Honoring the Sabbath

Finding time in a world of space

A month ago I dug a few holes in our back field for bare root apple and pear trees. We stuck sharpened sticks into the sides of the holes and walked to the top of the hill to evaluate our design.

"I like it," I said, imagining the new profile of our hilltop path, the surrounding sticks replaced with 3 foot saplings, then in a few years by the sturdy trunks of mature trees, dotted with fruit.

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"We owned this land for several years before the house was finished. Why didn't we plant the trees then? We'd have shade and apples by now." So says the voice in my head, sometimes.

It’s probably my nature that I’ll always think this way but as I get older I find it easier to let go of these kinds of thoughts. Hobby farming is good therapy for perfectionists, because of the fecundity of, well, everything. When summer's blazing sun rises across the fields, nothing more than seeds and water and dirt can make food to eat. And not because everything works, but because nature is so excessive, so persistent.

A few years ago I brought a girdled pear tree back to life by cutting it down — a desperate act that prompts the tree to send up a new shoot, which you can then train as a replacement trunk. It shocked me when this worked, but nature is like that. It tries, and tries, and tries. It may be a gamble, homesteading; you have to roll the dice, but there are a lot of dice to roll. And when it works, it feels like a miracle.

I think of those last lines in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as Dillard comes to terms with the duality of nature's majesty and cruelty — “And like Billy Bray, I go my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says ‘Amen’: in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.”

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It was Cody's idea to start a tradition of respecting the Sabbath once a week. He had read The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, and felt moved by it.

I will admit that this tradition is difficult for me, and I don't always succeed in the habit. Having a toddler doesn’t make it any easier. Strike while the iron is hot, I think, because tomorrow she might stop napping, and then how will you sweep out the shed with the mouse poop in it, or paint the side hall?

But then I consider this passage from Heschel's book, where he muses on the nature of space (things) and time:

Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking, therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space. The intentions we are unable to carry out we deposit in space; possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees or frustrations. But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the Sabbath flames. Is the joy of possession an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death? Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives; we are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things.

It is impossible for man to shirk the problem of time. The more we think the more we realize: we cannot conquer time through space. We can only master time in time.

It stopped me in my tracks, this answer to a question I never really knew how to ask. Why do people so often use materialism to fill a void of unhappiness even though we all know it fails so spectacularly? I wrote once about how we spent years living in a city, hustling, thinking we were happy even though we were too busy to do anything, only buy things. And yet we still kept buying things over and over again, the Amazon boxes we never had time or energy to open filling up our hall. Why?

It's because time makes us feel our mortality, the preciousness of it. And that is scary, so we fill our lives with things, which feel permanent and stable.

It makes one recognize that materialism — consumerism, whatever you want to call it — is less about greed and more about hiding from the idea that our lives are slipping through our fingers. But slip they do, if we don't find ways to really experience them.

And so I joked to Cody one Sabbath, "I hate this and you're also right about it."

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The bulk of our trees arrived in mid April, and for days we did nothing but haul trees, plant trees, and fence in trees. Ninety-seven bare root trees and shrubs in just about a week — the majority done over a weekend. Precious heirloom fruit trees, native rose bushes to block the wind, young river birches to create privacy. It sounds crazy, and it was. But it was also fun, and special, and a vacation from our regular lives. Usually we spend much of the evening indoors, rushing to get dinner made and pets fed and laundry batched, looking up to see the clock somehow already at 8, or 9, or 10.

For the tree planting week we ate basic meals off-schedule, eschewed bedtimes, and paused all other chores. The days stretched long into the evening as we dug holes outside against the backdrop of the slowly changing sunset. On the surface it doesn't seem like something so laborious would have anything to do with a period of rest. But if the sabbath is about taking us out of the hustle of ordinary life to truly experience our lives and the majesty of creation, then digging holes is a great way to slow down those moments and feel the world around us — the birds and bugs and tiny leaf buds just starting to emerge. All of it.

That week was probably the most successful I've ever been at the Sabbath tradition, except maybe in 2020.

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A few weeks ago the news was filled with several articles with the same lede: how has your life changed since Covid?

I think a lot about that topic, now living a life that is largely unrecognizable from the one I had in the "before times."

I've written a bit about the changes I made because of those experiences — the most notable of which was deciding to have a child later in life. But largely I find it hard to put to words how Covid changed us for the better. It was like a forced Sabbath, having to cease all those little crutches I had that got me through my often-unhappy life — the cups and cups and cups of coffee, the endless "treats" of dinners and snacks out, the distracting opulence of the cities I frequented for work, the alcohol, the job struggles. All of it paused and suddenly I felt time, and there was time to think.

There's a paradox here, because Covid has killed and harmed so many. But five years on, I can't help but notice a bitterness in the tone of so many survivors — not because of the trauma they experienced, or the lives lost, but because of what they weren't allowed to do back in the early days. We couldn't have our Christmas party at work. We couldn't have our vacation. We couldn't have normal life. Schools were closed. We lost so much time.

It is a missed opportunity, to see it this way.

The modern world is governed by work and chores and dinners and deadlines and achievements. We worry about every moment and what it accomplishes. We're taught to fill our days with experiences and "stuff" — no amount is too much, and any amount is too little. Children’s days are packed with school and sports and activities and parties and toys. Adults’ days are packed with work and holidays and vacations and hobbies and shopping. When we’re too busy, time becomes another “thing” — a memory you stash away. You don’t experience your life as you’re living it.

That’s why we honor the Sabbath.

It’s not easy for me, and sometimes it takes a hundred trees to get me to stop and be in the moment. But we need to be open to those opportunities when they present themselves, in whatever strange way, to stop sometimes, sit in the grass, and watch the sunset with nothing else on our minds.