You’re reading Tethered Letters, a monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. I also write a biweekly poetry letter called Five Lines, which you can subscribe to here. Oh, and I wrote a book. Everything you read here is AI-free. Thanks for being here.
Hello loved ones,
I hope your autumn is moving you, whether to bundle up in a cozy sweater, or to pull out your pipe for a porch session, or to go on an adventure at a nearby state park. Even if it has moved you to drink a pumpkin-spice latte, I think that's cool too.
We ushered in the fall with what we thought was going to be an utter disaster: celebrating Hobbit Day with our kiddos (you know, Bilbo's birthday). The only reason it wasn't, I think, was because most of the seven meals were snacks we made ahead of time, and because we had scheduled our garden clean-out day for the same Saturday. It turned out to be quite nice to work for a few hours in the garden and then go have blueberry muffins. We listened to this fantastic Hobbit Day playlist. We also read sections from the book during the big meals, and ended the day with the 1970s animated version of The Hobbit.
Other than that, I've been planning out Christmas music for church and fall plans with friends and gradually getting more and more overwhelmed about things. But that's par for the course around this point. All the exciting plans can so quickly become stressful.
How about you? What exciting, possibly stressful plans are coming about in your life?
The big news around here is that we are harvesting our first batch of winecap mushrooms!
We laid out our mushroom patch back in the spring, with a $26 bag of sawdust spawn from Field and Forest.
The life cycle of a mushroom starts with these spores determining they are in a good spot, with plenty of moisture, shade, and decomposing plant matter to chow down on. I created a three-layered cake for our winecaps:
First, I soaked corrugated strips of cardboard in water until they could be peeled of one side. Everything has to be as moist as possible, and by peeling off a side you expose a ridged surface that will give mycelium something to cling to. The added benefit of the cardboard is weed and grass suppression.
Second, I laid down a large patch of straw and soaked it down thoroughly. I was warned against hay, because it has seeds that can sprout and out-compete the shrooms. This is when you crumble up the spawn brick and sprinkle it like brown sugar all over the straw. Unlike brown sugar on oatmeal, which should form a beautiful brown crust on top, you mix this stuff in.
Finally, you layer over fresh wood mulch and soak the whole thing down. Then, there's nothing to do but wait and make sure it stays moist (that's why a shady spot is best).
Here's what's happening in the meantime.
The spores are like, yo, this place looks good. They split and start growing something called hyphae, which release enzymes to break down the plant matter around them. It's kind of like a fly spitting enzymes on your burger so he can lap up the broken-down bits. As they consume the world around them, they grow into a larger colony called mycelium.
The mycelial network is different from plant roots in a number of ways: it spreads further and longer, it absorbs both soluble and insoluble nutrients, and it actually digests the dead and decaying matter around it instead of just water and nutrients. This network can remain dormant for years until conditions are right for it to fruit.
Once those conditions hit, it does what's called "pinning," the first visible sign of the work going on under the surface: a tiny button, knot, or pin extending above the ground. On rainy days throughout the summer we've seen these; they are fragile and vanished pretty quickly. They are a sign of things to come. If the mycelium has developed sufficiently and the conditions are right, you get the actual fruiting body of the fungi: the mushroom.
Isn't this fascinating? When I first set out to grow mushrooms, I had no idea that the world of fungi was so completely different than the world of plants. I should have known, given Alan Moore's treatment of The Grey in his Saga of the Swamp Thing. If you know, you know.
Going into the mushroom experiment, we hoped to see a spring flush of mushrooms, but knew that the very dry start to our growing season was not ideal. September arrived and we had a few weeks of warmish, wet weather — but despite some rare pinning in the spring, nothing. We were wondering if somehow our shrooms just hadn't taken.
Then, I walked out of the door to go to work one day and spotted a mushroom the size of my fist. A week or so later, and we have so many we're giving them away.
I've been reading Wendell Berry's essays from Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, and it's a rich well of wisdom and warning even if you don't live in a predominantly agrarian community. Our area is largely a manufacturing community, but we have a lot of Amish neighbors who are running what Wendell would call "family farms." I suppose I have designs on building our property into one of those someday. Anyhow, I dog-eared this section from the essay "Nature As Measure":
"For a long time now we have understood ourselves as traveling toward some sort of industrial paradise, some new Eden conceived and constructed entirely by human ingenuity. And we have thought ourselves free to use and abuse nature in any way that might further this enterprise. Now we face overwhelming evidence that we are not smart enough to recover Eden by assault, and that nature does not tolerate or excuse our abuses. If, in spite of the evidence against us, we are finding it hard to relinquish our old ambition, we are also seeing more clearly every day how that ambition has reduced and enslaved us. We see how everything — the whole world — is belittled by the idea that all creation is moving or ought to move toward an end that some body, some human body, has thought up."
There's a sense in which Wendell's words rebuke not only the industrial farming complex, but also the publishing industry and its surrounding ecosystems. Also, the churches who have sold their birthright for a pot of entertainment and celebrity — all in the name of expanding the Kingdom of God.
As if the creative act could be shoved into an influencer mold, optimized for efficiency, replaced by robots, and monetized at the expense of the writer's sanity and integrity. Not to mention the damage done to readers.
As if God needed a marketing crew, a makeover, and a media team to spread the Good Word that He loves you so much He died on a cross to save you from sin and death.
I tend to be essentialist in my thinking, but is it not true that the chemicals we spray over our creativity, our churches, and our crops in the name of unmitigated, concentrated growth are doing us way more damage than good?
Beyond the consequences, wouldn't you just love to get back to simple community together, writing what you love, worshipping God without the slick trappings, gardening in harmony with the ground instead of in combat? This doesn't sound like a step back. It sounds like freedom. As Wendell says:
"To be free of that end and that ambition would be a delightful and precious thing. Once free of it, we might again go about our work and our lives with a seriousness and pleasure denied to us when we merely submit to a fate already determined by gigantic politics, economics, and technology."
The unwritten wisdom that governs behavior in the Amish community is known as Ordnung. At the risk of talking about something I know little about, my understanding of how my Amish neighbors approach new technology is that they carefully measure how that technology will impact their hearts and the hearts of their community, with an eye to simplicity and neighborly love. This stands in direct opposition to how our Western culture typically behaves: as if each new innovation is a literal gift from God.
Amish folks are not anti-technology. They just recognize something we all would do well to recognize: every new thing humanity creates has pros and cons, and sometimes the cons outweigh the pros. Sometimes what we make will belittle or sicken our souls.
Consider what you gain when your mode of transportation relies on a living creature, when it requires more effort to get from here to there, and when it involves longer stretches of time with your family or friends in the act of travel. Consider what is lost when what you eat is two, three, or four times removed from the person who grew it, easily procured at low cost, and made by someone else. Andy Crouch points out that the modern technology of social media and smart phones has made "easy everywhere" the motto of our age — and that convenience, like every other cultural creation, has an impact on our souls.
I'm not suggesting that we all become Amish. I guess I'm just beginning to wonder if part of the cure to the societal ills of polarization, mental illness, and general hopelessness is going to be found in intentionally making things slower and harder for ourselves.
Wendell doesn't just rail against industrial farming, of course. He offers a practical solution rooted in slow knowledge:
"Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love."
If the best method of living involves knowledge and love, which require massive amounts of time and dying to ourselves, we've got to temper the quick and easy bits of our lives somehow.
I've been teaching piano to a few really wonderful, skilled teenagers from my church lately, and in toiling through some of Bach's piano works with them, we've been talking about the importance of slow practice. If we want to play a Bach invention or a prelude and fugue with any mastery, we must slow down. It is a requirement. If we attempt to bypass the kinesthetic learning (the brain-body connections) required by his acrobatic counterpoint, we will fail to truly know the piece. We may be able to play notes, but we will not make music.
It reminds me of C. S. Lewis's definition of progress in Mere Christianity:
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
When I saw that first mushroom, I was ecstatic. I immediately picked it and carried it in to triumphantly show to Linnea and the kids. I was just so relieved that it actually worked. We fried it up that night in butter and tossed it on top of a burger with some caramelized onions. It was truly delicious — for so many more reasons than just the flavor of a fresh mushroom.
I think spending the time learning about and growing these mushrooms has lifted my spirits for another reason: not only that I get to eat mushrooms, which I love, or that something I tried to do actually worked. Rather, I got to see another way in which growth occurs.
Those of us who garden do have a waiting period during germination, and we are used to tending and watching over our little green things once they emerge, giving them all the water, sun, and fertilizer they need to grow. We can diagnose issues and adjust how we care for them accordingly — more water, removing pests, pruning. Almost all of the growth is seen, however slowly, above the ground.
On the other hand, the survival of a mushroom requires only three things: dead stuff, moisture, and time. The support necessary to put forth fruit takes months to spread sufficiently (for shiitake, up to a year). During those months, you see little or nothing to show for your efforts; everything is beneath the surface, and exposing it to sunlight will harm the network. You just water the bed and pray.
Then, when the fruit does come, it swells to an incredible size almost immediately, drops its spores (if it isn't eaten), and deflates just as fast. A variety of stinkhorn is the fastest, growing at a rate of .2 inches per minute — so fast that you can hear it crackle as it stretches! The winecaps we have take about a day from budding to maturity, two days if you want a bigger one. But the fruit of all that breaking down only shows when the conditions are just right. It does its work, it dies away, and you settle in to wait for the next flush.
I think we can over-tend our inner gardens sometimes, scrutinizing our motivations and processes to such an extent that we only ever harvest guilt. Or we clear away the dead and decomposing things inside of us instead of living with them a little, letting ourselves break down into better soil.
As the seasons have gone by, I've been learning to slow my heart down to a pace that allows me to notice and reflect. I got rid of social media back in March. Linnea and I determined to say "no" more often to many good things, and to choose more difficult things over convenient things. This fall we've started to incorporate rhythms into the space created by choosing less and choosing slower.
In the process of this, I'm beginning to see how small I have been inside, how focused on myself, how disconnected from the work of God outside of my efforts, how distracted from people's hurts and hearts. As I've grieved this and rested in the grace of Jesus, I've noticed a fist-sized change in how I approach walking with God.
Every situation in which I choose to do what I know is right instead of wrong is beginning to feel like a miracle. Not a miracle of cosmic proportions, but one that carries significance beyond its relative size. "Look at that," I hear God say, with a smile in His voice, "Remember? I told you I would be with you. I told you I would help you. I told you that you would grow. Abide in me."
Consequently, my prayer has become less: "Show me what you want me to do with my life," and more: "Enlarge my heart." I'm praying it for you too, for all of us. The wildness and wonder of His plan for us and our world is not something we will create, but it is something we can participate in. And the slow, unseen growth in your heart is a truly consequential part of that.
Until next time,
Chris
September Favorites:
So mushrooms are just intensely fascinating whether you eat them or not. Here's a cool time-lapse of mushrooms growing, and here's photographer Stephen Axford talking about fungi.
If you want to grow your own mushrooms, here's the straw substrate method I used, as well as a container method I'm going to try next year with oyster mushrooms.
This in-depth history lesson on America's relationship with planned obsolescence from Craftsmanship magazine was fascinating.
Addison Del Mastro writes about urbanism and culture at The Deleted Scenes, and it might be my new favorite Substack.
We harvested broomcorn this year and have designs on learning how to make brooms. I am skeptical about our chances, but that didn't stop me from enjoying these relaxing videos of old guys making brooms.
A few of our favorite recipes from Hobbit Day included this crockpot potato soup and these two-ingredient donut holes which you can enjoy with any number of toppings. Best right out of the oil, but not bad the next day either. We also pulled out this tried-and-true pot roast recipe from Adam Ragusea.
I just got a package of Original Sin's Black Widow cider (blackberries and New York apples), which is a damn fine brew.
Oh man, I might have to see if I can find that cider. I love me some blackberry cider.