728 x 90

Message from Walker: “Intellectual Takeout depends on donors like you to bring my work and the work of my stellar colleagues to the public. I love writing about art, culture, rural life, literature, and philosophy for ITO. If you value that kind of content too, please consider making a donation today. Together, we can help spread time-tested traditional ideals.”


Returning to First Things to Save Civilization

Returning to First Things to Save Civilization

Message from Walker: “Intellectual Takeout depends on donors like you to bring my work and the work of my stellar colleagues to the public. I love writing about art, culture, rural life, literature, and philosophy for ITO. If you value that kind of content too, please consider making a donation today. Together, we can help spread time-tested traditional ideals.”


In this most rare and radiant of Wisconsin February’s, with record-high temperatures and ample sunshine, my wife has been tapping trees and making maple syrup. I applaud her efforts, and I gratefully ingest the fruit of her labors. The sap has been running steadily, recklessly, almost, overflowing the pails she uses, turning their sides sleek with sweetness.

Meanwhile, the nations pursue their course of burning to the ground. War—in Ukraine and the Middle East—with threats of it broadening like a bloodstain on the robe of the earth. Another contentious election looms in the United States. The shudders of economic instability echo faintly, eerily, while an anti-family, anti-morality, anti-tradition, anti-civilization cultural war of disintegration continues apace. Forces like the World Economic Forum lay brick upon brick of their technocratic totalitarian nightmare.

But there are still trees. Trees that, by some unexpected miracle, draw nutrients from the earth and turn them into clear, crystalline, sweet nectar, pulsing like lifeblood under the bark. In my wife’s process of boiling down the sap into syrup, she has, a few times, brought me a glass of liquid clear as diamond. I’ve heartily drunk that raw sap, savoring the wood and bark and moss and earth distilled and sweetened, redolent of sun and wind and the quiet slumber of deep soil awaiting spring. I’ve thought—I’m drinking a tree.

Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

When I drink sap from my own backyard, I am drinking that endless freshness. I can feel it.

Suppose that the answers to many of our problems as a culture lie right under our noses, unobtrusive, out of the way, the common miracles, so oft forgotten. Suppose that what we need is to slow down, shut off the media pipeline of overstimulating information, and pay attention to the little things, the primary realities—things like trees and sap and the lilt of a song and a warm hearth with warmer hearts around it. As the wise John Senior wrote, “No serious restitution of society … can occur without a return to first principles, yes, but before principles we must return to the ordinary reality which feeds first principles.”

To be clear, I’m not advocating some kind of political quietism. The political and cultural battles must go on. We can’t give up the fight. But one needs some kind of reserve of hope and energy to draw on in order to keep up the fight, and those reserves, I believe, lie in a love of the common things. Aren’t they what we’re defending, after all? Moreover, to really change a nation or a world, you must first change hearts. And as philosophy professor John Cuddeback says, people are not changed by hearing a message—or at least not just by that. People are changed by an experience, an experience of what authentic human life really is.

And authentic human life is built upon the little, humble things: a baby pressed against his mother’s breast, a cow lowing in the upper pasture, a trout sipping at the surface of a glittering stream, a community of neighbors coming together to celebrate. These simple things will endure. They are eternal. Empires rise and fall—but rivers run on, and apples glint amidst autumn leaves, and a father rocks his child to sleep, and some brave voice begins to sing in the fields. These things will endure.

But, some may object, we face world-ending forces. Nuclear apocalypse or what have you. That may be—I can’t say. Only God knows. But even if some catastrophe lies ahead, I believe it will be the humble things, the overlooked ordinary realities of human life, that will matter in the end. And it will be a return to them, a new cherishing of them, that might hold us back from the precipice to begin with. It was forgetting them that got us here in the first place.

Nature has a way of renovating everything, given enough time. I remember seeing a documentary with footage of Chernobyl. The nuclear power plant is long-abandoned due to the radiation, but animals are returning to it. Life is returning to it. An ashen, empty street—but there, a flash of brown fur, and the glassy eyes of a deer. And there, a burst of green growth pushing through broken blacktop.

In Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road, a father and a son wander through a scorched America. All is dust and ash and darkness—except their love for one another. And the love between a father and a son is not such a complicated matter, nor is it so terribly difficult to foster. We might begin there.

Revival must start with beginnings, with first things, like a father and a son and their love. Maybe we ought to turn our gaze to such universal and profoundly good realities, both in order to restore society and to store up reserves for hard times ahead. It isn’t so hard to do. We can start today. We can start by looking—at the soil, at the stars, at the faces around us, all of which are here by some cosmic impossibility, a gratuitous gift.

The sweet nectar of life flows quietly and invisibly through the substance of the world, all around us, with astonishing abundance. We just have to tap into it.

Image credit: Pexels

7 comments
Walker Larson
Walker Larson
CONTRIBUTOR
PROFILE

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

7 Comments

  • Avatar
    karen
    February 19, 2024, 11:43 am

    So good. Thanks 🙂

    REPLY
  • Avatar
    Cadence McManimon
    February 19, 2024, 3:55 pm

    Well said!

    REPLY
  • Avatar
    Abby Adams
    February 19, 2024, 4:33 pm

    Lovely essay. I wish to be in the place you described to make my own syrup. It sounds delicious.
    This nation has the same thing to offer if only our 'leaders' would tap into it. The Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights would need to be read and adhered to for that to happen . Those documents guarantee individual liberty. How sweet the sound of freedom that would cause. It would create a great and wondrous uptick in motivation, innovation, and business would take off. The US would again gain strength because the people would once more be in charge and they would tend the forests brimming with the sweet liberty of doing things for themselves with little interference from others far away from them.
    Alas, there are too many who are too greedy and believe themselves too smart to allow others to enjoy a life of freedom given to us in the above documents. The documents which are not read or followed by the whole of the 535 members of Congress nor the past several Executives who believed they were a king. Do you believe there are more than 10 in all the 2 parts of Congress who read the above documents? Even those who do try to adhere will trade away the rules in the Constitution to get something they want. If there were more who adhered to the Constitution which guarantees freedom, we would not be witnessing the collapse of the USA.
    Thanks for the sweet essay.
    Abby
    Abby

    REPLY
  • Avatar
    Jackson Pemberton
    February 19, 2024, 6:54 pm

    Thank you. Loved this simple yet profound viewpoint.
    You will be happy to know that a dear friend of mine has just registered americanresonance.com where she plans to stimulate a celebration of the wonderful diversity that is the cultural melting pot of America. She hopes to draw our attention to our many beautiful cultural heritages in music, dance, art, etc.

    REPLY
  • Avatar
    Franky
    February 19, 2024, 8:49 pm

    So beautifully this is written. How wonderful are the truths that Larson lays out.
    Introspective inspiration brings us such gladness in times of much madness.

    REPLY

Read More

Latest Posts

Frequent Contributors