In today’s technological society we have become very familiar with reduction. In fact, many slogans of our time are described in terms of reduction: “Reduce, reuse, recycle”, “Reduced prices”, or “Reduced size.” And, often times, we can appreciate these simplifications of our lives; it saves money or it saves space or it saves the environment. But is there a point at which something that is meant to simplify our life becomes an oversimplification? Similar to when we realize that low prices for us here in America may mean poor working conditions for those who produce those cheap goods somewhere else? To make any sort of judgment about this requires that we attempt some understanding of life itself. What is life and how does it relate to all that composes it?
Reductionism has been a long-standing scientific perspective since Galileo Galilei first articulated it in the seventeenth century. It asserts, fundamentally, that all natural existence can ultimately be explained by a reduction of the phenomenon to its physical and chemical components. In effect, any event, process, or life, in any form, is simply understood by an understanding of its constituents. Meaning then, the understanding of the smallest and most irreducible part of physical existence would then constitute ultimate reality---the most fundamental knowledge. But when, if ever, does this simplification become oversimplification? The parts of life that we do not yet understand may be unattainable to us because of the nature of life itself and because of the important role we play in life while we observe it through experience.
The idea that the nature of life itself is resistant to such theoretical reduction has been a field of thought for many scientists and philosophers of our time. One such man was the late Michael Polanyi: Professor Emeritus of social studies at the University of Manchester. In one of Polanyi’s better-known essays, “Life’s Irreducible Structure,” he attempts to come to an understanding concerning this very enigma.
Polanyi asserts that, both animate life and mechanisms designed by human intelligence, e.g., machines, represent a set of “boundary conditions” which “harness” the law-like principles of physics and chemistry. These boundary conditions can be understood as any imposed restriction on nature enabling a mechanism toward some function. For example, how a Dam uses gravity to harness hydroelectric power. Consequently, living mechanisms, in the type of boundary they impose on nature, are synonymous with the type imposed by machines. According to Polanyi, these boundaries “form a whole hierarchy of consecutive levels of action” (124). Yet, the understanding of a particular organ in the body or part of a machine is only derived from the whole organism or machine, with respect to function and purpose. The boundary imposed cannot be inferred, then, from the physio-chemical laws themselves---just as we cannot infer the English language from the letters of the alphabet themselves. The letters provide us with a plethora of variability, but provide no meaning until they are bounded to a specified sequence to which we assign meaning. As Polanyi asserts, “Machine-like boundaries…cannot be defined in terms of the laws which they harness” (125). Their structure is “extraneous” to physical and chemical laws. For this reason, Polanyi holds that the structure of life “transcends” these laws.
For machines, this is true because we have provided them with specified information that enables them to function as we wish them too. Likewise, in biology there is a similar set or code of specified information that guides biological development---our DNA. It would not be an exaggeration to call DNA the language of life. And like a language, DNA is the means by which our genetic blueprint is communicated. Because of its very specific chemical structure, the sequence of DNA is completely neutral in terms of what sequence is expressed. Any possible sequence of DNA is chemically identical to all others. Thus, chemical laws have no means by which to influence DNA. Even so, the genetic information that is stored by DNA is very specific because the proteins needed for life are very specific. The reality of an independent code within nature is a great mystery because the code has been assigned a meaning that has forever eluded the explanation of both chance and law-like necessity. The information DNA retains is irreducible to any laws of nature that we know of, and yet is the basis for all animate life. This fact constrains Polanyi to ask the question: “Can the control of morphogenesis by DNA be likened to the designing…of a machine by an engineer?” (126).
Furthering this argument, Polanyi applies this subtle principle to the very nature of life itself. Like we see with the genetic information stored in DNA, the individual digits of this code can create a nearly infinite number of possible sequences; the majority of which mean absolutely nothing, like nonsensical words used in English. But the code imposes or reduces, from all possible sequences, those that mean the specific structure of a particular protein. This shows a reversal in the direction of reduction. Instead of reducing DNA to the chemical laws that garner it, the chemical laws are reduced by DNA to form a specific meaning that is replicable. This reversal, Polanyi asserts, can be applied to the nature of life itself. If this hierarchy, that Polanyi defends, is true, “…to reduce this hierarchy to ultimate particulars is to wipe out our very sight of it. [Therefore] Such analysis proves this ideal to be both false and destructive.” Wendell Berry, a contemporary writer and social thinker, takes this one step further.
In his essay, Is Life a Miracle, Berry asserts that such reduction, as is purported by the scientific community today, is inherently destructive and denies life a key aspect of its character. This facet of life is its ultimate mystery, which Berry holds to be the source of its dignity. Likewise, a machine as an analogue for life is both an incommensurate and destructive metaphor, which ultimately limits our potential understanding of it. Berry holds that such a metaphor is incapable of describing the incredible specificity and uniqueness that each of us experience.
That reductionism has become the common orthodoxy of materialism is no surprise. But, as Berry contends, describing life as miraculous infers the regeneration of non-material entities back to its rightful place in our consciousness. In our common experience, likewise, we realize that, “We have material existence only in the unstoppable, nearly unthinkable flux of the present” (185). And, as this is true, so is it also clear to Berry that the reproduction of our present experience is similarly impossible. No experience that we have had will ever be had again in exactly the same way. Our experience is, “…only in the present moment, not in the previous moment or in the following one” (186). And thus, the time in which we exist, the time in which we experience life, is immeasurable because it is infinitely divisible. Begging the question, “If it is immeasurably short, is it therefore metaphysical?” (187). In this light, Berry concludes that, if we can learn to recognize and appreciate the mystery of life, we will realize that we cannot dominate it. Our ownership of it is merely ceremonial and cannot express the way in which we are connected to it and interrelated with it. Likewise, our appreciation for life is limited, but ultimately, “[We]…must recognize its beauty, its preciousness, and its mystery” (188).
One of the primary aspirations of the human spirit is a will for knowledge. We search invariably for grounding and for understanding. When presented with the complexity and temporality of life, we often tend to attempt at generalizations out of desperation. Yet, we remain limited, and when we realize these limitations in ourselves, we often try to limit all of life so as to make it comprehensible. Certainly, some amount of this limitation can be helpful and sometimes necessary. But if material is relied upon as ultimate, if it is conceived as all that there is, destruction of life soon follows because we have understood life too generally. Life suffers from our attempts to understand its ultimate nature. On the other hand, humility towards the character of life essentially respects its primary dignity and complexity. It follows then, if we wish to sustain and relish this thing we call life, in humility, we must remain in defense of mystery.





Berry, Wendell. Citizenship Papers. Washington D.C:
Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003. Print.

Polanyi, Michael. "Life's Irreducible Structure." Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation
22 (December 1970): 123-131. Web. 


A couple days a week I work at the house of a Chiropractic doctor that lives in a nice big house just outside of Molalla. He owns about seventy or so acres out there, mostly timber, a field, and a couple ponds. From around twelve-thirty to five, every Tuesday and Thursday, he’ll have me doing odd jobs: chopping wood, limbing trees, blowing leaves, or whatever he needs done; all of which I do diligently, if not usually without any hassle or major mistakes. I’m a “good worker” I guess, at least, he says as much about me often enough. In spite of this, the reality is I’m practically broke when I look at how much I will be spending soon and how much I can reasonably expect to earn in the same amount of time. But Mr. Robinson faithfully pays me twelve dollars an hour for what I do. He must know the work isn’t worth that much. He ought to know he could probably hire someone with more experience for almost half what he pays me. But he does it anyway.
Of course, you could read a lot of motives into his generosity: guilt perhaps, maybe an “investment in the future”, or a brazen lack of economic sense. And all of these would, at least indirectly, clarify a view of the particular sensibility I think he is conveying and imparting to me. Many pessimists might attempt to reduce this sensibility to an instinctual urge to relieve past wrongs or even a merely self-interested appeal to a better future. But neither of these views portray the whole mystery that is compassion. And this, I think, is what Mr. Robinson’s generosity is attempting to grasp. Compassion is to suffer with another, and true compassion is always focused on the particular; it is personal, and it is intimate.
One can hardly think about compassion at all without being reminded of a story. It may be a story of our own, when someone did something very nice for us. And it may also be a story about some great man or woman of compassion like, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, or the Good Samaritan. Nonetheless, because compassion is so personal it is best understood as a narrative. Compassion constrains us to make this story or that story our story. It is inclusive, and as such it is never humanly comprehensive. Compassion does not generalize, and it takes scale into account.
Today, we hear a lot about loving the world and saving the planet. There are many good reasons for thinking in these terms and taking it seriously. But you will never be asked to feel compassion for the planet. The very thought is staggering and foreign because it is outside of human scale. In a time when communities are crumbling and so many families are broken, how can we hope to “save the planet?” If I can’t bring myself to love my neighbor, what are my chances of loving the world in any meaningful sense? The scale of compassion is very specific and always works its way from the bottom up. Before I can have compassion for my fellow man I must cultivate compassion for my next-door neighbor. The one with the dog that always knocks over the garbage can and the one who often seems to have forgotten what is appropriate to wear in public on a Saturday morning.
Because compassion is personal and particular, it is not something that you must feel and neither is it something that is purely chanced upon. Compassion is choice and, as such, is cultivated and built upon. Compassion is an immediate unity. It is a willingness to relate to the present with all that you are. It’s instinct is for mutuality; to suffer with, and sometimes, to suffer for another. It seeks the familiar and seeks to make all that it can grasp familial. And to the degree that we unite ourselves with those others around us, it is an act of self-denial and service; extended not from duty but from intimate affection---chosen and gifted to us. Compassion is a sensibility cultivated from mutual experience---both empathy and memory. And yet, compassion intrinsically resists classification and even limits. It remains a mystery when out of context. It wishes to be known in the action and in the narrative. It cannot be understood rationally nor by experience alone. It refuses to be domesticated because it unabashedly yearns for domesticity.
Underneath the good-naturedness and simple humility of Mr. Robinson, I think, lies the same resolve. His generosity towards me is because of a particular desire to make me a part of and familiar to himself. He knows what I am up against from his own experience as a young man having to find a way to pay for college. And he is not willing to see it as merely my problem, but rather as our problem; not because he cares about humanity but because he cares about me.

All my life I have lived next to several square acres of pasture and a big dilapidated barn. They have been a feature in my life for so long I have often taken them for granted; hardly even seen them at times. They aren’t mine but I’ve quite enjoyed long walks around them. I’ve been privileged to see the cattle grazing on them in winter and the hay maturing in them every summer, even before I knew it was a privilege. My family and I have often had a little garden at the back of our small house, but I had always thought of it as more of a novelty than a legitimate way of life. Like most American families today, we’ve never had land of our own to care for in any acknowledgeable amount. Yet, my mind looks back and reflects on those many and varied memories in this place that I’ve called home, and I see it in a very different light than I have ever before. This is largely due to one man and to this man’s sobering voice of sensibility and understanding. Wendell Berry is an author and a poet, philosopher and farmer that is driven by his heritage and beliefs to call a broken world back to its roots; it’s land and place. The influence of one individual on another is inestimable and ultimately mysterious.
In today’s society, especially at its highest levels, we suffer from what Berry often refers to as “hubris.” And the philosophical landscape appears to be no different. We, as humans, have always had an often harsh and sometimes deadly obsession for knowledge. In fact if there is any one thing that the greatest minds have desperately strived for it is just this. As it is often stated, “Knowledge is power,” and so it undoubtedly is. We have become very powerful as a collective group of creatures. We possess the means to assess and analyze a situation or idea to its seeming limit of understandability; at least in terms of the material that composes us and our world. And it is this material knowledge, in Wendell Berry’s view, that is at least in part, the source of our hubris today. Because we have found a method of proof for material knowledge that appears to answer so many questions, we tend to assume that this is the only knowledge that is capable of being known by us, and ultimately that it is the only sphere of reality that truly exists. Resulting in ideas such as Materialism and Utilitarianism. Of course, for Berry, this is simply untrue in light of our ecological history in terms of agriculture and the environment.
In many ways he simply puts words to thoughts of my own that I had not yet been able to express. And as I am witness to Berry’s investigation of agriculture and the culture that is formed from it, I see the validity of Berry’s metaphysical ideas. Ultimately humanity is incapable of being completely objective in any investigation because it is always wrong about the variable of humanity in the investigation. Because we can only know this moment and no other with certainty a calculation of the wholeness of existence is impossible and finally mysterious to us. To admit ignorance of these ultimate things is an act of humility that serves as a correcting force against hubris. Yet, without this correcting force we have assumed that the patterns that we see only look brighter and brighter in the ever more distant future. We seem to think that someday soon both natural selection and technological advancements will save us from both responsibility to community and to good work. But the arguments of mathematical efficiency have destroyed any chance of earthly continuity. As Wendell Berry so eloquently espouses, this is perhaps most evident in the way we produce our food of which science has played an ever more important role.
The effect that science has had on our culture, and agriculture specifically, is certainly almost incalculable. And, as Berry asserts, it also has submitted to, and often been the source of, the influence of utilitarianism and reductionism on social and political thought. Berry has stated that, while science has been misused and abused, it is his aim to “put science in its place,” not in a malicious way, but simply to make it an equal with the other various branches of human study and cognition. Only then will health, membership, stewardship, and wholeness receive the value that it lacks in agriculture and culture alike. Modern science has tended to surmise that understanding of a creature or phenomena can be attained through a simple understanding of what composes it, and inevitably we will, sometime in the future, learn what composes all life, thus reducing life to something we can ultimately understand. This idea is false, according to Berry, and is at the root of our environmental and cultural crisis today.
This reality, in its particularity, has had a lasting impact on me in several ways. I am forced to come to terms with my own ignorance about the ultimate character of life. “The way of ignorance,” as Wendell Berry puts it, is to some degree what keeps us from destroying it. Meaning, as a fact of technological history, once we believe we have understood something, we only do so by means of oversimplification. Ultimately we deny the nature of that thing its final complexity and, in the end, its harmony which destroys it. This is best understood and exemplified by Berry in the common metaphor for creature as machine and brain as computer. To some extent these metaphors are helpful, but ultimately don’t do justice to the life being described.
Spiritually, the implications of this fact are numerous both for Berry and myself. If all life is ultimately and truly mysterious and that we are truly destroying this life, the only way to understand life, if one wishes to preserve it, is as a gift. This is so because life will be oversimplified and reduced to a determinism that will finally destroy it. Stewardship will be lost in the swirling current of cause-and-effect logic. And to the extent stewardship is the way we must understand the relationship we share with our world, creation is the only word available to us that expresses this immutable relationship. For stewardship cannot be simply understood as the place of the most dominant competitor in a dog-eat-dog world. This simply transforms the word’s definition until it serves little significance that cannot be easily cast away. Consequently, any denial of the relevance or reality of morality can to this extent be rejected. In our time we have finally begun to hear Nature cry out against the wrongs that have been done to her, and that it is our behavior as humanity that has absolutely brought about this calamity. The question we have to ask ourselves now is whether or not we can continue to preach from both the religious and secular pulpits that how we act economically and how we act morally is of no consequence? If our society determines our choices, to that extent we are assured of future annihilation as a simple projection of historical trends since our beginning.
In all of this, Wendell Berry has been vicariously a mentor and guide. He has revealed a way of seeing the world through very old eyes, both in maturity and wisdom. I look out onto the fields in which I live and I sense my connection with them. Those memories of the gardening of past years now seems to me a gateway or rite of passage to a very different world. One that you do not have to see to believe, but one you must truly believe in to see at all.

In today's society we are accustomed to scientists and politicians spouting off statistics. For example: there was fifty percent of the expected voting turnout in the last gubernatorial race, or nearly eleven percent of working Americans are unemployed. The weatherman talks about a fifty to seventy-five percent chance for light showers on Thursday or ESPN tells us that the Cavs will beat the Lakers by a five percent margin. Statistical information and statistical probability mean something to us today; they can make or break arguments based on an event’s likelihood. Everyone understands chances. When we get in the car every morning, we know somewhere inside that it’s only a matter of time until it’s us in that wreck we hear about so often on the radio. Romeo knows that when he finally gets up the guts to talk to Juliet, enraptured with her enchanting blue eyes, that there's a chance he will get turned down, or that she won't be there this time, or she might have fallen for someone else. In a word, chance is the purest scientific ground for romance. Evolution is the denial of chance. The idea of risk is lost when our natural world is considered simply a conglomeration of material that can be completely described, and thus legislated, by mathematical determination.
Some mathematicians, even some very well known ones, have attempted to speculate at the likelihood of the unprovoked origination of natural life. Some, I'm sure, ascribe to modest numbers, say, 1 in a billion or 1 in a trillion chances. But at some mathematical limit if something with odds of such a high magnitude still happens, it has no probability. That phenomenon is a certainty; it involved a force that mathematics ultimately cannot describe. Because we exist, we have not beaten the odds; we have destroyed the relevance of odds. We are forced to use such words as “lucky” or “fortunate” or “blessed” to describe the natural world. In evolutionary social construction this demolition of probability only becomes more lucid. In essence, modern science today, firmly asserts that not far in the future a good scientist, be he a biologist or a psychologist, will be able to predict any circumstance and any behavior based on the causal circumstances. Our determination is set; the weatherman simply needs better meteorological science and the politician simply more accurate voting records to know what will inevitably and necessarily happen. The best description science has been, and probably necessarily, will ever be able to formulate about our world is as a machine that yields appropriate outputs for every input. Consequently, Romeo only needs a better understanding of biochemistry and psychology to know whether he has any chance with Juliet or not.
Romance is lost, decision is lost, and like the seer or soothsayer of old, science will be our guide to nearly psychic understanding. And we think this understanding will at last achieve a worldwide peace because the knight of romances does not need to loose his sword, but rather the fear of losing his own life, and thus a respect for it. Daring and bravery are reduced to dopamine levels and adrenaline infusion rates. His loss of fear is due to a loss of meaning in his decisions. Similarly, the princess need not be saved, except from the subjective sensation of being caught and stranded. She is ultimately caught in any case by the decree of circumstance. The evolutionist preaches freedom yes, but freedom from what? From the romantic, from destiny, from identity? And some will assuredly say, yes, yes of course, because Nature does not find use in such strange and abstract trivialities. But by this natural logic, the only reasonable conception of humanity, as an evolutionary environmentalist, is Nature's greatest mistake.
In Nature all around us we see equilibrium and balance. The sun makes the plants grow which are eaten by the rabbits that are eaten by the fox. The deer have the wolves and the fish have the eagles. They are dependent on each other in a complex web of relations. And all this is well and good. So good in fact that science boasts of Nature’s burgeoning complexity and insurmountable abilities, and such is quite nearly the case. But a good environmentalist knows of one animal that does not oblige to obey her rules. He knows very well that humanity is committing matriarchal homicide, driving the knife deeper daily as greed and lack of foresight rape the world and Nature of her nobler character. But I pose to you the question, if Nature has the power we claim her to possess, humanity has put a spell on her to which no sorcerer of science has found the antidote. If Nature truly has the might of selection that we espouse her, it would only be fair to say that we did not evolve from monkeys, no, monkeys evolved from us, and to them we must return. We have out-grown this world, we have over-evolved, and our power has corrupted the very fabric of material existence.
And it is this question that may prove to be the Achilles heel of evolutionary science: By what means and for what reason would Nature have the capacity and tendency to destroy itself? If our freewill is truly illusory, as some would have us believe, what conclusion can we surmise from the existence of a natural creature with power enough to destroy all of Nature? Could it be that Nature is really a romantic at heart? Could it be that she has willed into existence a creature that can begin to understand her responsibility? I doubt this, and I presume that any scientist would doubt it as well. Yet, what option is left to us? If competition is truly the natural norm, what advantage is represented by the destruction of all other competitors, as seems to have been the human evolutionary goal? It follows that, to the extent to which the theory of Evolution is wrong so too is Industrial Capitalism. Its results are similar and it is finally based upon the same premises as its biological brother.
If the results of the theory of Evolution are at all quantifiable, it would be difficult to deny the loss of a few very distinctive sensibilities. We have lost a truly romantic spirit because we have lost the fidelity of romance. We have forgotten our sense of what life is and its true health by a simple denial of our own needs, thinking them merely evolutionary artifacts from the distant past. Finally, we have lost any conception of the value of choice, and with this, any understanding of the responsibility we have in their effects. We, unlike Romeo, kill ourselves not because we think Juliet is dead, and wish to be with her in death. But rather we kill ourselves because we forget that she had ever lived.

The way in which we work as Americans has changed drastically over the last century. These shifts in how we work have followed the development of innovations in technology, beginning as far back as the steam engine and cotton gin, as well as in the physical sciences, opening the way for such advancements as genetically modified foods, pesticides, and herbicides. All of these developments have affected our work and communities. Yet, as the climax of the information age looms above us, we also are beginning to see that some of our work, some of our societal behavior, is accumulating a tangible cost to this world in which we live and grow, die and return to dust. This realization, whether new or old for the receiver, begs the question: How can we be good to our earth, our home? As Americans we work hard and more than most Western countries, but now, more than ever before, we must ask whether our industrialized and ever more information-based economy is truly serving the needs of our planet, the needs of our communities, and of ourselves. Our environment and human experience seems to be telling us that as our industrial and technological society grows larger and more powerful it tends to separate us from “good work” and from our identity as humanity.
Today, as always, work is the way in which we create wealth. Wealth being the means by which we sustain our lives, the way we put food on the table and a roof over our heads. At present, the vast majority of Americans produce wealth through employment. They have a job in some vocation where their boss or company or corporation pays them a wage in return for work done. You might work for General Electric, General Motors, or Monsanto, as many do, and they get a crisp check every month for their efforts. This has been a fact of life for American laborers ever since the Industrial Revolution when science and technology merged the visions of great names like: Edison, Ford, and Westinghouse. The world and especially the workplace seemed to be resonating with new ways to move faster, build better, and produce with blinding efficiency. Many families were accustomed to having to work hard and strenuously, but they did so at home or often in rural communities. But, because of ever more efficient machines and methods, the entrepreneurial American family was undersold and forced to move into the cities en masse which lead to living conditions of almost unimaginable depravity.
Yet, over decades and eventually centuries we corrected these problems for many. They still had to work for the company or corporation, but because of hard-won agreements, the employer was forced to compensate the employee in a satisfactory enough way to at least provide sustenance in some comfort. Even so, two key things have not been returned: economic freedom (for the vast majority) and a direct connection with place, land, and community. To help understand how our economic freedom has been lost, a study was done by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) in 2009, which shows the average real wage earnings of Americans compared to those workers productivity from 1949 to 2004. This study shows that from 1949 to approximately 1970 the average real wage of American workers increased nearly parallel with those same worker’s productivity. After about 1970 this drastically changed and while a worker’s productivity continued to increase dramatically, his real wage actually decreased. In short, this means that you would have earned more for less work in nineteen-seventy than you do today. One result of this is that our connection with place has also been severely inhibited. This is because, when you don’t earn enough money at your job to pay for what you need, buying on credit is always a convenient option, and when it came to one of the most expensive items an average wage earner buys, a house, he often bought it on credit, creating what was affectionately called the housing bubble. Many Americans have been forced to foreclose, leaving them with few options for good housing. And when a family cannot keep a home they are not likely to make sacrifices for their community and are incapable of making them for the environment.
If economic freedom and healthy communities are to be returned to us, and if the energy and environmental crises are to be resolved, the way in which we create wealth must change. A far greater number of families will need to be able to create their own income, meaning they will need to own their own means of production and their own land. The way in which this can be done is through a return to an agriculturally based society. In such a society, human and environmental concerns could not be as easily externalized because we would have an intimate understanding of the effects of our actions. The land could become our teacher and not something to be conquered and destroyed. Efficiency could be sacrificed to the degree that it is subordinate to human need both physical and spiritual. Society could again be seen as a complex web of interdependences rather than an individualized race for survival. We could begin to understand the importance of food production and its significance as a means to physical health.
Even so, not everything would be different and not everything could change so easily. Whether a society can unlearn its old habits completely or not, to do so would only be the repetition of a mistake already attempted. Better technology would always be developed and produced. The real difference would be a simple shift in the meaning of the word “better.” Likewise, the pursuits of science would have a similar change in standards from simple utilitarian needs to human ones. In effect, the purpose of all work would and must make a drastic turn.
Our present society suffers from a long history of misplaced values and dreams. We’ve attempted to remove ourselves from the land and our environment, the effects of which have been very harmful to both, and in so doing we have hurt ourselves as well. A new society is waiting to be built upon the ideal health of individual communities and the places in which they dwell.

Beads of sweat dropped silently into the void of space that separated me from death. As I looked down my eyes sensed color in what seemed to be a perfect portrait framed and signed by Ansell Adams himself. My vision seemed to pulse as though it wished to bring reality back to my mind as it perceived the landscape rush down and out with infinite speed to the horizon. The warm stone felt rough and porous to my blackened hands as only the volcanic rock of Smith Rock State Park can do. My good friend, Zach and I clung with confident respect to the stone suspended three hundred feet in the air. From the perspective of the swallows that flew like fighter-jets around us we must have looked like the colorful mountain baboons of the Andes as we made our slow ascent of this natural metaphor of beauty and beast. It was Monkey Face, bearer of some of the toughest and highest rock climbing routes in Central Oregon, and we were abreast its sheer pillar-like shape.
It was our junior year in high school, Zach and I. Since eighth grade we had been climbing together. Our adventures had led us all over Oregon as if we were hounds searching for excitement wherever we went. Together we had climbed at Horse-Thief Butte, Carver, and Smith Rocks, and up Mount Washington, part of Jefferson, and Three-Finger Jack. Everyday at school Zach would have his head in the clouds thinking about some new climb to do or hike to take, and found it quite difficult to focus on Mr. Sequeira’s instruction on how to factor polynomials. I, on the other hand always had my head in the books and he would often find it very difficult to get my head out of them. He would ask, “You wanna go climbing? I read about this new route and it sounds awesome. What are you doing this weekend?” and I would almost invariably say, “Homework. What are you gonna do?” But that was just my way of saying I wish I had the time. Even so, Zach and I had been playing around with the idea of climbing Monkey Face for quite awhile; it had loomed in our minds like a silent giant. You could plan on a full day of climbing no matter which way you decided to go up, and it required all the skills and determination that a climber could muster. Yet, one weekend in the early summer all the stars seemed to align and we realized with grave excitement that we could finally do it. With no little amount of trepidation we agreed to give it a try.
Preparing for such a climb is no small feat and requires quite a bit of planning. Ropes have to be inspected for cuts or abrasions, protective gear, like cams and nuts have to be cleaned and organized, and just enough high-energy food and liquids must be packed securely so they don’t drop hundreds of feet out of your reach.
“Did you get that rope coiled up right so it won’t be a hassle once we get off the ground?” Zach would say.
“Yeah, I think so, but we’re gonna have to be careful that it doesn’t get caught going up the first pitch or we could be in big trouble,” I piped back.
We woke up real early that Sunday morning. The air was crisp and harbored the ever-present scent of juniper. The gentle light of the sun had only begun to show its face in the distant horizon; it’s warmth welcoming yet cunning with the knowledge of its blazing heat still hidden by the awakening earth.
“We’d better get in the car and get over there before that sun comes up and eats us up on the hike in,” I said, seeing as we had stayed at a friends house a few miles from the park.
“You’re right, time’s getting short if we wanna get out before dark,” Zach said with a little excitement.
Once we had reached the base of the Monkey it had transformed from a looming but distant buttress into a towering and ominous ape above us, looking down with a scornful challenge in its gaze. We laid out all our gear there on the ground and put our harnesses on around our waists. By now, the sun was nearly up in full force and we bent under its yellow weight.
“On belay?” Zach said.
“Belays on,” I said, as I made the first few moves up and off the safe earth.
The first hundred feet slipped by with surprising ease. I moved with the flow of the rock, scanning it always for contours and shadows that might reveal a good hold to hang on with my one hand while the other searched for a notch to place another piece of protection. With each successive step I sensed everything, the grainy texture of the rock, whether it was solid or possibly loose and might break off in my hand. Every now and then I gazed up and tried to perceive the aspect and path of the face ahead of me. After a couple of hot strenuous hours we both reached a ledge where we could stand quite comfortably and take in the expansive view, let alone rest our swollen sore muscles for a few minutes.
“Almost there,” Zach said, with a tinge of apprehension in his voice.
“Yep, only one more pitch to go and we’ll be in the monkey’s mouth.”
As we rested there suspended out from the rock face by the webbing that held us I finally had a moment to pause and digest the whole experience. And that’s when I realized that I wouldn’t think of ever letting Zach do my math homework, yet only minutes before my life had been in his power. The trust exchanged in friendship is often taken for granted and abused, but the friend in whose hands you’ll put your life is a friend indeed.
From our vantage point we could see the great, mushroomed head jutting out and up, and it was easy to tell that this was going to be the hardest hundred feet of the climb. The last pitch was blank and overhung meaning you couldn’t climb the rock at all but rather had to use a special technique to ascend a long line of metal rings bolted into the rock face. I went first, clipping into one bolt, pulling myself up and clipping into another. Because the rock leaned back over top of me I was literally hanging out away from the rock connected only with a nylon rope and aluminum clips. The gentle breeze on the good safe earth would have been enjoyable, but here on the cliff’s face it was tantamount to a gale and swung you out and around with each jerk of your body for the next rung of the bolt ladder. Yet, after what seemed like ages I reached the mouth of the little cave embedded inside the spire, and waited for Zach to follow. It was quite a relief to finally feel secured to something solid once again. Luckily, Zach made it up a little while later, exhausted but in high spirits.
“Wwwhoo, that was tough,” he said as he climbed up into the cave.
“Yeah, tell me about it, but check out the view from up here.”
“Wow, that’s really amazing, but look at the sun, it’s already setting fast.”
And it was. We had been so focused on finishing the climb that we had all but forgotten the sun waning on the horizon. We ate quickly and prepared our rappel. To do so, we had to climb out and over the mouth of the cave with what seemed like miles of empty air below us, and setup our rope that would drop straight down to the ground on the opposite side of the rock spire. With this done, I sucked up all the air I could fit in my nervous lungs and began the two-hundred-foot descent to the ground. We were using two tough climbing ropes, but even so, they looked like so much spaghetti as they careened down in the open air. With a bit of unease and excitement I realized I was at least fifty feet away from the face where I had come and a hundred from the ground. I was suspended in nothing but air, motionless, like one of those cartoon characters before they plummet to the floor below.
No experience really compares with that; the sense of pure freedom with its imminent insecurity, as the sun dies like a firework in the western sky. You’re in a place that feels like paradise even though you know it can’t be home. But I knew Zach had tied the knots well and had my back all the way down. He would be following soon.

The fields looked like pieces of a patch-work quilt from the perspective of the deep cobalt sky, that is they would have, if one could soar over them with the perfect grace that the candle shaped herons did, their white, slender bodies cruising through the air with a long flame colored beak jutting-out in front. The fields were dark with rich soil and green rice or corn crops that seemed to smile up at you like the dark workers did as we talked and toiled hour after hour, the sun beating down on our backs threateningly. The name in Spanish for the fields where I worked was, la finca, and here in this place of sweat and beauty I lived and worked for nine months. These fields provided money and food to the adjacent orphanage nestled outside of a small town named San Juan Opico, located in the northern part of the central-American country, El Salvador. The orphanage was composed of several long cement-brick and mortar houses, painted beige and orange with a gray stripe around and bright red tile roofs; each house was surrounded by palm trees, often filled with coconuts, and mango trees, gigantic and gnarled, even great-leafed almond trees, with their many layered branches, would shoot out of the fertile slopes, like fractal patterns. And all the seven houses swept around in a great circle, following the path of the red-brick road, that surrounded on the inside, a great grassy space called, la cancha, where the boys would go out and test their skills with the idol of their generation, a white and black checkered ball.
I had come to live at the orphanage at the request of my sister who was also living and working there with her husband. Not only for this reason had I come, but also because I had been considering the idea of travel and service somewhere outside of the United States for some time, and as soon as I had graduated from high school I planned to go. That very same summer, after graduation, and after a great deal of negotiation, I found myself in a great white whale of a plane heading south, and toward a country whose language I hardly knew. Nonetheless, I was prepared to spend the better part of a year working with its people. Life changing decisions are always made too lightly yet shamefully, often never made. This is so, because the magnitude of meaning to your life invested in such a decision is incalculable, yet fear will never be the proper guide of an adventurous soul.
Touching down in a country you know will be your home for quite awhile can be a very strange and exhilarating experience. Luckily my sister and a few others were ready and waiting in a little white-gray van outside of the airport. The air was pungent with smells of bustle and smog, tobacco smoke and exhaust from trucks and buses, and people dashing here and there with suitcases set to burst any moment. They all seemed to give me a look-over, like I was a rather harmless zoo animal that had escaped from its cage. And from my cage I had sprung! Everything seemed so new and vibrant, every movement I seemed to sense and store away to later analyze and understand.
It was about an hours drive from the airport to San Juan Opico and the orphanage, which lent itself well to a fuller understanding of what life was like in this over-populated and exploited country. People were living everywhere it seemed, the landscape was hilly and surprisingly lush with an emerald shimmer coming off the trees. Wherever someone lived, something was being sold. Lined-up along the highway were shabbily covered spaces filled with coconuts or fruits, candies or cashew nuts. Every time you stopped at a light, it seemed that some young girl or boy would run up to your car window and try to sell you a newspaper or gum, and time and again you would have to tell them, "No, no puedo comprarlo ahora. Lo Siento.”, or just ignore them all together.
Within the first week of living at the orphanage I began working seven or eight hours a day with the mason, who also was one of the parents of the houses there. Everyone called him, "Abuelo", or grandfather, because that's exactly what he was to everybody. He was an older man, in his late fifties maybe, with very dark brown skin and ivory white teeth. His face was very large and long with lips that resembled a horse's in their size and limber character. The size of his face corresponded well with the extent to which his belly extended beyond his waist, yet he was not very tall, no larger than five feet in stature, giving him a gate that was somewhat more like a waddle, as he swayed to the left and then to the right with each successive step. He wore a small straw hat atop his head that looked as though it were some ancient artifact from years of sweat and sun. But in spite of his comedic appearance he was a strong man and had hands as thick and crushing as any hoof of an ox. The character to which he subscribed was often stern and calculating, yet gentle when it was needed. For the first few weeks it was just he and I working, usually in silence, partly because that was his way, and partly because I could barely say six words correctly in Spanish. Every time I would say something he would look at me with wide questioning eyes trying to decipher what I had tried to communicate, or he would simply try to correct me, either of which would usually serve to confuse me more. Our work often involved mixing concrete by hand. Mixing the sand, gravel, and concrete powder together was very hot and hard work. Usually you felt like a knife could be used to cut a block of the humid air right out of the sky and drink it in. The concrete had a very distinct smell, too, like ashes from a campfire or chalk floating up after a black board had been wiped clean. Through all of it, I felt safe with Abuelo, he was a very religious man and traditions of honor and loyalty seemed to run deep in him. When we had worked together for a few weeks, we struck a harmony, a physical bond of movement that resembled some great significance in my own mind; he accepted me and taught me about life in silence, like any grandfather would teach his own grandson.
On the days that I didn't work with Abuelo I would work in the fields, sometimes with the rougher yet good-natured field-hands; they would all tell rather lewd jokes and laugh long, showing off their sparse sets of teeth. They talked of times past; better times and worse times, about the land and how long it would be until it was time to harvest the maize or arroz. They also, wore big straw hats that only partially shielded their dark molasses skin from the looming yellow orb above that often seemed to be the source of strange ringing sounds made by cicadas as they sang.
A few times, they would tell me to go and help in the green houses that stood on the far right side of the fields all lined up in two rows like a concentration camp. There, it was shaded and cooler than in the direct sun, meaning vegetables like peppers and tomatoes were grown here. Often what I would do is weed row after row of cilantro or onion plants for hours on my aching knees in the moist dirt. While weeding, I would listen to classical music on my ipod: Rochmaninov’s concertos and symphonies by Tchaikovsky, Mozart’s sonatas and suites by Edvard Grieg. There in the grime, my fingers sore and my breathing steady it was as though I were becoming part of the earth and the music. The rhythm of my movements seemed to match the rhythm of the notes and the rhyme of growth and death. In those moments the soil became a sanctuary, and I became part of it; the earth had a beat and tempo and I could hear it washing over me. What began in that moment was a romance with the land and a sense that it would yield to me and give me peace and significance.
The work that I did there in El Salvador and the experiences I had are of inestimable meaning to me. Yet, its something so few people get the chance to really understand here at home. Pent up in our houses and cars, cubicles and cyber lives, we lose connection with the creation that surrounds us, and the people that make nature what it is. Physical work isn't something that many find meaning in anymore, or value in the way it deserves. To find this truth for myself, I had to travel several thousand miles to live with people whom I did not know, but grew to love, and return to the roots of who we are as humans. The significance of the decision I made to live in El Salvador for those nine months cannot be overestimated.