Revolutionaries, Transcendentalists, and Some Thoughts from Farming

The farm where I work as an apprentice is on the Minuteman National Park, in Concord, MA. As I go to and from the work and about the fields, I spend more than a little time thinking about how revolutions start, how the shapes and ways of the world change.

I also spend a goodly amount of time listening to NPR as I commute, alone in my car. This morning, I heard the tail end of a report about how the coal industry is arguing that they can’t upgrade to more efficient and cleaner ways of burning coal—that to do so would wreck the United States economy.

The next bit of news, probably an unintentional juxtaposition, was the Marketplace Morning report. At that moment, U.S. stock futures were trading in the negative.

So…we’re sticking with a dirty and dangerous way of being because we’re afraid that it will ruin our economy, and that economy is currently an exercise in negative futures?

As with all things, I am more concerned about the poetic implications of the words as I am about the economics or the science of a report. Those two news blurbs, taken together, contain enormous, bone deep truths.

It was with this idea of how to leave an old and no longer appropriate system, prognostications of a failed future that I drove past numerous historic markers of the Revolutionary War and arrived at the fun and vibrant and busy little farm where I work.

We planted today. We filled up newly tilled and shaped beds in three different fields with peppers and tomatoes and eggplant and flowers. I think we planted 1,800 pepper plants and I lost count of everything else. My hands are delightfully sore from all the digging, and despite best efforts, I still have some new patches of sunburn. We weeded the potato field, and one of the farmers plowed under a failed crop of onions (maggots, due to excess moisture, probably, they tell me—I am continually excited about how much I do not know about the world of food, which is strange as I have been eating food for many years now). We finished that day at the local ice cream shop. It was a great day.

I want the world to change, to be more like the kind and small and complex world of something like a farm or any of the other little worlds I’ve lived in. I want that so badly I cry myself to sleep some nights and I believe in the possibility of change so fully that I wake up some mornings on fire with the hope that the revolution will happen before lunch. 

And, more and more, I believe that change is happening, that the revolution can almost be said to be in progress. Does my working on a local organic CSA with a complex land lease permit from the National Park Service do anything to stop Nigerian schoolgirls from being kidnapped, or mass shootings, or climate change, or the violence of politics, of life, in Syria or Ukraine?

No, and I won’t pretend that it does in anything so grand in a practical manner. I wish it were that simple. However, last week, I looked down at the rows of tiny beet seedlings, just poking through the dirt and thought suddenly of all the life in that small patch. Then I looked up at the boundless sky and thought of all the life that is tucked in under those layers and layers of air and cloud. This perspective of scales of being changed nothing, geopolitically, except I felt incredibly humble and ferociously happy to be part of the world. There was a sense of braided joy and connection and responsibility that I am trying to carry with me and abide in. I believe even that small awareness of the world and one’s place and size within its fantastic scope is a step towards a better world for everyone.

And, truly, good and practical changes are happening: we’re—more of us than we even know—living our lives with the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be like “they” tell us it is. Again, I am literally cultivating the soil of revolutionaries and Transcendentalists. The revolutionaries rebelled against the way of being imposed upon their lives by an empire that was mostly focused on its own profits, not the quality of life of its worker bees and consumers. The Transcendentalists followed and explored ideas of personal knowledge and freedom. (They were also kind of nutters in how their ideals played out practically, but as I never had to winter at Fruitlands under the thumb of Bronson Alcott or been emotionally manipulated by Emerson like Margaret Fuller was, I am happy to just learn from their collective misadventures and learned lessons as I make my own weird little journey through life.)

We need to boldly recognize ourselves as the heirs to these lineages. These heroes of history were just people—eyes, noses, mouths, hearts, hopes and dreams and nightmares and loves and struggles—who gathered together to go against the grain. History hasn’t stopped yet, life on this sweet planet is not over, so we might as well put more care and attention and intention into how we are to live. We must revolt, revolve, evolve, love, transcend—whatever word you like for embracing life and the future rather than clinging to the past and the devastating patterns of the past that are negating the future.

I’m not advocating for violently taking arms against the rather nasty corporations who have a vested interest in our continuing to live fossil fuel addicted lives while the world melts. I assume that even corporate nasties have people who love them and I don’t think the world needs more violence or sadness than it comes to without my advocacy.

What I am advocating, though, is taking strong and scared and unsure and joyful steps towards what seems right. There isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this. Right means different things to different people at different times, and I know that even having the time to learn to listen to whatever place that works as your ethical barometer is a luxury that not everyone can afford.

However, your heart and soul are free—in every sense of the word. I believe that listening to, learning, the tenor and tone of yourself above all else is one of the hardest and also most necessary responsibilities of being a good human. What injustices and hardships can you withstand, and what can you not live with? What is that you do that makes you feel happy and clean and whole? When are you kindest, and how do you show your love for your people, your world?

When I think of what the revolution I want looks like, I picture people being kinder to and more aware of themselves and each other, putting their hearts and bodies and hours into the people and work that brings something like joy into light. And I don’t know how to start this revolution—I have the strong and lovely sense some days that I’m joining what’s been in process for a long, long time—but trusting our better selves, turning towards them fully, and going forward, that seems like a good place to start.

Daily, I go to a place where revolutions have already been lived out and I labor over learning how to grow new generations of old plants. On that evidence, every day I trust a little more that change is possible. We just have to make it so. 

(Photo is from www.concordconserves.org, as I have been too busy and my paws too dirty to take my own dang photo of the place.)

Simple and Complex

Today, I accidentally broke the handle off the pull-cord of a tractor-mower while mowing around one of the newly planted fields of the farm where I’m working.

The broken cord whipped back into the engine. One of the farmers got out her tools and put it all back together.

Last week, we spent several hours ripping damp rotting muddy burlap out of fields that remain too wet to be planted. Other tasks have included unrolling huge sheets of what feels like enormous dryer sheets to cover newly planted seedlings and seeding fields in a palimpsestuous parody of every peasant to ever sow a crop. 

All in all, I couldn’t personally be happier with this mix of mechanical and physical and green-growing skills. Basic capability is assumed, which is the fastest way to grow it, I have found. I have entered complicated little worlds before and love them, although so much seems new that I am overwhelmed by the seeming complexity of it all. 

As the farm is in Concord, MA, I find the giggling ghost of Thoreau on the edges of the field. Particularly, his often quoted and misquoted advice to “simplify, simplify.”

With all due respect, I think this is bad advice. Or rather, just poorly interpreted.

Nothing is simpler than how we live, most of us. With enough money, really, I could get anything in the world delivered to my home, and make my home anything, anywhere I’d like it to be. There are ways to live without lifting a single finger.

What could be simpler than this?

It certainly seems that this way of living is viewed as a goal for many people. Simple, easy, microwave everything, drive everywhere, swaddle ourselves from any reality that might be disagreeable—from climate change to social justice to our own sneaking suspicions that this ease of living isn’t all that it promised to be.

For a semester in college, I lived in a cluster of yurts on the edge of a lake. We had solar panels and a water pump and it was as messy an experiment in off-the-grid living as I could hope for. Taking a shower was one of the most complex operations I’ve participated in. First, you went down the dock and grabbed a 5-gallon bucket of lake water. You lugged the bucket up to the main site, treading over short stumps set down to make footing easier—this had mixed results. At the shower stall, you poured whatever water hadn’t sloshed out into a very large pot and lifted it up to a propane burner. Five or four gallons of lake water takes a long time to heat up, and I rarely had the patience for more than tepid. When your patience ran out, you lifted the warm-ish water off the stove and poured it into another 5-gallon bucket. This second bucket had a nozzle in the bottom with a handle to control the water, and a slightly reinforced bucket handle so you could attach it to a pulley over the open-air shower stall and hoist to an appropriate height.

Once the water bucket was hanging over your head, you hopped into the little plywood cell, looked up at the hemlock trees, and fiddled with the nozzle until a weasel-drool thin stream of tepid lake water leaked out over you.

It is far simpler to take a shower at my apartment. And far more comfortable. The water is hot and plentiful and I can be in and out and clean in less time than it took to lug the water from the lake to the burner.

So, I think that “simple” is maybe the wrong goal to strive for. There was something in the labor of that system that connected me to the world, took me in as a member of a complex web of labor and time and effort and resource and reward.

I think the same as I learn how deliciously complicated growing food turns out to be—there are machines with gears and teeth and purpose. There are plans and equations and chemical compounds of dirt and seeds to compute. There are weather patterns to take into account and untold varieties of challenges to be met. There is my own body as a tool to keep strong and healthy to do this work.

None of it is pure or simple. Honest and clear and complex—these are better words of advice for how to be in the world, how to be with ourselves, perhaps.

On the radio last weekend, I heard a bit about Stanford University divesting their endowment from the fossil fuel industry. This is excellent. One of the sound bytes I caught was “climate change solutions must come from the private sector.”

How true.

Not the private sector of business and commerce—although if that’s where your gifts and passions and talents lie, go for it—but the deeper private sectors of our own hearts and minds.

The solutions are staring us in the face. They are simple in the clarity of their truth, their obviousness, their proven ability to make us less reliant on fossil fuels, to make our lives less crisscrossed with unseen, unknown costs and infrastructures. The solutions are in the moments of clarity and the imagination to believe in our heart of hearts at the times when the world and our places within it actually, briefly, makes sense. And in the courage to act in service to that clarity and imagination and hope.

What we need to do, what we are doing in so many ways and places and corners of society is the complex daily work and effort that brings these simple ideas to life. To our lives, and for the life and livelihood of whatever we each hold dear.

As Thoreau also says, "Things do not change; we change." Let's. And let's be clear and complex. And have fun. And save the world and ourselves. 

On Fear, Bravery, and Leaping

No one else can tell you how to be brave.

In all of this—the vaguely organized and invisibly tendoned revolution of living cleanly and joyfully in hope and faith that such acts of daily affirmation and resistance to an unhappy and unhealthy status quo will bring us to the present and future we believe is possible—there are moments of fear and doubt and where a great leap is required.

The greatness of the leap is usually the smallest act, the often invisible motion of making one small decision. And yet, these are the times when bravery is required, when you can no longer put off what you know is truly right—for you. No one can do this for you.The moments that strike abject terror into the heart of one person can be as breezily easy as breathing for another. There is no accounting for where we each choose to make our stands, for what path our journey requires the first step upon.

I often say—with what might be misconstrued as arrogance if I didn’t mean it more honestly than anything else I ever say—that I am friends with, love and am loved by, the greatest people on earth. When I think of the scope of talent and passion and skill those near and dear and faraway but I love them anyway, I would be staggered by their brilliance if I weren’t too busy grinning and dancing around about how, with all that talent on our side, there can be no defeat.

And yet, I know plainly in some cases—and suspect in others—that there are deep holes and fears inside each of these wonderoos who are out and about in the world being amazing in countless sung and unsung ways. None of us, I believe can see how utterly remarkable we each are—one of my dear friends who is a writer, a musician, an actor and all around Wonder Woman looked at me this summer and said, “I wish I was good at things.” It took a few seconds before the absurdity set in and we laughed like hyenas. I think, though, most of us are so normalized to our own hearts and their shapes that we forget how lovely and unique they are, we are. Also, from the outside, most of our soft spots and sensitivities and doubts are hidden.

Daily life, more often then not, requires a certain girding of the loins, of waking up and jumping back into the thick and thin of it every morning, covering up the soft spots and making do. It’s hard, and there are times when to bring your best face or true face—or any face—into the world requires a certain amount of daring.

I find, rather boringly, that a certain amount of bravery is required for the mundane logistics of actually pulling a dream off. Bravery is supposed to be for fighting dragons, not making choices in the grocery store. The big ideas, these are easy, not quite a dime a dozen, but certainly come fast and furious some days. All of the flights of fancy, the “what ifs…” the imaginings and the wisps of possibility that come and go through our heads in the day and night…one can dwell for a long time in possibility. And, truly, I believe that so much is possible—a practical idealist with an imagination is far more happily overwhelmed and in love with life than a kid in a candy store.

To even type the word “commitment” makes my feet cold and toes curl up, When I think about what my life would look like if I committed to one of the half-formed day dreams that swirl around, my stomach goes choppy and I add to the ever growing list of things to do instead of work on this or that project. I can’t seem to sit down and say “Yes. How do I truly begin, how can I organize the logistics of my life to make this the, a, focus?” to even the most persistent of the hopes and dreams. The planning required to bring an idea to life is daunting. It’s not the leap, but how long will I be aloft, what does it look like where I land, will anyone be there to catch me, will I break my legs falling, etc.

To say nothing of the fear that, if I fail at something I’ve long thought of, I will no longer have the pleasure of its untapped possibility.

This, I believe, is where bravery comes in. Which is why no one else can tell you how to be brave. Or at least, not exactly. We’re each of us our own little hot mess—different heartbeats and different boundaries and barriers and needs and hopes and sources of faith and fear. In that, I think there is also the distinct possibility that no one either can or needs to do in the world what dreams burn in your heart of hearts. I think that I’d rather try and fail than never try. I’ve thought that for years, so perhaps it is time to live that way more fully.

I like to think that people who have made the first leap, who are living their dream, have a different glow about them than most. I find a common sense of innocent defiance, a subversive joy, in people who are living by their own rules. Simply, they have bowed out of the safe game of easier answers, of tidier lives (or the cruel myth of such thing). It may be scarier out there, in the lives build on dreams and birthed by courage, but I suspect it is a happier place.

I would rather try and fail at everything I dream than live in such a way that shuts out the hope of that encompassing happiness. In the logistics and striving by the light of an idea, this is where I believe grace can be found. A life made seems painted in colors a little richer than a life accepted.

Here is the other thing—I don’t believe we get just one shot, just one dream, just one chance. As a friend used to say in college, helpfully, “just because you make one decision doesn’t mean you can’t make another.” Just because you commit to one dream now, doesn’t mean you can’t have another later down the road, failure or success notwithstanding. It’s not that people make their own luck but rather, in finding the courage to try something once, there is the great comforting well of finding your own resilience, and the resilience of the people around you.

Those who have gone before are waiting to catch you as they can help your landing and the construction of your dreams. If you reach, those in the air with you will hold your hand through the leap. And those watching as you boldly commit to your leap—you are showing what greater ways are possible. 

Laboring thus together for the dreams of our individual hearts—I can think of no better or braver way to live.

Socks and Underwear, Perspective and Solutions

A man I met in Biloxi, Mississippi in 2005 told me, gravely, that in times of disaster, people always needed more socks and underwear, that those little things did more than anything else to “make a body feel human again.” I thought of him this morning with my nose prickling and my fists clenching as I read news and saw photos of damaging tornados and floods.

Hurricane Katrina was eight and a half years ago. The puppy I adopted down there now eats senior citizen dog food and naps a lot. But, in some ways, time doesn't seem to have passed at all. I hear a lot about disaster preparedness, but not as much about prevention. I’ve tried on and off and with moderate success to talk and write about what I experienced for the few months I worked with Hands On Disaster Relief in Biloxi. Once, in grad school, my attempt came back marked with the comments that “you don’t seem to have reflective distance on this yet.”

I doubt I ever will. Reflective distance seems to imply that I should have come to some sort of peace and perspective about disasters, that I should be able to get beyond the horror and find the silver linings, the lessons, that it is time, past time, to pack up the pieces of my broken heart and carry on. Until these disasters stop, I’m not going to have reflective distance and my perspective on the impacts and truth of climate change will always be more passionate than scientific. Knowing the causes of such events, knowing my role in these causes, peace is hard to come by.

The news today is full of tornados and flooding in the South, along the Gulf Coast. Washed out roads, flattened houses, debris that were treasures all scattered to the winds, carried away on strange currents. I find myself just as passionate angry and afraid as I ever have been—like all disaster footage, these seem like just another replay of stock photos of disasters.

We’re seeing these images more and more often, as our confused lifestyles exacerbate natural cycles and systems. Lost coastlines, fracking-caused earthquakes, forest fires, hurricanes, temperatures that vary like a demon is playing roulette, floods and droughts in disparate lands as if the water got lost like airline luggage…all of these images and news stories have become as ubiquitous and ignored as the wars and military operations that we are—as a country if not as individuals—engaged in. I’m almost more appalled by our cultural coma about these horrors as the reality of the horrors themselves.

I’m pretty sure that to the people who have lost their houses, who cannot find their loved ones, that this is all too real, like a nightmare with no dawn.

Here is a piece of my journal from my time in Biloxi: “I am taking a break from the real world where you can change your socks and underwear, where your food comes from the grocery store, if not your garden, not from the Salvation Army truck touring your neighborhood three times a day…Hands On has been concentrating their efforts in East Biloxi, Mississippi, where an alternate reality has, out of emergency and necessity, become the norm. Those mundane daily activities mentioned above have become visceral needs. Tears, hugs, and blessings tumble out of the survivors when they receive a blanket, when someone takes the time to listen to their story, when a crew of workers guts their house down to bare joists. There are people who have lost everything, family, friends, house, job...it's all gone. Homes, entire neighborhoods are reduced to piles of rubble that more resemble graveyards than anything else…The residue of interrupted lives, the teddy bears in the muddy streets, the cracked and moldy photo albums, the bowling trophies, the sofas, beds, all of it, lies in the streets.

The water lines vary from house to house, but usually the storm surge (not a flood, there is a difference as more and more people are being told by the insurance companies as they try to collect flood insurance and rebuild their homes and lives) crept up past the doorknobs, nearly to the ceiling on the first story in many other cases. Hearing the stories on the news of people riding out the storm in their attics, I had foolishly imagined something like the New England farmhouse attics, something dusty and probably leaking, but certainly big enough to settle in comfortably for a few days. I had imagined windows. I have yet to see a house with anything more than a crawl space beneath the ridgepole. There are no windows, no way out except down into the house, or, during the hurricane, down into the water rising around the house. One man I spoke to stayed in his attic, and could hear, but do nothing for his neighbors crying for help in their attic. They all died, except for one. The man I spoke with had pulled his last neighbor out of the eaves of the house after the water went down. “

When I saw the pictures of the tornado and flooding, all of this came back as if it were yesterday. It could well be tomorrow in too many places.

The saying goes that “if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.” I’m furiously trying to be more one than the other, because it makes it hard to sleep at night when I think that the ways in which I live my life—how my food is kept cold, how I type this on my own computer and post it to the internet for anyone else to read from whatever device their heart desires, how I don’t really know where or how most of my clothes were made—are contributing to the sorts of “natural” disasters which continue to pepper the globe like buckshot.

By continuing to live as if nothing is wrong, or as if we do not know what to do, we are making many things much worse. We are remaining the problem, when solutions are as clear as what we do upon waking each morning. How we live is killing the planet, devastating the lives of our fellow humans and countless other living things with big news-footage disasters and smaller untold stories of loss.

Certainly, we are not enough as individuals to change it—our own lives are drops in the bucket of the bigger changes that need to happen. I believe that our personal choices and actions and ways of being can lead the charge, can open hearts to change.

So, how do we live?

As best and simply and with as much kind awareness as we can, always striving for a better. And, send socks and underwear to disaster stricken areas.    

Happiness v. Consumption

A few times in recent months, I have watched movies on television, resplendent with commercials. One of the movies has been “The Silence of the Lambs,” and the aggressive messaging of commercials and pop culture were far, far more frightening than the horror movie.

The glorification of stuff and the reduction of humanity's complex variety is beyond me. What I see, beneath all the sales and deals and shiny appliances and beautiful people living fantastical lives in a rotating series of cookie-cutter paradises, is the message that whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you do, it is not enough. Simply, you are not enough without everything they are selling.

I cannot seem to get past the cruelty of this message, and its cultural ubiquity. Who are “they” to imply that my life is unfulfilled without that blender, this engine, or that I have physical flaws to be hidden, or that the correct direction for my life is to become the tiny, long-suffering, wise, eternally hot wife to a schlubby looking man—who has the intelligence of an inbred puppy—and a beatific mother to a few messy children in an unbearably beige home? As a lady, I will also require a very large gaudy diamond ring to get that whole show on the road if my life is going to count as successful. And Dude-man is going to need a spiffy car and a good aftershave and I’m going to need some eyelash implants, a Brazilian wax, and the “right” outfit if we’re even going to get past a first date—we all are inadequate and incompetent without the vast assistance (abetting?) of consumer products to make us lovable. We will also need boring, soul-sucking but well paying jobs to accomplish this life, and expensive educations to get those jobs. (Lesser paying passions and interests be damned!) If I believe commercials, then this is what everyone is doing—worrying about stain removers, if the neighbors’ grass really is greener, which international retailer will give me the best deal on grotesque quantities of the necessities of life, and how much I hate my job, but how worth it all is to have fulfilled The American Dream.

This is absurd. I get by, pretty contentedly most days, without any of this and without agreeing that my life would be better with any of those “solutions.” And I can only hope that most people see all of this as a ridiculous parody of life, not an instruction manual on how to live. I can’t imagine believing the underlying message of personal inadequacy. I am as, if not more, insecure than the next person. I am regularly wracked with doubt, with worry, with fear, with the sense that I am barely holding things together. And, given all that, I still look at commercials, at most television shows, and popular movies with hysterical, horrified disbelief. Simply, I am certain that the life they are selling, the attitudes and mores on display is the antithesis of happy and healthy.

What makes me happy cannot be bought, cannot be sold, or marketed. Happiness isn’t a product. This must drive product development firms crazy. From my experience—which I’m happy to say is frequently emotionally if not physically outside mainstream anything—happiness comes in how you live, how you treat the people around you, how close you can hew to the truth of your heart. Life and logistics and that the people around you are as gloriously irregular and complex as you, are not hollow characters and puzzle pieces in your story, all of this will impact how well your visions of happiness can practically play out. It’s not exactly as if you can make up your mind to be happy, and nothing bad will ever happen to you again. Life is going to hurt, sometimes. Nothing you can buy will stop that. Life is also more beautiful and brilliant and soaring than any of us can imagine or articulate. Nothing you can buy can come close to that. Thank whatever is holy that this remains the stubborn truth.

I am not patient, and not always fully empathetic to people who are still trying to buy their way to happy, who haven’t learned that there are ways of being beyond the banal versions of life on big and little screens, on ads, in magazines and bad novels. It used to be that I just hated them for killing the planet, for buying all that stuff that will not last, will end up in a landfill, or floating out to the plastic island in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve gotten so angry and sad and scared that I’ve burst into tears thinking about all the pollution spewed into the world to make the trinketry, the abuse of people and land and resources that go into a cheap tee-shirt or new cell phone.

I’m not saying I don’t have those moments still.

Lately, though, I’m trying to look at why we live as we do, what are the underlying reasons for it all, what hunger are we trying to assuage? I don’t know. My suspicion, after watching a few hours of television and coming away feeling unclean and tinged with self-loathing, is that many people may have come to believe that they are not good enough, in some way. With so many “solutions” being sold, we must have an equal number of problems.

And, as a culture, I believe we do have problems. Lots. But, as people, as individuals, I believe that we have more solutions than problems. The key is to step away from the molds, the expecteds, the shoulds and supposed-tos, and examine fully where your happiness comes from, and what you truly need to sustain that. Do not let “them” make you fear and doubt and undermine your unique joys and talents. The mainstream cultural bathwater is dirty and stagnant—I feel gross having even dipped my toes in briefly.

My suggestion is to pull the plug, and go skinny-dipping. 

Where I Went and What I Went For

“And for many,” says the man I presume to be a tour guide of some sorts, pointing to a freelanced cairn, “this site is even more meaningful than his grave.”

I overheard this when one of my sisters and I went to visit Walden Pond on this last Patriots’ Day, Marathon Monday. We were standing at the cabin site, thinking our own thoughts and watching other groups and pairs and individuals do the same and stroll around where Henry David Thoreau lived for those two years.

That also others find his life and living place more powerful than where his bones were laid to rest makes sense to me, that life outshines death. Particularly for a man who was so deliberate in how he lived, where he lived, and what he lived for, it seems the deeper tribute. Bones decay, but if you bend down and touch the stones around the cabin site, something powerful remains or has been created.

My understanding of Thoreau has evolved about as my entire ethos of how to be in the world has done the same. When I was nineteen and living in yurt on the edge of a lake, I wanted to be like Thoreau and Edward Abbey, a maverick living in wild places, in being alone and apart and independent from the world. I was living in the yurts in the fall of 2001, a particularly poignant time to wish to disconnect from mainstream culture and find balm, equilibrium, and solace in the patterns of woods and wild places.

First, Abbey burst that blindly idealistic bubble when I learned he was not, in fact, solitary in the desert—his wife and young son were present for much of the seasons that became “Desert Solitaire.” Some part of me—much as I admire that he complemented his wilderness work with being a social worker in Hoboken—cannot quite forgive that omission of his family. It just seems rude.

And then there was Thoreau, with his pesky walks into town, with his mother doing his laundry, with Emerson having him over for dinner, and all the rest of his interactions with Concord. My sister pointed out that, as an 1840s bachelor, Thoreau's mom would have been doing his laundry regardless of his living in the woods or no. A valid point. But, at nineteen and for many years between now and then, I wanted Thoreau to be a paragon of isolated and wilderness and wildness, and there he was, leaving the woods more than I thought seemed appropriate.

I hadn’t yet come to realize that wildness was more the point than wilderness, and that can be found anywhere once you learn to look. Or that paragons are not as rewarding to love as the contradictory symphonies of human beings.

As I spend more and more of my time these days trying to figure out how to live more like I do in the woods when I am out of the woods, I am newly struck by Thoreau’s genius. That, yes, it is an isolation of sorts, but it is also an intentional, deliberate way of being in the world. I find that when I go into the woods or the mountains or along the ocean, anywhere that is different and away from clocks and cell phone coverage and constant connection and demands for my time, there is a difference in how I am, how I perceive the world and how I engage with everything that lays before me. Those open eyes and heart are what I keep trying to bring to better life away from those places. By walking to town, by not isolating himself, Thoreau made the boundary of nature and culture porous, irrelevant. How he lived, there could be only one way of being.

I don’t say “one way” like a one-way street, there are as many paths to whatever this good balance, further shore, sustainable lifestyle, happiness, human-erred enlightenment, etc. may be as there are walkers of these ways. But only one way of being in his own skin—that he didn’t have different hats or costumes for who he was playing his flute alone the woods and who he was talking to his mother and sisters about abolition. That constancy is what I am after. I doubt I am alone in scrabbling towards this, and we all make, as Wendell Berry says “more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.”

Mistakes are allowed, wandering and sauntering encouraged, but the intention of getting somewhere—and enjoying the journey—more whole and less splintered is as good a beacon as any I know to go towards.

I had wanted to go to Walden on Monday not just as an escape from the city to a beautiful lake with my sister, but to go there as a pilgrimage on a day when there was so much remembrance of a freshly dark and strange time in Boston’s history. I wanted to be in a place where the infallible salve of nature and the peaceful bravery of human justice merged seamlessly. I’ve read that the Concord Ladies’ Antislavery Society met at the cabin at Walden Pond. At the recreated cabin by the parking lot and gift shop, there is a quote that “I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof,” and I like to think that some of those gatherings of bodied souls were working for justice, talking about the great horrors of an unjust, unsustainable system and the yawning need for personal actions when the powerful were sitting on their hands, orchestrating who was bringing snacks for  the next meeting and who was guiding and guarding the former slave towards freedom. All of those actions have a sort of mundane holiness, a brilliant humility about them. 

This was a place where the beauty of the world met the challenges of the world head on, with courage and action and joy, and where there were no boundaries between such things. I wanted to be reminded of that the way some folks go to church—sometimes the choir wants to hear the words again, to be preached at, to rekindle the faith they sing out with.

Anywhere, I believe, can be that boundless place yet if in your head and heart you deliberately live it into being.

Although, Walden Pond itself is particularly lovely for a reminder and renewal.

My sister, requesting entrance to Henry's cabin (and life).

Oil Addiction

As I walked into the grocery store this weekend, I came upon a group of women gathered around a woman who lay on the ground. She was mumbling and shaking a little. It didn’t look good.

I’ve seen two people have seizures, and witnessed a few other emergencies. I don’t like this, seeing someone at an awful, if not the worst, moment in their life. But, at the same time, I’ve been helped out of some dark corners, am trained to respond to emergencies and can’t or don't walk away. In the pain, in the confusion, in the reptile-brain, or stupor—there is a human in there, hoping and trying to be better than the presenting symptoms.

One lady had her phone out and was calling for an ambulance. I crouched down to talk to the woman on the ground. She didn’t seem to hear me, or notice that I was there. I didn’t want to touch her, not knowing if she’d seized or was going to get violent out of hallucinations or fear or nausea.

A plastic bag lay near her on the ground, with a Pepsi bottle poking out. Water, of course, would have been better, but I pulled the bottle out and offered it to the woman. She tried to drink and flailing, missed her mouth completely and sloshed the soda into her hair, before falling back to the ground and mumbling about being in pain and needing to get to a psych hospital.

Five of us stood and knelt in a ring around her, shielding her as much as we could to save a little dignity. Another woman arrived, announcing she was a nurse, and stepped right in, finding a paper bag for a pillow, rubbing the downed woman’s back, calling her “sweetheart” and promising that help was on the way. With her other hand, she dug into the plastic bag and pulled out a mostly empty bottle of gin.

I was impressed that the tenor of our ad hoc response team didn’t change. There was no talk of how she’d brought this on herself, no blame, just steady empathy at how awful a situation it must be, how sad it would be to be so incapacitated by an addiction, how frightening it would be to live a life that leaves you semi-conscious in the care of strangers.

The ambulance arrived and we dispersed. The nurse talked to the ambulance, the woman with the phone left, another lady went home to nurse her baby after raising her eyebrow at me and saying: “interesting that only women stopped, eh?”

Not quite true—one homeless-seeming man stopped to tell us how to get to the nearest shelter, and what time to get there by—but maybe women are more empathetically responsive, or just more apt to go to the grocery store that day.

I had started off my errands that afternoon feeling the slight traces of smug that come with biking to the grocery store. That morning, I’d finally and proudly bolted carrier baskets to my bike and so felt like a capable one-woman station wagon loading up with organic milk and beets and kale and yogurt.

I am trying to, one choice at a time, break from my participation in our cultural addiction to fossil fuels.

To see someone, laid so clearly low by addiction and tenacious demons, humbled me—how lucky I am to have these choices to make, to be free from biochemical imbalances and aggressive psychological turmoil—but also reinforced my thinking of climate change in terms of a chemical addiction.

I am not the only to think this. I watched Bill McKibben’s uplifting and clarifying sermon “God’s Taunt” and heard of his experiences in that church with addicts and sheltering the homeless. (Take the 20 minutes and watch the whole thing.) He points out how little difference there is between a drug addict needing their fix and the fossil fuel industry’s addiction to profits, regardless of the harm their disease causes others, causes the planet we all live and the society that touches us all.

I’ll go one step farther to say I believe that we normal folk are also dangerous and sad addicts. Examine our fossil fuel dependent lifestyle, our lashing out at anyone who suggests perhaps we are killing ourselves, destroying our lives and the lives of our loved ones, with this insatiable hunger, this miserable selfishness, and so on. Certainly, those who profit from this destruction are horrible—but they are predatory drug dealers, we are the addicts. They need censure, we need help.

Addiction scares me. The loss of being able to be fully independent, to make choices based on what the demons demand, not on the best intentions of our hearts. But, having lived in a terrible pattern for so long, we do not know anything else and to leave the security—even the sad and toxic security of addiction—is enormously hard to contemplate, to undertake.

It sounds familiar. I think of the patterns of normal life in America. We are indoctrinated with “needs,” with expectation of what to do, what we should do, how we should live, what a good life and success look like. There are a lot of Joneses to keep up with, veneers and structures to maintain, and we are—as per The Lorax—bent always on biggering and biggering. To grow, to expand, we require more resources, we need more electricity for all the new technologies we need, we need bigger cars and houses, we need more plastic devices filled with precious metals mined in horrific conditions, we need to go everywhere—farther, faster, frequently—at the drop of a hat. I could go on, but you know the limits that you are reaching for which you find silly, superfluous.

And yet, we all keep on, drinking the Kool-Aid, building up our tolerance of this lifestyle until we are so stepped in oil so far that, should we wade no more, returning were so tedious as to go over, to borrow from Macbeth in his bloody, deadly quest for security and satisfaction.

I think that’s how we view this sometimes. That, basically, we and our beautiful earth are beyond salvage, so what is the point of trying to change our life now? We’re in too deep to get back out, so may just ride through with the status quo until the nearing end. The planet is heating up, the land is eroding, the weather is terrifyingly erratic, the seas are rising, homelands are disappearing, species are going extinct, and so, we’ve lost, so let’s just make ourselves comfortable and go resignedly into this good-enough-for-gloomy-addicts night.

I will not go this way.

The most recent IPCC report about climate change, I think, puts us humans pretty squarely on the ground with the lady outside the grocery store—we are almost overcome by our addictions and seem to teeter on the brink of unhappy self-destruction.

And so, what do we do? The self-depreciating thing to do here is to say that I don’t know. That I am as overwhelmed and addicted as the next person. And parts of that are true. But there are things that I do know we can do, the things that are working for me in trying to make mental and physical breaks with the substances and systems that seek to shape my life. These may not be right choices for you, but it'd be cruel to not share my budding solutions for how to live clean. Namely, pare down to what you truly need in your life—own only what is useful and/or beautiful to you. Reshuffle your life priorities so you can spend the most time on the parts of your life that bring the greatest joy, satisfaction, and sense of happy efficacy. Develop an allergic reaction to bullshit. Enjoy your paid work, but do not let it rule your life, lest you come to resent your passion. Be kind. Open your eyes to what is possible, and do not resent what is, even as you work to bring what is possible to life. Trying to do and doing these things brings me joy, allows me to be hopeful about the future of the world, to forge merrily into the bleak facts and imagine something better.

There is so much more, so many more ways to beat this addiction. We humans are extraordinary at pulling together in times of crisis. This is a crisis. Pull. We are better than our addictions and our demons, but we must help each other get out of this pattern, solve this problem we know in our bones we have.