Looks like we’ll be calling it the Frozen North Library Tour. Another storm coming Friday, and wicked subzero cold through Sunday at least. I had to schedule the tour in January, because the rest of the year is booked up for me. When you schedule a book tour in January, snow and ice are a good possibility, so I can’t whine about it.
I can say that it won’t deter me. As long as the libraries are open and there is a body or two there, I will show up and do my thing, and happily. Some of the best discussions I’ve ever had about my books have been …well, intimate. All I need is a podium and tea or hot chocolate to keep my squeaky throat going. Maria is bringing notecards and her sketchpad and the cold and messy weather are pretty familiar to me. I even have my rugged new Toyota SUV to get me there, and it is already covered in ice and mud. FIrst stop will be the Pember Library in Granville, 2 p.m. Sunday. Monday evening, the Community Library in Cobleskill, N.Y. Tuesday, the Scoville Library in Salisbury, Conn. Wednesday, the Free Library of Northampson, Richboro, Pa. Thursday, the Rochambeau Branch of the Providence Public Library. Friday, Osterville, Mass. in the afternoon, Scituate, Mass., in the evening. And if the wind isn’t too bad, we’ll make it across to Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday morning.
I will be bringing my camera, my IPad and some good shoes. Can’t wait.
People who meet Izzy often refer to him as the perfect dog, and I know what they mean. He takes everything in stride. Perhaps because he lived out of doors for the first years of his life, he loves to sit out in the snow, sometimes for so long he is completely covered by it. I usually bring him inside before we get to that point.
One of the many things I love about animals is that they don’t listen to “Storm Center 5.” They accept their fate, from rain to snow to heat. I’ve learned a lot from them. Up here, in Washington County, N.Y., there isn’t too much chatter about awful weather. Weather is a part of life. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it isn’t. Perhaps we learn from the animals here.
For much of my life, I considered things like meditation and holistic medicine and spiritual counseling to be on the wuu-wuu side of life, not things serious people did or believed in. I grew up and then lived as an adult in the Fear Machine. You rushed from one job to another, stewed about who was on the left or the right, hauled out candles and flashlights at the first humid boom, read newspapers and devoured the news with faith, and checked every medical thing we could as often as was requested of us. We also believed in insurance – life, disability, the whole works. Life, after all, is dangerous and you must not let your guard down. Kids shouldn’t talk to stranges, walk by themselves, or have a single problem they might solve by themselves.
Wendell Berry seems to have always known that this is, in part, a profit-making and inter-connected system whose very existence depends on our being anxious, frightened, and addicted to disturbing information. On my last visit to a doctor’s office, there were three new monitors installed broadcasting graphic and videotaped alarms about cancer, diabetes, obesity and hot weather. All were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. I meant to ask the doctor if he didn’t feel this was a conflict of interest – promoting anxiety and medications under the screen or promoting health. But I didn’t get the chance.
When you fall apart, the good thing is that you either view the world differently or you disintegrate. I choose to try the first option. I have tried and learned many things, and one of the best is daily meditation, which has not only helped to quiet my mind, but allowed me to see my mind for the first time.Having lived inside the Fear Machine so long, it is difficult for me to change the way I think. Not easy to refuse blood tests, reject medications I don’t need and proceedures I don’t want, decide against life insurance, make my own news, or think carefully about the information I receive from the outside. This approach is at odds with the world, especially in our country, where systematized fear seems to be the fuel on which our politics and economy operate.
These days, I rarely listen to the news. I hardly ever go to doctors. I have a message therapist, a spiritual counselor, and when something bothers me, I meditate rather than reach for pills. Or take a long walk. I am beginning to understand what health is for me. Other people have different ideas, and I don’t ever tell anybody else what to do. Or think I know more than they do. But I am beginning to understand what works for me. And I am beginning to change a way of looking at the world that kept me and the people around me in a dark and unrewarding place.
Yet I am just beginning on this path, and it is pretty well traveled. Almost every writer and thinker I admire – Thoreau, Campbell, Emerson, Berry, Merton, Oliver – has been on it long before me, and come to better conclusions well before I did. Still, it keeps me from being lonely. If most people in our time think these decisions are crazy, it wasn’t always so. Some ideas really are timeless.
