Give us this day our daily bread. The Lord’s Prayer

It’s been a hectic five days. A drive to Pennsylvania, a Microtel overnight near the airport, and toting my older son’s bedding and clothes into his new freshman dorm room on day one and two. A 320 mile drive home, a short night and a day of laundry and gardening on day two and three. Day four was a three hour trek to New Hampshire for a visit with my Arizona residing brother and a night in my sister’s home. Then came the family dinner out and the drive back to Wareham with my younger son on day five – all this done just in time to get ready for the beginning of his high school years tomorrow. After that, with a little planning and luck, my family life will return to its usual routine.

Driving home last night, I asked my son what he’d like for his first school lunch: a tuna sandwich on regular bread, cheddar goldfish, homemade chocolate chip cookies, fruit and a full water bottle. After so many days on the road and so many good meals in a variety of restaurants, with his brother living away from home for the first time and a new school year beginning, he just wanted familiar food.

I love trying new restaurants and spending time with siblings who live too far away to see every day. I am happy for my older son beginning his adult life in a new, exciting place. It’s time for my younger son to move from childhood to adulthood. These are blessings I thank God for every day. But it’s all happening at once, and it’s tiring. For that reason, I am grateful for a return to putting healthy, familiar food on my dining table: it’s a nourishing and creative act that feeds the body and restores the soul. Sometimes, the literal take on a prayer is the one that sustains.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire,

I hold with those who favor fire.

Fire and Ice, Robert Frost [Untermeyer, Louis, Intro. and Commentary, Robert Frost’s Poems, New Enlarged Anthology of, “Fire and Ice,” New York: Washington Square Press, 1971, p. 142]

In four lines, Frost names what can destroy the world. All-consuming passion burns everything within its reach – good, bad, or indifferent. It’s a cautionary tale in verse. Be careful what you do with your passion, warns Frost; it can destroy your world just as easily as enliven and illuminate it. My passion can make life an extraordinary show of fire and light. If I don’t temper it with patience and love, it will just as easily consume me and disfigure the lives of others.

Save us from the time of trial… Lord’s Prayer

He wrote Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. Today I found Hesse’s Hours in the Garden and Other Poems a few books down from Neruda’s Odes to Common Things. Since I came to the library to tidy up the learning garden materials, and since I’ve spend so many hours in the garden here, I brought it home. His first poem, written in 1939:

Page from a Journal

On the slope behind the house today

I cut through roots and rocks and

Dug a hole, deep and wide,

Carted away from it each stone

And all the friable, thin earth.

Then I knelt there a moment, walked

In the old woods, bet down again, using

A trowel and both my hands to scoop

Black, decaying woods-soil with the warm

Smell of fungi from the trunk of a rotting

Chestnut tree – two heavy buckets full I carried

Back to the hole and planted the tree inside;

Carefully I covered the roots with peaty soil,

Slowly poured sun-warmed water over them,

Mudding them gently until the soil settled.

It stands there, young and small,

Will go on standing when we are gone

And the huge uproar, endless urgency and

Fearful delirium of our days forgotten.

The fohn will bend it, rainstorms tear at it,

The sun will laugh, wet snow weigh it down,

The siskin and nuthatch make it their home,

And the silent hedgehog burrow at its foot.

All it has ever experienced, tasted, suffered:

The course of years, generations of animals,

Oppression, recovery, friendship of sun and wind

Will pour forth each day in the song

Of its rustling foliage, in the friendly

Gesture of its gently swaying crown,

In the delicate sweet scent of resinous

Sap moistening the sleep-glued buds,

 And in the eternal game of lights and

Shadows it plays with itself, content.

[Hesse, Hermann, Rika Leser, trans., Hours in the Garden, “Page from a Journal,” New York: Farrar, Straus, Girroux, 1979, pp. 2-5]

Note: fohn is a warm dry wind blowing from the northern slopes of the Alps.

Life goes on all around us. Plants live and die, and so do we. Who will remember our names decades from now? Who will remember or care that we once walked this earth? In the grand scheme of things, we count for little if we only count what is credited to our names and remembered beyond our days.

I will not be remembered beyond the few people I love, who love me. That’s as it should be. But the plants I tend, the children I’ve spent time with, the prayers I’ve offered? The world would be very different if I hadn’t done such things.

I’ve done my best to keep faith with the world and the lives it holds. It’s a small price to pay for the beauty, love, and holiness that I’ve found here. It’s more than enough to play a small part in this holy endeavor called creation. It’s blessed and sacred. I, too, am content with the eternal game of lights and shadows that is my life.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze… (Gen. 3:8)

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was a German born Swiss poet, novelist, and artist. His works explore what it means to live an authentic human life. Siddhartha is still required reading in many high school and college programs.