Years ago, when the cacophony was just a murmur, and the world a gentler place, I drove Nebraska from Southeast to Northwest along the section lines, avoiding the howling wilderness of the interstates. Drove Big Red solo from the Point of Beginning to the Ogalla. It was a fabulous, beautiful, might I say...joyful adventure. You say it's flat Tom, but I know different. It's wrinkled, rippling, textured, surprising, sacred. American. At 69 years, your words resonate with this old man. I too, sense the pilings giving way. I too, am considered obsolete. I too, know things and see the silhouette approach - over the mountains in my case - and feel the ground tilt. I am yet a sailor and a captain, headed for the boat, and my own stash of Jameson's. My Dawn has the garden planted and it's already blooming. But, the wind is blowing fair from the Southwest, its time to set sail and go. Cheers to you and yours, Mr Tom.
Another fantastic essay. So much resonates even though I’m from the east coast.
One of the many passages that stands out,
“There is a thing about this country right now that I keep turning over. We have confused the performance of caring with the actual thing. We have confused the announcement of values with their practice. We have confused the flag with what the flag was supposed to mean, which was not the flag itself but the idea underneath it, the one about what you owe the stranger.”
Also the message about the difference between being humble and showing humility was impactful. I felt this tension near the end of my teaching career when they rolled out the latest, shiny bit of technology as some sort of panacea. I knew better because four decades taught me that but when you’re older some just see age and not the wisdom of years in the trenches, figuratively, of course.
Four decades of classrooms is four decades of consequence. Real students, real outcomes, real evidence about what works and what the people selling the next thing want you to believe works. That is not the same kind of knowing.
What you're describing is exactly what I was trying to name. The humility that becomes erasure. You earned the right to say the thing plainly and the room decided your birthday disqualified you. That's not a small indignity.
Thank you for reading it from the coast. That matters more than you might think.
"The moron is the constant. Every era produces them in roughly the same quantities, it is one of the few things about human nature that does not appear to be improvable." This is so true!!! Though it seems they are multiplying, daily. It must be in the water, or the data centers, but probably the forever chemicals streaming through our blood.
There are so many great passages but this one really struck me:
"There is a difference between intelligence and knowledge. A further difference between knowledge and wisdom. The last gap only closes one way. You cannot think your way across it. You cannot credential your way across it. You cannot read your way across it fast enough, cannot podcast your way across it, cannot find a shortcut through it because the shortcut is the thing you are trying to learn and you cannot learn it until you have taken the long road."
After I closed my firm and decided to sit on boards and consult I ran into this constantly. I was brought on for my experience and knowledge (wisdom). I could literally see what was going to happen before it did. I'd tell the young CEO exactly that. He, of course, would do it anyway. The results I predicted happened every single time.
I got myself fired two out of three times for having the audacity to tell them "I told you so." The third time, the blunder was so monumental that the company closed.
It's almost a metaphor for what's happening on the macro scale today. We've all been fired, but is the company going to close? If not, who is going to save it when wisdom means nothing?
Fired for being right. That is the exact tax I was describing and you paid it three times with receipts.
The macro parallel is the one that keeps me up. Because you're right. We've all been fired. The question you're asking at the end is the only question that matters right now and I don't have a clean answer to it. I have a suspicion that the answer is the same people who were right before, still showing up, still saying the thing, even after being fired, even after the third company closed. Not because it guarantees anything. Because it's the only move available to people who actually know something.
Wisdom doesn't stop being true because the room stopped listening. It just gets lonelier.
What a long piece. An endless dirge. It’s too big for me to wear in one sitting, but I’m quoting pieces of it and scheduling them to drop into my feed for the next several days because you’re singing my song. Thank you, Tom. I truly hate that we feel so much the same way, but it helps me to know you feel the way I feel despite the fact that I’ve never had the pleasure of stepping 1 foot into Nebraska.
Elderhood. I'm going to sit with that word for a while. You might be right and I might not have been ready to say it that plainly. You said it for me.
The camera in the box for five years after the fire. The grief and the joy arriving together when you finally put your hands on it. That's not rambling. That's the most precise description of how healing actually works that I've read in a long time. It doesn't arrive clean. It comes in the same box as the thing that hurt you.
Ramble all you want. The tightened up version isn't always the truer one.
Well, you can call this time of life whatever you want to call it. I've given up trying to pretend otherwise and just call myself "an old lady" now. Been teaching other old people how to access their memories using their photographs to capture the detail they never put into words so we share what we know using stories now. Nobody will listen to anything else from us at this point in the national and global disintegration...but I'm pretty damn passionate about not dying with what we learned the hard way left unshared. Hence, my enthusiasm about this piece you published today. It's become a non-optional activity in my life right along with getting my ass to the Y and doing chair yoga so I can keep walking...and sometimes dancing. Please keep digging deep and writing what you find inside, Tom. You're inspiring me ... and a lot of other folks. From our 50-yard line seats at the collapse.
Venting and rambling are a part of remembering and reconfiguring meaning...at least they are for me... One way or another, I'm becoming a fan of your Substack whether you're doing this or you've tightened things up.
My experience reading what you're publishing is that you're using writing to make sense of your elderhood. Maybe you wouldn't say that... but I say it because that's what I'm doing now with writing and soon to be using photography again with my writing because I finally opened a box full of gear a friend sent me over five years ago after the fire wiped me out and I had great joy playing with it despite the grief and PTSD that keeps rising as I put my hands again on a camera... And how's that for rambling? Old people ramble a lot. . . and I'm finally just joining my peer group.
Beautiful, Tom. As the media whore moron continues its garish hateful quest, I continue to think and say that his particular glitter is faux gold for empty hearts and souls.
Your description of love is exquisite and true. It’s not the flash and ardent declarations. Sometimes it’s simply silently showing up. Sometimes it’s simply looking directly and kindly in the eyes of another person
Faux gold for empty hearts. You said it better than I did and in fewer words.
But I want to stay with what you said about the eyes. Looking directly and kindly at another person. That's it. That's the whole counter-argument to all of it. Not a rebuttal. Not a platform. Just that. The full attention. The honest look that says I see you and I'm not going anywhere.
You can't perform that. Either it's there or it isn't. People know the difference immediately and they remember it the rest of their lives.
Yes, the recognition and acknowledgment can change one’s life…it can warm one’s heart years later…and always provide comfort and reassurance. Tom, thanks for your continued inspiration.
I can't write about all this yet. Have to let it sit. But I do, as a resident of CA now and many states, want to ponder the importance of the Plains in my life. Born in Lincoln, NE I grew up in IL. But NE was in my veins. Not sure how or why, but it's my floor. Not farmers or ranchers, it's still there. My uncle was the art editor for the Omaha World Herald, my aunt, his wife and Mom's sister, an editor. They were both widely read, aware of those things others had discovered and wrote down. But they were aware of the land, the endurance, the view. That endless, amazing view of things eternal.
I have on my wall an artist's proof commissioned by my uncle for a vignette written by a woman for the World Herald in its Sunday supplement, December, 1937. The artist, John Pusey, was kind of famous in his day, part of the regionalism of the mid passage of the 20th century. The pen and ink drawing, complete with my uncle's editorial notes above it, is a small, horizontal depiction of a Nebraska railroad water stop. A few houses. The water tank, Trees. Land stretching away behind the little town. I love this illustration to the depths of my being. I never lived there. But it is the bedrock of who I am. Values and respect for all who work the land, support the life, describe the grout. To me it's never flyover country. It's where you stop and take it in. My uncle was a most urbane man who also loved the land and all who lived on it. He valued the artists who made it manifest. My mother's mother was a social worker during the Depression. Was the first woman to drive alone from Omaha to the Sandhills to visit her clients. Why they, so far from Omaha, were her clients is unknown. Just were. Needed her. And she helped. It's just who we all were. Now they live in me.
I may not like everyone I have known in NE but I love them for their enduring understanding and, occasionally, wisdom about something more than the passing fancy. That illustration says it all. Thank you as always, Tom, for revealing in words the emotions and understanding I carry into my life everywhere I go.
Your grandmother driving alone to the Sandhills in the Depression to see about people who needed her. That's the whole thing right there. No audience. No credential. Just the understanding that they needed her and she could go.
The Pusey illustration on your wall, your uncle's notes still on it, a water stop and the land stretching away behind it. You've been looking at Nebraska your whole life without always knowing that's what you were looking at.
It lives in you because it was put there by people who understood that the land and the people on it were worth the attention. That's not nothing. That's almost everything.
Let it sit as long as it needs to. It'll still be there.
Many people were confused about why Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were paired for the election. Both understand communities that come from the lands via mutuality, community, common devotion to survival through cooperation, and good food. Different food, but all good food. The salt of the earth rests in community. Not some cobbled together thing but real, lifespring, enduring. As you said in the Code, someone you don't even like needs a hand - you give it. Maybe it circles the fields to get back to you, but you give it. It's how my family lived their lives - community, mutuality. I know no other way.
Early on, Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving" made a big impact on me, and this idea is what I have tried to live by - that love is not a feeling but a practice. And, lilacs are among the things that most make life worth living...
I'm 78, and I've been paying attention for a long time. I was born in California, and after I graduated from high school I went to live in England for 5 years. Later I went to live in Wichita Kansas for 8 years. I've been back in my childhood home, with my second husband for almost 40 years. I love this wonderful essay because everything about it resonates perfectly with me. Thanks.
It's hard to find the right words to express what I think and feel about this piece. I am right there with you. I'm 71, and I have felt the tectonic shifts and seen the San Francisco Bay at sunset when we were called "hippies" derisively. I didn't have 7 children. I had 5 miscarriages and just had my 11th surgery. I did care hands-on for thousands of our most marginalized.
I am right there with you. I will repost and recommend this all week because that's all I can do. I'd like to shout it from a mountain top, but sharing is the best I can do.
Two more things. I will never again feel any guilt for drinking Johnny Black. My Johnny says "cheers & joy" to your Jameson. Remember that. And the other thing, God, I need some petunias!!!!!
Hi Tom, I started reading this this morning while waiting for my wife to finish at an appointment she had. I thought about that love part in your essay. Giving up time, without any reluctance to be her chauffeur, when she needs it Later, I thought I had time to read more. But it was one interruption after another. Until, finally, I'm the only one still up.. There are so many things to unpack here. Some don't sink in right away. But enough have. All those examples of things that bring joy into human existence. I'm not going to give that up without a fucking fight.
I was born and raised in Upstate NY, in the Finger Lakes Region, NYS farm country. I am not a farmer myself. I've been across the country by train, from northern NY to Denver. Saw the middle of the country up close for the first time, at slow speeds, for three days. It wasn't until that train trip that I truly understood what landscape does to shape the people living in it.
I saw the oceans of grain, undulating. I saw the long approach to any fixed object or landmark. I saw the treeless, unrelentingly sunny sky. I started to understand that there is a different way of knowing, of seeing, when you live on the plains. I can see it all when I read this essay. This is a different place. This is a different pace. This is a different knowing.
I'm a woman over 60 now, and in our current sociopolitical climate, I could be more invisible than ever. But I'm doing what I can to speak up for what's right, for what my grandpa, who was a farmer on the rocky ground of Northeastern Pennsylvania, taught me: You work hard. You leave things better than you found them. You take care of each other. That's just what you do. I imagine that happens out where you live, too.
Grandpa saw the Depression and the War and the better times that came after it. He would not recognize the country he fought for now. I will do what I can to make this country more like something he would recognize, even if just for a moment.
Three days at slow speed across the middle of the country. That's the only way to let it teach you what it knows. You can't get it at altitude.
Your grandfather's three sentences are the whole thing. Work hard. Leave it better. Take care of each other. No qualifications. No fine print. Just the obligation, stated plainly by a man who earned the right to state it plainly on rocky ground during the worst decades the century produced.
He would not recognize it now. That grief is real and it is not small. But here you are, over sixty, invisible by the culture's verdict, doing it anyway. Saying the thing. Showing up.
I am approaching 60 myself. And I also remember my first trip across country. We used to take long summer drives to my grandfather‘s home ground of western Montana. We would play a game of picking something at the horizon and then counting the mile markers to see how far we could see.
But this new invisibility, perhaps it’s a superpower. Maybe us invisible women can start gathering communities around us and simply start acting as if a new and better world was already here. Act as if our neighborhood is a place where people plant gardens and share food. Act as if we live someplace where childcare is traded for goods or services. Act as if we live in the kind of place where one guy always has his garage open and is fixing tools and lending tools every Saturday from noon until four. Because love is the action, right? And because we’re invisible, nobody will notice that we’re quietly assembling the foundation of something better at the margins.❤️🌎🌱🐝🐦⬛
I love this idea. This summer we’re putting a sign out on our road to invite our rural neighbors to stop and pick berries and flowers when they’re in abundance. No money involved; please just come help us make sure the crops don’t go to waste. There’s only 4 in our household, and all the berries and the beans seem to come on at once. So we’ll share. 🧑🌾
Years ago, when the cacophony was just a murmur, and the world a gentler place, I drove Nebraska from Southeast to Northwest along the section lines, avoiding the howling wilderness of the interstates. Drove Big Red solo from the Point of Beginning to the Ogalla. It was a fabulous, beautiful, might I say...joyful adventure. You say it's flat Tom, but I know different. It's wrinkled, rippling, textured, surprising, sacred. American. At 69 years, your words resonate with this old man. I too, sense the pilings giving way. I too, am considered obsolete. I too, know things and see the silhouette approach - over the mountains in my case - and feel the ground tilt. I am yet a sailor and a captain, headed for the boat, and my own stash of Jameson's. My Dawn has the garden planted and it's already blooming. But, the wind is blowing fair from the Southwest, its time to set sail and go. Cheers to you and yours, Mr Tom.
The section lines. That's the only way to see it and you knew enough to take them.
A sailor reads water the way a plainsman reads land. Same knowledge, different horizon. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Fair winds. Give Dawn's garden my respects. Slainte.
Another fantastic essay. So much resonates even though I’m from the east coast.
One of the many passages that stands out,
“There is a thing about this country right now that I keep turning over. We have confused the performance of caring with the actual thing. We have confused the announcement of values with their practice. We have confused the flag with what the flag was supposed to mean, which was not the flag itself but the idea underneath it, the one about what you owe the stranger.”
Also the message about the difference between being humble and showing humility was impactful. I felt this tension near the end of my teaching career when they rolled out the latest, shiny bit of technology as some sort of panacea. I knew better because four decades taught me that but when you’re older some just see age and not the wisdom of years in the trenches, figuratively, of course.
Four decades of classrooms is four decades of consequence. Real students, real outcomes, real evidence about what works and what the people selling the next thing want you to believe works. That is not the same kind of knowing.
What you're describing is exactly what I was trying to name. The humility that becomes erasure. You earned the right to say the thing plainly and the room decided your birthday disqualified you. That's not a small indignity.
Thank you for reading it from the coast. That matters more than you might think.
"The moron is the constant. Every era produces them in roughly the same quantities, it is one of the few things about human nature that does not appear to be improvable." This is so true!!! Though it seems they are multiplying, daily. It must be in the water, or the data centers, but probably the forever chemicals streaming through our blood.
There are so many great passages but this one really struck me:
"There is a difference between intelligence and knowledge. A further difference between knowledge and wisdom. The last gap only closes one way. You cannot think your way across it. You cannot credential your way across it. You cannot read your way across it fast enough, cannot podcast your way across it, cannot find a shortcut through it because the shortcut is the thing you are trying to learn and you cannot learn it until you have taken the long road."
After I closed my firm and decided to sit on boards and consult I ran into this constantly. I was brought on for my experience and knowledge (wisdom). I could literally see what was going to happen before it did. I'd tell the young CEO exactly that. He, of course, would do it anyway. The results I predicted happened every single time.
I got myself fired two out of three times for having the audacity to tell them "I told you so." The third time, the blunder was so monumental that the company closed.
It's almost a metaphor for what's happening on the macro scale today. We've all been fired, but is the company going to close? If not, who is going to save it when wisdom means nothing?
Fired for being right. That is the exact tax I was describing and you paid it three times with receipts.
The macro parallel is the one that keeps me up. Because you're right. We've all been fired. The question you're asking at the end is the only question that matters right now and I don't have a clean answer to it. I have a suspicion that the answer is the same people who were right before, still showing up, still saying the thing, even after being fired, even after the third company closed. Not because it guarantees anything. Because it's the only move available to people who actually know something.
Wisdom doesn't stop being true because the room stopped listening. It just gets lonelier.
It's the grief and the sadness when looking at what we have become that is the hardest weight to bear.
Your description of love is love itself. You captured its essence brilliantly. Thank you, as always for writing such touching essays.
Thanks for reading Jane!!
What a long piece. An endless dirge. It’s too big for me to wear in one sitting, but I’m quoting pieces of it and scheduling them to drop into my feed for the next several days because you’re singing my song. Thank you, Tom. I truly hate that we feel so much the same way, but it helps me to know you feel the way I feel despite the fact that I’ve never had the pleasure of stepping 1 foot into Nebraska.
Elderhood. I'm going to sit with that word for a while. You might be right and I might not have been ready to say it that plainly. You said it for me.
The camera in the box for five years after the fire. The grief and the joy arriving together when you finally put your hands on it. That's not rambling. That's the most precise description of how healing actually works that I've read in a long time. It doesn't arrive clean. It comes in the same box as the thing that hurt you.
Ramble all you want. The tightened up version isn't always the truer one.
Well, you can call this time of life whatever you want to call it. I've given up trying to pretend otherwise and just call myself "an old lady" now. Been teaching other old people how to access their memories using their photographs to capture the detail they never put into words so we share what we know using stories now. Nobody will listen to anything else from us at this point in the national and global disintegration...but I'm pretty damn passionate about not dying with what we learned the hard way left unshared. Hence, my enthusiasm about this piece you published today. It's become a non-optional activity in my life right along with getting my ass to the Y and doing chair yoga so I can keep walking...and sometimes dancing. Please keep digging deep and writing what you find inside, Tom. You're inspiring me ... and a lot of other folks. From our 50-yard line seats at the collapse.
This one was rambling but I think it was exactly what I needed to write. Sometimes I just need to vent.
Venting and rambling are a part of remembering and reconfiguring meaning...at least they are for me... One way or another, I'm becoming a fan of your Substack whether you're doing this or you've tightened things up.
My experience reading what you're publishing is that you're using writing to make sense of your elderhood. Maybe you wouldn't say that... but I say it because that's what I'm doing now with writing and soon to be using photography again with my writing because I finally opened a box full of gear a friend sent me over five years ago after the fire wiped me out and I had great joy playing with it despite the grief and PTSD that keeps rising as I put my hands again on a camera... And how's that for rambling? Old people ramble a lot. . . and I'm finally just joining my peer group.
Beautiful, Tom. As the media whore moron continues its garish hateful quest, I continue to think and say that his particular glitter is faux gold for empty hearts and souls.
Your description of love is exquisite and true. It’s not the flash and ardent declarations. Sometimes it’s simply silently showing up. Sometimes it’s simply looking directly and kindly in the eyes of another person
Faux gold for empty hearts. You said it better than I did and in fewer words.
But I want to stay with what you said about the eyes. Looking directly and kindly at another person. That's it. That's the whole counter-argument to all of it. Not a rebuttal. Not a platform. Just that. The full attention. The honest look that says I see you and I'm not going anywhere.
You can't perform that. Either it's there or it isn't. People know the difference immediately and they remember it the rest of their lives.
Yes, the recognition and acknowledgment can change one’s life…it can warm one’s heart years later…and always provide comfort and reassurance. Tom, thanks for your continued inspiration.
I can't write about all this yet. Have to let it sit. But I do, as a resident of CA now and many states, want to ponder the importance of the Plains in my life. Born in Lincoln, NE I grew up in IL. But NE was in my veins. Not sure how or why, but it's my floor. Not farmers or ranchers, it's still there. My uncle was the art editor for the Omaha World Herald, my aunt, his wife and Mom's sister, an editor. They were both widely read, aware of those things others had discovered and wrote down. But they were aware of the land, the endurance, the view. That endless, amazing view of things eternal.
I have on my wall an artist's proof commissioned by my uncle for a vignette written by a woman for the World Herald in its Sunday supplement, December, 1937. The artist, John Pusey, was kind of famous in his day, part of the regionalism of the mid passage of the 20th century. The pen and ink drawing, complete with my uncle's editorial notes above it, is a small, horizontal depiction of a Nebraska railroad water stop. A few houses. The water tank, Trees. Land stretching away behind the little town. I love this illustration to the depths of my being. I never lived there. But it is the bedrock of who I am. Values and respect for all who work the land, support the life, describe the grout. To me it's never flyover country. It's where you stop and take it in. My uncle was a most urbane man who also loved the land and all who lived on it. He valued the artists who made it manifest. My mother's mother was a social worker during the Depression. Was the first woman to drive alone from Omaha to the Sandhills to visit her clients. Why they, so far from Omaha, were her clients is unknown. Just were. Needed her. And she helped. It's just who we all were. Now they live in me.
I may not like everyone I have known in NE but I love them for their enduring understanding and, occasionally, wisdom about something more than the passing fancy. That illustration says it all. Thank you as always, Tom, for revealing in words the emotions and understanding I carry into my life everywhere I go.
Your grandmother driving alone to the Sandhills in the Depression to see about people who needed her. That's the whole thing right there. No audience. No credential. Just the understanding that they needed her and she could go.
The Pusey illustration on your wall, your uncle's notes still on it, a water stop and the land stretching away behind it. You've been looking at Nebraska your whole life without always knowing that's what you were looking at.
It lives in you because it was put there by people who understood that the land and the people on it were worth the attention. That's not nothing. That's almost everything.
Let it sit as long as it needs to. It'll still be there.
Many people were confused about why Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were paired for the election. Both understand communities that come from the lands via mutuality, community, common devotion to survival through cooperation, and good food. Different food, but all good food. The salt of the earth rests in community. Not some cobbled together thing but real, lifespring, enduring. As you said in the Code, someone you don't even like needs a hand - you give it. Maybe it circles the fields to get back to you, but you give it. It's how my family lived their lives - community, mutuality. I know no other way.
Sorry, church lady. What does kamala know about any of that?
Early on, Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving" made a big impact on me, and this idea is what I have tried to live by - that love is not a feeling but a practice. And, lilacs are among the things that most make life worth living...
I'm 78, and I've been paying attention for a long time. I was born in California, and after I graduated from high school I went to live in England for 5 years. Later I went to live in Wichita Kansas for 8 years. I've been back in my childhood home, with my second husband for almost 40 years. I love this wonderful essay because everything about it resonates perfectly with me. Thanks.
It's hard to find the right words to express what I think and feel about this piece. I am right there with you. I'm 71, and I have felt the tectonic shifts and seen the San Francisco Bay at sunset when we were called "hippies" derisively. I didn't have 7 children. I had 5 miscarriages and just had my 11th surgery. I did care hands-on for thousands of our most marginalized.
I am right there with you. I will repost and recommend this all week because that's all I can do. I'd like to shout it from a mountain top, but sharing is the best I can do.
Two more things. I will never again feel any guilt for drinking Johnny Black. My Johnny says "cheers & joy" to your Jameson. Remember that. And the other thing, God, I need some petunias!!!!!
Wow! All I can say is Thank you 🙏
You are welcome!!
Hi Tom, I started reading this this morning while waiting for my wife to finish at an appointment she had. I thought about that love part in your essay. Giving up time, without any reluctance to be her chauffeur, when she needs it Later, I thought I had time to read more. But it was one interruption after another. Until, finally, I'm the only one still up.. There are so many things to unpack here. Some don't sink in right away. But enough have. All those examples of things that bring joy into human existence. I'm not going to give that up without a fucking fight.
Good luck!!
Thank You Tom
I was born and raised in Upstate NY, in the Finger Lakes Region, NYS farm country. I am not a farmer myself. I've been across the country by train, from northern NY to Denver. Saw the middle of the country up close for the first time, at slow speeds, for three days. It wasn't until that train trip that I truly understood what landscape does to shape the people living in it.
I saw the oceans of grain, undulating. I saw the long approach to any fixed object or landmark. I saw the treeless, unrelentingly sunny sky. I started to understand that there is a different way of knowing, of seeing, when you live on the plains. I can see it all when I read this essay. This is a different place. This is a different pace. This is a different knowing.
I'm a woman over 60 now, and in our current sociopolitical climate, I could be more invisible than ever. But I'm doing what I can to speak up for what's right, for what my grandpa, who was a farmer on the rocky ground of Northeastern Pennsylvania, taught me: You work hard. You leave things better than you found them. You take care of each other. That's just what you do. I imagine that happens out where you live, too.
Grandpa saw the Depression and the War and the better times that came after it. He would not recognize the country he fought for now. I will do what I can to make this country more like something he would recognize, even if just for a moment.
Three days at slow speed across the middle of the country. That's the only way to let it teach you what it knows. You can't get it at altitude.
Your grandfather's three sentences are the whole thing. Work hard. Leave it better. Take care of each other. No qualifications. No fine print. Just the obligation, stated plainly by a man who earned the right to state it plainly on rocky ground during the worst decades the century produced.
He would not recognize it now. That grief is real and it is not small. But here you are, over sixty, invisible by the culture's verdict, doing it anyway. Saying the thing. Showing up.
That's exactly what he taught you. It's working.
Thank you. It’s important to me to follow his example, and I always hope I can live up to it.
I am approaching 60 myself. And I also remember my first trip across country. We used to take long summer drives to my grandfather‘s home ground of western Montana. We would play a game of picking something at the horizon and then counting the mile markers to see how far we could see.
But this new invisibility, perhaps it’s a superpower. Maybe us invisible women can start gathering communities around us and simply start acting as if a new and better world was already here. Act as if our neighborhood is a place where people plant gardens and share food. Act as if we live someplace where childcare is traded for goods or services. Act as if we live in the kind of place where one guy always has his garage open and is fixing tools and lending tools every Saturday from noon until four. Because love is the action, right? And because we’re invisible, nobody will notice that we’re quietly assembling the foundation of something better at the margins.❤️🌎🌱🐝🐦⬛
I love this idea. This summer we’re putting a sign out on our road to invite our rural neighbors to stop and pick berries and flowers when they’re in abundance. No money involved; please just come help us make sure the crops don’t go to waste. There’s only 4 in our household, and all the berries and the beans seem to come on at once. So we’ll share. 🧑🌾