News from the Morning Star

The swallows returned at the end of April, like angels, when the farm was coming to life again

For the entire month of May any new yearly paid subscriber to The Druid Stares Back will receive an MP3 of my wife Bonnie’s song “White Horses” which we recorded under the name Quiet Fire about 25 years ago. It’s a beautiful song about the birth of our son, Tommy. And Bonnie sings like an angel.

Life on the Farm

May is an enormously busy month at Stella Matutina Farm (from the Latin for “Morning Star”) here in Waterloo Township, Michigan. We run a CSA (“Community Supported Agriculture”) in which people receive 18 weekly shares of our produce for a fee, and we also offer a herdshare by which people can buy an interest in our cow which entitles them to weekly shares of milk. We spend every day in May (and much of April) in the garden prepping beds (we use no-till methods), seeding, and transplanting in order to get ready for the first shares to go out in June. This is also the time when we can move our cow onto pasture—and, my goodness!, does the milk production go up! We also start raising chickens for meat as well as bringing up a new laying flock. We also just sent a two-year-old steer to the butcher and have a dairy goat doeling due to arrive imminently. Not only that, but I have to pay attention to our honey bees (fyi, they have not been too crazy about the schizophrenic weather pattern, between a week of 80s in mid-April, to snow and cold and rain, to warm, to cold). Nevertheless, I have pulled some honey supers and will be making mead very soon, probably using a recipe from The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, which I first discovered while writing a chapter (entitled “Love’s Alchemist”) on Digby for my dissertation many years ago. The book has over 100 recipes for meads, metheglins, and melomels. A classic!

This past weekend I gave a workshop on biodynamic farming and gardening at the farm. I’ve been a biodynamic practitioner for about thirty years and this is the second year I’ve hosted a workshop. About twenty adults participated this year and some of them brought their children, including a few infants. The place was just bursting with life! My youngest son, aged 12, was in his element with so many kids around to organize games. Here are some of the highlights:

*Friday evening, after my introductory lecture, I discovered my wife and all the kids still at home (4 out of 9) were gone and that no one had milked Fiona, our Jersey. So it was my job. Some of the participants were still hanging around and asked if they could watch me milk. Then, once I’d started, they asked if it would be okay if they prayed compline while I milked. They chanted it. It was a mystical experience.

*Saturday afternoon, following a workshop on how to make a compost pile and how to inoculate it with the biodynamic preparation we decided to take a short break. I went into the barn to grab a cup of coffee and when I came out I saw many of the participants lying on the grass near the garden in a truly inspiring pastoral scene, as if the mowers had just finished with a field of corn.

*I found myself profoundly hopeful and encouraged throughout the course in the ways in which the participants, people from a variety of backgrounds and persuasions, were committed to a holistic vision of human flourishing in the context of caring for Creation that was not marred by politics and facile sloganeering. That is to say, I found these folks to be grounded in the practical while also informed by the spiritual—which is what biodynamic farming and gardening is all about. Very inspiring.

The Butlerian Jihad

A year or two ago, my eldest son told me I needed to read Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel to the Dune saga written by Herbert’s father, Frank. I bought the book six months ago, but have only now gotten around to it. The Butlerian Jihad of the title refers to a long war between human and thinking machines. Let’s just call it a timely read. An epigraph (citing an invented historical thinker) to the first chapter captures something I think we can all relate to:

“When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.” ~ SISTER BECCA THE FINITE

Imma just leave that there.

Mythologies

As I think I have mentioned before in this space, I am also in the middle (well, maybe a little past the middle) of writing a book of poetry under the working title Mythologies. In the poems, I explore mythological/sophiological themes, some drawing on the myths and stories that have lived with me throughout my life, some grounded in the present. The deeper I get into the collection, the more I discover how the folk ballad tradition informs my current state of soul. I thought I might share one of those poems here.

SOMETHING I MAY HAVE HEARD IN A BALLAD WHILE DREAMING

The swallows returned at the end of April, like angels,
when the farm was coming to life again, hale and sovereign 
in their flying, blessing the barns with muddy nests and children.

I stepped over the tumbled stones of an ancient wall 
at the meadow’s edge, the pear tree singing with bees, 
swallows whistling and scudding above me, the new-penny 
sun peeking through the trees in the east, and traveled 
a pathless way through the high grass to the woods beyond.
Pine gave way to oak and maple, oak and maple gave way to beech,
and I stood amid the silver musculature of the trees’ reaching,
the cool breath of the forest winding its way through deer paths
and over moss-covered remnants of trees, the lairs of salamanders
and newts that nestled under the greenness and within the rotting wood. 

Dappling the forest floor, scattered everywhere, I saw
a wealth of mushrooms, some amber, some grey, some crimson,
pocked or fluted, shiny or dull, pushing through dead leaves,
from the rotted corpse of a deer. One I found stood out,
the color of sea foam, milky and green; it dazzled my eye.
I plucked it from the leaf mould and its rich, earthy aroma filled the air, 
and noticed a trickle of blood from the stem. I placed it in the pocket 
of my ragged woolen coat and, after hesitating for a moment, 
without knowing why, began the journey home.

I heard a voice from the wind call my name and turned to see a lady mantled in green, her skin white as milk, her eyes sparking emeralds. In her night-colored hair she wore a thin circlet of silver braided with with ivy and beech leaves and her gown was as if woven from lichen and moss. “You have taken that which does not belong to you,” she said, and I reached in my pocket for the beacán to offer its return, though all I could feel was a lining damp with blood. “The penalty,” she said, “is to serve me full seven years, at which time, if you desire, you may return to your imagined world.”

Service. Servus. I know not the difference. I served the time as the time served me, though for the duration it was as if I watched an image of myself reflected in a pool of cloudy water. Even now those years, vaporous, insubstantial, only return to me in the snatches and rags of memory, the experience and life of another. Did I really learn the language of the hare? Did I drink the sap of the beech from cupped hands? Did I, in truth, learn the secrets of the raven and the owl? What I do recall is the leaving, when the lady kissed my eyes and touched my mouth with dew that tasted of deep Spring. I returned, yet never returned, belonging to no world of making, a lodger at the threshold of night.