A few days ago I was out with a farmer friend of mine doing some temporary fencing (an electric fence to keep a horse from going walkabout), and we were engaged in that time-honoured Canadian tradition of struggling with the bush. The original fence was interlaced with sumacs, incipient apple trees, wild grapevines, and god knows what all. In the hot sun, we hacked and slashed our way along the fence row, heading deeper into the woods. Since the job had nothing to recommend it, we waxed philosophical. At one point, a badly set up fence post caused my friend to remark: "A farm is a constant provider of rebuke -- why didn't you do that right the first time?" When faced with a particularly recalcitrant snarl, I suggested the notion that clearing the bush was like Buddhist teaching: the easy entanglements to clear away are the big branches, that only require an axe and some brawn; it is the wild vines that weave their tendrils inextricably into the fence rows that are the hellish ones -- and then you have to decide if you are going to untangle them one by one, or go at them all at once, and even then it is almost endless. And then there are the initial fence posts that you never set up right when you skimped on digging the original holes, and have to be redug, and so on...... As the sun got hotter and the task snarlier, we both agreed that perhaps the nearest analogy was editing one's own writing, trying to create a decent straightforward sentence out of the unweeded clumps of intertwined thoughts and cheap ideas and bad grammar that engulf our every attempt. And so on. As Robert Frost knew, there is nothing like working a fence row to get you talking about something to take your mind off how many more hours of this bushwork you have to go through before dinner.