MamaStories

Leigh form 5 Acres and a Dream awarded me the Honest  Scrap Award. It’s my first award ever. These are the rules:

1. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs to give this award to that you feel to be brilliant in content and design. That’s the toughest part.
   
2. Show the 7 winner’s links on your blog and leave them a comment informing them that they have been given the “Honest Scrap.” That’s the easiest part.
   
3. List 10 honest things about yourself that people may not know.

So here goes:

1. I was born in Congo (it was called Zaire back then), where my parents were doing missionary work - my dad taught math at a country high school. We left when I was one, so I don’t recall that adventure. I grew up in (Dutch-speaking) Antwerp, Belgium, the oldest of two. I moved to Boston in 1998. The idea was to stay for a year to do my Masters (in Philosophy) but I never, or at least haven’t, left. I haven’t been back to Belgium in over three years! We’re trying to make it work this winter.
2. I like being alone. DH will call it like it is and say I’m antisocial. True, if you let me I’ll just potter around here on my hill and be totally happy. But I do love the company of good friends and good friends-to-be and am never more thrilled than when they stay over for a meal or a sleep-over. Then I will molly-coddle them to make them come back more often.
3. If I didn’t have my wonderful family, I’d be a drifter. I’d live out of my car, on a dime, and travel this great continent seeking out nature. I discovered this about myself when I moved here. I traded my beloved medieval Europe for the adventure of America’s wide-open spaces, dense forests and mountain peaks…
4. I am obsessed with nuclear threat but am careful not to indulge myself too often. It goes back to when I saw The Day After on television as a young teen: it sent me into a tailspin of depression for months. Now I sometimes consciously seek it out, because in some ways it makes me feel more alive. But I’m careful. I know my limits.
5. I’m addicted to the written word. I must read and I must write, every day, or I go crazy. The most gruesome moment in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was not the nuclear disaster or the cannibals or the dying world or the physical and emotional deterioration, etc. etc., but the scene where the protagonist looks at a sodden book and can’t remember what once attracted him so to reading and learning. Chilling.
6. I despair a lot, yet I go through life smiling and my smile is sincere. How do I do it? I don’t know, I just don’t see how a gloomy face could help… Same with my blog: it’s mostly chipper and the gloom only comes through once in a while. Whenever I write an entry about how scared and sad I am I over-write it and then it doesn’t feel right, so I nix it.
7. The stuff we do here (like the Riot and Freeze Yer Buns etc.) gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, as in it’s fun and makes for a healthier lifestyle, both physically and spiritually. But I don’t think any of it will help to make the future better, unless we start something like Transition in our towns.
8. I’m lousy at most homesteading things - you should see my needlework (cough) - but I don’t care. I’ll get better with practice.
9. I walk away from arguments. I’m the most non-confrontational person I know. If I stick with an argument I soon get upset to the point of tears and often feel physically sick. I think that’s why I walked away from an academic career: even arguing metaphysics was just not in me.
10. I’m a procrastinator but I have some ways of overcoming that. I’m big on making TO DO lists and will always include something I’ve already done, then will tick that off and that gets me going. And sometimes I will post something on the blog as having been accomplished, while it hasn’t yet, and then I’ll feel so guilty, I just have to do it!

Well, I wanted to make an upbeat list, but I guess many of these points seem rather negative and gloomy. What can I say: it’s honest scrap.

I nominate, in alphabetical order:

1. Faith Acre Farm
2. Handbook of Nature Study
3. Humble Garden
4. Living and Learning
5. Pile of Omelays
6. Stony Run Farm
7. Throwback at Trapper Creek

I was talking with a friend today and she mentioned my picture a while back of my canning pantry. She said she certainly understands the feeling of growing, harvesting, putting up and getting the firewood ready from her reading of the Little House on the Prairie books - which I admitted I have never read (all gasp), as it’s not quite part of the European schoolgirl’s library, and as I simply never felt the need to read it after my school years. She told me that especially the ritual of putting up always gave her a sense of security, and how had she lost that feeling?

I said when you live according to the seasons, you live according to the ever recurring year, with its waxings and wanings, its rituals of life and work, its periods of plenty and of less, and its ample pockets of security in rough times… A life, in short, that can count on certain comforts even if they’re not present, because the recurring rituals hold them in place in the future. This gives you a sense of security without however lulling you into a false sense of security. Because it is a whole year, it doesn’t get boring, and the periods and transitions within it cannot be taken for granted.

This unlike “modern life”, which lives not the recurring year, but the recurring day, over and over again the same day, with (as per usual at least) not a one big shift, whether gift or sacrifice, to make us feel alive and the passage of time.

This friend understands what I’m trying to do here, and I appreciate our conversations, however interrupted by kids and “modern life”, more than she knows. I hardly ever write about the emotional side of our endeavors and dreams on this blog, I don’t know why. Perhaps I fear of the dreaded “No Comments” under the entry headings. But most of the time, it is simple exhausting to try to get the maelstrom of emotions to stay still on paper/screen, in neat sentences let alone paragraphs. Easier to let it all come pouring out as a warbled stream of consciousness into the ear of a dear friend. And, later in the evening, to salvage a few choice thoughts.

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.

Someone asked me: What if you  would have to move now? This was with reference to the vegetable garden, to which I have devoted many, many hours of hard labor and a whole lot more of research, hopes and dreams. My answer was: It would be no problem. Really? You could leave all of this behind?

What would I be leaving behind? A half acre of land, some well-tended topsoil and some raised beds, and a fence. Possibly a season’s harvest.

What would I be taking with me? The knowledge of what vegetables, herbs and flowers are available for my region, where to buy them, how to sow them and tend to the seedlings, how to amend soils and dig beds, how to compost, how to space vegetables, plant companions, water them and wage war on bad bugs and weeds. What tools are needed (surprisingly few). Knowledge of the path of the sun in the seasons. Of the functions of the soil horizons. Of the fact that organic materials don’t “break down”, no: they are broken down, by fungi and bacteria and little critters. That chipmunks dig holes in the beds, deep ones. That it’s okay if a couple of bean seedlings are eaten  by an entity unknown: pull and reseed. That it’s good fun, “tucking in” seeds here and there. All that, and also a fitter body, more physical endurance, and above all a happier spirit for my entire family.

That’s what it means to be self-sustainable: to have skills and knowledge that can travel with me anywhere.

Amie’s picture of Mama in the Garden (taken with her very own camera)

(It’s that dead bird again)

Well, at bedtime Amie again asked to talk about the dead baby penguin. Again she wanted to know why there was no blood. Was it really dead? I explained that it died because it was too cold. Probably its heart stopped working. I explained that our blood needs to circulate - go round and round - in our bodies and that the heart is a big pump that does that, and we listened to each other’s heartbeat (it will be a new game; she also loves to put her ear to my jaw when I eat crunchy things, which makes her laugh out loud). Then we slowly came to the heart of the matter, for her, on this evening.:

- If you’re a human, do you have to be a grown-up to die?

- Well, sometimes children die too, but not so often. They’d have to be really sick, or in an accident.

- But if S [friend at school] died, I could no longer play with her. I could still play with C and E, though [more friends at school]. But not with S anymore.

- Well, mostly, in this country, children grow up to be adults.

- But I was really sick, and I didn’t get dead.

- That wasn’t sick enough. Much sicker.

- If we die together, like in an accident, we could hold hands and still love each other. If you die first, I will still love you. But I will still have Baba and S and C and E at school to play with. That will be ficient [sufficient]. But I will still love you even though you’re dead. And I could still hug you, if you die with your arms open a bit [demonstrates]. Not if you close your arms [narrows her arms], then I wouldn’t fit. We could hold hands then.

- Usually, though, when someone dies, they take away the body, because it gets all smelly and rotten, because the blood no longer circulates through it and so no longer keeps it fresh. So they bury it in the ground or burn it up in a big, bright flame.

- I will still love you then, even though you’re not here.

Then the conversation turned to whether all her friends, E and C and some others (note: not S anymore) could come and live with us, and where would be put them to sleep and where would their Mamas and Babas sleep.

None of this - and nothing in our earlier conversations - was said morosely or sadly. It was simply matter-of-fact talk. She is trying out the concept of death, lingering mostly at its fringes: the poses we die in, would there be blood. Sometimes she gets at the heart of it, like today, when she considered what it would be like if her friend or I died, what she would do, if it would still be sufficient for her. But even then it is a trying-out of the thought of it, not the feeling. That’s why I am not worried: it is safe. And being so open about it, answering all her question without flinching, safeguards that safety and her trust in me.

The Pachy Patch in Summer 2008

yesterday was a perfect summer, spring, winter’s day: cloudless sky, 60F, the mildest of breezes, and some good hard labor. I went out, turned the two defrosted compost bins and then tackled the Pachysandra patch, a.k.a. the vegetable garden. Ah Pachysandra…

It took over five hours of hacking and pulling, getting down on my knees to pull out each and every root and dumping wheelbarrows full of the stuff in our growing “brush” section (or should I compost it? All that green…). In the end my hands were almost no longer up to peeling all that  tape off the cardboard boxes. We saved these boxes from our move and big purchases last summer with exactly this in mind: to protect the suddenly exposed soil from the wind and the rain. But the tape was still all over them, so we peeled and cursed as the sun dipped further behind the horizon and a brisk wind came on. We loaded the cardboard with some of the big stones that also came out of the ground. We should have watered them down too, but then it is going to rain and sleet this evening, so why waste tap water?

This now was mostly me, as DH was busy putting out cold frames together. Once in a while Amie would come to help with her little rake, but most of the time she played by all herself in her play set or just exploring the garden, mumbling a a dialogue to herself. I looked over at her often, and knew it in my gut, that that is what we came here for: Amie telling stories in the garden.

So I had time to think, to write stories in my head. There was an incredible clearness that came with the hard work and the cool breeze. I believe it now, that gardener is good for writers, for people in general.

But my particular train of thought was precipitated by a neighbor stopping by to remark: “Mm, Pachysandra. You’ll never get that out, you know.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” I went in my head after her had left, “did I really need that?” This was followed by retakes of all the avowals, by friends and strangers alike, that this would be difficult, as we have no experience, and it will be very hard work, and we’d get tired before we got anywhere, and did we know what we were getting into, etc. etc.

And then I realized something: how often have I said this? I stood up. How often have I said this not just about our food-project, but about everything else I’ve ever attempted. And not just to myself, but to others, to my friends, my family? Oh, many many times.  Because that’s me: the “pessimist” or the “realistic” or “cautious one”.

Why? Because it’s my nature? My upbringing? My culture?

BS!

Then I laughed out loud, the rake (by now one twine was bent up) in one hand, one of those pesky roots in the other. I had just realized something else. You’re going to laugh too, but here goes:

If you are passionate about something, you can do it.

To test this now I rehearsed all the “big projects” I’ve ever worked on. First, my studies in philosophy. Basically I studied philosophy when I was 23 until Amie was born, when I was 34. I earned a Master’s and a PhD, all Summa cum Laude. Then, on the cusp of earning a second PhD, I dropped the whole thing. Why? I’ll tell you why: eleven years of accumulated doubt, most of it self-doubt. I had been passionate about philosophy, in the beginning, but that passion had been slowly eroded away by doubt. Overtaken by a weed.

Second, the novel. I finished that book - baby/toddler in the sling - in a year and a half. Why did this succeed? Because I made short thrift of it. There was very little time for doubt. The idea of not finishing it, of it being hard work never crossed my mind. I just did it. My first agent’s response was a rejection, but it was incredibly encouraging - indeed the best rejection a first-time author could hope for. Once I’ve found the time to follow up on his advice, I could sell the thing.

Listen to me! It’s a new me! The novel has shown me that I can do whatever I set my mind to.

So this garden project now. There are many reasons why I am doing this: food for my family, food for the community, physical and mental health, preparation for an uncertain future, a wholesome life for my daughter… Yes, I know I have no experience. I know there is a lot of shade in my garden. I know it is and will be hard work, and a frost might wipe out all the crops, and our chickens will all eventually die, being animals likes us, and I won’t be able to go on a long holiday in spring, summer or fall. And I will have missed some of this here Pachysandra and it will grow back and I’ll have to weed it again…

I have thought of all these things, you know. And whenever I’ve voiced them to my DH, he said (though maybe not in so many words): So?

And he’s right! I’m not afraid of hard work.  I always do my homework. But most of all I’m passionate about this, and no one - least of all me - has the right to trample over it.

Then I said to myself, as I bent to my Pachysandra again, that if this works for me then it will work for others, and I am the first one who should make a change. As of now I will encourage my friends and family no matter what their passion is. I will nudge the doubter aside and say: “Now wait a moment, I can see it in her eye: I have no doubt that she can do it!”

And with that resolution I resumed my hacking away at the last Pachysandra. I could see in that liberated, humusy-dark and lively soil our garden growing.

~

Today it’s coming down, a flurry of almost melting snow on the Pachy Patch in the Winter of 2009:

Yesterday one of the headlines in Google was “Economy Contracts as Consumers Retreat“. There is a nice rhythm to that phrase, don’t you think? And, also like a good line of poetry, it says a lot in the most subtle of ways. The bellicosity of this phrase reveals what we all really know about consumption in a more-is-more, me-firs, “free” market: it’s a battlefield.

Who are these consumers at war with on this field, and to whom are they losing the upper hand? And where can they retreat to, to which safe haven?

Since beginning the Riot 4 Austerity I have had some conversations with friends and family members about reducing one’s footprint. I’ve noticed a couple of things. First, that invariably the first two questions from family members  are: (1) Are you in financial trouble? (2) Isn’t 64 F (17 C) too cold? No to both. That was easy.

But friends have more complicated, diverse reactions. They run the gamut of (1) a smile (you-goofy/silly-people-now-on-to-a-different-topic) to (2) “why on earth would you deprive yourself of Coke and cable”, to (3) “I really admire that but we just can’t do it like you”. So far I am ashamed to say that I haven’t made any convert, but then again I’m so non-confrontational I am probably the lamest activist you’ve ever met!

But here’s the thing: I get the sense that none of my friends are happy in their role as consumers, to which they choose, nevertheless, to cling. I have the feeling that they all long for something different than a life on the battlefield/market. I have heard them talk of their need for something spiritual, a different kind of riches. For a return to daily rituals of comfort and belonging, like they remember from their childhood perhaps (because most children, if you let them, are so naturally at home with themselves). And for time: time to be at home with oneself and one’s family, time to reflect on something beautiful, to read a book, time for friendship. Time that is not hurried, not stuffed up with stuff, but calm and warm and ample.

They want these intangibles (a nice way of avoiding calling them “things”), but they seem to deny  that the only way to get them back is by taking them back from the mass  marketplace. Because in my honest opinion, that’s where we have traded them in, our time most of all, for stuff, for plastics, for vapid “entertainment,” for glossy magazines and a glossier, paper thin life.

The mass marketplace where we are at war. The “economy shrinks” as we “retreat” from a battlefield: what does that mean? The newspapers and politicians and Wall Street investors would have us believe that it means that we are losing jobs, so money, so stuff, so happiness. They would have us believe that the only way to win it back is to ratchet up our consumption again, to “have confidence in the market”. They want us to believe that the enemy is the Chinese toymaker, the Euro, the Japanese car manufacturer and the Indian telemarketer. And they want it to be taken for granted that our retreat can only be temporary and that a victorious recovery just around the corner. That there is no other place to be.

But I believe that we are really at war in that field with our worst enemy: ourselves. We have been pitched against ourselves. No wonder no one can win. And even if the market recovers, “victory” is only Pyrrhic. Pyrrhus after winning one of many battles said that one more such victory would utterly undo him. It’s the same with us, only worse. I’m saying that we have already been completely undone.

I’m not just talking about global warming, peak oil, and all those “obstacles” to economic growth and ultimately, of course, our self-preservation. I am talking also of our loss of our “spiritual needs.” Yes, let’s name them: love, home, kindness, peace, and time. I believe that’s what my friends have been saying, suffering. Not the loss of stuff, but of soul.

And no marketplace is going to return these to us.

There are many other ways to recovering  happiness. By avoiding the mall and the box store, and saving the money for something more permanent and less polluting to the body and the mind (a woodburning stove, in our case), or for a sense of security at least. By coming together every evening in the kitchen, cooking together and then sharing the meal at the dinner table. By congregating in the living room, telling stories and listening to music or discussing a book,  and playing board games or making art together. By staying home, going for a walk in the woods and listening to the birds.  By counting what we consume in energy and goods  and how much we trash our planet, and reducing those. By planning our garden, our self-sufficiency.

By knowing where we stand, as a family, on that marketplace: more and more on the sideline, less and less at war with ourselves.

Why do I even look at the news - my “consumption” of which is out of spiritual necessity minimized to reading the headlines in Google News? 8-year-old boy shoots himself in the head at a firearms expo, 7-year-old boy kidnapped then shot to death, Neo-Nazi plot to assassinate Obama.

The places where my jawbone fits in its sockets floods with hot anger. My spirit rebels against the hard and cold instances of brutal despair for the individuals and their loved ones, but my mind quickly makes a getaway into the general meaning of such instances. We are supposed to have biophilia, an affinity for the earth, for rivers, for other creatures, for life.

Quickly put on some Bach, open again David Orr’s Earth in Mind on the environment and education - book seem so innocent compare dot the internet, but that’s a illusion - with Amie on my lap “fishing” while she sings about the Whoop-Dee-Dooper Bounce. From the corner of my eye I also stalk the new bird that has been frequenting our feeders, the Red-Bellied Woodpecker. I’ve been wowed by its red hood, its novelty and most of all, I admit, its rarity here in the North-East. I feel shamefully proud that it is here with us and to make things worse I’m intent on stealing its soul with my camera. Why this need to possess its image? Well, here it is anyway:

I also “caught” the Carolina Wren, who has been around all this time, but whose presence at the feeder is new. Here’s the bird in its box:

I am well aware that the presence of a lens between myself and these birds only distances us further, and that that is an arrogant statement. “Us”, as if the bird cares about how distant I am (as long as it’s at least ten feet). “Further”, as if I can ever bridge even those ten feet. And as if I could feed wildness so I could take a picture for a reward.

Why wasn’t it enough to just see it? The same with the book.  I often find my character has been ruined by my education in general but especially by academics and my “specilisation” in philosophy. It is addicted to sentences and abstractions and  incapable of spontaneously undergoing awe and joy at a natural instance. Such moments of simply being-in-the-moment are too rare, such moments like yesterday, when I cleaned out some of our gutters and marveled at how this wet black soil came to be in them, ten feet away from the ground. Then I thought it’s not soil but decayed leaves and pine needles, and then but that’s what soil is and I nearly fall off the ladder.

Back in the living room I read Orr quoting Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac):

One of the penalties of an ecological eduction is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

I write “for Amie” in the margin (it is something I need to equip her for), close the book and plot the making of bread and this entry.

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.

The books I am reading are effecting a revolution in me that I would like to postpone describing for a bit: let me work through it in my journal for a while. Then I hope I will be able to put down in words, for you, what is happening in my thinking and feeling, how revolutionary but also how logical it really is, given the changes in our lives over the last two years, the dreams of the past few months, the reading of the past few days and, simply, the kind of person that I am today and want to be tomorrow…

So I’m sorry to keep you waiting, I hope it will be worthwhile. In the meanwhile,  though, I’ll let you in on the books that are fueling this change.

• Rick Bass for the mood

I’m reading two of Rick Bass’ books. Winter I have read several times before. I still remember my first reading of it, how powerfully it affected my mood: I am happy that it does the same thing to me each time I reread it. I’m only thirty-something pages into Bass’ Ninemile Wolves, but it has already moved me deeply. I think this is what Bass does best: the steady accumulation of mood…

• Holmgren for thought

But the greatest impression, or rather pressure  at the moment is being exerted by David Holmgren’s Permaculture. Principes and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. I have been reading up on Permaculture gardening (Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden) for The Homestead Plan, but this book, well…

If you’ve read this book, let me know what it did for you.