Viktor Frankl

At a meeting tonight about the future of my daughter’s little elementary school, a parent spoke about the importance of the schoolhouse, built a hundred years ago, by the town of Woodbury, Vermont. Until I went to a tiny college (also in Vermont), I never attended school in a building that had not only beauty in spades but also soul. The Woodbury schoolhouse has both.

This afternoon, a little thirdgrader showed me the dirt on her clothes from working in the garden. The children had been digging potatoes, and she showed me with her hands the size of the largest potatoes. Sometimes, she told me, my fingers got stuck around the potatoes and they were hard to pull out. She laughed, and I could see a sprinkling of dirt over her cheeks.

Too much of our world now is placeless – grab your i-phone and laptop and head out for new territory, but where we live and work matters; it matters who builds our homes and schools; it matters who opens the door to your child’s schoolhouse each morning. And on a sunny and windy October afternoon, it matters that someone shows a child to bury her hands to the wrists in black soil and extract an apple of the earth.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

–– Viktor Frankl

All day, I was working in Burlington, and when I stepped out, I saw the lake just down the hill, a blue glassine surface on the other side of the rail yard. Late getting home as I was, I ran across the parking lot and crossed several rail lines to stand there for a moment and admire the water and a seagull pinwheeling over my head, and all that gorgeous sun on my face.

Lake Champlain, sacred waters of the Abenaki, polluted now, subject of wrangling in the legislature and funding arguments, fingers pointing every which way. Yet the lake, her waters dirtied by us, laps on with her work, no doubt wiser than all of us.

Driving away from Burlington, leaving the choked lines of idling traffic for the lesser travelled highway heading toward Hardwick, I thought of that lake and that seagull and all the tangled power lines I stood beneath and the pavement, stretching on and on…..

When I was about my older daughter’s age, I first read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a book about his horrific experiences in the Nazi death camps. One of the most stunning scenes is of a young woman about to die, who sees through a window just a single branch of a chestnut tree and two blossoms. She tells Frankl the tree is her only companion, but she is quite cheerful and resigned to dying. The tree says to her, “I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.”

Often I’ve thought of this young, nameless woman, whose fate in her earthly life was cursed. Today, surrounded by Vermont’s summer plenty, I thought of her again, and her portion of a single branch, the two blossoms, a savage death upon her. In times of my own meager despair, I’ve returned to her, holding the woman’s words like a talisman, a shining beacon, her bravery resplendent in the ugliest possible world.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Potato Digging at the Schoolhouse

A Single Branch, Two Blossoms