These Very Days of Wonder

These Very Days of Wonder

When you have a website, all manner of phone calls and messages come your way. Some people seem to think that the internet is a mall of sorts (which it is, I suppose), and that if something of yours is there you have a stall there and must be selling something (which is so often the case), and that you are on call, and open 24 hours. So the subsequent discourtesies often apply. This can wire you in a certain fashion. It bends you to a certain intolerance when the phone rings and you don’t instantly recognize the voice on the line, which I don’t recommend. It isn’t the best way to answer the phone – I’ve thought of just not answering it anymore – but it seems to come with the territory.

A few weeks ago I did answer, and the man on the phone said something very close to “Yam faydesh”, followed by a more indecipherable phrase. I apologized and asked him to repeat it, which he did, with greater eagerness and the same inscrutable message: “Yam faydesh”, and the elaboration. Twice more he said it. Sure now that someone from Delhi was about to pitch me on an upgrade for an unnecessary something, I awkwardly passed the call to my wife, grateful in this new way to have her. Within a few seconds she had engaged her remarkable skill for UN-style spontaneous translation of mysterious human communication, for which she is famous in our house. And then she said, “Okay. You’re from Fed Ex and you can’t find our house”, and proceeded calmly to give him directions. Easy as that.

To keep the dogs calm I met Yam Faydesh in the driveway, and when he got out of his truck I thought instantly that I recognized something about his face. After signing for the packages and so forth I said: “If you don’t mind me asking, where are you from?” For a moment he did seem to mind. I said, “Well, it’s alright”, I said. “No, no”, he said, “is okay. I from Afghanistan.” These days his hesitation is understandable.

His face was a perfect moon, and his build squat and efficient and roundish too, like a wrestler’s, with nothing of the angularity that seems typical of many Afghanis . “I don’t think you’re from Afghanistan”, I told him. “Ah no, no. Really no,” he said, glad of the chance to elaborate, “we have only been there t’ousand years. But before then…”, he paused for effect, and then proudly said, “Mongol!”. By which he meant, I think: “and still Mongol”. And then we both said, at the same time, “Chiinghis Khan!”, and laughed. Within a minute we were in the house playing central Asian instruments together, comparing tunings and gut strings, and then sitting inside the ger by the river which is our school house having tea, happy to be alive and unexpectedly well met. “I never think I see this in Canada!”, said Mr. Yam Faydesh.

So this was a delightful moment for me, and I treasure it. The sheer elegance of that phrase – ‘We’ve only been there t’ousand years’ – the adroitness of that self understanding, the willingness to remember the old stories, the mixed ancestries, the many beginnings, was something I never thought I’d see in Canada either, a land of many beginnings if there ever was one. The idea of human purity – or religious or cultural purity, or the One True Anything – is so crazed and forlorn, really. It is more forlorn than it is dangerous, as forlorn as the idea of ‘mongrel’. Who doesn’t come from a score of places? Who isn’t in the midst of a journey of a few thousand years, trailing behind them, in William Blake’s beautiful phrase, clouds of glory? It’s just a willingness to remember you need, that’s all. And a willingness to be on the receiving end instead of the crafting end of what you usually think of as ‘myself’.

This is how it is for our identity, if we are willing to know it. This is true of our ideas, too. Though eager to lay claim to the cleverness or creativity or hilarity of what we think, it serves us well to wonder: Where was my brilliant realization, just before it came to me? Not that I didn’t work for it, not that I don’t have learning and discipline, not that I don’t deserve the great thought I have (not that I do, either) … but where was it, just before it came to me?

This is an important thought for me to think, and important that I think it regularly. If I am in any business, it is the redemption business. You could say my job is learning how we think about how we live, and then wondering what we do now, with the time entrusted to us, given everything, in our small corner of this world?

The truth is that I don’t know a lot of things, really, though I do have some skill in recognizing unannounced connections between things. I am glad of this ability, but it is built upon the willingness and the labours of others before me and alongside me to learn things and find ways to say them. That is where the things I work with come from.

If you look through what I’ve written on the Orphan Wisdom site with this in mind you’ll see the threads of ideas, discoveries and conjurings that I myself am not the author of, not the creator of. There are things there from James Hillman and Marion Woodman, from Robert Bly and Alden Nowlan, from Martín Prechtel and my Anishnaabe language teacher Linda Assiniwe, from Brother Blue and Ruth Hill, from Leonard Cohen and from farmers I know, and from others neither my contemporaries nor elders. There are some things from people you’ll never read about on the internet or anywhere else. Directly from them.

Some of it is well digested by now and probably recognizable, if at all, only to them. Some of it is more recent, or is still having its way with my thinking and my life, as it did when it first came to me. Those things are more easily traceable back to those from whom they came.

I have a school here at the farm, and I teach a lot of things there. I bring in other teachers, Artisans of Deep Living as I call them. We consider farm work, Old English and medieval work, cuneiform and koine and Wendat work, plant medicine, music and etymology and metalurgy, the dead and grief and beauty and food and other things. But I am in truth not the creator of very much there. More I am a conservator of endangered wonder in a time much imperilled and imperilling. I am a herder of unruly propositions that kick at the stall, sometimes all night. I am a caretaker of what I have been entrusted with, and I suppose my job is to have some discernment in how and when and if I lift those things up into the light, for others to consider. And in so doing I try to keep lithe and well practiced the ragged hum of human wonder that can bind us in something very like kinship, to each other and to those who came before us. Especially to them. When I remember to, my teaching lifts up my teachers, but always it is a praise song to them and their teaching. And especially to their teachers, and to theirs, to the ones I don’t know and will never meet.

I know that many of you are about to enter the hothouse atmosphere of ‘the holiday season’. For some this means seeing a movie in a mostly empty theatre, or getting a table in a restaurant you usually need a reservation months before to get into. And for many this means you will be obliged to be with your family or extended family or family equivalent.

Some of you will do so eagerly, and some not. Some of you are in families in disarray or in peril. Some will come to this holiday for the first time without a father, or a brother, or a daughter. Some will come to the season for the first time as orphans. Some will be married or shacked up or divorced for the first time, or for the second. Some will have their kids or their kids’ kids, some will drop their kids off tearfully or with relief. Some will wish they had kids to drop off. Some will find a way to avoid the holiday altogether, and some will not.

Some will hold their breaths, wading into the family stream that pulls together people who don’t otherwise see each other much. And some will huddle for a while with people who will pass for a family of their choosing. Almost everyone will feel the gravitational sway of ‘family’ over the next while, and with it the bite of the mandate to be happy.

I don’t have much in the way of advice at any time, and certainly not for this time of year. I would recommend granting the darkness that is the proper libretto of this season as much presence as the light tends to get. The brief daylight now pleads for it. Beyond that, to be honest, the way things are these days in our corner of the world, given the fistfights over plasma televisions that have become the order of the day, given that Nelson Mandela has just left us to our devices, you and I are somewhat on our own to sort these things out.

But it might be useful to regard our families the way we might our ideas: They aren’t our ideas, not really, and they’re not our families either. No matter what the therapists say, they are not our creations, or our possessions, nor are we theirs. Instead, they are entrusted to us, and we to them, in all their raging glory, in all their mysterious habit and dappled array.

We could try to recall the brief history of the ideas and the families (and maybe the ideas about families) that make up our lives, just, say, those of the last thousand years or so. We could imagine the caravan of nobility and larceny and lunacy and honour that has traveled all those years and miles to come to us, now, in this troubled time, seeking a place at the groaning board, the banquet table in the meade hall of our days. We could be wowed by all that.

Gathering in this way, even reluctantly, once or twice a year, with reluctant companions, might still render us down with the alchemy of being human together into a bundle of wild ideas whose origin is mystery, whose power is entrusted to us for a time. That might be the beginning of readying ourseles to become ancestors, worthy of being claimed, worth coming from.

All blessings on your house and your road, on your people and on your table.

Stephen Jenkinson