THE MENDING CYCLE

My third son, Gabriel, was born at just after Christmas, stillborn. The feet of this little soul were one inch long. He was buried on a frigid January day, “in the bleak midwinter,” as Christina Rossetti so aptly describes it, when “earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” To prevent my heart from breaking, I penned a poem to hold the memory of our son, then transformed it into a song to sing with our other four children, but a flood of tears prevented me from singing it through to the end.

Gabriel’s birth almost led to the death of his mother, my faithful and courageous wife. But even beyond her near-death experience, imagine for a moment the emotional trauma of the mother who carried him for many months, who prayed and wept and longed for him, who bore him in pain, and who loved him with all the love that only a mother can know.

I have heard the word “closure” bandied about a lot these days, but I am unsure whether such a thing exists at all. A profound sadness, a wound to the soul, the heart, and the mind, does not simply disappear with time; it remains an integral part of us even as we move forward with our lives. Peace is, perhaps, more like a mile marker along the road of life than like a gate that has closed behind us. Emotional trauma takes time to heal, to mend.

At the time of little Gabriel’s death, my wife wrote down some thoughts for others who might find themselves in a similar situation. “It may take years to find healing,” she wrote. “Don’t be surprised if it takes time to find peace; the grief will always be with you.”

In a gesture of love that still touches my heart, the grave of our tiny son was lovingly tended for many years by a former prison inmate, a man and friend whom I loved with all my heart, and who himself was laid to rest, some years later, only a hundred feet from our son.

Recently I came across a beautiful and thoughtful passage on the subject of healing and recovery. In his essay, To Mend a Farm, Adam Nicolson speaks of the life cycle of birds.

At the core of a bird’s year is a phase of mending. Reduced to its essentials, the bird pattern is this: find a territory, get a mate, raise and feed the young to the point where their lives are their own and then withdraw and mend. In late summer, in England, nearly all the birds fall silent. They have undergone the stress of raising one or more broods of chicks. Their bodies are exhausted, their plumage often unrecognizably torn and frayed. And so in the quiet and dark of a thorn thicket or the depths of a forest, their bodies repair themselves. Internally, all the organs devoted to breeding, to the production of sperm and the laying of eggs, shrivel away. Even that part of their brain that is dedicated to singing the songs with which they establish their territories and attract their mates shrinks to nothing, waiting in abeyance until needed again the following year. The birds molt their old used feathers and new ones sprout in their place – not all at once; the birds are never left naked or flightless – but one by one new feathers appear until the birds are equipped again. The bodies of those that must fly south gather reservoirs of fat on which to make the journey. (1)

Withdraw and mend.

Rest and recover.

The mending cycle is steeped in wisdom and mystery, and its vital importance is imbedded in many areas of our lives.

The most obvious example of the mending cycle is our day-night circadian rhythm. The natural day/night boundary almost guarantees that we take the necessary time for rest and recovery at the end of each day. The sun rises and floods the earth with light, and we arise, rested and ready for a new day. With the setting of the sun, we are unable to continue our work, and so we are forced to slow down, to rest, to recover. The day/night work/rest mending cycle prevents our bodies from becoming exhausted, enabling us to rise in the morning with new vigor and energy.

The turning of the seasons is another example of the mending cycle. During the spring, summer, and fall, we prepare the land, plant the seeds, nurture them, then harvest the abundant crops. But when the extreme temperatures of winter arrive, making the earth frozen, hard, and unwieldy, the crops will not grow. In addition, the cold work conditions force us to retreat indoors. And so we pause, we rest, we recover, and prepare for the next cycle of hard physical labor which will begin in the spring.

With the advent of electricity, greenhouses, and cold frames, we are now able to push back against the natural order of things, to stretch the boundaries of the day/night cycle and the summer/winter cycle. We can work in the night, if we so desire, and we can grow crops later in the season. But we would be wise to avoid disrupting the mending cycle to too great a degree. Without proper rest and recovery, we falter and weaken, and if this is continued for a long period of time, we will eventually fail and die.

Farmers too understand that, to sustain the long-term health of their soil, they must rotate their crops, and even occasionally allow their fields to lie fallow. The gardens and fields and pastures, which have given of themselves and produced crops, need time off to heal, to recover. The season of winter provides this in a natural and wonderful way and shows that the mending cycle is a vital component of responsible land management.

The human body itself gives testimony to the healing cycle. From infancy to youth to middle age, and on to the grand triumph of becoming a senior, our bodies absorb injury and pain, wounds, bumps, and bruises. After each such altercation with the world around us, a time of mending is required, and when that is completed, the body emerges renewed and refreshed.

That leg you fractured rolling down an abandoned overgrown ski slope, which gave you such a high fever that you fainted in the shower, healed perfectly well at the end of it all.

The time you swung between two upright fenceposts and your left hand slipped and the full weight of your body plunged onto the top of the left post, splitting your forehead open above the eye so that you bled ferociously, that one healed fine too, given a few weeks. And the scar hardly shows.

That college basketball player, barely a third your age and high on something at the time, who intentionally drove his knee into your midsection, breaking three ribs and leaving you on the gym floor with your tongue split in half and searching for the breath of life for what seemed like seventeen minutes. In spite of some bad nights of wheezing, those ribs healed well, as good as new.

When that blasted grapevine that you were swinging on snapped mid-stroke and you plunged thirty feet to the forest floor, fracturing a vertebra, your wedding went ahead as planned four days later, even though it was necessary for you to spend several months in an upper body brace which forced you to work standing up.

The mending cycle, working its remarkable magic.

To some, it may be breaking news that even writing a book is tiring business. A writer who has poured his or her heart and soul into a novel for months, perhaps even years, needs to take time off before launching into a fresh new project. Try to imagine the state of exhaustion of Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy after completing their books Les Miserables and War and Peace, both over half a million words long! Creative expression can be a truly exhausting occupation, and rest and recovery are an important part of the process. Artistic inspiration can only flow from a rested and peaceful mind.

According to the Bible, even God Himself needed time for recovery and refreshment, and small wonder! The book of Genesis tells us that for six days he labored, creating the firmament, the earth, lights to separate the day from the night, the waters, plants and trees yielding seed and bearing fruit, seasons, living creatures (birds, fish, great sea monsters, cattle and “creeping things and beasts of the earth”).

Then . . . He rested on the seventh day. And to think that I’m exhausted after hauling a couple of loads of compost to my wife’s vegetable garden in a Gardenway cart!

In the sport of running, it is widely recognized that days of rest and recovery are just as important to long-term success as days of hard training. The body needs time to recover after running long and hard. This may take the form of a walk, a short easy recovery run, or even a day of complete rest. And even within a training run, the mending cycle can be applied by mixing short walks in between hard intervals, sprints, and hill workouts. This allows the heart rate a chance to drop, a sort of coffee break for the body. Like the “withdraw and mend” cycle of the birds, the Run-Walk-Run method is an in-race form of the mending cycle.

There is even an emotional component to the mending cycle in running. When I first began to run, it was because my body was breaking down and I was gaining weight. I began running and training, therefore, because of my physical needs. But after doing it for some time, I realized that the emotional rest and relief that I gained from running far outweighed the physical benefits. Running in nature, I found a peace that absolutely changed my outlook when I got home; all my frustrations, concerns, and worries were gone, and all the world looked fresh and new. Yes, I needed the physical exercise which prevented me from looking like an over-seventy version of the Pillsbury Doughboy, but the most important benefit is the peace that comes from being immersed in nature. When I need to mend emotionally, when my mental stress and tension simmer to the boiling point, I go running in nature. It works every time.

Even pinecones can teach us something about the mending cycle.

My kitchen window looks out onto a lovely meadow, where as often as not, a family of five deer graze serenely. A couple of months ago, I witnessed a barrage of pinecones cascading out of the white pines outside the window. At first, I thought it was the work of a convocation of eagles or an unkindness of ravens, energetically detaching the pinecones from the top branches in a grand free-for-all. But apparently, it was simply time for the cones to drop, and drop they did, thousands of them, over the course of one day. (I have seen ginkgo trees pull the same trick, dropping their brilliant golden leaves within an hour, creating a golden carpet on the ground.)

I was puzzled by the astonishing volume of pinecones this past fall, for I could not walk across my lawn without crunching dozens of them underfoot. Putting on my research cap, I learned that pinecone seeds are an important source of food for squirrels, chipmunks, mice, chickadees, woodpeckers, finches, nuthatches, and other birds. The number of pinecones produced varies dramatically from year to year; some years the trees produce a poor harvest, other years they produce a mediocre crop. And then, randomly and dramatically, there will be a tremendous bumper crop thrown in for good measure. These highly variable crop sizes are known as “masting,” and each species of tree has its own masting cycle.

The benefits of the masting cycle are many. In good harvests, there is a marked increase in the volume of pollen in the air, which promotes the spread of new trees over a wider region. A weak harvest of pinecones results in less seed predators in subsequent years, and erratic harvest cycles keep the insect population off balance, thereby reducing their numbers for future harvests. Most notably, the lean years allow the trees to recover from the sensational effort of producing a bumper crop, and are, in effect, nature’s version of rest and recovery, the mending cycle.

Recently a friend and I spent a few hours off-road biking on the gravel carriageways along the Shawangunk Mountain ridge in New York, past Lake Maratanza, to the spectacular lookout at Sam’s Point. That section of the ridge is covered with wind-swept dwarf pitch pines (Pinus rigida), gnarled and twisted and covered with lichen, many of them hundreds of years old, but hardly a specimen over twenty feet tall. Eight years ago, in 2016, a fire swept over a swath of two thousand acres on this ridge. It was the first large fire that the area had experienced in seventy years, and it incinerated fully three-quarters of the pines. My friend and I were shocked to see the devastation, thousands of burned, charred, and truncated vertical stumps.

But here’s a fascinating thing! Pitch pines produce serotinous cones, which means that fire is required to break open the scales of the cone so that the seeds can be released, germinate, and grow into new trees. Fire, typically a disastrous event, is the trigger for new growth. And so eight years after the fire, my friend and I were witness to thousands of new young trees thriving among the charred stumps. The ecosystem on the burned portion of the Shawangunk Ridge is being energetically reinvigorated, gaining new strength in preparation for the next big fire, yet another example of nature’s astounding mending cycle.

Perhaps most importantly of all, the mending cycle works to heal our emotional lives. Times of difficulty and trauma are inherent to the human experience. We all have our dark days of loneliness, depression, separation, estrangement, serious health issues, or even the death of a loved one. After significant events such as these, a time of healing and recovery is necessary. Like the birds who need to withdraw and mend after completing their nesting cycle, and like the grief that my wife and I experienced at the birth and death of our son Gabriel, we need time to breathe in, to relax, to heal, to weep, to pray, to gain new strength of mind and heart.

I have friends who are veterans and who suffer from PTSD. Their recovery is often incomplete, and they are not always the easiest people to be around. In addition to physical exhaustion and injury, soldiers who have experienced the horrible tumult of battle are subjected to overwhelming mental and emotional stress. To mitigate this, the United States Army offers, to soldiers who have completed a tour of duty, a leave of absence for thirty days for rest and recuperation, commonly referred to as R & R. Surrounded by love, compassion, and support, the opportunity for time off can clearly assist in the healing of these veterans.

A friend of mine has experienced some very difficult things in his life. Attempting to find peace and healing, he began taking time off work every day to build a hiking trail up a mountain in the Adirondacks. After a morning of stressful work, he would head up onto the mountain and continue his work on the trail. Heavy stones needed repositioning with crowbars, dirt was cut from the high side of the trail and deposited between the rocks, branches were cleared, roots were clipped, and trail markers mounted on trees.

One day this summer I had the opportunity to climb the mountain with him, and I was truly impressed at the extensive work he had done. Along the trail he had stashed supplies and tools in tents which he left on the mountain. Hiking together, we stopped to enjoy several wonderful lookouts, to identify birds that gloried in song all around us, and to take photos of wildflowers that were everywhere. At the top of the mountain, he had cut down some trees to create a view, and now Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York, was clearly visible. This trail on the mountain was a place of refuge, a sanctuary of peace. The taxing physical labor, combined with the beauty of nature, was a gift that brought my friend much emotional healing.

Like my Adirondack friend, each of us have times when trouble overwhelms us, leaving us emotionally exhausted and drained. Then we are like a well from which all the water has been drawn, and only dry hard ground is left at the bottom. When this happens, we need to take the necessary time for emotional recovery, to allow the mending cycle to complete its wondrous work.

1. Originally published on Plough.com as https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/sustainable-living/to-mend-a-farm,
December 5, 2023. Used by permission.

Kirk Wareham: I am a father of six, a grandfather of seven, a lover of nature, and an avid reader. My passion for reading led me to a love of writing. My works have been published by Notre Dame Magazine, Passager Journal, Hearth & Field Magazine, Plough Publishing House, and other publications. Several links to published essays are included below.