Foot Treading

November 16, 2009

We are listening to the same music. But he's listening to something higher. I don't know what you call it. The Soloist (Movie)

Adults don't ask you questions about essential matters. The Little Prince

After a full day--ten hours--of picking grapes from terraces cut into the steep slope, on one of the Quintas along the Douro River, in Portugal's remote upper Douro Valley, exhausted workers ready themselves for a ritual that dates to the 17th Century. Forming two lines of eleven workers, arms draped over shoulders (like good friends after a long night at the pub), the treading begins. Standing in great low sided stone tanks called lagares, with grapes to the knee, the workers lift and tread in unison, urged on by the capataz (or forman, similar to a cockswain on a crew team) to make corte. You can hear them singing, encouraging one another to tread late into the night.

It is a scene that does not fit the modern mind. For we are too easily comforted by the distillation of all things beautiful and noble to technology alone.

As with cooking, one day we learn that recipes are not handcuffs, and that the food and the meal will be a reflection of the personality and passion and quirkiness of the cook.

To do this, we relinquish a little control--which plays havoc with our hope to take comfort in predictable outcomes (this is true not only in food, but wine, gardening, relationships and prayer).

We learn that the intangibles--the small human, but important details--give any work or art or mission its soul. After exploring machine treading, there are Port wine makers that have now returned to foot treading. These Portuguese winemakers believe that human passion and love pass through the feet into the wine.

The fullness of our humanity is not always a measurable commodity. This will be our problematic tension when we add the requirement of measurement to art. Or to passion.

It will be inevitable when I return and am asked, "How was your trip?"
I can compare it to other trips. Or, I can tell you about the sound the Douro River, and how it is more pronounced in the roeda (curves). I can tell you about the families that have farmed this land for generations, and about the Portuguese saying, "The noise of the river is a presence in our life."

I can tell you about terroir, how the unique characteristics of the soil can be tasted in the wine (what some would consider the "flaws" of the soil, to be eliminated), and how this terroir gives the wine its uniqueness, and exquisite beauty.

Or, I can tell you that I know this for certain: I will never forget.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people.
But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.
It needs people who live well in their place.
It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane.
And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
David Orr

For almost daily updates, follow my blog --
blog.terryhershey.com
When I can find an internet connection, I will be blogging from Portugal.

Poems / Prayers

O Maker of Worlds
O Maker of Worlds beyond us,
help us to live in the world we know
in peace with one another,
a kaleidoscope of nations,
a patchwork quilt of ways and wills
that rise from the depths of cultures
created by Your love.
Open us to the richness
of one another's vision
and the good we can accomplish
when we share one another's views.
We pray this prayer of unity and peace
in the hope of Shalom
Amen
Sister Miriam Therese Winter

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
Rumi

Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it."
Jewish Prayer

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