Chickens, chickens, chickens, part 2: This is the Way the World Ends

Inspired by a piece I just read by Ben Hewitt, I will now try to share some of the story of our last day with our meat birds-- July 12. Warning: this gets a bit graphic. No, there are no graphic photos.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

It's been almost a week since our first attempt at slaughtering our own chickens for meat. From waking at 7 to drive out and pick up the rented plucker to putting them in the freezer at 6 pm, we slaughtered and dressed 14 chickens. We didn't actually get started until around 11 am, and finished around 4, and let the chickens chill until 5:30, when I cut them and put them in our aunt's freezer. We also had a pretty solid lunch hour, so all tolled 5 hours for 14 chickens. Not bad timing for a fist go.

We started slow mostly out of reticence and insecurity. The four of us who signed up for this onerous task convened at 9, and we were still setting up, but the truth is we were slow at it. All of us wanted to do it. No one was forced. Our friend Aaron, the person with 1 or 2 slaughters already done, was our guide. He brought along a young friend Trevor, a rising senior at University of Vermont. And Norman, my partner, and myself made four. I felt like I was falling all over myself that morning, trying to be both hospitable and prepared, mindful and driven, alive to what was happening and still able to do it. I wanted to do it. I wanted to know what it was I was participating in.

It's not often that we get the chance to really know what we are participating in in this society. As a person of education and privilege, I know that there are so many people, beings on whose shoulders and back I stand in order to have the life I do have. I have had significant breakthroughs in this awareness over time, through accident and intention. But it's easy to fall into the stupor of the consumer. It's easy to forget the implications of the things we have.

If this is not ringing a bell to you, what I mean is that the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the accessories we use-- all of these are made somewhere, and often the where is far far away. Because of this distance-- of geography, culture, species-- it's easy to never know, or to never seek knowledge, or to actively ignore information that does not directly impact our lives. Mexican farmworkers treated like slaves while harvesting tomatoes on Florida farms? Feed lots in Colorado leeching nitrogen from cow manure into lakes and rivers? Factory workers killing themselves in China while churning out iPads? Not in my back yard. Not my problem.

So I approached chicken slaughter as a way to know what it is I am participating in when I eat chicken. It also was an attempt to unhinge from some of the industrial agricultural practices that are so very dangerous on so many levels. I think I have had some success on both of these fronts. I now know what it looks like to slaughter and prepare a chicken for eating. I now know what it feels and smells like.

We watched a video or two to refresh our memories on how to do this thing. We carried the first chickens to the cones, upside down, and put them in, let them chill out. We hugged each other before we started, and agreed to thank the chickens as we sliced the veins on either side of their necks. As the chickens struggled through their death throes, I watched and repeated thanks and sadness at their leaving. The blood was less than I thought, and painted the pallet the cones were tacked onto throughout the day. Within five minutes of their death, the chickens looked a lot like what we eat when we buy chicken from the store. Almost.

By far the hardest part of this process for me was the evisceration. For whatever reason, I didn't think that the inside of a chicken would want to stay on the inside. But it did. We spent a long time with those insides. And lucky for me, there were 3 other folks there who had a better handle on this than I.

I started to gravitate to the beginning of the process, moving the chickens to the cones, thanking them, saying goodbye, and bleeding them out. I also felt competent using the plucker, and removing the feet and gland on the hind of the chicken. Then I got stalled. So I went back to the cones, and the plucker, and hoped the rest would get done.

And it did. Though we had a few close calls, all 14 were slaughtered and chilling by 4 pm, and we were able to clean up and harvest some gratitude greens and scapes for Aaron and Trevor. I returned the plucker in time, and came home to chop half of the chickens in half, dry them as well as I could, and carry them in 4 paper shopping bags up the hill, where they sit, quiet, white and pink.

I am writing this easily, as if I am telling a story that did not happen to me, that I did not do. The truth of this is that I killed living beings almost a week ago, and though I haven't the stomach to eat them yet, I imagine I will, over time. I took a knife and I bled something with a brain, with an insides that looks a lot like my insides.

This happened, and it was ugly and smelly and hard.

We have a neighbor who shares the house here, staying in a large studio apartment on the land. She had no interest in participating in the slaughter. In fact, we could find her often chatting up the birds when she got home from work. She is a sweet and compassionate woman. She told us, that day, that there was a calm over the land, that the seriousness of the task at hand felt respectful.

I like to think this is true, that this was how the world ended for these chickens. But the truth is a lot more complex than that, a lot messier, a lot more than I can really grasp, yet. Maybe it's a small thing, what we did last week, but it is changing me. This life is changing me, and I hope to be up for the lessons I am learning.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

At my second farm apprenticeship experience, back in 2007, one of my supervisors was a very smart and generally grumpy and loving man who taught me a lot. Chris McNichols, spouse and co-farmer with Amy Johnson, managed the 6 acre Red Hill Farm in Aston, Pennsylvania, where a 120 family CSA had pick ups twice weekly throughout the long and balmy Pennsylvania growing season.

I worked 40-60 hours a week, with no car and no other employment. Walking, biking, bussing to get where I needed to go, I ended up sleeping in a friend's spare room and getting a ride in early morning with Amy. As sunrise spilled across the hollows, we pulled ourselves up and over hills in the surprisingly rickety canvas topped jeep, and worked morning and afternoon in greenhouses and fields growing all manner of vegetable.

Chris would come in for the afternoon shift, as Amy and he would split childcare with their two children to make their farm dream possible. He would get to sleep in with the kids and roll in around lunch. By afternoon, after I'de passed out on the floor of the farm office for 45 minutes before grabbing round 3 of coffee to motivate for weeding in the sun, Chris was the motivator and teacher I needed to get through the hump of fatigue and heat that was the norm for me.

Chris was never one to look at a problem and rush in. He would think, he would fiddle, and he would come up with the solution that made the most sense, often with the least amount of exertion.
Was this laziness? Indeed not. He taught me the saying he lived by-- Work smarter, not harder. And he lived it. And he impressed me no end with his forward thinking and effective planning.

In this incarnation of my farming life, I've taken on this saying with a vengeance. My partner and I talk. A lot. We talk about multiple solutions. We talk about myriad problems. We talk. And this means things slow down. We're sitting on the need to slaughter our first round of chickens because of all the complexity in getting the systems together. We're slowly working on finishing the high tunnel as we talk about the best ways to move forward with labor and resources. We talk.

Does this make us lazy? Sometimes, I think it does. I cannot tell you how many folks, when I share the vision for life on the land here, echo an interest and desire for the same life, saying, I've thought about that, I'de like to do that, too. My initial response, which I keep to myself, is fear. Fear that there is nowhere for the food to go, the market is saturated, my thoughts and desires are pedestrian and useless.

But then I realize that there is a fundamental difference between thinking a thing and doing it. In a society that so values the thought over the action, that values symbolic work over actual physical work, and that denies the basic reality that you cannot eat money, it's easy to get caught up in the thinking about the doing. Sometimes I feel pressure build in me, of the undone task, the project incomplete. I feel physically uncomfortable with the not-doing. Never mind the overwhelm, which I can handle a bit better than the pressure. And so, when the thing gets done-- the plants planted, the weeding started, the purchasing for the project done-- there is a relief, a release of energy into the world.

Are these actions the best solutions? I honestly can say I don't know. Sometimes the thinking about a thing can deaden it, can make any solution seem incomplete. Time will tell, and perfection in farming is both illusive and truly an inductive process. We try a thing. It works or it doesn't. We talk to other farmers. We talk to ourselves. We try another thing. It works or it doesn't. And on and on.

I got to help with haying for the first time the other week, and it was loads of fun, at the very fine Center Farm less than 5 miles from us-- neighbors, as rural standards go. I was one of a handful of grown-ups, and a number of teens. It felt exciting to be able to keep up even in the slightest with teenagers. At one point I mentioned to one of the farm boys-- maybe 17-- the saying Work smarter, not harder, and he had something to say about it. He said, Sometimes that's true, but sometimes the work is just hard. And you do it. And if you don't do it, it doesn't get done. Farming is hard work.

Smart kid.

Chickens, chickens, chickens. Or, the problem with civilization.

I hate our chickens. There, I've written it.

Layers at 2 days

We ordered 40 chickens from the local seed and feed store this spring, and I was excited for this new adventure in farming. I've been growing vegetables for 7 years, and I thought it would be a good challenge to take on this new crop, as it were. 30 we ordered for meat. Yup, meat. And our plan is to slaughter them ourselves. And 10 for laying.

A short in our order, and the loss of 8 chickens due to pasty butt or weasel attack leaves us with 31. 31 chickens we are stuck with, for whatever duration.

Why don't I like these chickens? Could it be their intense creepiness? Or perhaps their highly effective digestive system? I don't hate them equally, it's true. The layers are much more enjoyable, if only because they seem more like actual chickens, and less like the genetic experiment of some farm scientist whose only concern is the rapidity of growth of their output. We bought the one step away from the every popular Cornish Cross chicken, who is touted to be ready for eating in 8 weeks. The Red Rangers we are growing are now 9 weeks, and they are giant reptilian creatures with feet like pterodactyls and as aggressive as all hell. And it is so so clear that we humans have bred them to be twisted parodies of actual chickens, and I only know this because we have other chickens as well. I imagine if we hadn't gotten other chickens, I would not know that chickens could be anything but mean and desperately hungry. All. The. Time.

Laying chicks at 8 weeks

The other chickens, the layers or layers we are raising for meat, are much more chicken-like, in whatever mythic conception I have of Chicken. They peck. They squabble. They leap and almost fly. They grow in a recognizable trajectory. They seem to be having some level of development, getting more or less adventuresome. I see that they flock together. I see that they look for things to interest them. The meat birds mostly eat, shit, and sit. And as the time comes closer to their end, I see that their weight is too much for them, and they aren't strong enough to carry their weight. But they still eat. All. The. Time.

I think what bothers me most about the Red Rangers is how they have been manipulated by us humans. I know farm animals are useful. They are meat. They are eggs. They are manure. But they are beings nonetheless, even with their specific purposes, having been bred. I know acutely that all of these birds have no place at all in the wild eco-system surrounding us. The 7 birds that had their blood sucked and heads taken off by weasels one night was enough to convince me that farming is not, strictly speaking, natural. And the Red Rangers, in their intense appetites, body dysfunction, and aggression, are a clear example of this ending of nature.

Red Rangers at 4 weeks

Michael Pollan, of Food Rules and Omnivores Dilemma fame, has a really good book about what human attempts at wrangling nature are about, called Second Nature. The irony of my listening to it was that I took an heirloom seed workshop with one of the more pretentious gardeners I have interacted with at the same time. I would travel to this gardener's home and see the intensely manicured gardens, with vibrant bursts of diversity and elevation in gardening, and listen to Michael Pollan describe the rapid dissection of his illusions about gardening as being anything about 'getting back to nature.' I'm glad I listened to this book, digested it as I drove and weeded at the student farm I worked at Westtown School. The lesson I took from it is that there is no mythic idyllic natural relationship between humans and nature, and attempting to capture that in a farm is crap. What we need to recognize is the struggle with nature we have. And instead of giving up, we must attempt to harness natural processes appropriately, with reverence, respect, and humility, and know that, in the end, we lose.

I see this all over the place in Vermont. Farmhouse ruins, overgrown hoop house frames, even decaying stone fences in the woods, all point to the winningness of nature. At some of my most cynical times, I've been comforted by the television series Life After People. In it, various scientists speak about what will happen to the infrastructures and eco-systems that are part of civilization, and what would happen to them if humans ceased to exist. It's comforting to know that nature would take things back, and there would continue to be life after our various attentions or inattentions.

Maybe I just think the Red Rangers are human meddling gone too far. Maybe I am having a hard time being confronted with what exactly we humans have done, and what I have benefited from in my consuming habits. I think by raising these birds myself I am responding to this distance from my food. It's important to engage this process, and I'm glad for it. I just wonder if on the other side, I'll be a vegetarian again.

Turning Over, Overturned

It's mid-May, and I am learning that where I live, life is simultaneously waking up and bursting out with newness. Leafing out, spring bulbs, the small kernels of flower bud on lilacs, dandelions and grasses greening up a landscape that has been grey since late October. Wow. Late October.

As I wander around downtown Montpelier, or stop in at the Adamant Coop, I express an ecstasy I think I have earned. And my joy is often met in equal measure by my neighbors. Temperatures are topping out in the 70s. The once frozen streams are running high.  We've made it through, I've made it through a long winter that held on like oh god I don't even know-- like a mama bear holding her cub, encircling us in cold and quiet for many months. I've written elsewhere about this, and am now so glad that I can look back on it. It is maybe 5 months away, winter. That feels like an eternity.

I cleaned out the hearth today. I walked into the cluttered living room, and couldn't take the flakes of moss and bark anymore. I swept, vacuumed, stowed the wood stove tools. I put the vase of daffodils my family picked me for Mother's Day on the stove. It felt good, and I like that room a lot more now.

And today I threw open all the windows, put the screens on the doors, and wandered around outside with friends, imagining what this farm and life will look like. It's not like we haven't been working for it, but it's easy to forget, when surrounded by piles of sod as big as the piles of snow outside your front door 2 months ago, what all the work is for.

We've been beginning to change the landscape around us. I've been weeding in the raspberries. I've been digging out sod in preparation for the high tunnel kit we'll get next week. I've been planting seeds and repotting small plants, their numbers clearly marked, each imagined bed space counted, planned.

And tonight, the miracle of the plow came to visit. I have accepted that this season will be a slow one, and decided to go the complete route of flipping sod and watching it decompose before doing much else. Our neighbor angel came along in his orange tractor, with a good old plow to slice into and turn over sod that has been growing for maybe 100 years in that spot. He backed into the bed space-- only 3000 square feet this year-- and made his way, painting brown into this rapidly greening earth.

I felt, as he did this work, as I ran after to help flip pieces that got stuck, tromping on tubes of earth and feeling the soil settle in my toes, like the world was flipped, the script of my inadequacy, my doubt, overturned in the face of the possibility of this good soil. There is so much left to do-- chicken housing, construction, soil amendments, barn clean out that never ends, bed making, and on and on-- and getting there will seem almost impossible until it's over. But tonight, grunting as I pulled on sod in the gathering night, I felt powerful, and capable, and awake. And I knew, for a few moments, the joy of being close in to things, touching life with bare hands and strong arms.

These are the gifts I seek, and the gifts I want to share, when the time is right. Welcome the gift of this bodied life, and the work of hands and hearts. Happy spring.

Acts of Faith

Welcome to April in Vermont, where temperatures wildly shift and there's about a foot of snow still on the ground. Welcome to the farmer whose most recent experience is in Pennsylvania, where even with a snowy winter, crops grew through the coldest times in the high tunnel and harvests started in February or March and continued through the summer. Soil turning would happen anywhere from now to within 2-3 weeks.

Now, I am looking at getting into the ground in May. Another month. Even with glorious sun and one day with temps in the 50s, it's hard to believe that this day will come, when the earth is visible, and the seeds I have purchased can be put to good use.

It is the job of every farmer, I think, to plan and envision the future. For me, as a newer farmer on new land, the vision feels more like a dream, more like something that might or might not happen in the face of so much uncertainty. Having land does not mean anything will grow on it. Having time and seeds doesn't mean that there will be harvest. Getting from seed packet to harvest, though I've done it 8 or more years now, is a long and uncertain process. I can plan and envision. I can do my best. I can try to listen closely to the land, and respond appropriately. There are no guarantees. The science of farming is powerful, needed, and all the knowledge in the world cannot control the outcomes of planting and growing food.

My father is having surgery to replace a valve in his heart. He called to tell me last week that it will be a cow valve that will replace the one that currently is so covered in plaque that it has a hard time opening.  As the time for the surgery gets closer, I am having the desire to know more about it, and the subsequent desire to know nothing about it. I want to be with my father during this time in the most authentic way I know how, and I'm not so sure understanding all the science behind it will help me with that.

Because I believe that science can explain itself as much as it can, and there is still a vast uncertainty to this surgery. Because the faith I need to believe in my father's chances for success is not based in science. Because I believe in the requirement that we engage in acts of faith-- wild leaps of possibility into a great uncertainty, with the hopes for the best possible outcome-- in order to live our most full and meaningful lives.

I know my father continues to move, willing or no, into the acts of faith that will define these years for him. I know I am embracing faithful leaps with this risky, and well planned, farm venture. These acts of faith are powerful and humbling, and leave us both leaping into the stream of life that will carry us where it will. Where it wills, and where we will find ourselves, on the other side.

Spring, despite itself

Today the temperature is hovering in the mid-teens, and with the wind, it feels closer to zero. There have been intermittent snow showers, a hazy sun obscured and finally gone for the day as steel gray clamped on the skyline. The mountains are obscured by slow moving clouds and fog. We have been running the wood stove on sticks Norman has cut from dead trees in our yard, as we ran out of our bought wood almost a month ago.

It's cold. It's winter. In Pennsylvania (though I know this winter has been different) I would have planted onion seeds with seventh graders in the greenhouse by this time, been harvesting from the high tunnel with morning work crews, and had delivery of my season of seeds and potting mix from Vermont Compost (another irony being that I now live within 5 miles of this fine living growing medium selling establishment). This is a very different season.

I had a revelation of this difference on the thaw last week. For three days temperatures soared into the 40s. I went for a mid-morning run in only leggings and fleece. I closed my eyes into the sun, running down the hill on the road. I got to see mud and the erosion of these unpaved back roads. I got a taste of the fifth season in Vermont called mud season. I have the wrong shoes.

And though the light and warmth was a blessing and surprise, it did not, on the whole, make me happy. I felt robbed of time, like I should have been planting onions already. Like I was making a mistake, in fact I still was in Pennsylvania. I also felt scared, scared of being one step closer to getting into soil, starting seed in the basement, making a go of this farm. It was a lot to get from a day in the sun, but I took it.

Lucky for me, it froze up again on Sunday and we haven't looked back. I get to have my Vermont winter. I get to plan and take the time needed to learn what I need to learn. I've written a survey for folks on their farm loving habits. I've begun to clean out the basement, plan for seedlings, chicks, workspace for building a hive. We've opened our business bank account, and I am pricing supplies.

But that's not the whole story. In the past days and weeks, as day length increases, there has been an interesting and much forgotten experience from my youth-- indoor spring. A proliferation of ladybugs have attached to our bathroom window. Spiders we brought in with the wood are getting fat on our fly population. There was a large assassin bug in our pantry. The grapevine given to us by a beloved family member and friend is sprouting new leaves in our downstairs south facing bathroom.

These are all promises of a spring that I know is waiting under all this snow, past the zero temperatures and 20 mile an hour winds. At lunch with the men who came to prune our orchard of plums, pears, apple, apricot, and cherry, the joke was when Norman asked, We do get spring here, right? And the reply--Yes, around the 4th of July. But that's only a story we tell ourselves. What's true is life is waking up, even in this cold, and we have to pay attention to its awakening, and welcome whatever it brings.

Happy spring.

Open Way Farm: The Plan

From the wilds of a north-central Vermont winter, we are dreaming of peas. Dreaming of chickens, high tunnels, functional barns and farm stands. Dreaming of bright air and seasons long growth. We are dreaming, and we are planning.

I just completed round one of a business plan, projecting out three years for the farm, and projecting further in visioning the long terms potential for this land and community. Lucky for me, I have nine folks out there in the world who are looking at it and critiquing it in the next few weeks. I did ask them, but they could have said no, so I am lucky, and grateful.

What's in this plan? The biggest aspect of the plan is to begin the financial engine of our homestead and small market farm, and to ground that engine in this good earth and space. These first years will be full of log jams, confusions, failures, and unexpected turns in the road. And each turn will be towards a long term sustainability, or at least that's the plan.

But I know that plans are meant to be thwarted and thrown in the trash heap, along with all the will and certainty of vision, in the face of the following that is required of me. I have decided very specifically that I am following God(ess) and the impulses and leadings within me, if meeting my joy and the world's need, are part of that plan.

This is a hard won belief and decision. To listen to my self, my self in relief, in reflection, in impulse and push, is not an easy thing, and not something I have always, or mostly trusted. But I'm here, working it out. I refuse to mock my desire, the movement within myself. I refuse to be suspicious of myself any longer.

This does not mean I do not plan, however! In some early board work, I remember being introduced to the article The Tyranny of Structurelessness. This article drove home what I had been experiencing in many small community based groups of which I was a part. The resistance to structure within groups leads to impotence and solipsism. It also leads to a lack of accountability and a sense of disconnection to a greater context or work. It also means you don't get anything done.

So I attempt to put a structure on what can feel like a structureless call to the wilds of the broken world, my heart reaching out to express a desire for connection with the earth, with broken and hard working movement builders, with sustainability and self-sufficiency as teacher and muse. I put numbers on start up costs, though they feel like a lot of conjecture. I made a list of goals and plans. I wrote a 25 year visioning statement.

I was surprised at just how specific I could get. Residencies for burnt out activists. Community gatherings and events around the cycles of farm and season. Connections with urban organizations needing space to send leaders and workers for respite. Niche markets or CSA membership, or value added products, or, or…..

There's a lot of possibility when we vision. It's powerful, and potentially paralyzing. And it needs to be tested, I need to test my vision, against the good minds of folks I respect and care for. I also need to take my vision to the feet of the woodlands, to the feet of God(ess), to the space where I am both powerful and vulnerable, and where I must listen.

I am sometimes good at this, and sometimes too caught up in my own self-importance to stop and do this important work. The good news, I find in this inconsistency, is that no matter what I do lessons and shifting happens. I cannot control what will happen, despite any expertise or best efforts. In fact, trying to do that leads to a lot of pain. And so I act, I plan, I build, and I know it is just as much an inchoate cry as the unformed vision welling up in me. And yet, it suffices, and things progress.

So again I find myself holding possibility and uncertainty, but this time looking at cash-flow numbers and risk analysis. Is it any different from holding these two headed hydra without the numbers? No, in fact, it is not. I am glad for the numbers, as an anchor to what will be happening in the next weeks and months. I am also glad for the years of work to get here, and the listening I make space for, or that is forced upon me, by the closeness I seek with the world, with the land, and with God(ess).

Bring it on, world. I am ready.

That Vision Thing

Pretty sure the title above is from a Buffy the Vampire episode, but there you go. Day #26, blog #24 of Fun-a-Day, a month of art every day by artists from around the USA. We are family.
-----------
Here's an article I wrote awhile back, and submitted for publication, to no avail. So, the joy of self-publishing. It articulates really clearly the process that brought us to this land, and the vision we hold onto as we take our plunge. A lot of what my writing will be about, after this month, is this massive and human undertaking-- seeking community and healing on land the feeds us, holds us, and teaches us.

***

Way Opening: Building a Vision for Farm and Community in East Montpelier, Vermont

Another turn of the wheel, in spring 2013, had passed at Westtown School, in West Chester, PA, where I was working and living in community as Earth Literacy Teacher and Farmer. Managing and teaching on a 2 acre educational farm and gardens with children in all the grades, I marveled at their opening to the lessons on the land—peppered with hearty resistance to things like worms and dirt—and watched, wistfully, as they flew off on summer’s wings.

Six years building a farm program and curriculum at a largely traditional academic institution had left me with a sense of fatigue and hope. My work and growth while at Westtown gave me a clear knowledge that way had shut for my growth and vision. This was my last spring at Westtown, as I embraced the larger vision of my work to build farm, community, and justice-love in Montpelier, Vermont—a final yes to the calling that has tugged at me since I was small.

Yes, this vision has been with me, conscious or not, since childhood. Springs and summers growing up on suburban land in Cranston, Rhode Island, were times of late night dancing, solitary weeding projects, and conversations with a Jesus who came to me as I watched the rolling tides of Narragansett Bay.  Catholic Mass could not hold a candle to the in-breaking of God(ess) that met me as I stretched my body into the frames of trees on our land, or clanged the bell of the flagpole as the rope flung itself with great clatter in evening ocean winds.

I always knew that God(ess) was with me, when I cared to truly experience the world as it was. When I would sweat and struggle to dance my imaginings in the backyard, while listening to Peter Gabriel’s So album, at 11, I was not simply seeking to be seen. I was seeking communion, at its most sacred and least elevated—the marriage of sacred and profane in the body, with the land, with the weather and water that accompanied me for many years. I came to know this experience, as a feminist theologian, as panentheism.  I came to know this experience, as a Friend, as the inward Teacher (or Light, or Friend) speaking out, in words and in-body.

This awareness dipped out of consciousness, and re-surfaced again and again through garden work and justice work.  I sought community and justice as my body sought communion. Secular friends became religious friends in seminary, and turned to the Society of Friends as I sought theological ground for my experience for the in-breaking of God(ess) in my life and work. Living, learning, and working in community at Pendle Hill periodically from 1997 to 2003 became, for me, a ground of growth and an experience of yes to faith and Friendship. It stays with me still.

And now, the plunge. Doesn’t every faithful act start with the risk to say yes to it? Leaving the relative safety of Westtown School, with community, labor, ministry, work clearly marked success on its label, we land on land that has been in the family for three—now four generations, with the birth of my son.

We are starting small. We are starting with turning 264 square feet and planting ten pounds of garlic. We are cleaning out old storage and finding artifacts from our ancestors. We are stacking wood and building winter compost. We are excavating generations of memory and life, and making space for this new vision and work to blossom, even as the leaves change.

And from small things, big things build. Homestead and farm stand are our first steps, and from there, we hope to expand to grass-fed meats, value-added products, and interfaith meeting and healing space for all who seek shelter from their world-wearying work. As an activist and educator, I know that world-working work is tiring and sometimes injuring. As a minister and farmer, I know the land can be healing and enlivening. And as a person in the world, I know community must anchor us all.

My faith has found a home on this well loved pasture, mature acreage of woods, and few acres of arable land. A much defunct barn, a decrepit gazebo, and a house from the 1860s welcomed us in late August. The beginnings of our life, the seeds of farm and community, have germinated in this strange season. And as my faith grows, here, in my lived experience on this land and with my family, this seed will grow and change, reaching its true maturity and depth, in time.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the

Blog #21, Day #23 (all right I'm not perfect) of Fun-a-Day, where overly optimistic artists commit to doing art every day in the month of January. I'm doing the best I can.....
----------
I've been thinking a lot about truth lately, and a few lines from an Ani DiFranco song keep on playing in my mind: nobody's lying, still the stories don't line up. why do you try to hold on to what you'll never get a hold on? you wouldn't try to put an ocean in a paper cup. 

I think I pride myself on looking for truth, and in fact I've written about how I want my writing to be about that seeking of truth. But I am aware of a certain arrogance imbedded in that statement. Why would I try to put an ocean in a paper cup?

I come from, on one side of my family, a lineage of science. My father's parents were both plant scientists. Time spent with these grandparents, as a child, was not the most heartwarming experience, but it was always very stimulating intellectually. I learned about all manner of plant, and was taken to the New Alchemy Institute, as a teen, to get my first taste of both community living and sustainable agriculture.

I know that these folks, these ancestors of mine, lived their whole lives believing clearly in some sort of objective truth that had nothing to do with human emotion, or agreed upon meanings. For them, the reality of science was absolute, and in some sense ineffable.  I saw their knowledge of science as its own religion. I remember being both impressed and scared of my grandparents, because of my decidedly mutable truths, both in my youth and in my growing awareness that there was a bigness I could not understand, or really know, but only seek.

Maybe I envy my grandparents their certainty, and desire it for myself. But I'm not fooling myself, and I sure as hell wouldn't fool my grandparents. I'm not living in an objective world, not by a long shot. I've even, for a time, thought that farming could teach me objective lessons. That's no joke, but it is one. The methods of farming, the objectives of farming, the interests of farming, they lead to a million different choices and possibilities. One outcome can be brought about by many different paths, and each outcome will be slightly different. Farm research folks might disagree with me, but if nothing else, the weather is the great leveler of control groups.

Or maybe it's just that I don't have the patience to really know a thing. I feel a thing, I experience and internalize it, and then it is shifted in meaning through my own lens, my own need. God is much like that, for me. I need Her, and so she is, and in that sense, ineffable and mutable, both.

This is getting a mess, but I guess what I want to write is that perhaps I should take my stabs at truth, and know that really I am not holding anything in the paper cup but air. And if I'm lucky, I'm floating on the ocean, a drop of it, or a fish, in my element, breathing in the ocean truth, and not worrying if it will be there, or not, for my next breath.

Traveling

Another Fun-a-Day blog-a-day post, for your reading pleasure.

----------------

So I'm in Boston again. I spent a good 5 years here after college and through grad school, and come back periodically to visit family. This weekend we are visiting with my father, who had a kidney transplant at Thanksgiving. I was in Boston for the holiday, so I got to be here for the surgery and first day out of hospital.

A kidney transplant is no small thing. There is much I don't feel I can comfortably share about it, because it's not my story to tell. But I can write about the resurrection. Yes, I think I can.

I wonder about resurrection. As a good (or not so good) Catholic school girl, I remember learning about the transformation of the resurrection of the body-- both in Jesus' body and the promise to the faithful at the end times, and the allied act in eucharist of transubstantiation, where the bread and wine become the body and blood of the risen Christ through the miracle of the ritual. Both of these always felt like long shots, somehow something I could never really understand, and frankly, were kind of creepy.

As an adult universalist christian Friend (who enjoys pagan and buddhist frameworks, as well), I am at best an uncomfortable christocentric christian, if that makes sense. The miracles of Jesus' death and resurrection do not really sit well with me, because of how they smack of a separation from humanity, a sense of elitism that has been utilized in such interesting and damaging ways over the years and millennia since Jesus walked this earth. But this experience of my father's extreme health after the transplant really feels like an example of resurrection. To have life after one's life has ended, to serve and heal another person, is a miraculous and powerful thing.

I also think that, in a basic biological sense, resurrection happens all the time. I love manure, decay, and decomposition because of the life that can spring forth from it. I love post-apocalyptic writing for some of the same reasons I love compost-- often it has a period of grossness, but what comes out at the end of the destruction and decay is pure gold, utopian in its possibility for what can grow from it, and purposeful, without waste.

To call my father on the phone, as he learns of his health, hearing him tell me how he doesn't feel sick anymore, after years of it, is also a resurrection for him, I believe. I see him as grabbing life by the horns of this gift, this miracle. I see him traveling to Alaska, as he always wished to. I see resurrection in each day he is given by this transplant.

So maybe resurrection isn't about a transformation, but rather a transportation-- a traveling of life from one form to another. A life ended can bring life to another. After decomposition is life anew. What was it I learned in chemistry-- that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed? Or was that energy? Well, the results are the same-- our matter/energy move in time, and change, and change again.

I remember, in high school, I had two friends. We three were solid, and solid in our alienation from mainstream high school life. An example of this is one of our biggest jokes-- You know, like back in the day, like back when we were all couches? 

The infinity of what we were, what we can be, in a limitless timeline, is overwhelming. But these small transfers, travels, I can handle. I'll take them, and make good green growing things with them, and thank the resurrection of this life on earth.

A Food Post

Because my son actually ATE it, and because I am so proud of my cooking, I will be writing a food post for my Blog-a-day offering today.
_______

We bought a lamb as our first purchase in this local economy. The very talented Erica Zimmerman at Center Farm contacted me because we had talked about her chickens that we were too late in ordering. She told me she had a couple of lambs that didn't have a buyer, and would I be interested?

I was. Both because a lamb would fit in our normal fridge freezer and because I wanted to support this local farmer, I shelled out $250 for what turned out to be some of the best meat I have made or eaten in my life. This lamb provided our solstice celebration and numerous other meals, and there's still so much left! We have lamb chops, lamburg, a stew meat and a shoulder left. It's been a real adventure to explore meals in various cultural shades, and to resist the lamb and mint jelly I grew up with-- and hated.

from winecountry

A highlight is tonights meal. My son actually ate the meat we put on his plate, a real success. I had four lamb shanks and I knew I had to cook them slowly, so I found a British site that had a good and not too slow recipe for cooking them, in wine and chicken stock, with the mirepoix ingredients cut large for eating at the end of the 2 1/2 hour bake.

I read the comments section in the recipe, and found a reference to mustard mashed potatoes. Mustard mashed potatoes?! I had never heard of this, but quickly found a less cream-filled version and made that-- with double the mustard in the potatoes. Truly yum.

from onehungrymama

And finally, the kale. I make kale maybe 3 times a week, and am really getting good at it. I de-veined the dinosaur kale I love, and I heated up the cast iron skillet real hot. I sliced garlic thing, and fried it until crisp brown with olive oil and salt. Once that was done, I threw in the kale and watched it pop on the skillet, added a bit of water and watched it pop some more, moving the kale around every 20 seconds or so. This makes for a chewy and cooked kale, with a real smoky/creamy garlicness in it. Oh so good.

You know I didn't take a photo because I wanted to eat it so badly. I love cooking, and visit sites a lot looking for good recipes. I also love eating, and quality food, and quality local food. Though the wine was from Chile, and the kale from California, the garlic, onions, potatoes, and lamb were local, so that's something. Here's hoping we can grow enough this coming season to reproduce this meal next winter from our own homegrown bounty.

Won't You Come?

Day 12 of Fun-a-Day. I chose blog-a-day-- for good or ill.

-----------

I borrow the truck from our neighbor aunt and go to purchase three 55 gallon drums, for storing wood ash, feed, what have you. Before I leave, I explain to my son I will be back soon, and he asks, Can't I come?   I slide slowly over iced and sanded roads in the truck with plow attached, making sure to brake before hills to keep my speed down. The sky is spitting snow, steel grey and white. I make it to Cate Farm, a giant of the small farms in these parts, started in 1981, now with 7 high tunnels and wholesale markets locked. I am awed by their set up, their barn, the conversation with this elder farmer where he welcomes me to the neighborhood. I am learning that, though we live 5 miles apart, we are in the same neighborhood.

---

We make it late to Quaker Meeting, and I take my son down to the children's room. He is the only child in this small meeting, and a dear and gifted member offers to come down, every week. And he refuses. But this week he asks after her, walks into the silent room, and says, Won't you come? to her. She agrees to meet us down there in a few minutes. But he dissolves, barely makes it through the waiting, and when she comes, he can't hold it together. He is confused, where is his father? Why can't he pray with everyone else? And over-stimulated, and rude. We leave after 45 minutes of weeping and struggle.

---

I rush out of the house to make it to a community meeting, and hear, as I close the door, my son talking to his father, asking, Can't I go with mama? I want to get away, be with adults for awhile. I sit in the meeting, trying to pretend like I don't have a child waiting for me at home. The work of listening to community building and evaluating community resources is fascinating and mind expanding. I marvel at the work of years this small community holds in the minds, bodies, hearts, of its members. There is power here, and purpose.

---

I come home from the meeting just in time to see my partner and son making a bee line for a far field, in hopes of neighbor children. My son says, Won't you come? and though I think I would rather jog, alone, or read, alone, or do almost anything else, alone, I come. We walk to an empty field and decide to not let this get us down. We walk in the gathering cool up a field with skeletons of harvested corn plants jutting out of the ground. Our sled catches on one, and he asks after it. We see turkey, mouse, cow, deer tracks, and stop to talk about how we know they are what they are. We slide under a wire and see a half dozen cows barely moving in the coming cold. And on to the town trail, the small hills a joy of push and pull of the sled chariot our son is riding.

I have come to be with him, as he wants it, as we should be. In this cold season, on this hillside. He had been asking since 7 this morning, and it took me until 3 pm to listen.

Stories We Tell Ourselves

I've been getting some great responses to this blog-a-day thing. Folks have been writing comments on posts, thanking me for my writing, generally being supportive. Thanks, all. I gotta say this is not easy, though. I am hitting serious resistance today. But here goes-- Day 9 of Blog-a-Day for the amazing 10th year of the Fun-a-Day project.

_____________

I make up stories for my son all the time. When we are in the car, or when we are in his bed, trying desperately to get him to sleep, or when we are in a restaurant waiting for food and the books we've brought just don't cut it anymore. I love telling him stories, and I think my son likes hearing them, too. My partner is always interested in them. It's fun to make up stories, fantasies of dragons or magic books or friends who live far away. And in these stories I try to give some lesson or idea that I think he needs to hear, that I can't imagine he hears elsewhere. 

Like the story about the very mean dragon. This story has in it a triple gift.  First there are the three friends who now live in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, magically moving onto the same street in Philadelphia along with a very mean dragon who will scorch your shrubbery if you mess with him. Second is, well, a story in Philadelphia. Third is the lesson of what happens when people are made fun of and give up on friendship. 

This dragon was once a grand communitarian-- working at food cupboards, participating in civil disobedience, hosting garden parties, running for city council. But a 'friend' started to make fun of him, and told him his breath smelled bad. And not politely and quietly, but in front of all his other friends, and he was laughed at. 

The band of brothers-from-other-mothers write the dragon love letters in various colors while in school together, and the delivery and reading of the letters helps the dragon to realize he doesn't have to give up on friendship. Weekend barbecuing ensues and they live happily ever after.

Why do I feel like this is a good story for my three year old? Maybe because he tells me about the mean games that happened in his old school, or how he was chased by older kids or told he was a girl because of his long hair and love of pink and purple.  I tell that story to my son to explain both the mindlessness of meanness from others, and the chance that there will be good people elsewhere. I also want him to know that his kindness can change things for others.

I am trying to show my son a resilience that I can only make up stories about, that I don't feel all the time. Sometimes it takes a fantasy, a pretend thing, to teach what is most necessarily human, most possibly our best selves. 

Our family doctor has got this down cold. When we went in to see him, the doctor first felt the heartbeat of the plastic frogs my son was playing with before moving on to my son's chest. I took a clue from that and started acting out with a finger puppet the steps of our days together.

I gotta say I wish I was able to motivate myself in this way. Looking at the vastness of possibility and

work waiting for me in starting this farm, I feel overwhelmed! It is too much to look at directly, some days. Okay, today it is too much to look at. 

Maybe because in the business planning class yesterday we talked about types of risk in business. We looked at five types of risk: market, production, financial, legal, and human resources. This way of thinking makes me want to hide inside, or better yet, in a white room with ambient light and no sharp edges anywhere. It stimulates in me the fear of failure that stops many many many amazing people from doing their amazing thing. I want to believe I am not one of those people. 

So I will tell myself a story, maybe. A story about a child, afraid of the dark, who listened to his mother's stories for comfort and calm. And that mother, content in her success at caring for her child, dreamed and grew her life as a model and example of just what joy, what love can do, when put to good use. 

Belonging

Day 7 of Fun-a-Day: the ArtClash Collective's amazing art-piece a day commitment for the month of January. I chose blog-a-day.

______________________

Here I sit in my living room on another frigid day in East Montpelier, Vermont. My partner and son are in the next room playing. I spent the day free of parenting, visiting with friends, reaching out to find mentors and advisors for this farm and community project we are starting here.

It's hard to reach out, as I have mentioned in another post. But, I do. I take risks, I reach out, and the results are not always satisfactory. And sometimes they are. That is the work. To risk. To try. To keep on keeping on.

My son has started at a new childcare center today, and when we arrived there this morning, it felt like walking into a friends living room. This small farmhouse sized school, with 15 children a day, has the same 6 staff members, and is rooted in a community of artists and musicians. The sense of comfort is palpable. It takes my breath away, in the transitional moments when I am leaving or coming. I feel as if I am leaving a safety when I go, which honestly is such a relief for me as a parent. And when I come back, it feels like stepping into an old remembered hallway. And my son is there.

But it wasn't easy to get into this school. Norman wrote to them in spring, and when we got here, there was no space at the inn. We ended up at another school, maybe 10 times its size, with a lot less closeness, a sense of emptiness in the halls. I didn't like leaving Forrest there, though they were very helpful around medical procedures and taking Forrest on for more days in the fall.

How did I find room in the inn? Persistence. I continued to experience discomfort with the previous school, so I kept on emailing this one. Suddenly, in December, the director said, we might just have a space for you! I jumped on it. We visited a second time, Forrest loved it, and two weeks later he started.

We have a name for our farm, now. It wasn't an easy process, but we've come to it: Open Way Farm. This name comes from a Quaker concept of way opening. My understanding of this is that when things are rightly aligned, or rightly ordered, that the way opens, and we enter the kin-dom of God(ess).

Well, maybe not all the time, but this idea stands as a central part of my lived faith experience. The ways in which way has opened in my life, the openings of faith through experiences that seemed to present themselves like so much ripe fruit, ready to be picked, is truly miraculous, when I think about it. I also know that a lot of those experiences are tempered by my privilege and place in society.

And I have also worked for these opening ways. The rose colored memory glasses might tell me that things opened easily, but that is not always the case. And the opening stands side by side with the work, like the easy transition to the new school that took months of communication.

As I share my vision for this land and farm and community and healing place, sometimes I might sounds like a pie-in-the-sky fool, with nothing but some hot wind coming out my orifices. But I know that the work and the vision need to stand, side by side, for way to open.

I believe that God(ess) is present in most things, people, beings. You might call me a panentheist. You would be right. But this does not mean, therefore, that we are passively part of an All that leads to the pearly gates. My faith, my experience shows me, teaches me that we must work for the kin-dom, and when we work, She comes rushing up to meet us, in all the glory and realness that is the world.

This belonging isn't easy, but it feels true to me. I pray for the strength to continue the dance of try and opening I find myself in, and pray for partners in the dance. Welcome to the dance, if you are willing. Welcome to the Open Way.

Snow Day

Day 6 of Fun-a-Day: the ArtClash Collective's amazing art-piece a day commitment for the month of January. I chose blog-a-day.

______________________

Today my partner was home from work. This was a great gift from the Barre School District gods, though I guess it takes rain in winter in Vermont to call it a snow day. Temperatures soared to 43, rain and sun and rain again made the roads slick and dangerous. Although we made it off the land in the afternoon, the morning was miserable, to be sure.  It was a good day to not go to work.

We could have done work on the next phase of this farming and community adventure-- begun the long process of cleaning out the barn. This barn, like many old barns in these parts, has not been used for agriculture in many years, and is now home to stored memories, and not some small part trash, of past residents. There are some current residents of the furry variety, as well.

And honestly, it's not really a barn. It's a large shed that at one point had a couple of horses, and some very extensive gardening happening out of it. It's pretty perfect for our size for now. If we grow, that will be another issue, another blog post.

But instead we made pancakes and sausage after sleeping in, hung out with our son, and noticed a rainbow during a break in the weather. It was pretty perfect.

This project is at once so clear and so overwhelming. Starting a farm is something that I have dreamt of doing for many years, and the fact that we have made it here, and the wheels are turning, is quite something.

In the fall we planted garlic. We hand turned 352 square feet of bed, pulled sod out of old pasture, tried to make a good home for it in this very acid soil. I managed to plant it all by October 30, the day after the first snow here. As Aunt Janet says, Nothing like a little snow to motivate you to finish that fall project!

Garlic is something one orders all the way back in January, to be delivered in the late summer or early fall. Garlic has this amazing reversed-ness, that makes it appealing to grow, and something one can invest time and energy in the fall, and hope for good results the following summer. I ordered it as a promise to myself that we were actually doing this, though I hadn't given notice, we hadn't confirmed with the house. I just needed to do it. And I was right.

Now, we plan. I am so grateful to be in Vermont, where there are so many resources for farmers. I am taking the Building a Sustainable Business class with the UVM Extension, and it is giving me many tools for business, marketing, and infrastructure planning. I am also grateful that there are so many farms in this region. Farmers' markets are robust, even in winter. I can stop and chat with someone about kale in the coop, and likely they will be a grower of some type. And we are surrounded by farms on this land, in this neighborhood. Directly next door is an herbalist. On the other side of a neighboring aunt is a beef cattle and maple syrup farmer. Down the street is the dairy coop. And on and on and on. 

We have arrived in a rural place, designated as Agriculture and Forestry Conservation in the local zoning law. The land is ripe and ready for next things, after many decades in pasture and small gardens. We will start small and build on the good basis of pasture, garden, barn. We will build out, with season extension, beehives, chickens. Our goal is to self-sustain, and share the harvest with those who are interested. 

But it's more, and the Snow Day lends me to dreaming, remembering the vision of community and faithful opening ways of space, land, food, healing. Though I know we have a barn to clean out, a budget to set, and seeds to order, I remember the good and big thing we do, wedding ourselves to this land, committing ourselves to a ministry of healing and growing, in so many ways. And I know that the big things are made of the small steps we take-- to work, to connect, to love, and even to sleep in, in good time. 

Mise en Place

Day 2 of Fun-a-Day: the ArtClash Collective's amazing art-piece a day commitment for the month of January. I chose blog-a-day.
__________

On New Year's Eve we hosted a small gathering of members of the Adamant, Vermont community. Truly, this was a success for me, as I am not the best at reaching out. Although I value closeness with people, developing friendship and caring, mutual support and connection, there is a grumpiness, a mistrust, perhaps even a curmudgeon I carry with me. Is it from youthful rejection? Burnt outness? Fatigue? Whatever the source, I know I need to resist the resistance, and reach out.

And the folks in Adamant are good folks with whom to connect. I went to a women's gathering recently at one of our invited guests house, and she is a new transplant here, too. She told me that Adamant is the closest thing she's seen to a matriarchy she has ever seen, and that she is really lucky to have found this place. There is a community club, a music school, a coop/post office with outpost library books, ponds and small waterfalls, and farms surrounding this hamlet. And for all these reasons and more, the most interesting, eccentric, and genuine women and men have migrated here.

photo evidence

So I mention to a new friend, why don't we get together for New Year's? She and her partner are early sleepers, so we both were not interested in late night escapades. And she suggested, well why not invite a few other folks? And I agreed. We hosted at our place because of our set up-- casual couches and low table for putting plates on. A warm stove right there. Easy buffet in the kitchen.

I volunteered to make a recipe that came to me by accident. As I was opening a French cookbook that my partner's mother gave me, an index card fell out onto the counter. Unknown to me, this index card has been traveling with us from Boston, where we got the book, to Pennsylvania, and now back, to where is started, in East Montpelier. This recipe was typed on the card in 1972 by Polly Holden, the matriarch of the house we now live in. Polly died about ten years ago, but I tell you she was talking to me through this index card.

It's for maple syrup cake, and she typed it from a recipe she read in 1932. I figured if she had this recipe for 40 years and then decided to type it up, it must be good. It called for a number of things I had never done before, but I was game. I like cooking and baking.

example of mise en place.  from
everyday minimalist 

On new year's eve, I spoke with my new friend on the phone, checking in on her planned quiche lorraine (so delicious), and she started telling me about mise en place, as I described the joy of orderly preparation and work.

Mise en place, as I understand it, and as she described to me, is the sign of good cooking, and a phrase used in professional kitchens for having everything in it's place. All the resources needed to both follow the rules, and to break some, to innovate and create with the things you need, are there because of the chef's forethought and care.

We got off the phone, and I called my partner down to help me both boil the maple syrup and pour it into my whipping egg whites for a miraculous maple icing. He was mise en place for me.

I noticed the wood stove needed stoking, and easily grabbed wood from the closet-- mise en place.

And I wonder, now, thinking about this year of transformation, and our current moment, maybe I am working at being master chef of my life, seeking to be mise en place for the work that I so want to do.

I imagine my choices as chopping, my garlic planting as sauce making. I wonder when the steps, the pieces, will come together, and the creation can start. When will the everyday work of living become the community building and farm and spiritual healing space in our dreams?

Maybe it already has. Maybe the first sign of this being ready, being ordered, was when Polly's recipe fell out of the cookbook. At the gathering on New Year's Eve, I cut her a slice, poured a shot of scotch, and put it on our solstice altar with a candle. Welcoming her to the new year and honoring her lessons, no matter from what distance they come. Mise en place. 

Welcome to the Fun-a-Day House

It's 2014, and five months have passed since my last post. So much has happened. We had another month of travel in July and August to IL, PA, MA, AK, NY, NH-- and landing, finally in our new state of Vermont in late August. Since arriving in East Montpelier, we've unpacked (mostly), gotten work (well, one of us), planted garlic, started school, begun planning. I've traveled and retreated in CT and NJ.  My dad got a kidney transplant. We've hosted guests from NC, OR, MA, RI, PA. We've hosted two gatherings-- for Winter Solstice and New Year's, and one tag sale in the middle of December. A lot has happened.

And we continue to dream. I've dreamt of this blog, of the work of hands, heart, and mind that I want to share. I've dreamt of the farm and community project we are birthing up here, on this land. We've dreamt of having another child. I've dreamt of the families, the people who can benefit from this space, as a place of healing, as a place of good food, fun for all, and real purpose. And those people are you.

So enough dreaming, now it is time for doing. The very fine folks at Art Clash host, yearly, Fun-a-Day. Of course, this collective comes out of West Philadelphia, what we name as our ancestral homeland. Wherever we live, Philadelphia will be near and dear to our hearts.  I have committed to doing Blog-A-Day. For the month of January, I will write a blog post a day, with the hope of getting back into the swing of things with writing and reaching out for the extended community that we need to make our dreams reality. I am inspired by artists who do this project, and others who do more extreme projects (check out Jay Sand).

And what will I write about? Who knows, it's always a mystery what comes out. What I want to share is the work up here, the hope of what can happen when we seek to live differently. What will happen, as I steal minutes from parenting and household-keeping, will be the adventure that is Fun-a-Day.

And if YOU are inspired by this idea, you can participate in Fun-a-Day, too! Find the show nearest you, sign up, and send your art in to the show to share what you have done. It's wonderful to connect with other creative-minded folks, and to experience the community of folks stretching their busy lives to make space for art.

Happy New Year, and Happy Fun-a-Day to you!

Romance

I had the opportunity to listen to Tink Tinker speak in dialogue with Friends this past week at the FGC Annual Gathering in Greeley, Colorado. Dr. Tinker is a member of the Osage Nation and the Clifford Baldridge Professor of American Indian Cultures 
and Religious Traditions at Illif School of Theology in Denver.

He came as part of a dialogue with Friends gathered and Dr. Vincent Harding (link to his Veteran of Hope Project), elder in the freedom movement and religious and social change leader. In a room of almost 1000, these two men attempted to converse with Friends about the truth of the history of this country, and the growing edges of faith that call us to seek a more perfect union with those who have been on the losing side of USA imperialism—both overseas and on this continent.

It was a very extensive conversation, with a lot of pieces to it, and I can’t do it justice. I hope someone else does. What I want to write about is something Tink Tinker said in response to a question about the project to carve an image of Crazy Horse into a mountainside.

A woman stood up and asked him to speak to the project, and to the legacy of Crazy Horse. Tink Tinker said—and I paraphrase here—that the project of the Crazy Horse Memorial was something a group of white people are trying to do to compete with Mt. Rushmore, and that for Native Peoples, both of these projects are defacements of the inherent rightness, the sacredness of the mountains themselves.

And then he said something that has been sticking with me for days. He said something like “You white people, you are always making things romantic! Always romanticizing things.” And he went on to honor Crazy Horse as a powerful icon and hero of the struggle for Native freedom from European destruction.  

This has just stuck with me, echoed in me every damn day, as I have been driving, visiting, driving, and driving some more, back to the east coast. We white people, we are a romantic bunch. What is this about? 

When I think about this specific type of romance with ‘the other,’ the native, the war hero, I think about fetish. Not so much the sexual type, but the magical type, the special something we want to keep close to us for its properties, the something it gives to us by being in our possession, something we fixate on or give almost unnatural power to. This feels like a piece of the romantic relationship that Tink Tinker is referencing.

But there’s more. The romance of white folk with just about everything from our forebears, is everywhere. In our pop art, in our fashion shoots, in our incomplete history lessons, in our new age seeking, in our critical consciousness work. A friend enjoys the joke about how we name our streets, our housing developments, our sports teams, after things that we killed in order to build them.  

What motivates this flattening, this fetishizing? Is it a cloying sense that our whiteness has expunged any depth or value? Is it guilt? Is it fear? What makes white folks so afraid to really see, with wide eyes, what is? 

I think about authentic vision these days. I think a lot about the need to not idealize the life I am living, the decisions I am making, the work I am doing. In a previous post I wrote about excrement, and the need to really see where the shit is. Shit is useful. And it can be deadly if it is not dealt with well and with integrity with the land. 

I am thinking that I, as a white person, am swimming in a sea of shit. The history I have benefited from could drown me, and I can't spray perfume on it anymore. The excrement of my forebears has made the privilege and opportunity I experience now. I cannot divorce myself from this privilege. But why would I front about this-- deny its existence? Or, conversely, why would I want to lose my own sense of power and authority in the face of this excrement? Both sides of this coin are wrong. 

I know, the desire to flee pain is large. I know, the desire to self-flog in some Catholic sense is strong—at least in me. I also know that the truth is much stronger than any fantasy or fetish I can fabricate. 

As I plan to start farming in Vermont, I encounter folks who are both fascinated and repulsed by this plan. Some folks think it is an impossible task, others express envy. Both of these responses are incomplete, and flat. There is nothing impossible about farming, and there is nothing easy about it. When I was first learning about farming, I confronted the actual work involved with bringing food out from the wild. It was not pretty, and it still isn’t. But it’s real. 

And as I sit with this notion of romance as a limitation of my heritage, I ask myself, what else will I let go of idealizing, fetishizing? What can I do to truly know the shit of my ancestors, as well as the well tended compost, and fruitful fields? 

For me, I need to learn more about this land we are moving to, who has lived there, what it has carried. For me, I need to stop idealizing my ancestors, my mentors, the cool kids with the jobs and the nice lifestyles. For me, I need to stand on the land, feel its movement, be humbled in the years long task of learning to listen, again. Then, maybe I’ll know something more. 

Without romance. And without its opposite, shame.

Leaving

It's been quite awhile since I've posted. Major life changes are underway, and in the middle of change, I often get stuck. Stuck in writing, stuck in feeling. Overwhelm does not produce eloquence.

The truth is I am leaving the state, the relationships, the communities with whom I have the most connection, the most satisfaction, the best possibility of fulfillment. And we are moving up the coast to the land that calls to us, the lifestyle that we dream of, the reality we want to make.

I wish we could do it in Pennsylvania, and know that we cannot. Family resources make it possible for us to make the move to Vermont, and family is what calls us back to our New England roots. This call is not without its challenges, its risk, of course. But the call needs response, and we are ready to do it.  And so, a summer of travel and visiting, presenting at the FGC Gathering in July, family on Cape Cod and Alaska, and finally we land in Vermont in mid-August-- just in time to prep some beds and plant 10 pounds of garlic.

Our dream is to grow food on the land, building soil and community, finding the quiet and space for relationships and family that we hunger for. Our dream is to live differently then the powerful and persistent race-of-the-rat that has so thoroughly hoodwinked us all into believing that someone else owns our time. Our dream is to move beyond the mediated life of the work-a-day, and into direct confrontation with what is.

Along those lines, I have been enjoying completely re-listening to The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin, as I do my last bits of work on the farm I have been cultivating these past six years. This book is a revelation whenever I encounter it. One of the most powerful things that stays with me is the awareness of reality connected to the centrality of self-determination as expressed in a utopian anarchist society.

This is most directly expressed in the protagonists experience, as an anarchist, of visiting a highly polarized capitalist society. The protagonist-- a revolutionary physicist limited by his anarchist society, named Shevek-- travels to the home world from which the anarchists had fled, in order to explore his physics in intellectual freedom, in order to keep a sense of revolution alive in a complacent society. What Shevek notices clearly at one point on this highly polarized, classed, and capitalist world, is both the proliferation of and invisibility-in-plain-sight of excrement. Excrement-- human shit. Excrement-- human excess. Excrement-- art that is propaganda, distraction, drug. Excrement-- life without center, without purpose.  Excrement to Shevek is real, part of life and necessarily something to be dealt with. But outside of the reality-loving society from which he comes, this is stuff that is pushed out of sight to the marginalized classes, and the results are bizarre to him.

Oh how this book makes me see our own society with new eyes, and my path with critical awareness. One of the issues that is so crucial in our farm project is compost. Where will we put it? What will we put in it? Water is an issue, we don't want to put it too close to well or upstream from pond. And location matters because we want it close enough so we can monitor it, use it, maybe easily add our own waste to it, as we get better at tending to its heat. I want to be up close and personal with this excrement that will make our gardens grow. I want to know this compost like the back of my hand, and know the value in all its forms.

And so I hope for the ability to see the excrement all around me, and to see its value, its reality. As I unhinge from a lifestyle of rush and tumble, reach and strive, I want to see all of life as it is, and not hide behind the structures that would keep life from me.