MamaStories

Thanks to Moonmeadow Farm, this is Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from his book The Country of Marriage (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). I hope it’s ok to reproduce it here… 

Oh but be fearless!

 So:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry (my hero)

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.

                 ~

There is so much in this poem, I won’t even try to write about it, as yet. I’ve only just discovered it, let me read a couple of hundred times first, soak it up… rest my head in its lap.

A while ago I was given a review copy of Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape. Barry Lopez, the editor, set 45 writers to writing over 850 new definitions for the terms Americans use to describe their land.

What a book! It has revived my love-affair - lately somewhat neglected -with America and American nature writers, from Rick Bass to NathanielHawthorne, from Mary Oliver to Walt Whitman, from Wendell Berry to Bill McKibben to, of course, Henry David Thoreau.

I wrote a review for Suite1o1.com that explains why I think the book is so succesful and necessary.

It’s rare that one comes across a book of essays that grips you so tightly that, even though you’re a WAHM running after a toddler, you can’t put it down - or at least, you reach for it immediately once the toddler is asleep.

I had never heard of the poet, Lucia Perillo, though she won many awards. I let most poetry come to me, through recommendations and lucky finds in bookstores and libraries. Perillo never crossed my path, until I was sent a review copy (unasked) of her new book of essays, called I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing.

Being a bit of a, uhm, pessimistic, no, uhm, okay, glum (sometimes) person, I was intigrued by the title. Two sentences into the book, I was hooked. It certainly lives up to its title: Perillo writes about how she lives with disease (in her case, Mutiple Sclerosis), and she does so with the darkest sense of humor I have ever seen on paper. I laughed out loud, I wowed an insight, and in the end came away with great uneasiness.

I hope I got all of that, in more detail, in my review of the book on Suite101. You can read it here. Enjoy!

I am going to scour the second hand bookstores for her poetry books.

As you may know, I am writing a novel (in English), by the preliminary and rather misleading title of “The Potboiler”. I gave up my PhD studies in Philosophy - I had only the dissertation to go - and started writing an adventure novel! Sounds crazy, what? But (fiction) writing was something I had wanted to do since I was 14. With the support of DH, it became possible!

I wrote a novel (in Dutch) some years ago, during a long hot summer in between academic years. I had heard it said that you have to write a novel, as if you really mean it, then put it in the drawer, and then write a second one, and that one will succeed. I didn’t believe it back then, but now I do.

And now I also understand the phrase “the story writes itself”. This one does, I am not kidding. And the more I write, the easier it gets. The occasional writer’s block has more to do with life outside the story.

It’s not just me. Friends have read it, some of them professional readers, readers of the genre (adventure thriller), professional writers and journalists. They all love it and believe it should and can be published.

I want to send it off to an agent soon, but I fear they will want the whole thing. I’m on Chapter 8 now - a good 250 pages into the book - and estimate there will be 5 more chapters.

In any case, I just wanted to let you know. In case I seem to have fallen off the face of the earth: I’m writing!

It feels so good to be doing what I always dreamt of doing! So good!

DH is away to give a talk and I’m alone with Amie, who caught a stomach bug on Thursday and is still not recovered - the hot and humid weather isn’t helping much. When she’s not sleeping she is glued to me, so I haven’t managed and probably won’t manage to prepare a OLS meal this week.

Amie’s stubborn bug and my hard work on The Potboiler have thrown off my blogging. I have so many drafts of entries lined up, but I can’t seem to finish them.

I spent too many, many hours putting together A Story of our Friendship photo album for our best friend and maid-of-honor and godmother to Amie, in Shutterfly (a very clumsy program, to say the least - no undo button! - and I am curious to see the printed end result).

I’m also reading too many books at the same time:  all the reserach for The Potboiler plus Home Ground (Barry Lopez, editor) and Lucila Perillo’ s I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, among others, for reviewing for Suite101. I received my first Mother Earth issue in the mail, which gave me a wonderful feeling of connection with a community. Lovely. Soon the new Orion will arrive in the mail as well, and it will have to be devoured instantly, each and every letter of it! And of course I am still working on Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - though I shouldn’t call what I am doing with it “working” without immediately explaining that “work” for me means fun and enrichment. What a book! More on all that later…

Later, later…

Let’s first recover from the stomach bug and the heat and humidity and because of that a yucky, smelly basement (i.e., our house). I might cave and buy a dehumidifier. Ugh.

I just published a review of Najmieh Batmanglij’s wonderful cookbook, Silk Road Cooking. A Vegetarian Journey on Suite101.com. You can read it here.

It did occur to me that the Silk Road and many of the other ancient trade routes that Batmanglij travels in this book are about as non-local as you can get! How does this fit with One Local Summer, for instance?

Well, I’ve found that most of the ingredients used in the recipes are grown locally: eggs, spinach, cauliflower, squash, honey, apples… Even many of the spices are or can be grown here (saffron might be a problem). The only major trouble is the rice.

So - surprise! - you don’t need to live in Turkey, Iran, India or China to enjoy these recipes locally! This is a relief to me, because I adore this book, for all the reasons elaborated in the review.

I published an article called Coperthwaite on Educating Children on Suite101.com.

It’s a summary of William Coperthwaite’s views on the ills of traditional schooling and family life, and the roles of nature, community and physical labor in the education of children. Food for thought, definitely, for the home and unschoolers among you!

Enjoy.

I published a review of A Handmade Life, by William Coperthwaite, on Suite101.com.

It took me a long time to write this review, simply because I wanted to do the book justice. And 700 words are not enough to do it justice.

There was, for instance, no space to treat Coperthwaite’s fascinating views on education and childrearing. I will be probably write a separate article on that (UPDATE: did so, you can read it here). Food for thought, definitely, for the home and unschoolers! I did manage to reproduce, at the end of the article, Peter Forbes’ touching photograph on p.109, of Bill carrying a very young child: there is such protection in his stance, and such an outlook for the child…

Neither could I do justice to Coperthwaite’s self-sufficient and sustainable life in nature. I’ll try to devote an article to that too, for the homesteaders!

I still hope you will go and read the review: I did get some things said! There is also some criticism. However unwavering my championship for this book, I couldn’t in all honesty withhold that one reservation…

But most importantly, I hope you will read the book. It was written by a thoughtful and kind man, about lives that are possible for all of us - lives that are for that reason “democratic” in Coperthwaite’s sense. And the photographs by Peter Forbes are simply gorgeous.

It’s time to come clean, lastly, about my “Manifest“:

What do I have to do?

Preserve, not things,

But skills to make things

And skills to make the tools to make things

And the resources to make things

And the skills to preserve these resources

Etc.

Of course Coperthwaite was the one who brought home to me: the need to preserve our skills and tools so we and our children can survive in a difficult future. I am sure I will reflect more and often about A Handmade Life.

Enjoy.

Just published a review on Suite101.com of Gaia’s Garden, the book that led me to Holmgren’s Permaculture. I  tremendously enjoyed reading Hemenway’s book and I hope the review does it justice.

I also hope that, once we have some land, I can put the permaculture way of gardening into practice. I might have to revisit the review at that point.

We found a house for sale, quite a whiles west of Boston but close to the commuter rail, that we might go and take a look at. It’s 1500 sq.f. (too big, really, but maybe we could close some of it off during winter) and 0.95 acres of land. With that plural, “0.95 acres” sounds like it is more than “1 acre”. We can’t afford it, really… but it would be so sweet.

• Holmgren’s place

I’m oggling David Holmgren’s Melliodora, or at least what is avaiable of it for free on the net (the whole e-book seems worth it but is still AUS$35). You can check it out yourself here (go to publications, click on the e-book, then scroll down to the free demo).

The Melliodora project is a model of what I would love to do with a place:

1. get to know it by all kinds of methods (aerial maps, soil and water samples, photographs and sketches)
2. in detail (each aspect of its landscape, soils, waterways, flora and fauna, its history too)
3. approach it pragmatically (how can it best be developed, what plants will grow where best, where can we build structures, where can we harvest energy)
4. live it by personal experience (actually build the structures and work the land, suffer the losses, celebrate the successes)
5. treat it ethically (how to use the place sustainably, with respect for all its inhabitants, the firther environment)
6. and wholistically (how to let it enrich our physical as well as our spiritual being, e.g., how to maximize its educational potential) 

• A whole dream

Holmgren presents all the elements of the development and maintenance of his own home and demonstration site, Melliodora, as a case-study as scientifically detailed and as personally intense as they come. As a showcase of permaculture, it is a practical and scientific approach to place, food, time and life, based on ethical, educational and spiritual principles. 

I feel so lucky to have found this project. Its spirit (not its size) matches, challenges and fires my dream, the Homestead Plan.