is not a tango (it is far too gentle), nor is it a jig (too slow and subtle). It is less regular than a waltz but just as elegant. The time is not the ostinato of three beats or four; perhaps it is a dance outside of time, one with all time. The sun’s flares angle north toward me, grazing fig and fern, peeking through pines and oaks, simultaneously slipping through a gap to excite the Sourwood over the garden house. The coffee steams. Though I know it is the earth and I that actually turn, I fall very still to watch the ever-moving light.

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An opening in the woods to the southeast allows the sun to light up the oaks beyond the tree line of our garden and meadow. At the edge of our forest, two tall oaks reach toward each other in a gothic arch, silhouetted by the light behind, no flying buttresses required. The bright green behind the arch crafts my cathedral’s rose window. Each day, the effect deepens until, as the leaves turn, a collage of reds and yellows glorifies God, the leaves’ final gift of the year. To the west of the arch, long shafts of light reach through the woods beneath the crowns, the most light the forest floor will receive until leaf fall.

The sun moves apace, the light perceptibly shifting through the woods, marked now by this branch or that leaf; it grazes the edges of poplar leaves, finds a larger gap in the trees, and at quarter past an oak, it looks into my eyes, such that, Moses-like, I must turn away lest I die. Within a breath, I find myself in the shadow of another oak as God passes by. A grand beauty berry catches the light, and the hint of a breeze highlights the subtle moves of dewed spider threads now prismed as they cast an ephemeral rainbow. Somewhere behind the ambient murmur of crickets and the call of crows, the silks are singing:

I have never heard a spider symphony

Though I wonder if the silks sing

When plucked by so many legs

Octopizzicato

Bits of sun, finding its way through the densely leaved forest edge, twinkle like stars from the vagaries of breeze, and I marvel that such a mighty force, the founder of so much life, could be so light and humble. It seems an incarnation of a sort, the great sun aslant across the atmosphere captured and cradled in the most terrestrial forms, a dance offered each morning for those with eyes to see, a prelude to the worship of the day.

My coffee complete, I move through my morning paths to greet the green of the garden, to check for new fruit set in the night, and for the next ripe cantaloupe. Elvis the garden cat mewls a low morning greeting. The dance of light and shade follows me, encircles me. The sun, now caught by thick pine tops, now silhouetting the great oak in the bee meadow, cycles up, ever up. I see it now mirrored in a window of the garden house, reflected on my hands, shadows on a page of light. What cuneiform must I decipher to read this ephemeral message? The hens squawk, they too quite literally up with the sun. As I walk toward their run, the sun catches the great leaves of the Tromboncino squash now leaning in toward it, or rather, the squash leaves, like green catchers’ mitts, gather the sun. They glow in this first light of the day; the happy chlorophyll alight begins to perform its daily magic.

A tattered old black swallowtail butterfly flits overhead, flying west toward a double-trunked poplar, bespeckled with yellowing leaves, now in full sun. On the eastern end of the garden, near the honey bee hives, the dew-soaked blackberry canes in mottled light glisten silver. The early light filtering through the pines finds the bees still huddled in the hives. They remain humming together, gathered to maintain heat for the baby bees; soon they too will greet the founder of their daily feast, their source and guide, part of the very language of their winged life. The bees remarkable eyes see a different spectrum than ours, as well as polarized light: the former for spotting the favored sources of food, the latter giving them the ability to know the exact angle of the sun even when it is obscured by clouds, which they use to tell each other where pollen and nectar can be found. Their life is continuous with the sun, perhaps no more than mine, though they seem more attuned to it, more one with it.

Turning west, I see the moon over the crowns of poplar and beech, a third-quarter waning gibbous, as it continues its cycle. Sun and moon, light and shadow, reflection and polarization, all moving, shifting, dancing. Some moss on an ancient cedar finds its morning fix of light. The scaly bark of white oaks now find the spotlight, the smooth bark of beeches too. Even our senior Pyrenees, ready for breakfast, lolls in the sun. I squat with him and feel the warmth of his back, bright white in the sun.

The cats and chickens fed, I walk back through the vegetable garden. The leaves, half-alight, tilt east. I angle my head like the squash leaves to take in as much of the sun as I can. The exuberant chlorophyll all around me glows, and though much of the garden shows its September age, another day closer to the autumnal equinox, we all celebrate the youth of this day and are renewed. I greet all my dear green ones that I have known since germination and together we thank God for the sun. As I turn to leave the garden, I pass the first seedlings of the fall garden, the carrots and beets, the arugula and endive, the parsnips, and I remember that like light and shade, the life of the garden is ever-changing and shifting, is ever-ending and yet beginning. The garden, the day, the year, all part of the dance of light and life.

The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season (https://www.abookofseasons.com/), which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for information on how to order.

I am interested in the between places: porches, leaf litter, the forest edge, dreams, river banks. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau sits at the door of his humble cabin, between inside and outside, at the edge of forest and pond, at the edge of mind and time. He knows this threshold is far more than literal:

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. (Walden, “Sounds”)

“Liminal” is a word on the edge, before and between. In Classical Latin, its heritage is “limen,” literally threshold. Celtic culture celebrates the liminal, the “thin places”: they mark the edges of spiritual perception. The liminal is a place, it seems, to get lost, a lostness in which you may find yourself. It has a murky relationship with time, at the intersection of kairos and chronos; it is in-breaking or interruption, a cracked mirror or a cracked shell.

The porches on the east and west ends of our home are our liminal spaces, the thresholds where we linger between the inside and the outside, quite literally. They are where we eat and drink and talk, where I find myself in the morning with coffee and in the evening with beer. I tend to do nothing productive there, save perhaps for shelling peas, which is, in and of itself, more meditation than work, though the meditation does indeed make the meal richer.

Like Thoreau, I hold that

if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.

Most mornings in summer, in the cool of the day, I sit on a porch that faces east, watching the shifting light through the tree line, listening to the birds offering their commentary on the morning; I can rarely decipher their intent, though I much appreciate their song. We have a fig tree north and east of the porch that currently attracts tanagers for breakfast. A raucous batch of crows call out over the flitting song of the finches; the distant drum of a nuthatch is interrupted by the laugh of a red bellied woodpecker. Our dogs linger with me, though their ears and eyes are more attuned to predators and thus follow the track of the red-shouldered hawks. They will rouse me from the morning reverie most often with a nose that denotes they are ready for their breakfast; the squawk of a chicken above the murmur of crickets signals the same. Such times are best when my mind remains with the bird song rather than the complexity of the day’s calendar.

After lingering on the porch, I walk through the gardens, not to pick, prune, weed, or mulch, but simply to look; here is another threshold, the space between house and woods, between the fully domestic and the wild, between the land cultivated by humans and the land cultivated by the more-than human, the forest ecosystem.

The garden since Adam has served as a liminal space, the very first place that we humans met God. I am, like the birds, deeply attracted to its beauty, but I stay for its food. In the midst of August, the sunflowers have given over their gold and green; they no longer track the sun. Their heads are bowed as if attending their own funerals, a solemn set of monks offering a silent chant. Just weeks ago, with shining faces wearing a sunny yellow, the very essence of a child’s drawing of the sun, they mirrored their namesake and chased the sun. Now, determined and acrobatic goldfinches hang upside down for a morning meal. Then perching atop the now bottom-up flower head, they linger with their bounty, leaving seed shells scattered in the cupped underside.

I grow sunflowers for their show and for the spiritual kinship, follower of Helios that I am. I harvest some as a treat for the chickens, a small part of a rich menu they enjoy in summer. Yet my favorite use (though “use” is far too pedestrian a term) for sunflowers is as food and playground for the goldfinches. I never saw goldfinches here until I started growing sunflowers; now each summer, they come for the seeds. They never allow me to get close, but their color calls me even as their chatty songs spill over the garden. Still, I linger (knowing that stalking is best done standing still), and see this world anew: sun, sunflower, goldfinch, my eyes seeing the sunlight bounce off these so one with the sun, my mind seeing the sun in the seeds, now in the goldfinches, the yellow sun in the glowing feathers, the sun now in me, this gift of flower and bird and sun.

“‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.” Thus inspired by Emerson’s questioning encouragement, a young Henry David Thoreau begins his journal, a discipline he will keep throughout his life that will ultimately run two million words. His writing has inspired me most of my years, and with this beginning, I, late in my writing life, embrace his practice here.

Earth’s Eye

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

—Thoreau, Walden

Our garden is carved out of a mature forest in the Georgia Piedmont; thus sun and shade denote the passing of the day, east to west, and the changing of the seasons, north to south. The day, as Thoreau notes, “is the epitome of the year.” My writing in this space will linger over the changing life of our garden in the cycle of the day and the year, in hopes that looking into our own “earth’s eye,” I may measure the depths of my nature. Follow me on this journey.

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The Community of a Fig Tree

On that day, says the Lord of hosts, you shall invite each other to come under your vine and fig tree.”

-- Zechariah 3:9-10

On a hot summer day in August of 2020, the figs on our farm, in riotous abundance, called me and many of the more than human world to enjoy the bounty. Sitting under the shade offered by the luscious leaves, I fell into a reverie at least in part inspired by the heat, the fermenting figs, and the buzz of 10,000 honey bees. My reflection on this reverie became the first chapter of A Book of Season, which will be published by Mercer University Press in May of 2026. Watch this Substack for more.