To Count the Blessings

Notes from my final moments in America

Last night in Philadelphia, a quiet moment after the last event of the tour.

For two weeks, I have been drawing strange patterns across the top right-hand corner of the United States, with the help of trains, planes, automobiles and boats. Colouring outside the lines, as usual, I even made it briefly to Toronto. All of this has been made possible by the support of friends, many of whom I was meeting for the first time. Dwell on that for a moment, the strangeness and the truth of it.

“Until quite recently, a group of people could be gathered or scattered, but to be both at once was unthinkable.” I remember saying this in one of the early online series I taught, back near the beginning of the Covid years: calling attention to the unlikely intimacy that we had stumbled into, through certain ways of inhabiting the in-between space of a Zoom call. Gathered and scattered, all at once.

When I think back on last year’s UK tour, so much of that journey was woven from the cloth of reunion: landing into the company of old friends and family members, gathered to celebrate the occasion of my finally having written a book. I took to the stage at the Galgael Trust in Glasgow, the first public event on that tour, in the company of

Caroline Ross

, Dougie Strang and Alastair McIntosh, whose own book Soil and Soul had reoriented my life two decades earlier. That was a coming home.

This trip has been stranger, a finding home under unlikely conditions. Of all those I met and shared time with along the way, I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I’d been together with in the flesh before. Yet the friendships held, the ones first forged through words and images and voices over screens, and deepened into laughter, conversation, kindness, hospitality, fellowship and shared adventure.

Along the way, people ask how America looks to me now, fifteen years since my last visit. “What’s changed?” they want to know, and I tell them, “I have.” It’s hard to calibrate for how this country has changed in the meantime, because I am a different person, travelling at a different stage in life and in a very different role.

I couldn’t offer a fly-on-the-wall tour diary, the way I did on the UK tour, because it will take longer to digest all that happened. All the ways that I’ve been changed, again, during this short time, these absurdly full days. I’m carrying stories, further instalments for the series I’m calling America Through the Cracks, and these will surface in the weeks ahead, but they offer no kind of linear accounting, no straightforward sequence of events.

There’s a moment at the beginning of a tour when I squint at the itinerary, all the journeys and commitments that lie ahead, and wonder if I’m an idiot, if it will all be too much and I’ll wind up hauling a burnt-out wreck of a self from place to place, bringing no gifts that anyone could need. Yet somehow that’s not how it works out, despite the fourteen talks in ten cities, the geographical improbability of the route, and the pit of jet-lag that hit around day two and three. There’s a momentum and a life in taking this work on the road that feeds me and that bears fruit in all kinds of encounters along the way.

A few of the public encounters were recorded, so the recordings will come over the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, as I turn for home, let me share three offerings that arrived already from folks I met along the way.

First, I had the chance to sit down with Katie Teague in Washington, DC last week and record an interview. When we got to the end, she said, “Do you realise, you didn’t say ‘um’ or ‘er’ once, in ninety minutes?” I guess she caught me at the right moment in the tour.

Two of the Substack friends who joined me along the way have already written up accounts of the time we shared together.

R. G. Miga

of

Phasmatopia

joined the tour on the day I travelled from Great Barrington to Kingston to speak with Tiokasin Ghosthorse at the Good Work Institute. He’s written a beautiful, thoughtful and appropriately troubled reflection on what happens when the stories I am carrying meet an audience “eager to do something about the problem”, some of whom may be surprised at “the lack of strident rhetoric”:

There is plenty of hope in Dougald’s work. That’s where the contemplation comes in—the indeterminacy, the big middle, the unfinished story. Deliberateness in the face of urgency. We’re trying to plant things that won’t bear fruit for decades or centuries, in the ruins of the future, while the present is still standing.

Reading the Ruins

Deep in the heart of the tour came the two nights I stayed with

Adam Wilson

of

The Peasantry School Newsletter

. It’s different to read Adam’s words now, having swum together in the Sand River, walked with the flock he tends, sat up talking at the candlelit table and eaten the food given by the land he farms. This is one of the ways I’ve been changed by the journey of the past two weeks. It will take time to reckon with the consequences of this and all the other changes. For now, here’s the first instalment of Adam’s telling of the story of our shared adventure:

Darkness falls by dinnertime now.  Swimming season shakes hands with candle season.  Wicks soaked with the melted fat of these fields from summers past, fat from grass and clover and patient, dark soil.  Fat from rain.  Summer’s light released into the winter house by flame.

Old River, have mercy on us.

“How could we be so blessed?” Adam asks in that piece, and there’s weight in this language of blessing. There’s consequence attached to it. To count the blessings of a journey like the one that I just made, well, it would take a lot longer than I have before they call us for boarding and I step onto the plane that is due to take me home to Sweden, to my family and the rest I’ll be needing by the time I get there.

May the blessings roll onwards to others, and may the consequences bring an appropriate sobriety to our days.

DH