Today was my last day with Scott in his sugar house, I have come to love and appreciate our time together in this sweet-smelling, warm and steamy cave. Scott is a busy man and a tired man, in addition to running the Pompanuck Farm Institute, he and his wife Lisa have also created the Round House Cafe, now the heart and soul of our town.
Scott and I are good friends, we don’t get to spend much time together. This week, he is off to Switzerland for a week or so to teach Tai Chi to students from all over the world. He is a many of many parts, and he needs to get away and rest. Scott and I became friends in a skills bartering program – I teach writing to him, he teaches Tai Chi to me. As it happens, we gathered wood, stoked the sugar house fires, drank hot today’s laced with great old Scotch and talked about Onenda.
Onenda was first introduced to me by my friend George Forss, Scott and I are fascinated by it. Orenda is the supernatural force believed by the Iroquois to be present in all objects or persons, it is believed to be the spiritual force by which human accomplishment is attained. Onenda is also mentioned in the Kabbalah, the journals if the Hebrew mystics, it is described as the internal force that governments creativity and inspiration.
Scott is exhausted now, starting a new cafe seven days a week is tougher and more complex than I would have imagined, Scott and Lisa are making it work. Onenda is something Scott and I share – it is an elemental part of George Forss’s creative genius, he believes.
What a treat to kick it around in a sugar house on our last day. I loved the steam, the tubes and tubs, the bubbling vats, the roaring fire, the syrup pouring through filters into jugs, the jars on the wall. Scott knows, I suspect, that I don’t care all that much about sugar houses, I can’t imagine doing that, but I care a lot about friendship. Scott and I are very close, we get and trust one another. Love each other, too. I have never had close friends like Scott before, I have several in my life now. Buddies, I guess you might call them. Something I had always wanted, had given up on, along with love. Never give up on love. Never give up on friendship. They are the same thing.