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| My book mark is a magazine interview with Tara Henley. |
This book by Tara Henley -- subtitled "A Meditation On the Madness of Modern Life" -- is messing with my mind. It's well-written and captivating; I can hardly put it down. It's also tapping into something that's been inside me for awhile; I could use the seed analogy again: a little seed that's been buried in me is getting sunlight and fertilizer from the ideas and conversations in this book. Crazy to have chosen this book to read the week before my 50th birthday, when I'm facing that milestone and wondering what the coming decade will bring -- and what I'm going to be doing in that decade.
What's the book about? A line from the back blurb, "Part memoir, part travelogue and part investigation", describes it perfectly (I'm two-thirds of the way through). Listen, I'm dog-earing pages and underlining sentences and asterixing paragraphs like crazy. I know -- I'm one of those monsters who marks up a book, but there is so much in this that is speaking to me.
Perhaps the names of the chapters will provide a hint as to why:
The Modern City
The Woods
The Plate
The Pocketbook
The Internet
The Void
The Tribe
The Home
The Commons
The Adventure
Right now, I'm in Chapter Seven: The Tribe, and reading things like, "...People are so incredibly overwhelmed, either by their stressful, busy lives or their personal pain and suffering, that they cannot commit to coffee, let alone community". After I'd underlined that sentence, I wrote 'me' in the margin. Because this is what I do: there are writers around here I'd like to sit and chat with but I won't make the time. I'm too busy working, I say. I'm hampered a bit by travel time; it take 15 to 45 minutes to get to a coffee date. But still, I'm missing a writing community but struggling to make time for it.
This book (like this pandemic) has reminded me, too, of why I feel fortunate to live in a rural area. In Chapter Two, about the woods, Henley writes extensively about finding peace and solace and rejuvenation through being in nature. She writes, "The only way I could think to return to the green of growth -- hope -- was to seek it out on a literal level. To nudge myself out the door, and head off into the woods" (page 62). Exactly what I get to do every day, right from my door.
And later, Henley writes about having dinner with "a bunch of high-flying professional women" and telling them she was going to interview a woman who'd moved to a farm and "just those few brief words alone were enough to capture the attention of everyone at the table, all of whom immediately confessed that this was in fact, their dream."
That's when it hit me, in the middle of chapter Two, that I live the way many people would like to. I remember an Ontario woman, who is my age, commenting that my book, Field Notes, showed her it was okay to not be "in the rat race", as she put it. She said my simple country life inspired her to give up her high-pressure sales job for a job that paid less but helped people more, and had less of a commute. I think she ended up in a job that suited her and satisfied her far more.
Yet: I've squandered so many opportunities to do more with my land; too much writing, too little gardening. I'm so busy. I mean, when my rhubarb patch, a staple of all rural properties, is still a work in progress, I'm not managing my time better.
That's one of the main points of this book: Happiness and good health aren't found in having more stuff but in having more time. We need to slow down and walk more, cook more, read more, listen more. We need to put our phones away (this is a big thread running through this book: how smart phones, the internet and social media dominate, even control, our lives). We need to grow our own food. We need to spend more time in nature, and with other people.
Everything I take for granted in my life here on 72 acres in rural Nova Scotia is what so many people crave. Not everyone, but a lot of people. Perhaps it's more the idea of it, and like me, they tend to cringe away from the amount of work, the learning curve, and the fear they don't know how to do it and will screw up -- or worse, kill something (my fear if I get goats). But as I come up fast on the age of 50 and wonder how I can optimize my life in the coming decade, this book has opened up all the ideas I've been poking at. I've dog-eared too many pages and underlined too many sentences, I've gasped at too many paragraphs and dropped too many asterixes in the margins to finish this book and forget about it.
As I suggested in my Day 1 post, the words for the coming decade are authenticity, courage and confidence. This book inspires me, empowers me and even scares me -- living in a way that is authentic to me, to my instincts, to my heart is possible but comes with learning and a major change of habits and attitude. Example: I've talked about simplifying and growing my own; now it's time to turn those words into actions. So I've started: there are 24 little pots of tomato seeds sitting in front of a window in my office. I've talked about growing my own seedlings for years... I anticipate 50 tomatoes for salsa by September! (If I don't kill the seeds or seedlings first...)
Lean Out: A Meditation On the Madness of Modern Life (Penguin Random House, 2020).
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