MamaStories

And will declaim it!

~

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

~

Has anyone put this to song yet?

While participating in the Training for Transition I came to a profound realization. One of the most powerful exercises in Transition is the positive visioning. People sit in two circles, one inside the other, facing each other so everyone is paired up. The people on the outside are the elders of the future, who have  lived through Transition (the time of change). The people on the inside are young people, who did not live through it, and they ask three questions of their Elder, and listen. At the end, the pairs exchange seats and the circles rotate.

One of the questions is: what is your role in this (Transitioned) world?

Many people see themselves working with food. That’s only to be expected: besides air, water and shelter, what is more important than healthy, nutritious food? So people talk about how they tend the fields, teach others how to grow, scout out places to grow more crops, etc. People talk lovingly about being post-carbon farmers (farmers without oil), about farming together, and the more leisurely pace of life, with many conversations with neighbors, and kids roaming free, and nothing but the blue sky above and the dirt in their hands.

Wonderful visions.

This exercise invites only positive visioning, and some have trouble with this. That’s why we do the exercise. We need to practice hoping. Especially for those who seek Transition, those who have studied up and faced the truth, it’s hard. And thus, powerful.

So here it was my turn as the Elder to answer that question.

“I grow medicine. In the post-carbon world there are no pharmaceuticals, or if there are, there is no easy, quick and affordable way to get the medicine to where it is needed. There are no stockpiles of antibiotics or analgesics. Medicine is homemade.  I am someone who grows this medicine. I found the best spots in the town for growing marshmallow, or motherwort, or even ginger. I grow it, and teach and supervise the growing of it by others. I keep the inventory of the living plants. I harvest them at their appropriate times and with appropriate thanks for their abundance. I then bring them home and dry them and make them into medicine. I keep the apothecary. I don’t diagnose, I don’t heal. I don’t feel ready for that yet. I hope someone else can do that. If not, I’ll help, but humbly.”

I was silent for a second, surprised by my vision. Usually I am a farmer of unspecified crops. Usually I feed people. And beyond my surprise there was more to be said. So I said it:

“It’s hard in this world because we Elders remember the old medicine and health care. It wasn’t all good – the side effects, the addiction, the arrogance and entitlement. But diseases were cured, or held at bay, and lives were lengthened. Now we don’t have it so easy anymore. An infection that would have been treated with a shot can now kill.  We need to be vigilant all the time, grow whole, resilient bodies. Life is no longer prolonged – or rather, death is no longer postponed. We die at our appointed times. It is sad, sometimes, to think that an old drug could have postponed it. But, on the other hand, people now die at home, surrounded by their loved ones and communities. That’s better. That’s better.”

So there we are, that is what I want to do in the future, when I grow up, when the world grows up.

This is the marc of the echinacea root I tinctured and pressed yesterday.

It is what is left of the plant when it has given all it has to give.

Thank you.

~

I’ve added  a page called the Apothecary Inventory

The other day picking up my daughter from school I was preceded by a Cadillac Escalade. For those not in the know, it is the largest SUV on the market. Its numberplate read:

KHARMA

I am trying not to judge. I’m not judging.  I have decided not to judge.  It’s hazardous, anyway, to judge behavior without knowing the causes of it, the wounds behind it, or the joys.

But… is laughing judging?

I laughed because, really now, it was funny.

But I admit it, I did shake my head, just a little.

Just a quick word, here. I read only the headlines in Google News. That’s the extent of exposure to the Main Stream Media (MSM) as I can stand. And still, I’ll have to quit doing just that.

what’s coming out of Fukushima is radio-active poisoning, first of all, *not* falling stock market prices! And yet it’s the latter that gets the headlines. How screwed up is that!

We have sold our health and the health of the planet to the lowest bidder.

I must admit that I am down-hearted. I have managed for a couple of days now to avoid the news. A quick check in the morning and the evening and quickly look away again. Nuclear has always been my bugbear.

I was 15 in Belgium when Chernobyl happened and it impressed me tremendously. That was a very different situation in many respects, one of them being that we all found out about it many days after the event. Actually, I only found out how close we came to planetary-wide disaster a few months ago, when I saw the Battle of Chernobyl. Then I saw Countdown to Zero (and managed to keep my sanity)…

You see, I have to look away or it sucks me in. It sucks me in and prevents me from what I am doing - doing as against undergoing.

What I am doing is Transition, here in my hometown. The launch is in April but already so many good things have happened and I have met  so many good people. We’ve talked to two local  groups who have been bumping up against limits of expertise, energy and community support and we have invigorated them again, just by talking about Transition and offering some advice. We’ve become the volunteers in charge of a plan for an “edible park” at a very popular and visible place int he middle of town. We’re deeply involved with the Earth Day Celebration. We have a website up and are adding to it more and more every day. Now the local newspaper wants to do an interview…

I musn’t get used to writing about myself in the plural. Someone said “that’s a great group you have there.” So far it’s still just a group of one! I am kind of happy that it looks like a group to people, but am also very keen on making it a group very soon.

Why can’t we just be happy with what we need. Why do we gamble away our lives and the lives of many more who have no say in it, to our greed and our misplaced sense of rightfulness? Don’t tell me, “where will you draw the line between what we need and what we want?” Let’s look into it together and draw the line together. It’s not so hard to ask oneself,  ”do I really need this? Is it worth it?” I know there is a large grey area, but up to a point – a point we have overshot by a mile – the difference between our needs and our wants are clear to all but the most unwilling of us.

Let’s start there.

This upsets me. Actually, it disgusts me.

DH was flying for work and they gave him this on the airplane. It’s a single-use toothbrush, made of plastic, wrapped in plastic, foil and cardboard.

Convenience will kill us!

A week or so after my “I need to do something!” moment I stumbled across Wendell Berry’s essay “American Imagination and the Civil Way”. It pretty much answered my question, “But What?” The answer was Transition, of course, or more generally speaking, going out there and talking to people.

This one’s philosophical. I hope you don’t mind.

~

I believe “American Imagination and the Civil Way” should be read in the schools. It is insightful, candid, and moving; Berry at his best. It has many aspects that I find fascinating and worth discussing, also in the context of Transition, but here I want to concentrate on that one, the one about talking.

Berry writes that when opponents become enemies, they can no longer imagine one another. Then the only way their relationship can go is the way of generalization, and ultimately of violence.

Now I’m a introverted person. I live in a little house on a little hill where I do all my work – I mother, write and garden. I chat with the moms at Kindergarten and my neighbors and family and friends. Very rarely do I come across any serious disagreements or “personality clashes” or even differences of opinion. I’ve been writing about some pretty difficult issues,  yes, but to a generality, an “audience”, who does not confront me.

But with Transition, I’m going to have to go out there, with my neck. This is another aspect of Transition that has always frightened and (so far) paralyzed me, and one that I need to deal with now: How am I going handle opposition?

~

When I face someone in a discussion/argument who doesn’t agree with me, will I regard him as an opponent or as an enemy? Will I dare to really face him, that is, accept and imagine him for who he is,  particularly as that unique person with a history and a personality largely unknown to me, in which his opinion is rooted? Or will I retreat and see him only as some X who opposes my view, like all other Xs who oppose it, and will I thus stop imagining him, to see only his opinion and the fact that is is opposed to my own?

Will I be imaginative, or defensive? Will I see one particular person with an opinion, or will I just see one opinion that is against me in the way of all opinions that are against me?

In the first case, it is about us, him and me, and getting to know him, and imagining his reasons for holding his belief, and finding a solution, maybe by changing his mind, or my mind, or finding some common ground (all of which need to be imagined). In the second case, it is all about me. I am the only individual and particular self around, and all the rest is reduced to the general not-me, against me.

~

This is what I see happening around me, especially in the media (which I shun for that reason), the rigid isolation of what Berry calls “the isolated, displaced, desiring, despairing self”. Berry brings home the despair of this person, who has only enemies, by quoting John Haines:

you will always be waiting

for what you do not know,

knowing that when at last

it appears you will not know it.

You will never know it, because you can’t even imagine it.

~

I know it is how many people are, how they will approach me as I go out into that world. And I know I can be like this too, because I am afraid to even look. This brings me to another crucial aspect, which Berry brings up in the essay “God, Science, and Imagination”: “By it [imagination] we may see ourselves as others see us.”

That reflectivity is crucial, of course, because how else would I really imagine the other as he stands facing me and my opinion?  But there’s something else: Do I dare face myself? Do I dare imagine myself, this new person who talks with people?

As for myself I am aware that when I find myself in a opposition with a stranger, I admit it, I fear him. Not just him, but myself as well, caught up in that infinite rebound of our reflections of each other.

It is a failure of my imagination all round, ad one that I have to address, with courage. Because when I will go out there, I will be facing two strangers. Him, and me. And when the talking is done, I get to go home with one of these strangers.

What an adventure we will have!

A friend came by today to pick up straw bales for his garden  (I also gave him the quince atchar he supplied the quinces for, and my infamous apple peel jelly). He asked me why I am trying Transition again. I couldn’t quite answer clearly. I’m not clear in my head about the many causes and reasons and motivators. But one, I just realized, is that I want the pressure off myself.

I have always thought I want to grow as much food as I can for my family. I still want this, but two gardening seasons in my garden have changed my idea of “as I can”.

For one, the garden itself – the soil, the amount of sunlight, the presence of peckish critters – is not yet up to growing as much as I want it to. This will change in the future as I work on the soil fertility and judiciously take more pine trees down to replace them with fruit and nut trees, but that’ll be a long haul. And secondly, the gardener too will need some improving. That’s me, yes.

Then there are issues of livestock (no chickens yet) and food storage  (no root cellar yet, did very little canning this year) and even food preparation (no cob oven yet).

I know, the “yet”s say it all: have patience, these things take time!

But I am in a rush, and in the time that I feel I might have, I can’t get it all done. Not on my own.

And so, there it is: Transition, a whole community moving towards one big garden and food pantry.

You might say, hold on, that’s exchanging one kind of pressure for another. Just April 2011 will be a lot of work and worry for me, and that’s supposed to be only the beginning!

But here’s something that also contributed to my starting up again: I have changed my expectations for Transition in my community. I’m no longer expecting my whole town to go Transition like these towns in the UK have done. I remember at the Transition Training, a year ago, watching those UK success stories and thinking “I can’t make that happen!” I’ve accepted that now. I can’t make that happen because America is a very different place from the UK, and as a European who has lived here for over a decade, I should know.

But to find just a few people interested in a few topics of Transition, like growing more food, keeping chickens and bees, canning and foraging for herbs together, skillsharing, etc. would be enough already.

Amie asked me the other day what would happen if no more electricity came out of the walls. The context was simple: she was upset that it took so long to recharge the batteries of her toy hamster. The fact that the possibility occurred to her shows, I believe, some of her Mama’s influence. And that she asked the question so matter-of-factly, so undaunted, just shows that she is the intrepid  five-year-old.

And there you have the essence of this post in a nutshell. But let me elaborate.

So, well, I was stumped for a second. I was torn as usual between my we-’ll-make-it-work attitude and the oh-uh-zombie-hordes panic.

Amie was again ahead of me, proclaiming, “That would be just a problem, right, Mama? Not a predicament.”

Yes, my 5-year-old knows that difference (a predicament is a problem that cannot be solved, we can only manage our response to it – a different thing altogether).

I said, “Well, we could learn to live without electricity, couldn’t we?”

That was acceptable to her, and the world inhaled and got going again.

~

What Amie already knows are a few principles we live by. We respect nature and others, we should not waste, we share what we can, pollution hurts the Earth and the beings on it, if we can do something ourselves, we should do it ourselves, and there is a difference between what we want and what we need. I keep it positive, can-do and will-do. I am working on the foundation, handing her principles and skills that will allow her to adapt to different times, encouraging her to be just, responsible and forward-thinking, and giving her the tools to think critically.

In other words, I have not discussed with her climate change and its eco-victims and refugees, the precariousness of our food system, the price of oil, my fear of food riots, cholera, farming in 120F, or zombie-hordes. She’s five, and she gets upset when the hairy Barbapapa gets shaved by accident!

But one day, probably sooner rather than late, the future will be on the table. She‘ll put it there. That’s my Amie, who already knows about the possibility of predicaments.

~

And she is the one whose future is at stake. The predicament is hers. Of course, as you know if you’ve read this blog a bit, I believe the future will get here in my own lifetime. But I’m her mother, and so what this will do to me won’t matter in the face of what it will do to her. Also, it will have been me who screwed it all up in the first fifteen years of my adult life, and even now, in these five or so years since my realization, with all these half-baked lifestyle changes. By the time she becomes responsible, the culpability for our predicament will be a moot point (an academic issue).

Let this, especially, be remembered.

~

I hope one thing, that when she requests to know all the hard facts, and what we’re doing about it, and why we aren’t doing enough, or even anything — I hope that I will speak truthfully about climate change, peak everything, economic collapse, and human greed, ignorance, laziness, much of it my own.

The child can sniff a lie, and I hope I will be able  to pass that test.  Of course her dad – who is a techno-fix optimist – will be there too, with his own opinions, and I hope we’ll have our usual passionate discussion, the three of us this time, and she can make up her own mind.

~

So what with all this on my mind I was happy to stumble upon Robyn’s post on the Adapting In Place Blog (via Sharon’s mention of it on Casaubon’s Book). Robyn writes about the challenges of teaching environmentalism to children and concludes that teaching it doesn’t work. She writes:

I have found, for myself, that when I’m considering lifestyle changes for environmental purposes, I like to put them through the 5-year-old test. I imagine explaining what I think of as the problem to a 5-year-old and trying to imagine what she would reply. [...] I try explaining to the 5-year-old in my head what my solution is, to see how it fares. I suggest this method for everyone.

Children are the fastest path to learning to live within our limits, but only if we let them. If we listen, if we give them access to real information, and then take their responses to it seriously, we can see through the eyes of someone who hasn’t been fully indoctrinated into our culture. They don’t know how things “should” be, so they can tell us how things “could” be. If we stop trying to teach them, they can teach us a great deal.

So true. Even though I won’t be sitting down with Amie to discuss the practicalities of what to do when the electricity, the water, the money goes, she is there whenever I think of these issues. I look at my garden and see that I neglected it and imagine her asking why I did that, why we’re not growing more of our own food. I look at the beehive and see her smiling approvingly. I looked at the store-bought loaf the other day through her eyes and thought, why can’t I bake the bread myself? If we can do it ourselves, we should do it ourselves!

Thank you, Mieke, for keeping me honest.

While gathering kindling in the woods behind the house my mind turns to the future. There is enough wood that is down and dead to heat a household or two, perhaps, but not more. It could sustain many more households in kindling, but again we’re not talking of  the feudal forests that could trip up Hansel and Gretel, or the massive forests of a bygone America. This is a narrow woodlot – belonging to the State – in a suburb of Massachusetts.

Once in a while we meet neighbors jogging, or walking their dogs, and we make light of our “cargo”. They  move on – invariably they’re faster than we are – and I wonder if our exchange will stay as friendly, as lighthearted, as the times change. Will we encounter more people gathering “free” wood? Will there be axes? Or worse? Will we discuss our rights to gather? Or will we just take?

I want to gather kindling every day as the weather allows. It’s good physical exercise and it stimulates Amie’s imagination – not always verbalized for me to partake of. It kindles my thoughts as well, summoning a dark picture that is fuzzed, though, at the edges, by the knowledge of how easily these smooth, dead sticks will catch fire in our wood stove, come the cold days.