Dear Folks, It’s a gray Sunday morning, six degrees outside, the ground war has started half a world away, and they’re not telling us anything about it.  I am awed by the momentum of war.  Once the people who love war are handed control, once they have made their plans, there seems to be nothing that will stop the unfolding of those plans, not even the offer of the “enemy” to grant the terms over which the war is putatively being fought.  I’m appalled.  I keep thinking I couldn’t possibly be more appalled, and then something happens to make me so.  The whole mentality of war, the language it uses, the arrogance of it, the unwillingness to let anyone but generals have a thought of their own, the brainwashing of the public, the satanizing of the opposition, the monumental waste of resources, the glorification of violence — all of it makes me wish I belonged to some other species.

Here on the farm this morning, it’s peaceful.  The kitchen and my study, where I’ve gotten woodstoves stoked up, are just beginning to be inhabitable.  We have an oil furnace, with thermostats set at 55 degrees to keep the pipes from freezing, but comfort in winter around here comes from wood.

I’ve just ejected Heather from the study.  We have a RULE about jumping on the furniture in here, and age 3 1/2 seem to bring on a stage of trying out every rule repeatedly to see if it applies in THIS moment.  I don’t enjoy these tests, in which I have to be a meanie so regularly.  But I remember they were necessary for the civilization of our dog, so I suppose they are needed for the civilization of a person too.  I could swear that the dog learned about jumping on furniture faster than Heather is learning.  But then Heather has a much more fiery spirit than the dog ever had.

This business of disciplining is a problem for me.  I feel as if I’m breaking something — as if I’m suppressing the spontaneous, wild, wonderfulness of childhood.  At the same time I know SHE’S breaking something, namely the furniture, and just about anything else she wreaks her will upon.  Order versus freedom.  Discipline versus spontaneity.  I know the answer is some kind of Buddhist dualistic balance, but how the heck do you find a balance point in an encounter with an incoherent, screaming 3-year-old?

I’m told by people who know more than I do about these things that it’s good for a child to be around lots of adults with different ways of living and of disciplining.  Sometimes I wonder, though, whether that just makes confusion for Heather.  On the scale of disciplinarians in this household, her mother is most lenient, her father most strict, and the rest of us are ranged across the middle.  Sylvia is likely to start laughing in the midst of punishing an infraction, because of the cuteness of the little perpetrator, and because the perpetrator is resonating with a rebellious streak that lies within Sylvia herself.  (Sylvia’s best stories are about lively, naughty animals.)  Don generally just clomps down; Daddy’s will prevails over daughter’s will, no questions asked — a pretty typical situation, met by the daughter with impotent fury.  The rest of us try to be intermediate and consistent, but aren’t; when we’re tired or grumpy we swing one way and when we’re relaxed and happy we swing the other.

Heather, bless her, hasn’t yet learned to play us off against each other, nor does she store up grievances.  It’s now ten minutes later and she’s back, sunny as a June morning, having informed her mother with no guile whatsoever that she was bad and jumped on the furniture.  “Let’s play witch,” she says as she comes back in.  “You bake me in an oven and eat me up.”  She loves to be scared.  Her world these days is populated with witches and monsters.

Ah, me, what unclouded, relentless mirrors chidren are, showing us the devils and angels and monsters inside us all!

Yesterday was a terrific day, as Saturdays usually are for me — the only day of the week I don’t have to sit down at a word processor.  It was cold but sunny.  I started some more seeds; there are some to start every weekend from now into May.  The onions, petunias, and dahlias are already up, making green fuzz on the plant cart in the south window of my bedroom.  I cleaned up various messes, did two loads of wash, made a pot of chili, split and stacked pieces of the great maple that Don took down last week.  I listened to La Boheme from the Met while sewing potholders and stuffing them with insulating wool from our sheep.  (We needed new potholders badly; our old ones were totally grundgy.)  I remembered how sick I was at this time last year and was overcome with gratitude that now I feel so good.  I feel REALLY good.  I whomp the maple with the Monstermaul and stack armloads of wood with the greatest pleasure.

Don is still laid off, which is bad for the Spains’ finances, but good for the farm.  I’m trading him rent for farmwork, and it’s amazing what a full-time farmer can get done around here.  He’s fixed up all the hand carts, which haul wood, hay, tools, vegetables, and manure all year and fall apart in various ways.  He’s gathering the kind of scrap that accumulates around a farm (old car doors, old tires, pieces of tractors we don’t have anymore) and taking it to recyclers and reprocessors.  He’s taking down trees for firewood.  He’s clearing brush and dumping heavy branches down into a place where the brook is eroding its banks and threatening to cut into our water well.  (We have a theory that the brush will slow the flow and cause silt to be deposited instead of washed away.)  He built a new sliding barn door and a new ramp up to it, so the sheep, ducks, and geese can get over the front step easily.  A great horned owl carried off one of our ducks last week.  The geese set up an alarm and Karel got outside fast enough to see the huge winged shape swooping over the snow.  So now at night we’re shutting in the birds, though they really prefer to be outside.

So the work exchange between Don and me is raising both his spirits and mine.  I am tickled to cut into the list of things that never get done because there’s only time for the immediate and urgent.

My time is almost all spent with students now.  The term is coming to its final crescendo — Dartmouth has four 10-week terms a year, and they’re intense.  At the beginning of this term I resisted the teaching and resented its incursions on my writing.  Now I’ve just let go and given myself over to the students.  They’ve had a hard time of it, confronting the difference between the academic slop they’ve been trained to write and readable, publishable writing.  For awhile, as I covered their papers with rude red comments, I despaired that they could make the transition.  But in the last week they’ve begun coming up with real stuff, and they are as delighted as I am.

They’re learning to talk about what they REALLY KNOW, instead of what they’ve learned from books.  One boy was struggling to write about “the necessity of multi-party democracy in Africa” and I kept challenging him to show me that multi-party democracy would be any better or worse than any other kind of government in Africa.  Finally in one of our talks he mentioned that he had spent a term as a simple laborer, a “shamba-boy” on a small farm in Kenya.  Why don’t you write about THAT? I asked.  Do you think anyone would care? he wondered — as if anyone would care about his totally uninformed opinion of multi-party democracy!  So finally they’re writing their hearts out — about building a log cabin in the mountains last summer, about the confrontation between students and cops with regard to dogs on campus, about a land protection deal in Hanover, about the Dartmouth recycling program, about a local chapter of Earth First!  Last week I turned papers back and one student gasped, “There’s a WHOLE PARAGRAPH you didn’t mark up!”  It was a clear, shining paragraph.

Well, it’s fun, this teaching, and I’ll do it again next year, but I’ll also be glad to get back to my own writing (just two more weeks!).  More and more stuff is piling up on my desk and in my mind, demanding to get written.  I’m excited about it all, and it will take five years to finish, even if I never have another writing idea.  Here’s the backlog, not counting the weekly column, this newsletter, the Balaton newsletter, Balaton proposals, and the occasional piece for the LA Times:

– The textbook, of course, about two-thirds done and languishing in the middle of a chapter about affluence and air pollution, with a chapter on sustainable economics coming up next.

– A re-issue of Limits to Growth.  This must be my next project, since the manuscript has to be ready by fall to make the 1992 20th-anniversary deadline.  I intend make a second book, probably about the same length as the first one, to be published alongside the first, commenting on our “prediction” from twenty years later.  It will take up all the classic issues — will technology “save us”, will the market “save us”, will we “run out” of resources, what did we say, anyway, and why did people hear what we said so strangely — and what might a sustainable world, not obsessed with growth, look like.  Since Dennis and I have written on all these subjects extensively, I think the job will be more pulling-together and editing than new writing, which is good.  I’m a slow writer, but a lightning-fast editor.  Because of legal tangles we have a real AGENT for this book, the first ever in my publishing career.  Happily, that agent is Peter Matson, Karel’s uncle, Anna Pluhar’s brother, and therefore, essentially, a family friend.  The whole arrangement feels good to me, and I’m anxious to get started on this project.

– A television show on cancer.  This is the idea of John Angier, the executive producer of “Race to Save the Planet.”  It was inspired by my newsletters of last year about my own experience with cancer.  I’m not at all sure what it will be like — maybe a dramatization of my story, or maybe that’s just a starting point for something more comprehensive.  I’m not convinced that there’s a story worth telling there, but I told John I’d spend a little time working with him to see if there is.  That work has already begun and will proceed sporadically over the next six months.

– The book on alternative cancer therapies.  I’m as enthusiastic about this as ever, and in my spare time I’m reading and researching and thinking about it, but it has to wait until the rest of the list is done.

– A history of system dynamics.  A book of good-news stories about sustainable development.  An editing of Anna’s book.  And more, there in my head, waiting to come out!

Well, the good news is that at least SOMETHING is about to come out.  The book of my collected columns, gleaned from the last five years, and titled The Global Citizen, should be available in both paperback and hard copy from Island Press by the middle of March.  It will feel good to have at least one finished project in hand!  Tell the world about it!  Buy copies for all your friends!!!

So my own life is feeling wonderfully good to live, while around me the superpower I live in is destroying itself and tearing apart several Middle Eastern countries in the process.  It’s been a long time since I have felt helpless and hopeless.  There are many parts of the world where I know the sun is shining.  But for the last few months I have felt helplessness and hopelessness about my own nation.  It seems to have given in completely to the military-industrial complex, content to be first in the world in heat-seeking missiles, 18th in infant survival, and dead last on the ability of high school students to do math.  As our bridges crumble and our oil wells go empty, we cheer and wave the flag and dominate small nations.

Sorry for that wave of pessimism there.  It’s been lurking inside me trying to get out.  I guess I may as well admit the awful secret that I do have thoughts like that, and that they come more and more frequently as I listen to war news every day.

Love, Dana