On the National Cabbage Day in the Year of the Plague
_________________________
LOVE
Let the more loving one be me.”
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
~ bell hooks, All About Love
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention…
~Mary Oliver
“We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?”
~ Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love
“Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny”
~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
CABBAGE (and fish)
~Cabbage: A Global History, Meg Muckenhoupt
“Give a man a fish, and he will be hungry again to-morrow; teach him to catch a fish, and he will be richer all his life.” ~Source unknown
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1.
If you’ve never encountered a braided stream, they are a wonder to behold.
According to the National Park Service, braided streams and rivers have multi-threaded channels that branch and merge to create the characteristic pattern. These sections of river “are highly dynamic with mid-channel bars which are formed, consumed, and re-formed continuously.”
I wonder what it must be like to be a fish who lives in one of these dynamic places. A watery world that is its own thing but also connected to, always and forever revised by, its relationship to the whole? What kind of piscine mind would you develop in the practice of charting a course through an ever-shifting stream whose reaches are, by definition, forever beyond, and contributing to the place you are? How would it be to know that today the islands which, to your fish-eye view, are mountains soaring beyond the top of your world, might be gone tomorrow? To navigate a topography of obstacles or hiding places that forms and disappears at the pace of storms? To live in a place where it was obvious that it, the place, and perhaps you the sentient being, are recreated anew by the luminous water that simultaneously shapes and is being shaped by the multiplicitous forces of your surroundings and your body in those surroundings?
2.
It was Sunday morning and the Zoom screen had the dozen-plus faces I’ve come to expect. Along with those expectations— the sort that can give us the closest thing we ever get to security, there is always the promise of surprise— an insight or observation, an expression in words or just in the tilt or bow of a head, or the lift or knit of a brow. So I was not shocked when the magic happened again— when both my Covid-shaped, unusually dynamic-and-static-at-the-same-damn-time day and world changed in a Zoom-y instant. Although I know to look for the unanticipated, it never fails to leave me a little awestruck, this flow from distant sources, unseen, around the bend from which these transfiguring, numinous powers mix and surge, reforming islands in my own solitary world and ,with them, my thinking and seeing…
But first I need to tell you a story of one person’s heartfelt effort and complete failure. I need to tell you what happened before, on this particular Sunday, the broom took flight, this wheel began spinning and a braided stream buoyed me to this day of revelry in celebration of a vegetable. For today, on this short winter trip from dark to dark in these United States, is the National Day of the Cabbage.
3.
It was just about a month ago when I assigned myself an essay. Ross Gay, who will return to this thought-stream soon, notes that the word “essay” derives from a French verb that means to try. By “essay” I suppose I mean, an attempt to form an ingestible portion of the gushing river of sentences that, in the last couple of years, has flooded the previously photo-dominated current of my creative life. An effort to form them into something someone else could take something from, perhaps something that might slake at least a little thirst.
The topic of this attempt?
Love.
The deadline?
Valentine’s Day.
I would be making this effort in my home on the coast of North Carolina, where I am not supposed to be in this cold month. When I decided that, for me, it would not feel responsible to travel to my usual winter home in Costa Rica, that I would remain here to, if possible, stay well and avoid getting or giving the Novel Corona Virus, I thought that perhaps I might also avoid all the viruses.
Valentine’s Day was three days ago.
I’ve read an inspiring, at times transformative pile of pages on the topic— love. The stacks of books that have become the temporary islands that channel my lugubrious COVID-time flow have included bell hooks and Valarie Kaur, Cornell West and John O’Donohue, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Audre Lorde, and, and, and
I live by love. I love love.
But, regardless of how much I wrote and read, and wrote and thought the sentences trickling out of me on the topic have been more breathless than usual, flapping about but under-oxygenated, frenetic, turbid with all kinds of sedimentary nonsense. In short, clarity was elusive and the stream was not one anyone would be interested in drinking from.
Meanwhile, somehow, I managed to catch a cold.
A damn cold.
Its origin is a mystery as I’ve been around almost no one and been inside precisely no indoor place for months. In recent years colds have been stubborn events in my life so, after riding a wave of outrage, I settled into what this viral battle would mean for the duration— little to no surfing which, in the current Covid-crafted society, means little to no daily social contact with the beloved humans with whom I usually share my wave-riding passion. In turn, this means little to no embodied contact, period.
But because of this self-imposed assignment— an essay on love—the outrageous reality of a minor respiratory infection also meant hour after hour to swim in the braided channel of various brilliant human hearts speaking through exceptional minds as they mused and theorized, evoked and created around this pervasive, elusive idea of love. I read a small but growing pile of shifting books and essays. With intermittent breaks to go outside and see what was happening in the winter light behind my house, under a copse of trees—sweet gums, live oaks, myrtles, and a holly. These weeks of angled sunlight and cold rain have been one of the most delicious, savory episodes of mild illness and spicy inquiry I could imagine. The time of these odd Covid months, by which I mean the temporality, the sense of time and its passage, can be so long and strange and, for some of us, lonely and sad. But this month of solitary, conscious focus on love as an idea has flown by like a delicious meal I wish I could start all over again with the moment of anticipation, of not even knowing what was on the menu. It was wonderful. This is true in no small part because my friends, the ones with whom I was not sharing wave-riding passion, kept texting me to see how I was doing, whether I was ready to get back out, and give me reports on the conditions.
I guess you could even call what they were texting “love.”
As I said, it was a great month, but there was this deadline… As February dawned, my cold hung on, and my mind and heart continued to be delighted and confused with swirling vortices of evocative perspectives on that greatest human emotion. I wrote every day. But my narrative sensibility couldn’t find a way to navigate. My writing mind was not steering, not even hanging on. I flailed and splashed. The sentences coming from my own pen flew by in what felt like a roaring rush of clouded understanding and murky expression and it began to occur to me that I might not be equal to this writing task. At least not in this timeframe.
Now, I get stuck in this place all the time— lost and swirling in sentences that come readily enough but don’t, won’t adhere to any purpose or pattern. And I often look to etymology to help me get my bearings, to find how I might possibly attempt to make truth, beauty, and meaning out of words (which, as far as I can tell, is what writing means). What with the Valentine’s Day deadline looming in only a couple of weeks, I went to “February” school.
It turns out that our word for this month is only about a century old.
“February” comes from the Roman Februa which means purification or cleansing and reflects the ritual purification feast held in this month. The Welsh called this month – y mis-bach (the little month) and the Saxons called it sprout-kale.
I thought I’d found no help from etymology. But, in retrospect, this was the first vegetable intrusion into my attempt.
I realize now the love essay was a ludicrous assignment for me. It’s the wrong word altogether. Like asking an Eskimo to write about snow or a fish to write about water. Love makes for the right life but the wrong prompt with a short time-window. Failure had arrived.
No problem! Half a life-span of making art- which is to say trying to do what I’m reasonably certain can’t be done— has left me comfortable with failure. I am easily distracted by the next effort although sometimes what form that will take can be difficult to discern for a bit. Usually, eventually, the flow between shifting islands becomes apparent and I can cheerfully begin to make my way downstream, to the next attempt, and failure with just enough intermittent success thrown in to keep me hooked. But in this case that reorientation took no time at all because just as I began to let go of the Love-Day deadline, my interior life was hijacked by cabbage.
Yes, the cruciferous kind.
4.
Remember that Zoom screen? The once from which magic emanated?
You see, when the pandemic first began to take shape and we Humans of Earth all entered an unknown chapter of unknown duration with uncertain outcomes and some unhinged political leadership, I responded to a request and announced an online group. We would meet on Zoom and engage with some creators and meaning-makers whose ideas and practices might help us find our way in this time. I hoped I might help at least a few people emerge having survived but also, on the far side of this braided, disjointed “now,” come out ready to do what was ours to do.
I’d never been a part of an online community of learning, or class so I couldn’t foresee how powerful the connections would become. In retrospect, I should not be surprised. I do know first hand from many years of teaching that groups of people who dive, with open minds and hearts, into a flow of demanding and abundant ideas and perspectives, often and automatically begin to collaborate in a mysterious process of their own meaning-making and wayfinding.
Now, many, many adolescents and the adults they grow into are understandably rigid when they think about what “classes” and “learning” are for. Traditional schooling can be life-giving— like going from not being able to swim to being able to not-drown. Learning how to navigate a concrete pool is a fine, often crucial first step.
But, although it usually stretches or blows our dualistic minds to try to get this, most of life is about being the water you drink which is the same water you must swim through (and with, and against) as you navigate life’s shifting islands and unpredictable rapids. Those rapids can be either terrifying threats or great rides (or both simultaneously), depending on your mindset and prior practices. One of the practices that can help you get a great ride (or, at least not-drown), even when the current feels (or is) dangerous and the water feels (or is) murky, is living with and through art, by which I mean carefully crafted communication of what matters most.
I suppose you might even call it an act of love. Both the engaging and the crafting.
As a teacher, my go-to pedagogy to get students to think outside the box (or pool) was to literally take them outside and, there, in the woods, on the beach, atop a mountain (anywhere beyond the boxes with roofs and the ones in our thoughts) and to get us to all read some thing that some other human had lovingly wrought. And watch. And talk. We would talk about what was going on outside as if it were in the same world as what was going on in the text.
We would read and be in place. We would read as if the world humans occupy. As if humans, including We The Readers were not just in but composed of the very stuff (earth, air, water) that made us… makes us possible. To at least try to read with others as if you don’t only live in but just plain are the world of connections between rivers and lines of text and meaning flowing on pages and blood through your own beating hearts. To work and play as we found new kinds of immersion in learning, in dynamic and shifting ways of knowing.
But most of that marching groups outside of the box was with students, self-described learners who had signed up for a class, one that was usually required. Such things are certainly possible (and just as powerful) with groups of not-students but Covid would brook no such togetherness. Now a context that meant being able to sense one another’s bodies in space, feeling the same clay, water, and air was off the table. We would have to find flow without our feet feeling the rushing water of streams while our consciousness, collective and individual, bathed in whatever current of discovery we were riding together. I was doubtful. “Online community” seemed potentially, perpetually diluted. In a word, virtual. Virtually, but never quite, real.
But that isn’t what happened. Instead this online community or class or group or whatever we are, turned out to feel a lot like the many waves I’ve been frightened of, then awestruck and, ultimately and dynamically, instructed by. The most unpredictable ones— waves that I’m not at all sure I should try— are usually the very ones that leave me basking in breathless, deeply satisfied gratitude. So, in an act of faith, when we started in March of 2020, we called this group Riding the Waves.
Almost a year has gone by. We have never been together, in an embodied sense. We are all loosely connected, not more than a few degrees of separation, but we are, as a group, not familiars, never mind intimates— or, at least, we weren’t.
When we began, I had no idea where to lead us. But as we started out talking together about contemporary research on play and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, I embraced the reality that my own ignorance and lost-ness has, when honestly articulated, often proven invaluable as a creative instigation to others. So, one of the prompts we’re using is to consider ourselves “cartographers of meaning” as we move through this unprecedented landscape and follow the course of this unknown stream as it has shifted and reformed around us. Terra incognita seems to imply more stability than this moment, an epidemiologically, emotionally, and politically “dynamic” time offers. I prefer to think of us as charting a course through aqua incognita.
I know a brilliant historian who says a map is an argument about what signifies.
The “we” who formed in this online group is comprised of people who have, in the global, historical context, tremendous privilege. And we are gathering at an exceptionally pivotal time. It is the stuff of history and historic change. We all have the benefit of an education and respect the power of thought, and the dynamic, shifting natures of truth and hope. Occasionally, during one of the meetings, one of us makes something like a map, an argument, an offering about what has signified for us. The rest of us are assisted if not accompanied, in our wandering. In doing this exercise in existential cartography we’ve practiced serving someone other than ourselves and transformed ourselves in the process. The rest of us learn from those offerings that sometimes feel more like incantations than coordinates. And, when we are at our best, this feels absolutely and not at all about us, the finitude of humans represented by the gathering, figures of electrons on my screen. I think it’s fair for me to generalize and say we are all grateful for one another and for the whole we formed, are forming.
After all, there’s no time like Covid Time to feel the intense importance of our social ties, and by extension, of the form and function (or disfunction) of our society. To extend the old “helping parable,” you can give a man a fish or you can teach a man to fish. I suspect that parable has a sequel we need to write together, one that goes something like this:
Or you can teach a man to fish and find ways to love him while he learns how to fish, then be with him as you both begin to learn that that fish sees and knows things you can’t. So then you both fall into a deep respect for and attachment (one I suppose you could call love) to both the fish and the braided, shifting stream where you and it both draw life. And then, someday, you can watch in silence awestruck reverence as the man you taught becomes a teacher of fishing and of attachment. And, perhaps, of love.
5.
We are far downstream of the first time we met for Riding the Waves but, months later, we know we have only just begun to learn from, to integrate Viktor Frankl in our search for meaning.
This winter, as one of our possibility models and meaning prophets, we have been, at a slow, dripping pace of a few pages a day, ingesting Ross Gay’s Book of Delights. Gay, an effervescent, sometimes ecstatic poet determined he would make a daily practice of writing a tiny, complete essayette each day of the year. The subject? Something that delighted him. His capacity to feel delight grew strong in the process. So, it turns out, has ours.
If you are not currently reading this book I urge you to change that today.
For with delight, comes meaning, and a clearer course. Now, let me be clear. Although we, with the help of Ross Gay and many others, are finding our ways to meaning and to developing the capacity to share that meaning-finding, as any earnest cartographer would, there is plenty of room for being lost. We often witness one another’s sadness, grief, and fear. There is plenty of space for shooting an occasional terrifying rapid of overwhelm or hopelessness. On the day I’m slowing meandering towards, the one in which the magic vapor of new meaning radiated from my Zoom screen, one of us was, in fact, having such a moment.
Solitude is good. Time alone is crucial. Reflection and rest, all good things. And warm sunshine in excess can burn the hell out of us. Too much of a good thing can, after a point, take on Biblical plague-proportions.
In this woman’s CSA boxes, the result of committing to support a local farmer year-round came huge wave after relentless wave of cabbages. The cruciferous kind. The accumulating vegetables seem to form an impenetrable, flow-stopping dam.
She was talking about herself but the magic, the alchemical whatever-this-is that keeps happening as these beautiful heartminds interact with one another through our technologies, was almost immediately palpable.
I wish I could tell you that some plot-worthy thing then happened. It didn’t. We did not talk about the cabbage for long, although a couple of people did immediately share their favorite cabbage recipe. No problems were solved. And, if they had been, that would have been engineering, not magic. The transformation was subtle but existential. Like an adjustment of only a few degrees that dramatically alter the outcome of a long journey.
I don’t think any of us knew at the time that the indigenous Saxons called this month, February, in which we celebrate (mostly romantic) love, kale-month. That a surfeit of cruciferous beings in our midst might represent an ancient relationship, an eternal dance, another kind of love, a dance in which we are only the latest expressive embodying-forth… Well, I think it was something along those lines that happened in that tiny shift in our braided stream of consciousness. It was as if we all knew we had tripped over a place that needed a mark on the path, a signpost on the banks of the shifting forms.
On our way to efficiency or productivity (or some boxed-in version of love), it would have been an easy moment to overlook or denigrate as insignificant, that story about overwhelming abundance in darkness.
Encountering that dam of piles of cabbage was about coming to feel the gossamer web of being in and of a place from which you can’t escape. Perhaps, in part, because you are it. And it was about nourishment begging for flavor, to be made palatable with the spice of connection to place, to farmer, to food, to water, to one another across the miles and the generations. It was about spicing up an offering for those of us who are malnourished, if not downright starving. And it was about ways we could reconfigure what is on offer, even if the task, the pile of things that need to change, is overwhelming.
One of the group pointed out that kale and cabbage (and broccoli and collards and Brussels sprouts) are all different varieties of the same species, brassica oleracea. They look completely different from one another.
We use different recipes to understand how they should come out.
But they are the same species.
Yet another subtle but profound shift.
Again, I wish I could tell you that the earth quaked.
That the Zoom Screen suddenly turned iridescent.
That lightning shot from the keyboard.
But it didn’t.
Nothing happened.
Everything happened.
There was no shift in any of my five senses.
But the water in which the body in which those senses gather information was altered by the telling of the tale of too much cabbage and of the artificial barrier we’ve drawn between cabbage and kale, Brussels sprouts and broccoli.
What I can tell you is that there was no longer too much cabbage. There was just enough for the monolithic CSA box to become something other than what it began as. It had become a delight.
I don’t know if we would have found our way, If I would have found my way as the group’s purported guide, or even been able to recognize the moment without Ross Gay. Without that Book of Delights. But, here’s the thing, I didn’t have to. Because he did what he did when he did it and we are all harvesting meaning from the bumper crop he sowed. We had plenty of steam to navigate this obstacle and to turn it into something else. The cabbage dam crumbled almost immediately. The woman broke into a large smile on my screen as she told the rest of her cabbage tale. The smile was more contagious than any variant this Covid monster can invent.
6.
So, I spent the last couple of weeks with this cold trying to stay warm and dry, patient and restful while the beautiful cold ocean waves broke without me. I was still reading about love, still not really writing about it while writing about it, but gave up completely on meeting the deadline for the essay on love. Instead, I opted for the lifeline of living with a cabbage.
Literally.
I placed a single purple cabbage on a ceramic vessel, a gift from one of the humans in the group.
I looked at it.
A lot.
Occasionally, I photographed it.
One day, as I was staring at the outer layers of these crumpling, curving, undulating waves of this mysterious cabbage something startling appeared in the background. It was a bird-like fluttering but gigantic, much too big to be a bird. Then the heat pump outside the window switched off and I could hear them. The giant-seeming flapping thing wasn’t a bird, it was hundreds of them. Robins to be precise. They were converging on the red holly berries on the tree at the edge of my yard.
I looked from the cabbage to the birds and back and forth and back and forth again.
I went outside, left the box, and was overwhelmed.
So many birds!
They were so loud!
I walked up the block.
Every yard had hundreds of birds, flying, pecking, calling. I hurried back to the house, put on half a dozen layers, grabbed a camera, and spent half an hour still actively not writing about love but out there, in the yard, as close to the holly as I dared to get, with the birds in front of me and the cabbage just inside the window at my back. So many birds. It was almost frightening. Almost. But, although my heart pounded and I kept catching my breath as the birds dove and ate, fluttered and sang, the feeling was of watching something mountainous form, knowing it would not last.
Then, all of a sudden, someone nearby banged on metal with metal, three loud clangs.
They all left.
Every last bird, gone.
My heart slowed.
I tried to settle with the feeling of what I’d just seen.
Annie Dillard, describing fecundity in general and dragonfly nymphs in particular, calls them “insatiable and mighty.” That is what I encountered in that yard with the cabbage at my back. At least in the context of my life, it was the most insatiable and the single mightiest form of the lingering wilds of the urban backyard.
I will never forget that feeling. 
If it weren’t for Covid I would not have been here in North Carolina.
If it weren’t for the cold I would not have been in the house.
If it weren’t for the cabbage head, I might not have been at the window.
And if I had happened past the window, I’d have likely moved away, gone back to the desk, my senses absorbed in the powerful magic of screens and sentences, words and pages, and the mesmerizing boxes they can form.
But because of the delicate but powerful draw of Fibonacci’s geometric beauty, because of the cabbages slowly desiccating outer leaves, I was there, looking outside for what had startled me from my focus.
Birds, sure.
But something the birds summoned me to.
Something we are both a part of.
Something I suppose you might even call love.
7.
After that afternoon, it seemed like the right thing to do to get ready to eat that cabbage. I had been a decent student of its teachings and was now ready to metabolize them in a new way. The birds had arrived two days before the next Riding the Waves meeting. So I would slice and cook and eat it the night before we met again. Its chemical compounds, its magic potions would be feeding me, in/forming the energy I brought to the group. If that isn’t a spiritual moment of deep love then I don’t know what is.
But, before I ate it, I would attend to it. Look at it. Perhaps delight in it. And, if it seemed right, make some photographs and write some sentences.
Our appointed hour came.
We met. We talked. Each of us calling in from the places we live, the clay and water and air from which our bodies emanate. The places from which, with the help of, among others, cabbage farmers, we draw what we need in order to keep, for now, meeting in this disembodied format.
We are keeping one another company as the mountains shift in the gushing, uncontrollable forces around us. But we are also part of the reformation, the flowing currents of one another’s thoughts and lives.
Not much and everything that matters happens in these meetings.
Now, after a year, we know one another so well and not at all.
We have spent such significant time with one another and almost no time at all.
We have shared so many experiences and almost none at all.
Virtual?
Perhaps.
But also as real as life gets.
I know this possibility would not be on offer without pandemic, without this technology, without the political and climatological, and social threats and the openings they bring. Without the necessity, of embracing being lost as we revise our collective and individual courses, we would never have the opportunity of rediscovering what it means to be found.
Wayfinding.
Cartographies of meaning.
Zooming.
I suppose you could almost call it love.
So, although I failed utterly, for the moment, to write that intended essay for Valentine’s Day, I can without hesitation and with nothing but love in my heart write to the world, that I hope you, you individual human reading this, have a beautiful, meaningful, and love-filled National Cabbage Day!
Further Reading
Cabbage: A Global History
Meg Muckenhoupt
https://b-ok.cc/book/3696238/22c172?dsource=recommend
Further Reading
Cabbage: A Global History
Meg Muckenhoupt
https://b-ok.cc/book/3696238/22c172?dsource=recommend