“As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration.  I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.” 

 –John Adams

“The deepest American dream is not the hunger for money or fame; it is the dream of settling down, in peace and freedom and cooperation, in the promised land.” 

– Scott Russell Sanders

I grew up near water, in the Mohawk River valley where my ancestors, Bavarian Palatines, came to live following the disastrous European winter of 1709-1710. They traded the Rhine for the Mohawk primarily to escape persecution. Three hundred years later and only a few hundred miles away, I’m trading the shores of Lake Ontario for the banks of the Genesee. For me, this is about entering into a deeper, more formal commitment as a writer, reader, and teacher; as a pilgrim on the faith journey; and as a member of a community through my work on campus and citizenry in my town. In the fall, I begin a new career as Assistant Professor of Writing at Houghton College for the 2010-2011 academic year. We are moving to a rural part of New York known as the Southern Tier. We’ve chosen the village of Angelica, a hamlet situated along a river, not unlike my hometown.

The Southern Tier has long been home to the native people of the Iroquois Confederacy, and, geographically at least, has changed very little. It is a rugged, sometimes bleak, hill country that stretches from the Allegany Reservation south of the Finger Lakes and east to the Catskills.  I’m excited for the rich natural setting we can engage as a family, for the opportunity for our kids to grow up exploring the outdoors. I did, and it shaped me as a person and a poet. (For a compelling study on the topic, read Richard Louv’s excellent Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.) We know that time spent outdoors has the power to balance the image- and communication-saturated, TV/video game/Internet/cell phone culture our children (and we) inhabit daily. Emerson tells us: “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

While living happily in urban settings most of my adult life, I admired people like Scott Russell Sanders, who wrote about a subject many hipper folks would dismiss out of hand: staying put–in Indiana, no less. The full title of the book is Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, and in it, Sanders describes “fashioning a life that’s firmly grounded in household and community, in awareness of nature, and in contract with that source from which all things arise.” In choosing a rural setting, Sanders, Wendell Berry, and others experience what Berry has called “the grace of the world.” He writes, “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be—I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg, who farms upstate but goes into the city weekly, writes of the ways in which the city and the country can inform and enrich one another for those who would take notice and time to deal in both. This approach works best for me, too. As I read Anna Karenina this past year, I strongly identified with Levin’s need for open spaces, his hunger for the chastening work of the outdoors (and the working out of his spiritual dilemma), as well as his discomfort with urban sophisticates and their collective superiority complex. At the same time, I sympathize with Vronsky’s desire for the great cultural centers–in his case, St. Petersburg and Moscow–where he enjoys fine cuisine, attends the theater, and experiences the range of cultural amenities a city affords (not the least of which is the company of the aristocracy). Anyone who knows me knows that I can’t go more than six months or so without at least a quick weekend in New York. Just ask the friends and cousins and cousins’ friends in Brooklyn whose couches I sleep on. Like everyone I get restless for the bright lights and the unparalleled artistic opportunities.

For me, it has never been an either/or, but always a both/and, and that’s how it will continue to be, only now I’ll choose both from a home base in the country. Like Adams, I adore “the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.” When I’m being honest I find in myself the dream to settle down in a promised land. But, Sanders suggests, promised land does not ultimately speak of a physical place but rather a kind of spiritual calibration that helps us live in “peace and freedom and cooperation.” And yet one must be careful not to idealize a new job and a new home or even pristine nature (or for that matter, the romance of the city). One must expect—and respect—reality. As Paula D’Arcy reminds us, “Reality is God’s greatest ally.” I look forward to the realities of the Southern Tier, the village of Angelica, Houghton College, and all the people with whom I will enter into community.

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 Stay tuned for Part II of this three-part reflection, in which I freak out about my course syllabi and inadequacies as a teacher, and ponder the unique issues associated with teaching at a Christian college.