Living with a Fallen Tower

It’s time to sort the rubble and continue the new build. Building community, building health, building a living and nurturing world.

How are y’all feeling? Are you grounded? Centered?

Yeah. This feels awfully damned right.

Next–the Star.

Per ardua ad Terra.

I was still on pilgrimage in Cornwall and began scheming the next steps and how to write about it. I decided on a new Tower Time document and am about halfway through it. I’ll post it in sections here for a couple of reasons–I want to get back into the habit of blogging and some of the ideas may require a little processing time and are best taken in servings.

It’s working title is Clearing the Rubble. Here’s the first part–

Clearing the Rubble

If a structure is destined to be demolished, two things may happen. A salvage team may go in to take out any materials that can be sold or reused. Windows, doors, wiring, antique bricks, claw-footed bathtubs. The next step is demolition and that can take many forms—the dramatic implosions that we watch in late-night videos, small structures stove-in by bulldozers, historic monuments taken down stone by stone.

When I was a girl, our neighbor made his living by salvaging the many grand old homes that had fallen into decay or were scheduled to be replaced by an apartment complex or strip mall. These were old house built during the boom times of the 1890s and now they were too big, too expensive to heat, too much for a generation that wanted sleek suburban ranch houses.

My father bought wooden doors from our salvaging neighbor and built a small barn and a shed to hold feed and hay. I think about those beautiful mismatched doors sometimes, knowing that they probably splintered and rotted in our Appalachian weather. I suspect they were bulldozed when my brother put a trailer on that part of the land.

Civilizations, like buildings, are built on the rubble of the cultures that preceded them. Dig a ditch in London and find Rome. Clear a section of beach houses on the Outer Banks and find a wealth of artifacts from the First Peoples. Machete your way through a dense jungle in Central America and rediscover a holy city.

We build on the collapse and that is the work we are called to in this odd moment in time. In July, I woke from restful sleep—and the sound of the sea, as I was on pilgrimage in Cornwall—to a strange lightness and subtle joy. In that moment, I knew that the Tower (that terrible metaphor that has haunted me since the end of the last century) had fallen. There was debris all around us, some of it truly horrifying. Ancient bits of foundation were still in situ but the mortar holding the stone together had been ground to dust in the larger collapse.

It is my fervent wish that we salvaged all we could before the collapse. In fact, that is one of the underlying themes of A Feral Church. I have said (more than one!) that I have gone into a once vibrant and stately structure and systematically removed all the copper wiring, the oak newel posts, the marble mantelpieces. Only a shell remains and no amount of flying buttresses will hold it up.

The site is ready to be cleared.