Sweetness lost, sweetness regained
A meditation at the start of Lent, and the start of sugaring season
Sugaring season has begun here in Vermont. For about a month, winter has been steadily losing its grip on the land. The days are gradually lengthening, the sunlight intensifying, and the black-capped chickadees are singing with ever greater confidence. There’s a long, pregnant season of anticipation where’s it’s definitely still winter, yet one can feel the energy rising on the land. It’s possibly my favorite time of the year. There’s little to do on the land, yet when I walk across the crusty snow I can feel the life of the new growing season underfoot.
Then, sometime around the end of February or the beginning of March, we have a stretch where the days consistently rise above freezing, while the nights still drop well below. It doesn’t matter if there’s still three feet of now on the ground. In the eyes of a Vermonter, this means winter is over, and sugaring season has begun. The freeze-thaw cycle stimulates sap to rise and fall along the outer wood of the maple trunk, and pressure builds within the tree’s vascular system. When you drill a small hole in the tree the sap comes dripping out. I like to wait for a day when the sap will be already flowing to tap our first trees1, and then everyone in our family takes a turn sticking their tongue under the new tap to catch the first taste of sweetness from the land of the new year.
After setting the first taps, the new year of wild food harvesting has begun. Our relationship with our food shifts from living off of our stores (both kinds of ‘stores’ - what we have stored from the past season, and what we buy at market) to receiving directly from the bounty of the land. I’m reminded that I live in a world of abundance, and that I am a creature of this earth, sustained by the life-blood of other living creatures. In March it’s the maple trees, in late April it will be fiddleheads, wild leeks, Japanese knotweed and dandelion greens. Sometime in May, it will be milkweed and cattail shoots. I haven’t planted or managed any of this - it’s all gift.
I am fed not by my ingenuity, but by the Creators’ abundance. Of course, that’s true for all of us. The gift of sugaring, and of harvesting wild food more generally, is that our dependance on Creation becomes obvious. The living connection is right in front of me, and it’s easy to maintain a vivid awareness of both my own smallness and of the Creator’s goodness. I find this easiest to do while harvesting wild foods. It’s a bit more abstract for me when gardening, but it’s still very easy and natural to live in wonder and gratitude for my food. When buying from another local farm, it’s slightly more difficult. When purchasing raw ingredients from a store, I remain aware that my food is coming from the earth, yet I have to be more deliberate with my intention to praise and give thanks. When I buy a snack in a crinkly package at a gas station, it’s rare for me to even recognize it as something that came from the ground - it’s in my body without so much as a thought as to where it came from.
I certainly don’t believe wild food harvesting, or gardening, or homesteading is necessary for salvation. I’ve seen plenty of people live ‘off the land’ from a scarcity/survivalist mindset whose hearts have grown hard and bitter. I also know many city dwellers who are radiant bearers of God’s love and mercy to others, whose diet is largely cut off from direct connection to the land. From my observation, they usually have more gratitude and satisfaction in their meals than the homesteaders who don’t pray. Additionally, opportunities for wild harvesting or gardening are simply not available to many who live in an urban setting.
Yet, for those of us who do, I’m convinced that participating in food gathering and production can be a powerful reminder of who we are, as creatures living off the bounty of Creation. It centers the relationship of blessing and dependence, and allows us to see and feel our true relationship to both God and the natural world. When we tap our maples, we say a prayer of thanksgiving, ‘Thank you God for the maples’. We also talk to the trees directly - ‘Thank you Sister Maple for your sap’. In doing this, our children grow up in a participatory universe, aware of both their Divine Source and that they inhabit a world of living relationships. We don’t have to sit down and tell them these things - it’s simply a part of their way of life. It’s one of the small steps we take in recovering right relationship between God, humans, and the rest of the community of life.
Among the indigenous people of our region, the Abenaki, there’s a story that, in ancient times, maple trees once gave pure maple syrup when tapped, instead of the sap that we currently receive which needs to be boiled down to about a fortieth of its original volume to become syrup. In this story, the trees also gave their syrup year-round, instead of the current four to six week season we experience. They say that the Creator designed it this way, and life was simple, sweet and easy in the Creator’s original plan.
Then, a generation of adults came that decided the sweetness of the syrup was so marvelous that they would no longer live the rest of their lives, and they instead simply laid down under maple trees, broke off twigs, and let the syrup drip directly into their mouths. They remained laying under the trees for days and weeks, growing so fat on the syrup that soon they could no longer even get up. The rest of their culture and village was falling apart - the gardens were filled with weeds, the deer population became unsustainable without hunting, the wigwams (homes) were falling apart, and the children and the elders were cold and hungry with nobody to care for them.
The Creator looked down on this situation with sorrow. He had wanted it to be easy for the people, but the people could not remain in this state. So, he send his messenger, Gluskabe, to carry a large bucket and fill it up at a lake. Gluskabe was then sent around to all of the maple trees, to pour water down their trunks until their sap became diluted to the strength we now have today. When this happened, the adults under the trees began to get hungry and lose weight drinking the now watery sap. Eventually, hunger drove them to return to their old way of life, and to begin to rebuild their culture. The Creator then informed them that they could still enjoy the sweetness of maple syrup, but now they would need to labor by gathering firewood and boiling down the sap if they wanted to enjoy the sweetness, and from now on the sap would only run one season of the year.
When I’m working with maple sap, I often think of old Gluskabe and this story. Our culture’s relationship with food often reminds me of the people that got stuck under the maple trees, living off nothing but sweetness to their own demise. The industrial food system provides a dizzying array of hyper-palatable foods that have little nourishment. We can regularly taste an intensity of flavor - especially sweetness - that would be unimaginable to a pre-industrial person, yet we rarely feel the deep satisfaction of being fully nourished. Our sugary and chemically flavor-enhanced food numbs us to the natural sweetness of life. Trained to hyper-sensation, wholesome food that was once satisfying becomes bland to our taste. What was once a gift becomes the raw ingredient for our diminishment2.
Of course, this is true in many realms in the modern world. Berries no longer taste sweet to kids raised on a steady diet of candy and soda. Ordinary women, and the emotional demands of a real relationship, lose their appeal to men who watch porn. The accomplishments at a job site pale in comparison to the worlds a teen can conquer in video games. Going to basketball game at the local high school just can’t compete when you can turn on the TV and watch the best athletes on the planet. Who has time to read a novel when there’s Youtube and Tiktok? Over-stimulation leads to numbness, which leads simultaneously to addiction and to a numbness to the goodness of ordinary life.
Lent is offered as an antidote to this pernicious pattern. Lent is all about stripping down, giving up, letting go, doing without. The reason is not self-punishment, but to support the restoration of our natural capacity to be in healthy relationship with God, with others, and with Creation. When we fast, we begin to regain a natural taste for the sweetness of God’s presence, both within and in the ordinary moments of life. As with the Abenaki tale, the Christian story teaches that too much indulgence leads to misery. In both the Abenaki story and the Christian story, God made the world very good, humans proved unable to live well in a world of superabundance, and God had to re-set the world under leaner conditions for our well being.
In the Abenaki story, the Creator still gives the People a way to experience the full sweetness of the original syrup - it’s just that now, they have to work to obtain it. This is also the Christian story - the joys of Eden (loving union with God and loving union with Creation) are still available to us. Yet like the chastised syrup-guzzlers, we must now access that sweetness through the path of conscious discipline and hard work. TheWay of Christ is that path - it is not easy (one might even call it a narrow way3), but it leads to life.
P.S. In about a month, I’m planning to change the title of this Substack to better reflect the central theme of these posts - supporting transformed life in God. The name ‘Metanoia of Vermont reflections’ was originally intended as a placeholder by a friend who set up the ‘stack to get us started. So please keep an eye out for posts from ‘The Land of the Infinite’ - it’s the same Substack!
Serious, commercial sugar makers don’t have this luxury, as they need to get hundreds or thousands of taps in ahead of time to catch the first ‘run’ of the season.
This dynamic is part of the fallen human condition - without grace and conscious effort we all have a tendency to develop excessive or unbalanced relationships with material things, when given the opportunity. It’s not unique to our culture, though we’ve become particularly adept at producing industries devoted to supplying the excess.
Matthew 7:13-14
I really enjoyed reading your sweet essay and your reflections on how we have become so alienated from Nature and from our Creator. So important to re=establish a mindful relationship with where our food comes from, and not take it all for granted as we mostly do.
On a practical note, I was surprised you included Japanese Knotweed in your wild food. Here in West Cornwall in the UK, it has taken over whole valleys, and is considered a huge problem, as non-native plants sometimes are. I have never heard that it is edible.
Dear Mark--thank you for this wonderful epistle....I just got back from our home in Italy where so much of what you describe is a way of life. I was unable to sleep and got up and there was your post to give my churning mind some rest. Thank you my precious brother. george