November, 2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
My sabbatical is three weeks old and it’s had a couple of chapters already. First I slept for a week in my red chair and read four crappy mysteries. I knew that I had to rest for a week before I made any plans. On the seventh day, which was a Thursday, I suddenly found myself feeling a little restless for the first time. What do I want to do today?
I took a stitching class at the Art Center for three days. Lovely. Then I drove south to visit my parents, which was all the things that a family visit is. Now I’m out in the desert at Joshua Tree.
Today nobody needs anything from me. I can eat when I want, drink coffee when I want. I can go back to sleep if I feel like it. Even though there are beautiful walks to take all around me, no one cares if I walk or don’t. No one knows where I am. Well that’s not quite true, but in the minute-to-minute of the day, I am in charge of myself. No one needs anything from me.
In addition to the four mysteries, I read one and a half books that have moved me deeply. The first one was Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. The second, which I’m only partway through, is On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson.
Suzanne Simard is the plant biologist who has done some well-known research on the interconnectedness of plants in the forest. She began her career in forestry, helping loggers to clear-cut forests and then re-plant quick-growing monocultures. But often the replanted forests didn’t do well. Simard began to ask why these new trees didn’t survive. She noticed that the root tips of trees actually connect with an underground network of fungus—mycelium—that spreads broadly across the forest floor.
By means of this network, water and nutrients are moved from plant to plant. It was assumed that trees do better if their environment isn’t cluttered with other trees and plants sucking up scarce resources, but Simard presents a very different picture. The forest, or any plant community, is not competitive for resources; it is cooperative and communicative.
As I was reading Simard, I found myself thinking of the human community as well. Like many of us, I tend to think of society, of politics especially, as being “red in tooth and claw.” I listen to the news every day and it’s easy to think this world as a battleground for scarce resources, a field upon which people compete for resources. It’s a fight for sunlight in dark woods where only the tallest and most vigorous constituents have a chance at survival.
I’m rethinking that picture of the human community now. I shouldn’t overlook the myriad ways in which we need each other and nourish each other. I’m thinking about all the ways that I am nourished by other people, very much including all of you. And that doesn’t include the ways that I am nourished by the underground fungi that sustains the world of plants and animals, and consequently all of us.
I recognize the role of news and headlines and punditry in creating a world in which other people seem to be dangerous, either purposefully or accidentally. Humans do commit violence against each another, but there is also a great deal of mutual sustenance. It’s rarely newsworthy, however, and it doesn’t sell product—from home security systems to guns to gated enclaves. I’m rethinking my tendency to overlook the generosity and the plenty of human society. I am reflecting on the network of care and communication and mutual sustenance that is so much part of my everyday life.
In On Freedom the always/brilliant and astonishing Maggie Nelson probes the difference between the kind of freedom where no one needs me and no one gets anything from me, and the ethics of care. She is a complicated thinker and has no simple answers, but she talks about a space between doing whatever you want and seeing to the obligations of family and community and society. She speaks of freedom as a practice, not a condition—as a never-ending set of paradoxes and complications.
IDuring COVID lockdown most of us felt terribly constrained. We weren’t able to be free in the usual ways that w e think about being free. We had to stay home. If we ventured out, we had to wear masks. When vaccines became available, they were required for entry in many settings. In response, we’ve been treated to childish assertions of freedom from people who do not acknowledge the legitimate needs of other people. Most of us, I hope, reject that simplistic notion of freedom.
But the needs of other people, while important, can also sometimes be very constraining. How do we find our space? Even here all by myself in my desert Airbnb, I am sustained by the innkeeper, the house cleaner, the grocery store, the groceries, the Internet, my ability to pay for this place, and by all of you who make that possible. Not to mention the air, the water, the earth, the sun.
So I circle back to that question of what I want to do today. For the next six months? For the rest of my life? Nelson writes, “Caring and coercion often exist in a knot, with their extrication never simple, nor sometimes even possible.“
I love the feeling of being able to do what I want when I want without having to consult anybody else, without having to care. I love it for a day or two, but then I need some connection. I’m interested in that space between freedom and coercion, that place of being one tree and still being part of a large interconnected and mutually dependent tangle.
What is my soul work? As my sabbatical gets going, I remember that some of it is solo work. I tend to get lost in other people’s crises and sadness and, in trying to make joy and meaning and community for other people. My sabbatical gives me an opportunity to step back from that—to focus on myself as a separate person with my own wants and my own needs. But that’s not the end of this story. In order to sustain and be sustained, I need to understand the ways in which I am a separate tree and the ways in which I am part of the hundred-acre wood. I am grateful for the opportunity to go deeper into the forest and I plan to keep you posted on my discoveries.
