Speaking into the Unknown

On leaving a home and garden, and the words that attend it

A prefatory note. If you are reading my writing here for the first time, welcome. I have not written on this newsletter for some time, for reasons I’ll mention in the essay below, but I expect you’ll see at least a little more from me in the future. I’m not a quick worker and not really a blogger, but I try rather pretentiously to write little essays in this space, concerned with gardening, language, life in the church, and life in the world. For an introduction, you might try my essay on losing peach blossom to an early frost or my essay on gardening and the Easter Vigil. Rather than the literal garden, however, today I begin a series of reflections on the garden of language. Thanks for reading.

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Futurity

“A certain awesome futurity, then, is the inescapable condition of word-giving—as it is, in fact, of all speech—for we speak into no future that we know, much less into one that we desire, but into one that is unknown.” - Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage”

As I write, my family has come to inhabit a strange period of uncertainty. My writing in this space came largely to a halt two years ago, as I began two large projects that should reach their culmination soon: composing a book manuscript, and moving out of our home. Now that both endeavors seem close to their completion, I find myself returning to this space to reflect.

The uncertainty in which I find myself comes not from the book—which is safely in the hands of my wonderful editor, Casie Dodd, at Belle Point Press—more about that later—but rather from the move, which has come to a strange place of limbo. I won’t tire you needlessly with the details, but suffice it to say that we have moved out of our old home into temporary lodgings, put all of our stuff in storage, found a new house, and are now waiting on the machinations of others, mostly bankers, to be able to complete the process, with no definite date on which that blessed event will occur. We ourselves have been ready for weeks, and indeed we originally expected to move weeks ago, and so we find ourselves in this frustrating interregnum, already but not yet moved.

All this is rather banal, though it feels like life and death in the moment. We will eventually close on our houses, make our move, and life will roll on. But the waiting, no less than the move itself, serves as a visceral reminder of how we speak and act only on partial knowledge. With closing dangling over me, close but not arriving on any date I can predict, I can make no definite commitments. I can only say: “if the Lord wills, we will go to such and such a place, and do such a thing.”

I could say the same of our ownership of the house we’re now selling. Six years ago, when we purchased that home, I had my doubts about how long we would stay there. And yet we invested ourselves in the place: we planted dozens of fruit trees and berry bushes, and I wrote extensively about our garden on this newsletter, in the essays that will soon become my first book. We were invested in the place. And yet even as we dug the planting holes and I ruminated over the garden in my writing, uncertainty was growing.

I write more about the decision to leave that home and garden in the book, and so I won’t rehash it here, except to say that we struggled with the home’s isolation in a rural area. As relieved as I am to leave that isolation behind—and I have been working toward our departure from that home for three years—departing from that home is also a loss, both of the fruit trees we nurtured and the context of my most sustained and meaningful writing project to date. As I gave my labor and my words to that place, I did not know the future that would come to me and to the place, and so I spoke into the unknown, never confident that my words would bear fruit.

If we are honest, every time we speak we venture into the unknown. Even so purely instrumental a use of words as a request for an appointment ventures out into the flux of time and change: we make our plans, but the outcome of even a commitment one hour in the future cannot be guaranteed. How much more so, when we seek to give our words in some more intimate and meaningful way, when we define a relationship, describe an identity, or document an experience.

We might think here of making vows, but we need not limit ourselves in that way, for every act of speech, rightly understood, commits us. If I am honest, when I speak I bind myself to those words, I put my reputation behind their honesty, even if the words mark only a transient feeling or a banal observation. To speak is a weighty matter, then, since we commit ourselves in our words, and yet we commit ourselves out of a basic ignorance about what the future will bring. Word-giving places us out upon the slimmest of branches above an unknown gulf, teetering on the slender reed of our own sincerity.

Today we inhabit a society dedicated to the elimination of vulnerability, in which people seek to render themselves technologically, legally, and psychologically impregnable; and so, this awesome futurity of language will tend to seem like a problem, a chink in the armor, a flaw. And yet to speak into the unknown is the very stuff of our humanity. We cannot hold back. We cannot keep ourselves safe. If we do not submit ourselves to the risk of giving our words—giving ourselves—we retreat not only from danger but from life and love.

And so good words, lively words, will be animated and complicated by the knowledge that they deliver us into mystery.

I can’t regret the uncertainty or the futurity of my writing about the garden that I have left. I could not have written with honesty and humanity in any other way except to give my words, to give myself, over to the unknown.

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