Dorothy Day, a cofounder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement, is known for (among many other things) this quote: “As Dostoevsky said: ‘Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.’”
While perhaps a bit startling at first reading, many of us experience this seeming dichotomy between love in reality and love in dreams. Parenthood, adult friendships with our parents, pet companionship …can’t you just hear the upbeat music as you consider all these happy things? And they are happy things … and they also include the challenges and fears of caring for little (and then bigger) humans, the possibility of a wrenching transition from adult friendship to caregiver for parents with diminishing capacity, the profound emptiness of returning to an empty house after a final vet visit.
When we last wrote (The Chronicle, May 21, 2026) about our transition from committed backpackers and wilderness lovers to people committed to loving and caring for a particular woodland, we talked a lot about the distinction between caring about and caring for. “Love in action” corresponds to caring for, not just about, something or someone. While most, if not all, of us may care about children, aging adults, and animal welfare, some of us know intimately that harsh and dreadful thing that is love in action. Love in dreams (caring about something) does not confer the same depth of understanding as does that harsh and dreadful love in action (caring for someone/something).
We love animals, but does our love and care for our own critters mean that we can tell others what decisions they should make? Or children. We love our adopted grandchildren, but we don’t live with them day in and day out; should we be the ones to make all the “harsh and dreadful” choices that come with actually raising them?
Who are we, who do not have children and have not raised them, to tell parents how they can parent better? And should all children, all parents, all pets, be cared for the same way?
Defining care
Where is the line between caring about (feeling our love in dreams deeply) and caring for (actually living that harsh and dreadful reality of love in real life)?
Take forests, for example. All of us, in the PNW, in Oregon, can legitimately care about our forests. That said, how many of us actually know how to care for a forest? How many of us are actually foresters? How many of us have actually studied tree physiology or silviculture? How many of us actually know how to assess the health of a forest stand?
And how many of us think these are ridiculous questions, because forests know how to forest?
Ethan Tapper, a young forester in Vermont (who also happens to play in the punk band The Bubs), wrote a book titled How to Love a Forest. The book is based on his notes as he got to know and care for a 175-acre woodland he had purchased. One could say that, if you are opposed in principle to active forest management, his love for his forest is a harsh and dreadful thing: he clears out invasive vegetation, thins out trees, and hunts.
He writes lyrically about his land and skillfully wields a chainsaw. And that is his point (without referencing either Dostoevsky or Dorothy Day): Loving a forest means, yes, a feeling, but also means the hard work of caring for it. Caring for is a harder thing than caring about. Caring for—loving – your forest may not look like the dreamy love with upbeat background music you imagined before you committed to your forest.
Our love for our woodland has certainly decided everything (re: the Pedro Arrupe quote from the Chronicle 5/21 piece) – and our battered bodies and trying-to-recover woodland are testament that it is not always the stuff of (at least pleasant) dreams.
Perhaps, in Oregon’s forestry conversations, it is time to recognize that love in dreams, caring about forests, is a legitimate foundation upon which to base an ethic of care of our forests, but it is not the whole picture. Perhaps it’s time to listen more to the folks whose love is more active than dreamy, whose boots are muddy, whose hands are torn from doing the harsh, dreadful, loving care for our forests.
Theresa Hausser, with her wife Kate, owns and manages 39 acres of burned woodland in the footprint of the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire. She is an OSU Master Woodland Manager and a member of Lane County Small Woodlands Association and Lane Families for Farms & Forests.
