Strings and Pearls

The image of the best moments as beads or golden bubbles or pearls that stand out and float above the more ordinary times has been circling around my head for a while. I think of those as semi-detached fractals of time and space and people when everything that seems like love and light coalesces.

And then I think of those moments as beads along some rosary, remembrances to click through like prayers when the good fight gets tougher.

The phrase “more string than pearls,” always seems beautifully pregnant with disappointment, sort of stoically accepting, anticipating, the hard and gray times. The string, the mundane, is boring, but must be lived through, to get to the successful pearls of glory.

At the end of my summer on the farm, I got into a great conversation with some of our CSA members. They work at a different local prep school than I, and, as they picked up their vegetable share one week, we talked about the things we hope for with our students. We—the not-quite-hippies with the vested interest in local organic vegetables—all seemed to be similarly bound to work on waking our various students up to the possibilities and curiosities of the world. We all want to focus on helping them learn to ask questions, not to provide answers.

In a world that seems increasingly, terrifyingly, bent on spoon feeding identity and opinions to the masses, finding someone who is on the same page with struggling to put idealism into action is like meeting another pilgrim on a dark stretch of trail.

It was a lovely moment, a pearl, the kind where I find myself putting my hand on my heart a lot, grinning, and saying “Oh, me too!” It is a relief at not, in this, being alone.

Of course, we’re never alone in these struggles, but some days it certainly feels like we are each the sole outpost of sanity in a society that seems far too focused on defining people by their inadequacies, and offering consumer goods and services as the surest means to alleviate those failings, the surest path to success.

These same lovely people, emerging friends, sent me a copy of the writer John Elder’s Last Lecture before he retired from Middlebury College. The title of the talk is “Freeing Education from Success.” I love it—Thoreau and Mary Oliver and Darwin and the Japanese poet Basho all tied together in a conversation about how to be in the world. Elder talks—he seems too joyous for the sterner verb “lectures”—about the dangerous thread of our current culture that defines success for each of us, rather than us each drawing our own understanding of a full and good life out of ourselves. And the role that education plays in all of this misunderstanding of what success might look like. How we need to be wistful, because “if we long for something, it draws us into the world.”

Success, as described by Elder, is an active amalgam of wonder and compassion, curiosity and engagement, community and humility, wistfulness and awareness. Success begins to sound not like a pinnacle to be gained, not a prize at the end of the road at all, but like a well-woven way of being in the world. Success is how and where we are, not as much how and where we will be, or would like to be.

The pearls—the best times—will always stand out. No life can be so rich that the special moments do not pop with shimmering intensity. I painted a bunch of my best moments as beads on a string a while back. What I didn’t do, though, was pay attention to the string. That, now, I think is where attention is deserved. The string is the mundane, the daily. It is the how we are in the world, truly and frequently. Our success is in those ordinary times as much as our brilliant joys are in the memorable contained moments.

To have a well-lived and happy-though-not-perfect string connecting all the golden bubbles and pearls of our best times—I can’t think of a more successful way to be in the world. Living like this won’t ward of the darkness and the challenges—trouble, frustration, heart-break and fear will still and always come your way—but it does help to change the scale of success you seek and focus on the moment you are living in, rather than the nebulous one you live for.

Personally, I want to make the world an ever better place while enjoying and celebrating all the good that is already here—from mountains and oceans to eggplants and our human capacity for love. It is a grand and lofty goal. Sometimes, that bar seems awfully high—I don’t know how to measure if I am succeeding towards that end or no, and so I take in of the general insecurity of our culture and assume that if I am not a blazing success with my name in lights, several award winning books, and a million dollars in my bank account, I must be a failure.

Most days, though, I can look around at the life I live and see that, by the measure of success I know in my bones, I am already there and here—enjoying and celebrating and improving my and the slightly larger world, little by little.

I think about this when I bake bread, ride my bike, eat vegetables from the farm, meet fellow educational idealists, talk to kids about books, or write. I’m lucky to not be in a phase of struggling to find work and meaning in my life—I’ve been there and imagine I will be again—and here will always be a thousand insecurities and frustrations in life (student loans, dog vomit, emotional turmoil, etc.), but, when I stop to notice, that even the mundane fibers making up the string between the glorious pearls are fairly wonderful, this is so much more joy to be had.

What is more successful than that?

One Morning in Maine

Last weekend, I ran away to the wild places and beloved people.

I first went, alone, to the coast of Maine, to the beach and geography of some of my earliest memories. This particular beach was where I learned what it is to fall in love with a place. In my experience, falling in love with a place is not so very different from falling in love with another person or finding a piece of your soul in words or art or music—it is as if your bloody muscle of a heart melts away and a space of light appears in your chest instead. The world comes in, the world goes out, alongside your breathing and while all may not be right in the world, for these ragged moments, all is right with you in the world. There is a tremendous sense of exhilarated belonging, of security and wild possibility.

I do not know of anything more beautiful than this.

The world, including this beach, has changed since I was first in love with it. Walking along the sands, I noted the absence of soft, rolling dunes and the presence of sterner, sturdier rock walls. The summer homes and cottages, the steep piney hills beyond, the continuance of all these things depends on how much sand is or isn’t lost to the hungry tides.

The thought of losing this place, of the waters rising and rising and erasing something so dear to me from the map used to keep me awake at night. I don’t relish the thought now, either. And it is not that I have reconciled myself to the loss, or the threat of loss. I am not, nor will I ever be, at stoic peace with the sea changes and erratic weather and melting glaciers and roulette-wheeled seasons, and all the rest that climate change means. It is not, though, the climate change itself that keeps me awake at night. It is our responsibility for these horrors that keeps me hungry for people to band together with and live out solutions, rather than dithering in fear and mourning and denial.

But, never mind that. We all know what is at stake. We, each of us, carry something known or unknown in our hearts that is the seed of all fears and actions regarding how to save the world. I am constantly surprised and buoyed by what is stronger than these fears. To wit, even as my sometimes weary and mournful eyes looked at the changing coastline, the better parts of me were hyperaware of being in the right place, of feeling as in love with this little corner of the world as I have ever been.

The ocean was a dark dark blue, glinting with the red-gold light of the setting sun. Where the waves crested and crashed, the water became the misty bottled green of seaglass. Frumpy uncomfortable looking adolescent seagulls swooped around. The beeches and maples on the otherwise evergreen hills behind and the islands before me lit up like fires that will never be extinguished. Looking far out of the islands, scrubby deep red plants—blueberries and poison ivy and sedges and the same hardy plants I love from mountain summits—clung to the edges of the sun-bleached rocks. The wind was cold coming off the water, the sort of breeze that smells of frost, while also carrying the scent of woodfires in the surrounding cabins and cottages. My hands felt chapped in my mittens and my face was wind and sun and smile strained by the time I got back to the car.

I lingered too long, perhaps, although it didn’t feel like long enough. This is the thing about love, tearing yourself away feels impossible, even if you are cold and hungry and needing to find a place to camp. My plan had been to camp as close to the beach as possible, so I would fall asleep to the sound of the waves and wake up to the sunrise.

Much as I might try, my life is not consistently as poetic as I find sunlight on the water to be. I spent the night curled up in the back of my car, with my sea-damp dog, in the relative safety of the L.L.Bean parking lot in Freeport.

On the plus side, when I woke up at 3:45 with numb legs and a kinked shoulder, there was no possible thing to do but get back to the beach in time for sunrise.

I walked down to the mouth of the Kennebec in the pearly darkness that comes just before sunrise and hunkered down on a log of driftwood.

And slowly, there it came. The darkness faded like a healing bruise, the star-like light of the lighthouses grew less bright as the sky pinked and purpled and blued back to day. I could see dear tracks along the sand, see the birds as they flew around cawing in the dawn chorus. A black bird—a cormorant? a sparrow in silhouette?—flew up the river.

By the light of the rising sun and the riffles of the dawn wind, the current of the river was visible, rushing to the open sea. The bird, whatever it was, flew up the river. For a moment, I could see the opposite forces together, like retrograde motion or an Escher drawing. The water goes one way, the wings the other and it seems as if they cannot possibly exist together.

Yet, they do.

Now is a time to be schooled in such beautiful, active paradoxes. There is so much—too much—in the discussion and actions of climate change that is focused on what is lost, what will be lost. There is fear and mourning and grief and anger, and all of that is warranted. But, at the same time, the world is not dead yet, and often our fear at what may be builds a premature coffin around what is.

Along my most beloved shoreline, there are changes from what I knew. What matters more, though, is what has not changed. The way the sunlight hits the water at all hours, the eternal and always fresh crush and crash of the water, and the feeling of being always in love with the intangible here of this place.

We must immerse ourselves as often in the wildness and variety and love and beauty of the world as we do in fear and facts and figures of threats to and hard realities of this world. I believe, with the certainty of tidal sunrise and the clarity of mountain frost, that doing so is vital to the salvage and survival of all that really matters. Sure pure love drives purer and purer actions, stronger and wiser choices.

And, conveniently, such immersion is eternally, ecstatically joyful. What is truly, cleanly, lovingly good for the soul is also for the world.

Qualitative & Quantitative Sustianability

I was recently talking with some high school students about sustainability. Like a lot of schools and institutions, the school where I work has latched onto the enigmatic idea that they should be more sustainable.

This is as admirable a goal as I can contemplate. The challenge, however, comes in determining what that means, and how we can all go from the hopeful work on paper to the practices and routines of our lives.

In Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael the narrator leaves one of his first sessions with Ishmael—who is a sort of eco-historian philosophy tutor and life mentor, among other things—in a foul foul mood. The trouble is that Ishmael has given the narrator an assignment. If there is an assignment, then it stands to reason that there is a syllabus of some sort, which implies an ending that approaches, a linear goal that will be attained with due diligence and scholarly application to the task at hand.

The narrator fears the end of his course in saving the world. I understand that—the feeling of finally finding something, only to know it is limited is heartbreaking. On the bright side, the world will always need saving and celebrating, so our labors will always be needed.

What sticks with me now, thinking about Ishmael and the regret of a syllabus, is that we are so culturally locked into linear patterns towards a specific goal. With most institutional and formal efforts towards sustainability, we are still adhering to this formula. If School A, for example, has this number of solar panels, that number of students and faculty active in environmental causes, this percentage of bike commuters, and this amount of local food, then it can be pronounced “sustainable,” or at least more sustainable than School B, which doesn’t hit any of those tidy metrics. 

This is treating our aggressively unsustainable culture as a quantitative problem that can be solved by neat rows of records and logical measurements. I see the underpinnings of our crises as qualitative at heart, and so must the solutions be.

Underneath the checklists and initiatives, there is the eternal truth that we are responsible for the state of the world, and we are letting its beauty and power and potential down. There are none but our own skinny shoulders to fix this, no matter how many sustainability studies get funded, reports published, or awards handed out.

We know this. This is why everyone gets snippy and panicky about how much greener they are than others, or defensive when talking about carbon footprints, or why some people lie awake at night, knowing that they could do more for the state of the world. We can have a thousand marches, rallies, vigils, festivals, acts of disobedience, degrees, policies, and metrics of environmental and social success, but until we can reconcile what we each do and live into upon waking each morning, when we align the real and practical actions of our lives with our deepest knowledge and highest hopes, we will continue to live cruelly and always hungry for something.

This is not a sustainable way to be.

It is difficult, though, to know where and how to start, addressing the qualities that can be revised and corrected, learned and remembered in order to calm our scared and rapacious ways of life and bring something simpler, calmer, happier and more sustainable to life. There isn’t a syllabus, there isn’t a handbook, there is not a linear progression that gets us—all of us, even the recalcitrant people who haven’t had the courage or support or love to handle waking up, or taking a first step after coming to face the challenges of now—towards simpler, cleaner lives.

Now is where I ought to offer five to seven tidy points for sustainability. The truth is that I don’t know. Sustainability is a one-size fits all type deal with an easy answer. I do know about environmental systems—about the moving pieces, the complex relationships, the entirely sublime Rube Goldberg type system that is ecology. And I suspect that being a sustainable society looks something like that—an ever-evolving balance of incongruities.

This is a messier answer than most institutions are looking for in their search for sustainability. In that mess, in the fluidity and humble recognition for flexibility and revision, I believe that there is a greater framework to follow than any organized and linear metric. Certainly, we can use the quantitative research—upgrade solar panels, increase efficiency of transport systems, and all the other great changes that come from having good information. The key, though, is to use the science in service to the heart, not the other way round.

As a bonus, beyond linear and back to an ecological approach—there is no end to what we seek. The clear delight I find in word by word, step by step, friendship by friendship building towards a better, kinder world to be the greatest source of purpose and joy in my life. In a quantitative approach to sustainability, I would worry that this sense would fade once the goal is achieved—I would have to graduate from the course, as it were. With a qualitative approach, I know that this is the core and essence of sustainability, and it will never fade.

Revolting Reading!

Today, when I asked a group of middle school students why they thought books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian had been banned, one student said it was probably because “they tell the truth.”

I love my job. Especially during Banned Books Week.

My first interaction with the banning of books was through the baseball movie, “Field of Dreams.” Amy Madigan and Kevin Costner go to a school board meeting where the Iowa townspeople are, as Madigan’s character Annie says, “talking about banning books again! Really subversive books, like ‘The Wizard of Oz’... ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’...”

I always thought that those particular books were hyperbolic examples, but it turns out, both have been challenged and banned at various times. The Diary of a Young Girl was challenged earlier this year in Michigan because some parents found the unedited descriptions of a girl going through puberty to be “pornographic.” This irritates me to no end—the hushing up of the messy corporeal reality of being human, adding a strange level of shame towards the normal bodily development of a person, of a teenage girl who is remarkably reassuring in her honest addressing of the confusion of growing up.

Otto Frank didn’t want those parts of his daughter’s diary published and edited them out of the first editions of the diary. Also the bits about Anne’s rocky relationship with her mother were taken out. It seemed too personal to him. In that light, I lean towards censorship, towards a parent protecting the privacy of their child, the public image of someone who did not survive to tell us how she feels about her teenage scribbles being shared throughout the world. Barring her voice, respecting her father’s wishes seems respectful.

But, I don’t know, really. I like honesty, and I like privacy.

Questions like this is what I really savor about Banned Books Week. Not that we get to point and accuse and judge different groups who believe different things, but that we have a chance to examine the merits of a pushed envelope and to explore our own preferences and choices. I like that people have deep enough values that they’ll make something of a passionate ass of themselves to try to get Harry Potter or Julie of the Wolves banned, although I do wish that these same people could expand their worldview a tetch and see more good than harm in such works. The whole idea of banning and censorship gets into ethics, and what sort of world we want to live in, want to build. This conversation, under any cover, makes me as happy as a pig in shit (or a librarian in Banned Books Week.)

Let’s take Anne Frank. Her descriptions of going through puberty are (presumably) honest observations and explorations of the fact that her body is exploding and changing, even as her life remains hidden and static. The sticking point is how normal she is—that there is something eternal and companionable in her way of being. That is part of the power of the whole diary. We read her diary, visit her life, and try to extrapolate it out over six million to understand the human weight of persecution, of war, of living with fear, under a repressive regime.

It is the quintessential “there but for the grace of God go I” book.

Oh fuck. Now I’ve gone and mentioned God. That’s another touchy subject this time of year. Because if a book isn’t being banned for pornographic reasons, it’s usually somehow either too religious—like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books—or not religious enough—like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Or you get something really tricky like Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time that manages to—variously and allegedly—promote witchcraft, be too Christian, and also bother some religious conservatives with the sci-fi aspect. 

Goodness. What nasty books, putting ideas like kindness, questioning authority, and exploring the world into the minds of readers!

I don’t like to argue, but I love to question answers far more than answer questions. I like knowing why the books were challenged. One of the reasons that both Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye have been found questionable is because of their derogatory statements about and portrayals of women. Certainly, that evidence is there in both those books (and a lot of others.) But less so, I think, than the unsubtle misogyny in an average twenty minutes of television. Besides, what either of those books offer is worth far more—to me—than whatever offense they also give.

Life, as we all know, is messy and all the unknowns are hugely frightening. I suppose I understand the sort of fear and hunger to protect children from all the mess that drives people—mostly parents—to challenge books in school districts and public libraries. However, removing Anne Frank from seventh-grade curriculums will not stop puberty from happening to all those kids. Banning books that dance even lightly around homosexuality will not stop people from living “alternative lifestyles,” as the Merrimack, NH school district termed it when banning Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1996. Keeping Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Jean Craighead George, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie off bookshelves will not eradicate racism, sexual violence, or classism. Jay Asher and John Green do not cause or glamorize teenage suicide or substance abuse in their books—I think they just deal honesty with the realities of being a teenager, which is pretty fraught and shitty at times, and for many does involve death, sex, and illicit substances. Getting rid of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series will do nothing to curb the tide of elementary school potty humor.

Books are, like dreams, artifacts and articulations of our past and our present. They are not prophesies of the future. If, in reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, people are disturbed by the repressive violence of the Iranian Revolution, I believe the answer is to educate more, act on and work for peace, justice and freedom, not ban the book as the Chicago Public Schools did in 2013. We need to stop shooting these wordy messengers, and look at the lives we lead outside the pages.

We cannot pretend that the pieces of life we do not like and do not agree with are nonexistent. We will not change the world for the better by remaining still and silent, by banning books that make us ethically uncomfortable. Ask Anne Frank what happens when the world remains still and silent, when censorship is accepted and freedom of expression ignored. We change by learning to ask questions, to expand perspectives, to juggle truths. Nothing is as powerful as the truth.

And, in that, nothing is more subversive and revolutionary.

Lessons From a Party of Whales

Here we have some whales, all dressed up and ready to party. They are, from the pages of Vanity Fair in 1861, celebrating that the world is tilting towards running on fossil fuel, rather than whale oil. 

Huzzah! Down with the harpoons and up with the oil derricks! For whales, this is awesome.

For the rest of the world, well, I can only hope that no one knew where fossil fuel extraction and reliance would get us a hundred and fifty odd years later.

We get stuck, too often, in thinking that how things are is how they always have been and how they always must be. The world was once peppered with wooden sailing ships full of barrels of whale oil. At present, we’re thick with oil tankers, trains, and trucks. I believe those infrastructures are phasing out—I throw something like the whale’s party whenever I see solar panels. Mostly, this involves grinning as another piece of grim despair evaporate from my heart. The world can change, will change, is changing.

In all the changes and transmogrifications, I feel we are getting closer to understanding what and who is behind the curtain. The clearer we know this, the less our lives and actions for a better world become random shots of hope in the dark, and the more effective we become at building the world we want to see, that we know in our hearts is possible, is real.

One of my favorite professors in grad school was endearingly fond of explaining the root of a wide variety of world troubles—from migrant children’s health problems to monopolies among food suppliers—was “because Capitalism never sleeps!”

I don’t believe she is wrong, and have certainly taken to brandishing the phrase while I pound my fists on tables and revel in attempts at revolution.

All melodramatically serious joking aside, some corporation making money at the expense of the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness does seem to be at the root of many of the world’s troubles. Why, really, are coal plants shutting down?

Because fracking and natural gas is cheaper than upgrading old infrastructure to new environmental standards.

This is the same switching dinosaurs for whales—trading one destructive form of energy for another—and someone is making money off the killing of the planet. It’s not that I don’t delight in the approaching end of coal, or towns like South Portland, Maine soundly rejecting a tar sands pipeline through their homeplace. I love all of that the same way I do solar panels and CSAs.

But this isn’t against one or another form of dirty energy, or even, really, a fight against corporations that value their bank accounts over all else. It is a fight that is resoundingly for something we don’t quite have the words for yet. Fighting for, pulling together towards the better unknown, this is what we are doing.

I like to think of all the efforts of people trying to and succeeding at doing good in the world as tree roots converging and thickening into a trunk, the little trickles of streams joining into rivers and oceans. The more small battles and old causes are fought and won and put aside, the more ages of whales and fossil fuels can be celebrated as over, the more focus and force comes into the adventure of what comes next.

We are, I believe, too smart and too wearied by the mistakes of history to believe in one single silver bullet solution to anything anymore. What comes next will be strange and diverse and multifaceted—there are so many good things to be done to live into better, cleaner, kinder ways of being. Some might say it will be complex, but I believe that the doing of the many right things to live well among each other on this still beautiful planet has the potential to be the simplest and most joyful acts we've ever undertaken as a species. 

We’ve got that going for us too. I had three high school students talk to me this week about going to the People’s Climate March happening this weekend. I am as delighted that they are going as I am with my own choice to be a witness elsewhere for a branch of the future I want to see—solutions are in everything we do. And, to know that none of us are alone in remaking the world in a kinder and saner fashion is where the trickles seem to come into a wider river, with the delight and relief and celebration of the whales at the dawn of a new era. Along with the growing clarity, we’ve got a marked increase in joyful momentum.

This is our most sustainable fuel source.

Climate, Change, Commitments and Love

As per Margaret Mead’s storied advice, I have never really doubted that “a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.”

Along those lines, I am nearly (but not entirely) sure that I didn’t do an involuntary victory fist pump in the grocery store parking lot when I walked by a poster for the 350.org People’s Climate March this morning.  I deeply hope that it will not be a small number of people who gather in New York City and in solidarity around the world this September 20^th and 21^st. Because, if a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world, just imagine what a LARGE group of thoughtful, committed people can do! Anything. Everything. 

Whatever the political goals and gains of a people’s movement, I believe that the greatest true success of such actions is the awareness of a community, of being one of many who believe and act in joyful expectation of what ways of being can yet be brought into the wider world. I am hungry for this sense of being part of and party to something greater than myself, for the reassurance that my hopes can braid into others and, together, we can bring about the sorts of changes necessary to enable the systems of the world and the patterns of our daily lives to stop harming and start healing the planet for all our sakes.

With of this hope-glittering belief, all of my midnight worries and sunlit bursts of dazzling joy regarding the better world I strive towards in all things, with my own aforewritten admonishment to just show up for such things where merely being a numbered participant really does matter, and all that I want to not feel so alone in wanting to change the world, I feel a little bittersweet that I will not be marching in New York, or anywhere else, that particular weekend to demonstrate for the causes of thoughtful love and committed passion that are necessary to change the world.

Instead, I’ll be witnessing the wedding of some dear friends. It is impossible for me to even think of their wedding without smiling, so I am sure I have made the right choice. There is no choice; their commitment to each other is simply where I must be present.

I say, too often and not often enough, that I am friends with the greatest people on earth, but it is in the lives of my loved ones that I see how many good and glorious actions and ways of being there are in the world. Most simply, my people know themselves and are true to those selves—such joy and honesty are the best tools I know for building a better world out of the best parts of our present reality. Most of the good being done in the world spirals out from well-aligned love and self-awareness. I believe this amalgam is what Margaret Mead meant by “thoughtful.”

I am absolutely in favor of all kinds of nonviolent actions and movements and protests to draw attention and educate and advocate for environmental and social issues. By any and all means—from letters to the editor to Twitter to running off to the wilds to joining a CSA to street theater and marching bands to poetry to blockades to parades to living as simply as Thoreau to donating your corporate muckety-muck wages to the causes of your heart to whatever sparks your soul that “YES! What I want and believe and hope for is possible and I am part of making it so!”—I love to see people rising up and coming into their own, of waiting only as long as it takes to hear the truth of their heart and act in the light of that clarity.

To me, a marriage between wonderful people is as great an act and action of faith in the better world we can build as anything public and political. It is an act of love, a thoughtful commitment to the unknown future, and an honest articulation of changing one’s way of being due to the truth of the individual heart. In truth, I believe all our actions and uses of time and treatment of the people around us are manifestations of an individual’s way of being in and hopes for the world.

To that end, as much as policies and politicians and fossil fuel executives and cultural nasties who foment the feelings of inadequacy that pressure us into lives that are untrue to our hearts and souls and whoever else shapes the world, whoever and whatever we protest against and demand change of, regarding the climate and everything else, what most needs to change is us, each of us, individually. This will lead to collective change—see above regarding small groups and social change—but it is on our own shoulders, souls, and ways of being that changes must happen. We need, each of us, to come to a marriage of sorts between our hopeful hearts and our corporeal lives.

Change is hard and messy and uncertain. It is one thing to advocate for divestment from fossil fuel industries, and another to divest oneself of unquestioning reliance on fossil fuels by riding a bike more and using computers, phones, airplanes and microwaves less. It is, perhaps, easier to commit oneself to a political ideology than a personal code—I will never forget the people I knew in college who bought cheap materials from Wal-Mart to make anti-capitalism shirts for a WTO protest. Anyone can justify their actions to themselves, of course, but I such hypocrisy makes me physically uncomfortable. 

I dearly hope that the People’s Climate March turns some important tides. That political leaders watch and listen and join, that change is wrought on deep levels in everyone’s souls and we come around in a year’s time to more and more solar power and public transportation and simpler lives with fewer, but more useful, long-lived, meaningful and beautiful possessions, that we come together to create a more perfect and just world. That people have come see their own lives in the rising tides and erratic weather and square their fears with their hopes and act kindly, honestly and accordingly to build lives around what they hold dear. When there is news coverage of how this particular weekend in September is something like a Freedom Summer or Stonewall or March on Washington, I will perhaps regret that I was not present for a big moment in The Revolution.

On the other hand, I keep a note on my wall that reads: “life is the action.” We do not have just a handful of times to show up and demonstrate our commitment to bettering the world. We have a lifetime of committing to the love and truth of our hearts and the life changes required to be faithful to those ideals. I believe the smaller and personal will likely, in the long run, trump the big and public acts, both in terms of how we truly change the world and in where we find our satisfaction and joy.

All the same, if you can get to New York City, please do. Sign up here: http://peoplesclimate.org. Thank you. 

(Poster by Josh MacPhee, grabbed by me from www.justseeds.org) 

Potatoes & Prophecies

My first day on the farm, we planted potatoes.

A few weeks later, the dark green leaves cracked through the thick crusty dirt. Then came the delicate and fragile purple flowers. We hilled up the potatoes with a BCS implement that fought us almost every step of the way. Then came the ravages of potato beetles, where we spent long hot afternoons picking the beetles and their larva off the leaves, squishing them between our fingers, and dropping the carcasses into buckets of increasingly slimey, filmy water. Then there was the use of an organically approved spray to keep down the ravages of leafhoppers and the shriveling burn they bring to the leaves. And then there were weeks of watching the potatoes disappear into the fields of weeds as the rest of the farm had more immediate and pressing needs.

It is not uncommon, I know, to mark time by the changes of the plants around oneself. We look at new leaves popping out in spring and find hope. We look at the fruits of summer and feel rich with the abundance of life. We look at the reds and golds of autumn with a snug appreciation for what is, what was, and what comes next. We look at the stark black fingers of leafless trees in winter and are reassured in their constancy—under all the costume changes, there are eternal shapes that bend and bow, but it takes a great deal to break them beyond recognition.

I came to the farm in May with a bruised heart and a flagging sense that the work I do and long to do in the world is possible, matters to anyone other than me or will make much difference. Against what feels many days like long political and lonesome personal odds, the truth that does not leave my heart lately is that we can make a better world, that we can salvage a lot of what has been lost and broken in ignorance and entrenched cruelty. I believe, like I believe in sunlight, that we do this when we recognize that our outward actions are reflections of our inner most motivations and priorities.

What do I want the world to look like, and is what I am doing part of making that vision real, are my near constant guiding questions. The answer—I want the world to be kind, honest, responsible, and loving—frame how I treat the homeless man sleeping at the church down the street, how I try to be with myself, my friends and loved ones, what choices I make about my consumption of goods, services and fossil fuels, what efforts I put into the world and what rewards I seek from my labors, and by what metrics do I measure my success or failure at being true to myself.

It’s a frequently hard and weird and extremely self-centered way to go about life, even if my goals are not just for my own contentment but an empathic bettering of the world. But, simply, I feel vomitously unwell when I stray too far from doing my right thing, and that’s a good enough reason to take risks in what feels like the right direction.

The farm, though, at the start, I was afraid that I expected too much of it. I was looking for some combination of personal salvation and affirmation. I wanted my heart eased through physical labors, through watching the changes of the seasons, through seeing good things grow from the time and attention lavished on them by human hands and sunlight, and I wanted—desperately—to not feel alone or crazy that lifestyles outside the churning systems of environmentally, socially, economically, spiritually and culturally degrading “Normal” were possible. I’ve been called Peter Pan-ish at times, and also impractical, radical, and idealistic in ways that are not meant as compliments. I do not want to live in an imaginary, magical land, though. I merely want to make this real world more like the sweet worlds I know are possible, because I’ve been there so many times and ways and in such beautiful company. It’s not living outside the margins—I want expand and make porous the margins until they disappear.

I wrote earlier that the night before I started at the farm, I stayed up too late finishing Susanna Clarke’s epic novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, about the resurrection of magic in Napoleonic-era England. One of the characters has a prophecy from one of the ancient books of magic on his skin—his father ate the book in a drinking contest so, naturally, the son was born with the symbols of the prophecy written on his body. Throughout the book, the prophecy comes to fruition. At the end, though, the oldest and most storied magician who had written the prophecy reappears, and touching the near dead character, rearranges the signs and symbols on his skin to spell out a new one.

The old ways and quests end, and something new begins, must be learned and read and done.

My time on the farm, for this season at least, is growing to a close. It is fitting, then, that we have started to harvest the potatoes. A dear friend says that her potato harvest is always like Christmas morning. I agree. To dig under the dirt—frantically clawing like poorly evolved moles—and to come up with grape like bunches of tubers is utterly delightful, and joyfully satisfying every time. We were all giggling and shrieking and singing like little kids at a birthday party as we pulled up the hundreds of pounds of potatoes, more than the farmers had expected, almost more than they had hoped and dreamed would come from this planting.

I know that the darknesses of the world have not been stopped by my actions. The climate is still changing at a rate that makes me cry often, injustices and cruelties abound, and too many people I love have spend these same months struggling with great challenges and sadnesses and fears and losses. As have I. But, my hope with the farm was to see if I could be part of practical, small-scale solutions to some of the more surmountable ills of an insane economic and cultural model of how we treat each our bodies, each other, our foods, and our landscapes. I have found the farm a way to make those hopes gloriously and joyfully manifest through good work. And the joy doesn't balance or cancel out the sorrow, but does deepen my love for the world and hopes for what can yet be done.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you are looking for reassurance that your way of being in the world is correct and possible (for you), everything looks like a sign from the gods or a dark omen (depending on your mood). I don’t believe in pre-written destinies in this world, but I do believe in cleaving to truths and following though on hopes. Hammer or nails or magical signs, then, I’ll happily take the potatoes and lived-out prophecies of this summer and go forward, quite literally fed and fortified by what hope, risk, love, work, and laughter brought into the world. 

(Photo from http://firstrootfarm.com, by local celebrity farmer Laura Olive Sackton)