To the Q’ero people of the Peruvian Andes, the most important principle to learn and practice in life is what they call “Ayni” — the understanding that everything in the universe is interconnected, and that a respectful balance must be carefully maintained through cycles of reciprocal giving. Similar notions of reciprocity abound in traditional cultures worldwide.
In modern American culture, our mythology is “winner take all,” “every man for himself,” “survival of the fittest,” and “he who dies with the most toys wins” — encoding the brittle doctrine of selfishness into the psychology of our society.
Even our modern environmental movement is grounded in a fundamentally economic view of reality, speaking in terms of “natural resources,” “carbon taxes, counting, and credits,” and other ideas that seek to collapse the living world into a series of quantifiable spreadsheets — as if nature were something “out there” to be objectively studied and managed. When we forget that we are nature, that nature reflects us, that life is a mysterious hall of mirrors, we can start to lose faith in the exquisite gift of being alive. In his classic 1983 book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde describes this dynamic:
Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him; The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him; The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him; The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him; The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him; The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail;
In this ritual, the cycle of In Fragments approaches completion. I visit a friend’s pine and spruce forest in the neighboring town of Charlotte, hoping to gather a collection of resin — the sticky “scar tissue” produced by coniferous trees to heal the “wounds” of broken branches. I make an offering of three pieces of sea glass from the collection that I gathered as a child on summer evenings with my mother at the High Acres Farmbeach. I use my childhood Bowie knife to harvest a few handfuls of resin. I thank the tree for sharing some of its healing with me as I leave.
When I return to High Acres Farm, my grandfather’s 125-year-old Adirondack birchbark canoe stands by the stables, awaiting repair. Since 1955, his canoe had hung from the ceiling of the “Trophy Room” building, with his many taxidermied animals below, as seen in Give Up the Ghost. The canoe is now seeing sunlight for the first time in over sixty-five years. Its bark is dry and cracked in multiple places from decades of disuse and neglect.
At a small wooden table, I lay out the necessary tools — each carefully chosen. I unload the harvested resin into my mother’s steel skillet, and set it to boil on the butane stove that I used in Give Up The Ghost — lighting the stove with my grandfather’s “HHW” monogrammed silver lighter.
I pour the melted mixture through a white plastic strainer to separate the chunks of wood and bark and isolate its gummy glue. In a second steel skillet, I use my great-grandmother’s monogrammed “EHW” silver fork to cook a stack of bacon. I pour its grease into the monogrammed “JJH” silver dish that I received as a gift for my 1980 Christening. I mix the bacon grease with the harvested resin in a heavy iron melting pot, and set the concoction to boil until it foams over onto the table — placing the hot mixture on an old “Flower of Life” trivet to cool. Soon, I carry the warm solution to the canoe, and use my great-grandmother’s monogrammed silver spoon to spread the gummy resin over the splits and rips of the bark — gradually mending the “wounds” of her son’s “vessel”. Finally, I lay a strip of fiberglass tape down the center of its hull, covering a large open split in the bark, re-enforcing the tree resin there. I mix up a concoction of West Marineepoxy resin and hardener, and apply it to the fiberglass tape — creating a strong and reliable seam at the center of the boat.
With the canoe repair complete, I carry two steel buckets into the barn and up into the hayloft, returning to the mosaic of mirrors that I placed there almost six years before in Hall of Mirrors — now covered with layers of cobwebs, disintegrating wasp nests, and many seasons of dust. I unlatch four old hay doors, one on each side of the building, as a way of opening up “the four directions” and inviting in the spirits of the land. I use my mother’s silver scissors to cut the “red thread” that’s been bounding the mosaic of mirrors for the last six years. I walk its perimeter, wrapping the string around my hand, and then use her scissors again to release the container entirely. The red thread is unexpectedly replaced by a single shaft of red sunlight streaming through a hay door, reaching to the back of the space.
With an old wooden broom, I sweep the broken fired mirrors into a pile, and load them into two steel buckets and a pail — while wearing yellow gloves. I place the gathered mirrors by an open window at the western end of the hayloft, with a view to Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains in the distance.
I load the buckets into the newly mended canoe. I paddle out onto the water. After traveling away from the shore, I select a piece of fired mirror and toss it into the lake. Two birds appear on the horizon, flying towards the boat. I take a second piece of fired mirror and toss it in as well — and just as the second mirror leaves my hand, the birds pass over the boat, as if by grace.
I continue feeding the fired mirrors to the water, seeding the lake with what will eventually be “sea glass” for future generations to discover — this time made not from the bottles of booze, but from the fragments of an ancestor’s story.
I paddle out farther, towards the center of the lake — the mended vessel feeling smaller and smaller in relation to the vastness of the water. A bird’s eye view reveals the iconic shape of the boat on the lake — with glints of sunlight shining from the mirrors as they tumble and fall through the water.
A flame appears, exploring a spiraling collection of sea glass. The offering is somehow acknowledged.
