It has been a long political season. Some are excited about recent results, others are despondent. Many are exhausted. All are distracted. As the nation decompresses from another interminable political season, it is appropriate that we turn to things more important. Thanksgiving affords us the opportunity to do just that.
It is so easy to get caught up in the business of busy lives and to become blind and deaf to the very things that make life sweet. It is absurd to think that busyness is somehow a measure of a good or successful life. Yet, often when people are asked how they’re doing, the most frequent answer is simply “busy.” It seems that all too often we let busyness distract us from the real business of life.
Edmund Burke wrote of the “unbought grace of life.” I like that turn of phrase. There are plenty of unbought graces, many of which we don’t see because we aren’t looking. Or because we are oriented toward the dramatic and blinded to the simple. Perhaps more than ever we need to cultivate the habit of paying attention to things right before our eyes. These are the things that provide human structure to an often chaotic and distracting world.
As I’ve been writing, the afternoon sun has retreated and the temperature has dropped. The house is warm. Books are piled near me. Cookies are being prepared in the kitchen. Soon the mingled smells of dinner and baking will tease me into the kitchen. I hear laughter and games coming from a far room. Memories being made. The first thing I’ll see when I enter the living room will be that most faithful companion, a dog, curled up near the fire. These are simple things. Unremarkable things until we begin reflecting on the beauty of it all. Home. Family. Time. Life. Unbought graces all.
Attentiveness to and immersion in a place, may be the most lasting contribution of Henry Bugbee’s The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. As the subtitle suggests, this is not analytical philosophy in the manner of much of western philosophy; there are no arguments, no syllogisms, no dialectical structures. Bugbee philosophized by living, wandering, watching, and considering. “What untold hosts of voices there are which call upon one and summon him to reawakening,” says Bugbee, “He remembers, and is himself once again, moving cleanly on his way. Some measure of simplicity again informs the steps he takes; he becomes content to be himself and finds fragrance in the air. He may eat his food in peace. He does not wish to obviate tomorrow’s work. He is willing to consider: not to suppose a case, but to take the case that is. He becomes patient. Things invite him to adequate himself to their infinity. The passage of time is now not robbery or show; it is the meaning of the present ever completing itself.” The journal form invites slow reading and meditating, and finally to turn from the book towards the world, where patience and attentiveness will reorient our vision towards a recognition of the everyday beauty around us.
These themes, attentiveness, patience, simplicity, are also present in much of Wendell Berry’s work, perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in The Work Of Local Culture, included in his exceptional collection of essays, What Are People For?. In it, Berry finds unexpectedly rich metaphorical soil that he uses to meditate on the simple and emergent phenomenons of culture, knowledge, and membership. The unbought grace of an evening on the porch, shared with friends and family, telling stories, learning the history of a people and a place, becoming a member of a community, provides everything but money, and “to have everything but money is to have much.” I think about that simple formulation often. Berry has been a public prophet of the attentive, patient, and simple for over 60 years and I recommend all of his work, but pull this one off the Quiet Shelters shelves and give the essays near the end a read. Their themes resonate with us as we create spaces to slow down, unwind, pay attention, care for, and build rich lives with one another and our guests.
Having a great conversation with each other, through all time, is what our greatest writers are doing with one another. Perhaps anticipating Berry’s metaphorical soil, we’ll leave you with one further rumination from Bugbee, “I have yet to discover,” he confides in his first entry, “how to say what moves me to the endless search and research, the reflective turning over in my mind of experience. The turning over is all so much tilling.”
Let’s reclaim this season as one of unbought graces, where the soils of culture are tilled, known and shared, so they will produce the sweetest fruit of reflection, membership, and gratefulness, where we refuse to allow busyness to distract us from the real business of life.
Cheers to you all.
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