Imagining the Other – Reflections in Transition

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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!

Why Transition: Taking the Pressure Off


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.

Daily Bread No. 11

This bread is so good. We had it with homemade pesto (last harvest of homegrown basil) and the last Brandywine tomatoes.

Tomorrow if I am feeling better I’ll pull all the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants from the hoop house, chop them up, and mix them with the orphan punkins, of which we received three more today. The neighbors are really into this!

Daily Bread No. 10 and Last Harvests

So I’m not going to be able to bake a bread every day, but it’s cool. Taking advantage of the hot oven, I also baked a punkin pie, using this wonderful recipe (but with canned pumpkin puree). I can’t show you pictures because it’s mostly gone already. I may become a (modest) baker after all. Still looking for that no-knead whole wheat, though…

The tomato vines in my hoop house have started dying, so I pulled the last tomatoes, 2 pounds of them, mostly green.

I also harvested 5 little eggplants, 3 more peppers, and the basil that was not blackened by the frost – which, judging by that frost-sensitive basil, made it into the hoop house on the last (fourth) night of the frost, after a gray day failed to warm it up enough.

Transition, Redux

I wrote some time ago about needing to do something beyond my own backyard. It didn’t take long before I figured out what that should be. Transition!

(Almost exactly a year ago I attended Transition training in Boston. You can read about it here and here.)

Taking advantage of a rare intrepid, or should I say now-or-never moment,  I called my library to reserve the Meeting Room for

  1. an introductory talk about Transition Initiatives by Tina Clarke
  2. a book club for reading Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook (three evenings)
  3. three movie showings – not decided yet which ones, probably one on peak oil (or should I say peak everything?), one on our food predicament, and one on the economic situation.

I know that’s a lot of events, and it’s all just to find fellow initiators, that is, to get to the first stage of starting a Transition Initiative. Though I hope that, simply by speaking to people to get them to come to these events and advertise in their communities and newsletters, I will find some before April.

I let the date depend entirely on the availability of the Meeting Room, and so April it is (I’m lucky, some town’s Meeting Rooms are booked for over a year). And so…

April 2011 will be Wayland Transition month!

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Meanwhile I also reconnected with the trainers and the fellow transitioners on my state’s Transition ning site, where we explore our values, share our practical efforts and look for news and support. One of my first discussions was about localization, and I shared some thoughts on “being local”:

As I am calling around my town, trying to get places to hold the Transition Wayland events in April 2011, I am confronted (in a good way) with “the locals” and especially with the question: “Am I a local?”

The I in question – that’s me – knows the answer: yes! It took me a while to get to it, but that’s a different story.

I speak with an accent. I’m from Belgium (Dutch-speaking), I moved here 13 years ago (and moved into this town, 2 years ago), and I speak English well enough, but people think I’m from Ireland (go figure).

On the phone with the library’s administrative assistant, organizing the book club for Rob’s *Handbook*, I was (kindly) asked: “Are you from here?”

Are you a local?

I said, “Now I am!”

It brought home to me the welcome principle – which Sharon in Casaubon’s Book  and several other have been espousing (cf. Adapting in Place) – that our home, our place, our locus is, simply, where we live.

So not, per se, “where we come from”. Though it is great, I hasten to add, to also have come from here (wherever you are), to have stuck around until now, to have already gotten to know your place and the people, and to be known. But we should not let the lack of such a past deter us from being “a local”. If circumstances or one’s own choice (poor or not) have only just brought us here, so be it. It’s about now, and the future.

I have let the lack of such a past (not an American, not a New Englander, not a Waylander) deter me. It made me shy, made me feel undeserving, in a sense, like I should be an observer for a while and wait for an invitation, to deserve a voice. But now I am beginning to think that it might give me an edge, this ignorance about how things are done in this town, the fact that no one knows me. This was an important realization for me, and one of the factors in getting me going again.

So you could say I’m inviting myself, or rather, have already invited myself, and so, true, I am new, but hey, I am here!

Living Room Green House

There’s Amie, counting on her fingers

This is what our living room looks like now. DH said it looks a bit weird, those big peppers.  I said, well count yourself lucky I’m not overwintering the eggplants! (Poor eggplants.)

At least I’m making that big picture window pay for all the heat loss in cold weather.

Speaking of heat loss, I need to calculate the Riot, it’s been two months now, but the site and so the calculator are down, hopefully not for too long.

The Garlic is In

It is recommended to plant garlic a week after the first frost, and we finally had our frost two nights ago, and i couldn’t wait any longer. That first frost was almost a month past our average first frost date (10/5).

I had about 30 cloves, saved from last year, and 10 volunteers from bulbs I must have failed to dig out when I harvested the garlic in July (I transplanted these to the new bed). They’re all hardnecks – with wonderful scapes in Spring – but I don’t know what variety, or mixture of varieties they are.

  • Clove prep

I didn’t prepare my cloves last year and wasn’t happy with the result: a lot of cloves didn’t grow at all, or the bulbs were rotten and soggy at harvesting time. So this year I decided to prep. I soaked them overnight in a solution of baking soda (1 heaping tablespoon in 1 gallon of water), then soaked them for 2 minutes in rubbing alcohol, right before planting.

  • Bed prep and mulch

I chose a bed that hasn’t had garlic planted in it in the last three years (in my young garden that means never). Until recently it had tomatoes  and peppers in it. It’s a fine bed,  I found the soil light and fluffy, just the way garlic loves it. It gets as much sun as any bed in my garden gets. It’s also situated to the East of where the Winter hoop House will be, so it won’t be in its shade and will even get some of its reflected sunshine and protection from winds.

I didn’t fertilize, but did mulch with 4″ of straw. It’ll protect the soil from the pounding rain, keeping it fluffy, and it will protect the garlic from temperature swings.

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While I was covered with straw anyway, I spread it over all the bed that will be unused over the Winter. This is what the garden looks like now. From the North:

From the East:

The asparagus bed still needs mulching, but I’ll wait until after I’ve cut down the ferns, after they’re spent.

Daily Bread No. 8, and First Pumpkin Foundling

Today, the day after Halloween, we found our first punkin orphan, dropped off at our mailbox. Amie ran to welcome it. We reminded people of the composting program when we were out trick-or-treating, and many were enthusiastic. And I met one elderly gentleman who was the first to live on this street, and he and I resolved to meet soon so I can take down the history of the neighborhood.

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I am back on track with the baking. Because these are busy days I went back to the old recipe which is such a favorite in our house. Daily Bread No.7 was finished in a jiffy and Bread No.8 will be finished at breakfast. I love it too, but am hoping fr a good no-knead whole wheat recipe.

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We had our first frost last night. It went down to 21. There’s more frost predicted tonight and tomorrow night, so I decided to bring in all my potted pepper plants. I’ll post a picture of my interesting living room tomorrow. The hoop house is performing well, though unfortunately I don’t have any precise data. But all the plants inside it survived the frost, so far. The eggplants are still going strong. The tomatoes aren’t looking so good, but the tomatoes on the vine are still ripening.

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Today I went into Amie’s class (K) to talk about compost. While putting her snack together in the morning I had an idea. I walked in, sat down in front of the kids, and asked them if it was okay for me to eat my snack, I was so hungry. I rummaged around in my bag, complaining that my snack had been in there for a long time and muttering that I hoped it was still good. Then I pulled out a big clear plastic box with wet, gooey, wormy compost! Eek! What happened!

We talked about rot and decay, composing and decomposing, falling apart and being taken apart, it no longer being food for us but still perfectly edible for other organisms, etc. I must say, I used to teach college kids metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics, and that was tough. But teaching these five-year-olds is a different thing altogether!  Afterwards the class went out to  plant bulbs and make a scarecrow in their little school garden.

(Note to self: mustn’t forget to take that “snack” out of my bag. I’ll do it tomorrow…)