A fire is roaring in my wood stove to quell the autumn chill. Green is succumbing to brown. Bareness is replacing luxuriance.  Dawns and dusks are growing silent; they no longer chime with the songs of birds, or buzz with the stirrings of insects, or rustle with the traffic of critters. Yet all this evidence of hunkering down for the long winter ahead is balanced by the surprising persistence of new sproutings.

Today I clipped the bright pungent shoots from the garlic; they will offer springtime freshness to autumn salads and soups. Meanwhile the bare spots in the winter gardens in the cold frames are filling in with hardy greens and beets and herbs. Inside, I’m nurturing populations of baby bacteria where they are turning cabbage into sauerkraut and cucumbers into pickles. Outside, the turkeys, ducks, and geese dash to reap the morning’s offerings from the raspberry bushes at the edge of the yard. And this week the chicks that hatched in April began laying tiny multicolored eggs. Mushrooms are springing up in proportion to the surrounding weeds dying back.

Autumn births and germinations balance springtime deaths and breakdowns. The rich mosaic of Earth occurrences is not respected by replacing linear timelines with cyclical progressions. Even cycles overlap and intersect and merge.          

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The degree to which David Arner liberates himself from  pre-determined constraints and sends it soaring might only be imaginable if you heard his concert of improvised piano music at The Stone in Manhattan last night, or if this effort was guided by someone who had this privilege. For those who missed this momentous event, I offer a step-by-step guide. 

1.  Imagine writing your signature with a pencil on a sheet of lined paper and the many constraints imposed upon you before you lift your pen:

         The paper dictates the shape and the dimensions of the field of operations

        The lines dictate the orientation, the spacing within this field, and the proportions of image to space.

      You determine the shape of the letters (no constraints), the size and width of the letters (constrained), and the darkness or lightness of your touch (within the paper’s tolerance).

2. Imagine writing your signature on a sheet of paper without lines.

    Now only the shape and the dimensions of the field of operations are determined before you lift your pen.

    In addition to the liberties identified above, you orient your paper in any direction, choose whether to honor the right angled rigidity of the paper, and select your orientation.

3. Imagine writing your signature in the sand on a beach.

Borders and other constraints dissolve.

   You are free to determine the size, shape, orientation, style, and pressure of your signature.

4. Imagine this beach in outer space – liberated from the gravity-bound constraints of Earth experience.  

The sand-writing analogy only describes Arner’s starting point, not his destination.

5. Imagine Arner drawing with not one, but ten implements simultaneously. Each finger served the fullness of his musicality in the instant of its stirring.

6. Imagine this drawing embracing the myriad conditions provided by the setting. Instead of beach, sea, sun, wind, and shadow, Arner probed the innards of his grand piano as well as the keys, unleashing wondrous percussive and melodic opportunities.

Flights and songs of birds served as this concert’s inspiration.  Arner’s expressive freedom seemed the perfect embodiment of avian disregard for human-contrived borders and rational systems. Yet, for me, the concert exceeded the untethering of music from compositional norms.  It demonstrated that human emancipation from constraint does not necessarily indicate explosive and destructive fury. Arner yielded to an alternative ordering system. He discovered the logic of birds.  Last night, he shared the glorious expression of this revelation with his audience.

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If it weren’t for my cousin’s terrible car accident which made it impossible for me to concentrate on office work, I would not have been gardening in the rain. The rhythmic plucking, pruning, and harvesting offered the solace of a lullaby and the reassurance of a steady pulse.  Then the potato patch beckoned me. Too impatient to retrieve the metal pitchfork, my fingers probed the earth in search of tubers.   The cumulative effect of gentle rain, the calming rhythms of garden chores, and muddied fingers culminated in an experience that seems worthy of sharing. I proceeded to the raspberry bushes.

Berries hung amid the leaves, thorns, and branches. Each promised a familiar taste delight. But they also offered an unfamiliar challenge. I could either transport the berries to my mouth with muddy fingers, or I could forego the fingers and accomplish the job directly with my mouth - like a hungry deer.  My hands were instructed by my animal curiosity to remain at my sides as I surveyed the array of succulent morsels. Most were crimson and pink, but there was one that was so ripe it verged on purple. Slowly I leaned toward it with the predatory stealth of a fox stalking its prey. As I inched toward my innocent victim, I noticed its umbilical connection to the parent plant was almost severed. The smallest disturbance could dislodge it. The berry’s fate hung in the balance - if it didn’t fall into my eager mouth, it would fall upon the indifferent soil.  Proceeding ever closer, I inadvertently bowed in honor of this tiny treasure. At a distance of five inches each individual pod in the cluster became visible. Its membranes were stretched into translucency by loads of juice.  At four inches, the aroma of sweet berry became palpable.  At three inches thorns brushed my cheeks as my tongue maneuvered around a leaf that was obstructing my path. At two inches I closed my eyes since they were of no use at this distance. Then millimeter by millimeter I approached ever closer, led by varying intensities of scent and diverse textures upon my tongue as it searched among the brittle stems and ribbed leaves for the chosen berry.  Such searches are normally the job for fingers and eyes. My tongue is not accustomed to probing unfamiliar conditions, and my nose rarely participates in such a task. Now both were laying out my mental transit, measuring the distances and orienting the approaches to my goal.  An awkward thrust finally accomplished the job. My protruding tongue collided with the side of the berry. I quickly repositioned it to the bottom, imaging that the berry would tumble onto this platform and into my awaiting mouth. But it clung to its stem. My tongue reached out to feel its shape and weight and calculate my next move. It instructed me to wrap my lips around the berry and tug. Success! A gentle squeeze and sweet succulence filled my mouth.  

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“I found him in a tree.”

That was my response to my neighbor’s question, “Where do you find these wonderful young people?”

My answer was in earnest. I really did find the lean, barefoot, 20-year-old with a mass of black curls and dazzling features up in the tree that grows mid-way down the field in front of my house.   At first I saw only the soles of his feet as he lay on a large branch high over head. When he saw me he leapt to the ground as graceful as a panther. He said he frequently walks through the woods late at night to lie on the hillside and explore the starry skies.  This morning, he was waiting for two young women to join him.

After a few brief minutes of conversation, I realized that the person who fell into my life from the sky shared my urging to mesh my personal life cycles with the myriad life cycles of life forms in our ecosystem.  

His falling to the ground seemed as natural as a falling acorn. Perhaps it signaled the origin of something as mighty and enduring as a great oak.

This encounter  is simply the latest in a series with well-intentioned, intelligent, capable young men and women who grasp the extent of humanity’s current challenges and its possibilities.  While the majority of young people I know are drawn to the virtualized and sanitized world of electronic entertainment, gaming, and advertising, there seems to exist a growing minority of mavericks who are attracted to farming, crafting, and physical labor. It is my belief that these mavericks comprise humanity’s future-tense. They will thrive while the techno-geniuses go down madly punching S.O.S. into their micro-chip devices.    

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They are perpetually hungry omnivores!

 I’m referring to my adolescent pig (his name is Dorky Porky) and my flocks of chickens, geese, turkeys, and ducks. During the months that they mature to become food for us, I procure food for them.  What they ingest becomes the meat we eat.

No sophisticated cost-benefit analysis is required to conclude that purchasing grain would bankrupt my venture.   Foraging off-sets, but does not solve the cost problem.

Left-overs from Camp Ramapo’s kitchens are my salvation.  Each evening I arrive at the loading dock with five gallon buckets. The staff fills them to the brim with hot and cold foods that were prepared but not distributed.  Besides the astonishing quantity of food waste, these kitchen offerings provide valuable insights into the food preferences of children and animals.

But first a word about the camp:

Each summer several hundred troubled children are transported from the inner city to the Ramapo Camp property which is next to my own. The camp provides the children with alternatives to the urban blight and debilitating clamor of urban living, believing that alternatives to familiar experiences of home will refresh their spirits, clear their minds, heal their anxieties, and restore their bodies.   

Lessons from Ramapo kitchen: Children demand precisely the foods my animals reject.

Evidently the children resisted including food in the new experiences they were offered. I know this because the fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains, and broiled meats that were served in the beginning of the season were gradually replaced by industrially manufactured nuggets, fries, and patties. As the foods that resembled their original forms disappeared, foods that were bleached, colored, reconstituted, and molded into geometric standardization appeared.  It seems the kitchen staff succumbed to 6 – 15 year olds' preferences.

The pleasure of my animals' dining experiences proceeded in the reverse direction. They gulped down the fresh foods and they refused to eat hot dogs, curly fries, chicken nuggets. It is as if they don’t recognize these substances as food.

May I tell you a third astonishing insight? Even my compost rejects these items! 

If it is deep friend and battered, like onion rings, it remains for weeks undecomposed, resisting the assault of huge populations of bacteria and insects voraciously chomping and digesting all the other organic offerings. 

These preferences reveal the inherent good sense of organisms that are immune to the appeal of advertisers and the influence of marketers. At the same time they confirm the power of culture to divert people from their body’s built-in messaging systems. Complex humanity might take a lesson might take a lesson from a big dumb pig and tiny bacteria - they  know what's good for them.

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