MamaStories

I am reading Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred. The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. Many points are too loosely argued for my taste – as in, I doubt it would convince my DH, who is a total techno-optimist. As a confirmation for what I believe, it reads pleasurably.

But these lines grabbed me:

With each new generation of technology, and with each stage of technological expansion into pristine environments, human beings have fewer alternatives and become more deeply immersed within technological consciousness. We have a harder time seeing our way out. Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds. Where evolution was once an interactive process between human beings and a natural, unmediated world, evolution is now an interaction between human beings and our own artifacts. (p. 32)

I have read in many environmental books that we are destroying nature, that great Other. McKibben, in his seminal End to Nature, hangs nearly his entire argument on the despair of there being just us.  I never realized what it meant until I read Mander’s words.

Don’t say that this is not true, that there is no other, that it’s just us. In many parts of our world this is already true:  in mega cities, malls, schools, work places. Look around you: what do you see that will take you out of your own mind? What do you see that is not you? Sorry, the potted palm does not count. Nor does the lawn. The creatures visiting your lawn, yes, but how often do you see them, look for them? And it is getting worse second by second.

Then you may ask: so what?

…

A few weeks ago I was on my way to fill up the buckets with rain water  when I came upon this creature amongst the weeds.

A garter or garden snake, about as dangerous as a field mouse (to us, not to the field mouse). But it’s a snake, and my biological instinct was: hark! And it felt good, that jolt of surprise and rapt attention, that lurch out of the of the ordinary.

I was, for a few seconds, out of my mind.

…

If we eliminate what is other, then we are without surprise, without instinct, without perspective, and without the possibility of ever being truly free.

In 2002, Chelsea Green published William Coperthwaite’s book A Handmade Life, In Search of Simplicity, and the book has now been released in paperback (read the review). It is a book that aspires to social design, and it is most perceptive and inspiring on the issues of childcare, the nurture of the young, apprenticeship and education.

• Nurture and apprenticeship

Bill Coperthwaite’s hopes for fairness, integrity and completeness in our lives and societies reside first of all with the children.

Coperthwaite holds both a Ph.D. in education from Harvard University and an unconventional view of the education of the young. The originality of his views, in fact, goes so far as to negate the usual meaning of “education”. For one who is of the opinion that “many of the most important lessons in life can be learned but not taught,” and that the best lessons are learned through experience, nurture and encouragement are the preferred words.

If, when reading his book you think of Coperthwaite as a “guru” in the sense of a life-teacher, he will challenge you to put that in perspective. At most he will commit to this one line, which sums up his message for the young and those in charge of them: “Apprentices needed, not disciples”.

• Non-violent, natural learning

Coperthwaite diagnoses several ills of traditional schooling, for one, the fact that it runs solely on competitiveness and compulsion, not enthusiasm, curiosity and self-confidence.

For most, school is “a parade of failures, one after the other, year after year, with ever more ‘proof’ of inadequacy.” For most, it is the threat of the law, social condemnation and the loss of “prospect” that keeps them there. And Coperthwaite is talking not just about the students, but the teachers too: all seem to be in school against their wishes. It’s a sure recipe for disaster.

But all children are naturally excited and eager to learn. To nurture that, he proposes “non-violent learning”, in which all are learners, young and old, chose the curriculum and participate in a voluntary and firsthand exploration of the world.

Central to his are three components, the first of which is nature.

• Nature

It is no surprise that Coperthwaite, who is homesteading “off the grid” in the wilds of Maine, locates the best kind of learning in nature. He asks: what are the most important geographical factors in your child’s life? A tree, the sky, the sea? Or the convenience store, parking lot, TV?

He is not advocating that we all go back to homesteading. His proposes not “back to the land”, but rather “down to earth”.

Nature inspires awe and tranquility. She teaches small, bite-size lessons – the ways of bees and grain – and, once in a while, whopping big ones too – as when a storm overtakes a scouting party and spurs survival instincts. All of these will teach a child about life: how it works, and also, more importantly, how to interpret and deal, indeed live, with it.

A close connection to nature not only heals the child – one need only read Richard Louv’s recent book, Last Child in the Woods (2006) for scientific and practical confirmation of that statement – but the earth as well, when that child grows up to be a good steward of it.

• More remedies

Coperthwaite’s other prescriptions for a better education are a context of home and family, and a feeling of usefulness through physical work, whether it be work on the land or in crafts. I’ve written about these here.

In A Handmade Life (read a general review here), Bill Coperthwaite promotes a different view of education. If education is more of an apprenticeship than a discipleship, if it allows the innate enthusiasm of children for the unknown to run its natural course, and if it acknowledges the value of nature, then children and, by extension, society, will be happier and smarter. But first and foremost, Coperthwaite points out that such an education would not yet be complete without a context of home and community and a deep-seated feeling of usefulness.

• Home and community

Coperthwaite deplores the sequestering of the young in centers of learning (from daycare to college). Wouldn’t their education would be so much more complete, and relevant for their futures, if they were immersed into the community of adults again. Simply put: “Do you want better doctors? Improve kindergarten,” or rather, abolish it altogether!

Coperthwaite writes that “the home is the center of education and emotional security… a school is no substitute”. But he is not your average proponent of homeschooling (or unschooling): the home where schooling needs to take place needs to change.

What is missing from our homes is variety. We should enrich our nuclear families with the elderly, who have so much to offer in terms of experience, stories and time. Extending the family also means adding layers of personality and ways of dealing with problems. And it is important that every member of the family is valued for his or her usefulness. “Every child has a right to a family with a purpose,” he writes, and purpose entails work.

• Usefulness and work

The best kind of work is physical work, what Coperthwaite calls bread labor. It includes raising and preparing food, making shelter and clothing, caring for children.

Children in our “civilized” societies rarely get to witness that kind of vital labor, or any work, for that matter. In the morning they and their parents go off in opposite directions: school and the office, shop or farm. When children do catch a glimpse of “work,” it is often as a negative: a stressful activity that adults rarely enjoy, something to be avoided.

This is shame and a crime, Coperthwaite finds. Children should get to participate in bread work again. But before we squirm at the thought of child labor, he makes it plain that that is not what he has in mind. Rather, young people, even small children, can be useful and indeed draw a lot of self-confidence and pride from their usefulness. Moreover, engaging in this kind of work will restore to them a sense of the value of the meat on their plate and the clothes on their backs.

• Homemaking

For Coperthwaite, homemaking is “the most important profession and can be the most exciting of all.” He is a homemaker himself – he built his home, makes his supper, washes his clothes (by hand).

He is also childless, but he is not without insight into children, or without the regular company of children. Going by the many anecdotes about children, and Peter Forbes’ pictures in the book, it is company in which both he and the child thrive.

A Handmade Life, In Search of Simplicity, by William S. Copethwaite and with photographs by Peter Forbes is published by Chelsea Green Publishers (ISBN 1933392479).

Last Saturday we had a big dinner with a whole bunch of friends and  one of them even stayed over! Oh, I love having people stay over, especially the kind of friend you sit and chat with, after the dishes are done, until  midnight…

Sunday warm (“heated up,” even, relatively) as we drove “into town” to drop her off at her place. It was the kind of day that used to be an average day: bookshop, visit with friends, coffee shop. But for us, now, it was out of the ordinary and extra special for that.

Our visit to the Brookline Booksmith ended in too much money being spent, but on books, you know, half of them secondhand, and we’ve been so thrifty, and there were presents for someone else – Henry the Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers – and poetry (Donald Hall) and one more Rick Bass for my collection, and Barbara Damrosch’s Garden Primer for a steep discount… So perfectly excusable.

We had a lovely visit with dear friends who just had a second baby daughter. We sat and chatted while the baby slept and Amie and her pal played. Afterwards we got in the car with the intention of driving home, but we happened past Simon’s CoffeeShop in Cambridge and DH – a coffee snob – wanted to try their famed espresso. So there we were, the three of us, enjoying our cups – some big, some small.

And reading our books, chatting… So lovely, the three of us together!

On the way home there was this:

And then a quick peek at Walden Pond, where people were still walking on the ice, although it was int eh sixties. Once home there was chatting with neighbors on the street, and swatting at mosquitoes already, while Amie and Baba went for a bikeride. They came home after the sun had (just) set…

Just last week I wrote that I was thinking of purchasing Edible Forest Gardens by Jacke and Toensmeier, but that it was too expensive. Luck and generosity came my way so I could buy it anyway. Amie really got to see how happy books can make her, when the mailman brought the big box (2 big volumes) to the door.

Just to let you know…

Here’s another article I wrote for Suite101.com, the copyright of which passed to me so I can share it with you here.

It’s of William S. Coperthwaite’s book A Handmade Life, In Search for Simplicity. It was one of the first books I read after making my turn-around regarding a Simpler Life in a Better Future, and it influenced me tremendously. I reread this book every few months now (it’s not too long and has some beautiful photographs). Rereading it is a great grounding  experience for me.

I wrote a couple of reviews of it and this one was the general review.

• The author

The author of A Handmade Life, In Search for Simplicity, William Coperthwaite, is a philosopher and anthropologist, and a designer of social as well as material constructions. He is a scholar – he has a Ph.D. in education from Harvard – and a teacher, albeit an unorthodox one. But he is foremost a physical kind of man, a skilled craftsman who built his own home and chops his own wood at his homestead in Maine, most accessible by canoe.

Though Coperthwaite lives “off the grid” – buying almost nothing, reachable only via mail to the local library – his sustainable living experiment is not an “exit strategy”. He welcomes visitors, travels to learn from other cultures, and is available for lectures and yurt-building workshops.

And of course he reaches out to all of us in his book, A Handmade Life, published by Chelsea Green in 2002 and newly out in paperback.

• The Democratic Axe (and Chair)
  

A Handmade Life has something of everything, but most importantly, it has hope. Though there is critical and honest analysis of a world in crisis, this is not a doomsday book. It has recipes for a better community – of humans and nature – that Coperthwaite himself has put to the test in over four decades.

“My central concern is encouragement,” he writes. He is reluctant to be called a teacher, but it is true that his most inspired writing evolves from his desire to better our lives. Still, like the best of teachers, he gently offers us the skills and tools for making better lives ourselves.

This he calls “democratic” and it is his greatest gift to us: the message that a fulfilling life is up to each of us – not big corporations, big government – and that we can do it.

But do what? Preserve not things but the skills to make things, and the skills to make the tools to make things. And work. With those we can emancipate ourselves from machinery, mindless consumption, and unhealthy, unnatural and asocial lifestyles.

• Hand-made

This brings us to the keyword in the book’s title: Handmade. A “handmade life” is centered on “bread work”, that is, physical labor. Sounds unappetizing? Coperthwaite is convincing when he pleads for reintroducing work into our lives and even the lives of our children, and promises that it is the only foundation for a healthy body and a happy mind.

Thus the book seamlessly combines philosophy and reflection with how-to-build inserts on “The Democratic Axe”, “The Democratic Chair” and handmade toys. And let’s not forget the “Democratic House”: the yurt. It is a house you can build yourself, with your hands, at a small cost to your wallet and to nature. It is beautiful and long-lasting, as are all the tools, objects and lives that Coperthwaite promotes.

That said, this most inspiring heart of Coperthwaite’s work is also his weakest spot. In his desire to promote it, he can’t help but generalize the individual handmade life to a social level. In this he is less convincing. In the sections on the social distribution of work and pay, for instance, the book loses its marvelous exemplary quality and slips into abstract, redundant theorizing. Such social theorizing or “designing,” as Coperthwaite calls it, is out of place in this book. Luckily there are only few such lapses.

• A simple beauty

The beauty of A Handmade Life lies in simplicity as its subject, method and presentation. Coperthwaite is a man of words both small – “I want to live in such a way that small gifts are meaningful” – and big – “We need poets who can discover and proclaim the beauty of simplicity while themselves living a simple, rural life of creative and honest labor”. But he makes sure that both kinds are democratic words that all of us can choose to use and apply to ourselves.

Peter Forbes’ stunning photographs documents Coperthwaite’s life and desire: a couple of hand-carved, curved spoons, Coperthwaite carrying a toddler, guiding his canoe.

Those interested in the Simple Life of Helen and Scott Nearing and the teachings of non-violence of Richard Bartlett Gregg will find Coperthwaite a thoughtful interpreter.

Sections of this book appeared in Manas and Mother Earth News. It is printed on recycled paper.

Mama’s potting bench in the basement

The situation at our “homestead” is very complex, and getting more so as I gather more information and experience.

I feel like I’m that not-so-proverbial teacher who is only one step ahead of her students, and I’m teaching French!  Today, for instance, I was transplanting the lettuce seedlings (the leaves of some were shading out smaller neighbors), and thinking how far I had come: two weeks ago I was so nervous about planting seeds, but here I am handling seedlings. Then I looked ahead: transplanting into our cold frame (yet to be finished) and oh my…

I am also having trouble choosing which book to read next and what to note in my notebook. Not buying my own books anymore but lending from the library, means no underlining, no notes in the margin, and no indefinite access. That last one is the kicker. I’m back to being the grad student with a pile of twenty library book on Kant sprouting a forest of stickies.

About the book-buying, I’ve been good, but there are some exceptions. Thus I’ve been dithering about whether to bite the bullet for Edible Forest Gardens (Jacke and Toensmeier), Four-Season Harvest (Coleman), or possibly Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook (which is to come out in April: should I buy it sight unseen?). The Edible Forest Gardens will probably have to wait for several reasons: the raised bed garden takes urgent priority over the forest garden, and the books (2 vols) cost $140 combined. I don’t doubt they’re worth the price, but we just don’t have that kind of money while there are hoes and drip hoses and floating row covers to be bought, not to mention loam and compost!

But back to the main problem: information. there are sowing schedules, crop rotations, succession planting, garden bed layout…  This seed needs 80F to germinate, this one 55F, this one needs to be covered, this one sprinkled…  What will our soil need for amendments? (I’m taking a soil sample as soon as it’s less soggy out.) And how much soil will we need to fill our beds? How many beds? What will the path of the sun be, on 21 March (= 21 September) and will I be able to guess the amount of sunlight our proposed garden site will get, the trees not being in leaf yet?

I must admit with all this going on – and the glorious getting-dirt-under-my-fingernails – I have lost track of the chicken plan, but then I’m thinking we can get that going any time. I’ve also set aside the fruit trees and berry bushes project. And the mushrooms. But we must for sure tackle our torn up front yard (now loam and buckwheat). And get the root cellar in. And devise and build some sort of simple and mobile green house for winter growing…

Prioritize, Plan and Patience!

But foremost:

Have fun, learn, and count your blessings!

Here’s one of the reviews I wrote for Suite101.com. The copyright recently passed to me, so I can share it with you here.

It’s of Home Ground, a book that deals with the concept that is most on my mind these days: place. The more I think about place, the more it amazes me that its concept (if not the physical thing itself) entails all the other concepts at the heart of our endeavor: nature, culture, self-knowledge, sustainability, wholesomeness, care…

Home Ground reflects this complexity, so it is a book that is within reach at all times at our house.

~

With over 850 definitions of landscape features, many specific to America, this book is about geology and history, American identity, and how one makes a place home.

In Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape, Barry Lopez (editor) has brought together forty-five writers and more than 850 new definitions for the terms Americans use to describe their unique land. Some of the contributors are Michael Collier, John Keeble, Barbara Kingsolver, Jon Krakauer, Bill McKibben, Robert Michael Pyle, and Barry Lopez himself.

What is so fascinating about these definitions is that they are (mostly) not technical, objective, general or scientific – however you want to describe the glosses in an average dictionary. Indeed, the intention is not to give standard definitions, but to approach the subjects from personal and specific point of views.

• Taking “place” personally

The personal line may be that of the authors, each of whom tackles the terms they are familiar with because they actually live with the landscape features they describe. Each was free to impose their own style, making some entries read like fairy tales, prose poems, or even jokes.

The personal is also injected by the inclusion in the definition of the people who invented, imported and evolved the term as they made themselves at home in a place. These can be a large group of people such as the Inupiaq, whose word for a swollen ice hill informs the Canadian and Alaskan word “pingo.” Or Conquistadores importing Spanish adaptations of Latin and Arabic words. Or a romantic ranger inventing the word “kiss tank” for the pool of rainwater that refreshed him in a dry place. Or even an individual, like Farmer Peek, after whose kill or brook the city in New York is named.

• The skill of naming a place

The authors know that only such personal connections can make these terms recognizable and thus usable to us. For, notwithstanding our alienated and predominantly urban existences, we are still looking for a place to call home. And a large part, if not the first part, of making oneself at home is naming the features of the new and alien landscape and thus appropriating it, in a way.

And let’s face it: we have lost the skill of naming. Land is merely a valley, a mountain or a plane. Water is but a lake, pond, river or brook. Such an impoverished language will not do if we want to honor a place as home and take care of it as something precious and worth preserving.

Home Ground re-introduces us to a treasure trove of words and definitions, some very old and on the brink of extinction, some relatively new. It offers time-tested approaches to how to make up our own terms. Home Ground is thus a dictionary, an etymology, and a collection of essays about place and our habitation of it.

It must be added that, though the explanations are personal, they are still accurate. The authors did careful research, in the field as well as in reference books geology and history. And the scientific accuracy of each entry has been checked by an advisory board.

• A literary effort

Another way in which Home Ground strikes a departure from the average dictionary is its realization that it is the writers who keep these special words alive. It is up to the settlers and inhabitants to name the places and their specific features. But it is up to the novelists, poets and essayists to record and preserve, interpret and explain these in their specifically human context.

The scientists – geologists and geographers – strive to make descriptions of place generic so as to fit them into an all too common framework, one that is too general to have any purchase on our minds. Writers, on the other hand, keep words alive in the lived-in situations of their stories. Thus Home Ground demonstrates how so much of American literature has been shaped by the American landscape.

• An American land

This brings us to quintessential American-ness of the book. The authors make it clear that their effort is “an invitation to learn American geography, to read American history, and to celebrate a deeply engaging dimension of American character.”

Perhaps it is even this American character that makes an effort like Home Ground possible and eminently successful. The book celebrates a distinctly American attitude to a land that was only recently a vast, diverse and often frightening New World as yet unnamed and thus ready to receive names. It also honors the native names that were sometimes adopted by the settlers, sometimes ignored and overwritten – but now, recovered.

Home Ground is not the kind of book you can read in one sitting. It is to be consulted again and again, measure by measure, for its scope is vast, even though its approach is personal. It also doesn’t end on the last page: if the essays don’t point you to more reading, the bibliographical note (however short) and the biographies of the writers will. The introductory essay by Barry Lopez provides more food for thought. There is also visual distraction in the form of 100 delicate black-and-white line drawings by Molly O’Halloran. If that were not enough, the authors invite readers to contribute their own landscape terms on the Home Ground website.

• Details and resources

Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape was published by Trinity University Press in 2006.

Click here to hear NPR’s Alan Cheuse discuss the book, broadcast on All Things Considered, December 11, 2006.

Click here to hear Barry Lopez and contributor Michael Collier interviewed by Jim Nielsen on NPR’s Morning Edition, first broadcast on November 16, 2006.

Just two days after I wrote about sowing my first seeds, and being so nervous about it, I went down into the basement to check on the seeds and there it was!

Ah, a sight for sore eyes!

I love it! In 50 days or so we’ll be eating lettuce: our very own, with a mileage of NIL.

I did a lot of research in library books and on the net about germinating seeds, growing on, etc., and the book I can definitely recommend as a great source of information detailed enough to guide the shaky beginner is Terry and Mark Silber’s Growing Herbs and Vegetables from Seed to Harvest.

I decided to combine this week’s Outdoor Hour and Winter Wednesday challenges. For the first we observe a tree throughout the seasons. Those who have followed the challenges from the beginning have done this three times already and will be completing the year. But as Amie and I have just joined the Outdoor Hour, this will be the first season in which we observe “our tree”. The season being  winter, and our attention having turned to tree bark, we also fit the Winter Wednesday challenge.

But first, to choose a tree!

• Choose Your Tree

We have many trees on our property, and of many species: Beech, Gray Birch, Red Oak, White Oak, Maple, Hemlock, Pine and some immature Spruces. I have been wanting to do a serious count for months now, but I never get around to it – when you move into a new place there are so many other, “more urgent” things to do. I would say that we have a stand of several generations of trees going, with the oldest a good 50 years old, the youngest still a sapling.

Too many choose from! But we’ll choose the American Beech in our front yard. It is one of the oldest trees on our property, probably about half a century old. Its trunk rises stately and straight as a ruler, then it forks, way up high, and develops a beautiful crown that shades out any other tree in its vicinity. To me it’s a symbol of strength and endurance. To Amie its a BIG tree.

• Trees in Winter: Snow and Ice
  

Until a couple of days ago the trunks of the bigger trees were encased in ice. Snow had fallen and lay packed on the branches and against the trunks. The picture below shows those layers of snow clinging to the trunk of one of our oaks (the tree lists about five degrees away from the camera, so it’s not totally vertical). If you click on the picture to make it larger, you’ll see the intricate layers in which the snow was laid down against the tree: a right marvel!

Then the snow thawed and it all came dripping, trickling, flooding down. Then it froze, hard. This picture is of another oak:

Here’s “our” chosen beech, slick with ice, gleaming in the sunlight:

Makes you feel cold, no? But it turns out that cold is not a problem for our trees, in winter. It’s heat.

• The Problem of Winter Heat: Frost Cracks
  

One of my favorite nature study books is Reading the Forested Landscape. A Natural History of New England, by Tom Wessels (*). Wessels discusses (p.79-80) how trees are adapted to the cold New England weather, particularly by their bark, which protects the cambial tissues (“the vital part of the trunk; it builds on its outside a layer of bark, and on its inside a layer of wood around the trunk”, Comstock, p.620). What they protect against is heat from fire and heat from the winter sun.

As Wessels writes, it seems counterintuitive that a tree needs to protect itself against exposure to winter sunlight. You’d think some warmth and sunlight would do them good. But most of our New England trees are impervious to the cold.

Wessels conjures up the image of a tree on the edge of a meadow on a cold January day. It’s -5 F. The sunlight falls directly on the dark trunk, heating the bark and the underlying wood to over 70 F, making them expand.  Then the sun dips below the horizon. The bark begins to cool and contract, but the underlying, insulated wood takes longer to do so. And so the bark doesn’t fit around the wood anymore: it’s too tight. So it cracks open. The resulting wound is called “frost crack”. This weak spot grows larger and deeper with each such temperature fluctuation.

I’ve yet to find a tree with such a crack. That’s because most trees have been around here for many millennia and they have foun ways to adapt to the winter sunlight.

• Bark to the Rescue

There are four kinds of bark texture (just counting the deciduous trees):

1. scaly (maples and cherries)
2. ridged (ashes and oaks)
3. plated (black birch)
4. smooth (beech, birch)

We explored these thoroughly, by sight and touch, and Amie can make out the smooth barked beech most easily. It’s good fun, running your fingers over the bark with your eyes closed, trying to guess which it is.

The first three of these kinds of bark allow the heat trapped underneath the bark to escape faster, so that the underlying wood can cool at the same rate as the bark.Result: no frost cracks.

The smooth-barked beech lacks this capacity. So how does it protect itself from frost cracks? It is lighter in color. When I asked Amie what color the bark was, she automatically said: “Brown” (just like she automatically reached for the brown pen when drawing her tree a couple of days ago, even though “I really don’t like the color brown. But oh well [sigh] I will have to use brown, because it is brown, after all!”)… I asked her to look again, and she said: “Gray!”

The lighter color of the Beech’s bark reflects the sunlight. This is an adaptation of this originally tropical tree to the exposure to winter sun in the high and not-so-high North.

One day I will tell this story to Amie again – my three-year-old adaptation of it, I must admit, falls woefully short – and we will marvel at the great resilience of this tree, and at Nature’s meticulous inventiveness and perseverance.

I also wanted to share with you another marvelous tree, in the back of our property. We call it the Tuning Fork Tree. I believe it’s a Pine, but shall go back to verify some day.

~

(*) Reading the Forested Landscape is a detective book, really. At the beginning of each chapter there is a beautiful etching  of a wooded landscape (by Brian D. Cohen). The chapter then deciphers the clues to disturbance histories,  the impact of logging, forest fire, beaver activity, blowdowns, blights, changing climate and human handiwork. As you read, you learn about forest succession, ecosystems, and the history of New England’s forests. It’s fascinating and beautiful.