Dear Folks,

YES! The bulldozers are rolling!

It’s been an amazing, nonstop, exciting month. Groundbreaking day turned out to be Monday morning, August 14, two weeks ago. After all we had gone through to get to that point, and after so many postponements, and after the breathtaking last-minute coming together of the essential elements (especially the Act 250 permit), we had no opportunity to plan a ceremony.. (We’d blessed the site when we were all together in July.) The permit and the decision to go came on Thursday. The bulldozers arrived in that weekend. They roared to life at 7 a.m. the following Monday.

We didn’t declare a ceremony, but many CobbHillians managed to be there anyway. With cameras. As the first yellow bulldozer bit into the hillside and started shoving topsoil aside, we cheered it on and at the same time felt appalled. That lovely hillside! What are we doing? But how wonderful that we’re finally, finally doing it! It felt like a sober holiday. It felt like we were over the hump and everything would be downhill from here. All we have to do is relax and let these cigar-chomping wizards build our homes. (Of course I will disabuse you of that fantasy before we even get many paragraphs into this letter.) That early Monday morning, we felt relieved and giddy and a bit scared at what we have unleashed upon the earth (and upon our bank account).

For the first week they pushed topsoil, stripping the four-acre site and making two mountains on the side, to be pushed back when all construction is finished. Four acres of topsoil makes a huge pile! (“You know, that stuff’s very valuable,” says the bank loan officer, musingly. “I’ll defend it with my life,” I think to myself.) This week they’ve been reshaping contours, surveying, and outlining paths and roads. Next, I hope, will come trenches to carry water and wastewater pipes, heating pipes, electricity and phone wires. Then cellar holes. Hopefully before serious fall rains begin.

We took risks, perhaps unwise ones, to start construction. We don’t yet have signed purchase and sales agreements from any of our members. We haven’t yet called in our private construction loans — it will be a race to get money in the bank before these bulldozer guys present their first bill. Our guaranteed-maximum-price contract from the builder has been in the final stage of negotiation for two months now and still seems to be in the final stage of negotiation. Heck, on the first day of construction we didn’t even own the land — our lawyer went off on vacation to Europe before we could officially transfer the land from the Sustainability Institute to Cobb Hill. But the building season is closing down, so we went for it.

By now the land is in the right hands. I hope to have the documents to call the loans and the P&S agreements this week. The contract is coming, coming soon, they say. And as of last Friday the work was hung up because the engineers’ diagrams are wrong, the architect is out of town, and the general contractor is reluctant to second-guess them.

Fortunately the community made a difficult but good decision this month (after considerable discussion and emotion). We hired Susie Sweitzer, who moved up just last month from Kentucky, to be our on-the-ground community representative, acting as liaison between us and the builders. Susie is a former farmer and nurse, not a developer, but she’s smart and organized and efficient — and available, because she hadn’t yet sought out a job up here. She’s already stopped the crew from cutting into a stone wall in the wrong place and authorized the contractor to move a road without going back to the engineers. Already after just two weeks, I suspect she’s earned her keep.

Art Kirn, who lives in the old Curtis house is there most every day too, schmoozing easily with the crew, helping tearing down the old sugar house, going to get Roger in the trailer to show the crew where the underground water lines are. Roger, who grew up on this land, and who operated heavy equipment before he retired, is having the time of his life. He’s the gossip center of the neighborhood, keeping track of us all, telling the whole town what we’re up to. He’s probably defused a lot of knee-jerk negative reactions, because he defends us to the other old-timers. I expect we’ll add 10 years to his life, just by giving him so much amusement. I hope so; we all like him, and he’s a great storehouse of the history and lore of this place.

Gosh, it’s good, it’s so good as this cool, brilliant summer draws to a close, to feel such an acceleration of life at this poor old beat-up farm!

Kerry and Stephen’s garden is going great. Sixty-two grateful subscribing CSA families are picking up weekly baskets stuffed with corn and tomatoes (finally!) and cucumbers and eggplants and beans and herbs and summer squash and potatoes and onions and leeks. S&K are also trucking loads of produce to the Saturday farmers market and to the Upper Valley Food Coop. For a first year on a new farm, they’ve pulled off a miracle. (With a lot of hard work.)

They also discovered this month that their mare Cassima is pregnant. The stallion, or anyway his critical contribution to this matter, arrived in a cooler, delivered by Fedex, to be administered by the vet. An ultrasound confirmed the happy success of the enterprise. So early next summer we should have a Norwegian Fjord foal. Meanwhile, Cassima and Mari are cultivating, manure spreading, rock hauling, and harrowing, as S&K plow up old veggie beds and sow them with cover crop at the same time they open new beds for fall plantings.

Last Sunday a surprisingly large number of CobbHillians turned out on a gorgeous cool, breezy day to paint barn. This is a task of great concern to me; I have been agonizing at the sight of the neglected and peeling Hunt barns for the past three years. But they’re big barns, and there are four of them. It’s entirely too daunting for just one person to get up on a ladder and start scraping.

So about 20 of us did it, ages from 6 to over 60. Two sides of the gambrel barn, the biggest one, got first coats and part of a second coat. The place is beginning to look loved again. We all got liberally spattered with red paint and had great fun. One of our potential member-families enjoyed the day so much that they decided to buy in. (Now we have only 3 of our 22 units unclaimed — two duplex units and an apartment in the commonhouse.)

There are many barns sides left to paint, but now that we know how to make it a joy instead of a chore, they’ll get done.

Marsha is busy going to cheese workshops and cleaning out the old milk room in the gambrel barn. She and Stephen and Kerry spend hours planning how the milking parlor and cheese rooms will be laid out. Three of those baby Jerseys S&K brought to Foundation Farm two years ago are due to have their first calves in early winter. We have a lot to do to get ready for all that milk. We keep telling Marsha, “make Parmesan. No, make Gruyere. Be sure to make cream cheese. Mozzarella would be nice.” She’ll experiment with several varieties and test markets before she settles on her repertoire.

I spent the last two Saturday mornings getting 12 young hoodlum roosters out of the barnyard and into the freezer. I always order a dozen cockerel chicks along with 25 pullets in the spring. By August they’ve gotten big, beautiful, loud and violent and I can hardly wait to get rid of them. This year they were White Rocks, a breed I’ve never tried before. I’ll order them again; they grew fast and dressed out beautifully. Offing roosters isn’t my favorite job, but it’s little enough trouble to raise them, and it’s great to have them to roast all winter long. Next weekend Marsha and I will do in the two-year-old hens, put them away for stewing, and move the new White Rock hens into the grown-up chicken house, where they should be laying eggs soon.

Cousin Eddie has returned to Kansas, after spending a month here weeding carrots. Well, he did a few other things too, but I’m afraid we worked him pretty hard. He was amazingly willing to be worked. When he left, Stephen and Kerry gave him the Woody-Love Medal of Valor for liberating carrots from weed-induced oppression. (Woody-Love is the woodchuck who makes occasional cartoon appearances in their weekly memo to their CSA subscribers.) Kerry’s sister Rachel has returned to her home in Hawaii, after weeks of steady hard work in the garden. The sun rises a whole hour later now than it did in June, and sets a whole hour earlier. We have valley fog in the morning, the first sign of fall. This exciting initial summer in Hartland is winding down.

I spent a whole precious week of it away this month, something I consider unthinkable — go away in August? forget it!. But my friend Vicki Robin put together an irresistible package. Vicki and Sister Miriam McGillis of Genesis Farm in New Jersey and I would do a 5-day workshop together. (That makes a rare combination of ideas, as I’ll explain in a minute.) And we’d do it at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound — the old Chinook community, a place I’ve always wanted to visit.

So I went.

It was lovely to meet Miriam, a Dominican nun whose order happened into a New Jersey farm, and who ended up managing it. They have a huge organic CSA there, and also an educational venture built around Miriam’s studies with Thomas Berry (Dream of the Earth, The Universe Story — I imagine readers of this newsletter are familiar with his work). Miriam teaches the Universe Story experientially, spiritually, inwardly, using Hubble telescope pictures and a walking time-spiral and candles and music and thistles and silent time for reflection. It’s very different from the intellectual hit through which I first got it, through the writings of Brian Swimme (The Universe is a Green Dragon, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos). Both ways of “getting it” are important to me — how is it that over 15 billion years the universe, simply by condensing bits of stardust, evolved enough complexity to create a creature that could understand that itself had evolved over 15 billion years from stardust? How could consciousness and understanding and a sense of morality be a consequence of the Big Bang? Surely there is something more than evolutionary accident going on! What is the proper role in the universe of those bits of stardust that are able to comprehend and celebrate the miracle of condensed stardust?

As Miriam says, there are no “objects” out there. Everything is a “subject,” made of what we ourselves are made of, imbued with the same energy, evolved from the same intelligence, not something to be manipulated, but something with which to be in relationship.

She sent us out into the glory of Whidbey Island to meditate on this. I headed toward a big pine tree I had been admiring, but then I discovered a whole civilization of ants climbing up that pine tree and laying out superhighways on the ground. I followed the superhighways to their nests, and I found myself in sacred relationship with the ants. Is it any more of a miracle that the universe evolved their complexity than that it evolved mine?

One reason I was so eager to do this workshop was to put my systems stuff into the context of the Universe Story. In my mind, since reading Swimme and Berry, that has been an essential piece. The systems stuff helps us to see how trapped we are by the very systems we create (the market, democratic government, corporations, Act 250). It leads us logically and ineluctably to see that our crazy, unsustainable, soul-demeaning systems evolve from our world views, our paradigms, our deepest story about our being and our purpose. Then my teaching stops, because there’s nothing in systems theory to tell us where to get a more noble, moving functional story than the “getting and spending” one our culture hands us. “Buy low, sell high.” Surely we were put here for more than that!

Having been trained as a scientist, I must have a story that is consistent with modern knowledge about cosmology and evolution. Berry’s is the one that does it for me. It incorporates all the magnificence and immensity of what we know about the universe without making us into minuscule, insignificant, random accidents. It makes us celebrants, lovers, conduits of the unnamable (unless you are willing to use the name of God) force that brought us into being.

I need that piece to put systems into the proper context. The other necessary piece is Vicki’s — the “so-what” piece. So what do I do with my life as a result of this understanding? How do I free myself from the system traps, so I can be a true agent for the work of the universe? If you’ve read Your Money or Your Life, you know Vicki’s answer to that one, which is funny, fun, and terribly subversive.

It was irresistible to put those three pieces together for the first time. It was a great audience of people who already knew most of it and were living it and were eager to drink in more and to go out and spread it to others. It was unbelievably serendipitous to do it at the Whidbey Institute, in a lovely new building called Thomas Berry Hall. It was magnificent to spend breaks out walking the trails through the Pacific Northwest forest. (With slugs as long as my hand! Wow! I did my best to be in relationship with them, but I couldn’t help but imagine how many cabbages they could eat.) I think for the participants the main kick was just to be with the three of us, each of whom has invested decades of passionate effort and joy in trying to live our larger understanding. And for sure we three enjoyed being with each other.

Now that we’ve done it once, we know better how to do it again. Vicki is trying to arrange a repeat performance on the East Coast next March. I’ll keep you informed.

The trip out was enough to make me swear off all plane travel forever. It was one of those rolling pilot’s strike days at Northwest Airlines. My scheduled flight from Manchester NH was suddenly canceled within 5 minutes of departure. They had to unload our luggage and we stood in an endless line to be rescheduled, most of us shuttled, hours later, down to Boston. There I stood in line for another hour and a half, got booked on a later plane, then it was delayed by two hours, so I would miss my Detroit connection to Seattle. This went on all day — I was on 5 theoretical flights, all canceled or delayed, before I ever left Boston. I spent the whole frigging day standing in line. I finally arrived in Seattle at midnight (3 am East Coast time), where faithful Vicki was actually still waiting for me. My luggage didn’t arrive. The airline system has clearly gone the way of the health care system, the supermarket and fast food system, the media system, the professional sports system, the banking system, and the government system. Zero integrity. To be avoided at all costs.

But I did have to fly home. That was an unexpected blessing, a soft touch directly from the magnificent universe. It was a red-eye. It actually left on time. I woke up somewhere to the west of Detroit, lazily looked out the window, and there was the most amazing display of Northern Lights. From 35,000 feet up, they look like a shimmering green curtain, reaching from the pinnacle of the sky to the ground, where glowing splotches of towns and cities passed slowly by. I gasped and stuck my nose to the window and drank it in. No “special effect” in the movies could ever surpass this. The whole sky vibrating with light. And then a meteor streaked right across the display! And another! And another! “Right,” I realized, “it’s August 12, and this is the Perseid meteor shower.” Wow!

I watched the Lights and the meteors until we landed in Detroit and the sun came up. I felt blessed. Maybe I’ll go on another airplane some time after all. (I’d better; I’m scheduled to leave for Hungary and the Balaton meeting next week.)

I got home just in time to see the bulldozers start rolling.

Love,

Dana

PURPLE CONEFLOWER (ECHINACEA PURPUREA)

by Marsha Carmichael 8/97

When I first saw you, my dear,

I thought, How garish

Fat orange center

Recurved purple skirt

(Who would want you?)

But there you were

Long lasting bright color

Needing nothing from me

A crazy daisy

Why hold you, flower, to the rule

For what nice girls

Should wear to school?