Dear Folks, My poor friends.  Ever since I wrote last month complaining about how busy I was, those of you who’ve had business or pleasure to conduct with me have been calling so hesitantly, so sweetly, saying, “I know you don’t have ANY time at all, but….”

Wow!  If you ever want to erect a wall between yourself and all your friends, just write a letter about how impossibly busy you are!  It works great!

And I don’t recommend it.  Friends are more important than anything I’m busy about.

So I want to tell you that last month’s letter was simply an example of one of my panic attacks.  They happen much less frequently than they used to (they used to be almost continuous), but they do still happen, especially in May and September, when farm work peaks.  Please know that I have now calmed down.  I calmed down almost immediately after writing that letter, since in writing it I discharged the panic.  It’s OK.  You can call, you can write, you can talk to me.  I’m here.

I’m just as busy of course.  I think my state of busyness never really changes much; what changes is my inner state of being.  When I’m following my Ayurvedic doctor’s advice and operating “from the place of calm inside,” I can, as he also advised, do even MORE and do it happily, with my full energy.  But when I operate from fear (“Can I get it all done?  Will it be good enough?  Am I sufficient to these tasks?”), then I spend half my energy stewing instead of working.  I get self-absorbed instead of task-absorbed.  I walk right past my friends without seeing them.  I write letters like the one I wrote last month.

So I apologize.  I thank you for being there and letting me dump out what is on my mind every month.  Please realize that that’s exactly what I do, and by the time you receive a letter, my mood, like all moods, has shifted.  The wisest of the friends who have to live near me in the flesh, as opposed to distantly on paper, have gotten pretty good at ducking when I’m in panic mode, which some of them call “Dana’s bulldozer periods.”  If they’re really brave, they stand in front of the bulldozer and face it down, grab me, wake me up, tell me to go soak my head, or meditate, or get a good night’s sleep, or do SOMETHING to become human again.  At the time it comes I rarely welcome that advice.  But it’s just what I need.

One reason for writing this all down right now is so I remember it.  My busyness is entirely my own creation.  I have no excuse for slopping it over onto other people.  I truly don’t want it to be a wall separating me from you.  So you have permission, when you hear pitiful tales from me about how busy I am, to tell me to go stuff it and to come back when I’m ready to be responsible for my over commitments and for my much more important relationship with you.

At THIS moment, I’m really happy.  It’s one of those June mornings that makes one feel washed in a stream of glory straight from heaven.  The sun is at solstice, beaming down through the crystal air of a Canadian high.  Everything outside is green in so many rich shades that you can only wonder how God or Gaia ever thought them all up.  A robin is singing a love song in the front yard and purple finches are warbling at the feeder.  The garden has never looked better.  On days like this I walk around this beautiful farm and wonder how I was ever so blessed as to come to live here.

And two days ago I got some wonderful news!

I have been selected as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment!  The award is $50,000 a year for three years!  I can do whatever I want with it!  Ten people receive the award each year; this is the second year it has been given.

What this means to me is — I am still absorbing what it means to me.  It will make such a change in my life that it will take awhile to adjust.  I’ll take half the money as salary and use the other half to pay Diana Wright, my part-time research assistant, and to have travel funds!   What this means is that I no longer have to scrabble around trying to find a speech to give or an article to write that will pay enough to fix the roof.  It means that I can center myself on what I think is important, instead of on how to get enough money to hold my life and the farm together.  It means that for the first time since resigning my professorship at Dartmouth and divorcing Dennis, I will have some peace of mind about finances.

I won’t have to scheme how to get invited by someone who can pay my way when I want to go somewhere.  If I want to go work with Hartmut Bossel in Germany on a book on canonical systems structures, I can just go.  I can buy a laptop computer to take with me.  I can take Diana to a Balaton meeting, to let her grow into and become part of the global environmental network.  I can hole up for a year and finish my textbook.  I can be more available to the members of the Balaton Group, more able to respond to their needs.

All this is such a shift in my reality that it will take awhile before I believe it.  My financial state for the past seven years has been — well — precarious is one way of putting it, though I have been thinking of it as a great test of faith.  I have had just what I’ve needed, and no security whatever.  No guaranteed income, no pension or medical benefits unless I supply them, no cushion to fall back on.  If I didn’t write a column or give a speech or sign up to teach a class at Dartmouth, that meant no money.  I couldn’t support the farm either economically or logistically without both the rent and the work of my farm-mates.  My worst fear has been that I would lose the farm.  The mortgage is paid off, but the operating expenses are about $1000 a month, not counting repairs and capital improvements.  That’s about what I make from the column.

I got myself into this situation willingly, of course.  I could always leave the farm and get a respectable job.  I could even stay at the farm and teach full time at Dartmouth, as I was doing seven years ago.  But I wanted to spend my time writing and to FORCE myself into writing with regularity.  Having a weekly deadline and sweating the property tax bills has produced just the result I wanted — lots of writing — but no security.

Somehow, though, there has been enough money, even through a bout of cancer that brought not only my energy but also my bank account right down to rock bottom.  I’m quite amazed at that, and a little proud, and immensely grateful.  I’ve gotten used to constant low-level worry about next month’s income, but I’ve also gotten clever about living frugally and patient about taking on farm improvements only slowly, as I can afford them.  I’ve gotten more confident about my ability to manage and more trusting in the support of a Higher Power.  Frugality, patience, confidence and trust were qualities I badly needed.  They have been great gifts from this time.

But there has been a cost, too.  I didn’t quite realize that until last year about this time.  I had applied for a Pew Scholarship then, too, and a number of other grants, and I didn’t get any of them.  I looked ahead to a year of nothing but column income, and I despaired.  “Dear God,” I said, “how long do I have to keep up this struggle?”

God doesn’t usually give me clear answers to my questions, but this time I heard the answer loud and clear.  (I’m not kidding.  I really did.)  “Only until you find the faith to stop thinking of it as a struggle.  Only until you trust.”

So I did my best to stop worrying.  And a bunch of opportunities came up — an article here, a speech there, a term of teaching.  Just enough to carry me through the year without deflecting me from my central purposes.  In fact sometimes (as in the Limits work) the new opportunities shoved me directly INTO my central purposes.  Everything that happened was a gift.  I’ve lived this year in wonder, not worrying, having faith.

And now I have a Pew Scholarship.  For three years there’s nothing to worry about.  I’ll keep writing the column, of course, and with that income plus the Scholarship I’ll have all I need.  If any of my books that are out or in the pipeline turn out to generate significant royalties (in my experience, books don’t do that), that will help with the time after the three years are up, or become my pension.  If they don’t, well, I’ll just go on trusting.

It isn’t quite accurate to say I’m happy about this Pew Scholarship.  It’s more that I’m in awe at the ways of the universe.

Maybe it’s just the shift in my own mood, but it seems to me that pressures have eased all over the farm.  The outdoor painting season is in full swing and Don is working again.  Sylvia’s making some money cleaning houses; enough, it looks like, to put Heather in day care, which will be fun for Heather and a needed break for Sylvia.  We got the hay into the barn last week, on a perfect sunny day — it was a rare luxury to put up hay without a hint of impending thunder.  The garden is now mulched sufficiently so that I can relax from weeding and start concentrating on harvesting.  Seven quarts of spinach went into the freezer yesterday.  This week we’ll start freezing pea pods and peas.

Pressure is building up on Karel and Stephanie, though.  Their wedding is July 6.  It will be a classic and fairly large affair, which Stephanie and her mother have well in hand, but this is the time when anxieties do creep into the fun of the pre-wedding flurry.  Karel and Stephanie also face the uncertainty of a new life in Colorado, where they will move in August, and we have what seems like an impossible task of replacing them — not only their rent and their help around the place, but more importantly their companionship, their quirks, the fun of them.  Karel doing imitations of the ram or the gander.  Stephanie’s steady cheerfulness, her easy way with Heather, her Sunday-morning soda bread.  Karel’s towel over his head like an Arab while he patiently hoes corn in the hot sun.  Stephanie’s sweet excitement over the details of the wedding.  Karel’s way with fixing things, his determination to figure machines out, that so reminds me of his mother I have to swallow tears sometimes watching him go at some task.

Sigh.  We’ll miss them, but there’s no point in missing them while they’re in fact still here.  Things will work out, for them, and for us.  Today, at least, I’m not in a worrying mood.

Sylvia is having a wonderful time working Beau Geste into condition for competitive trail-riding.  She and Beau are getting to know Plainfield’s woods and fields on their early-morning or late-evening rides.  (“I saw a Blackburnian warbler!” she tells me.  “I saw a fox!”)  Sylvia and the great shiny-coated horse look absolutely beautiful when they come up the road past the garden.  Sylvia also successfully set a broody hen in the barn.  The hen has just hatched out five chicks, three white and two black, to add to the multicolored collection of half-grown chicks we already have.  It’s so sweet to see a proud broody hunching down with little perky heads popping out from beneath her wings.  Today the little fluffballs got a lesson in scratching for bugs in the barnyard.

I’m working hard on the new Limits and Twenty Years Closer, and experiencing great ups and downs.  I go through emotional fits like a pregnant woman — I guess the act of creation does that to one.  Some mornings I can’t stand the delay of the 20-minute drive to the office, I’m so anxious to get writing and so excited.  Some nights I go home convinced that I’m about to become the laughingstock of the world for this stupid, empty, boring, naive, tendentious, depressing, (I could go on and on with this list of adjectives) piece of writing.  Sometimes I’m clear and filled with purpose and tell myself that no matter what anyone thinks, I have to write what’s in my mind and heart.  Sometimes I lose track entirely and start writing directly into the criticism I already hear coming — which is about the only really wrong thing I can do.  It’s tough, wonderful work.  The toughest and most wonderful I have ever done.

Somehow that will work out too.  In today’s mood, of thankfulness and faith, I know that if I just keep quiet, keep calm, keep working, the right book will appear on the word processor, sentence by sentence, word by word.

Of course by the time you get this, I will be in some other mood.

Love, Dana

P.S. My mother, who lives in Oklahoma, and with whom I talk on the phone every Sunday, has ordered me to tell you that The Global Citizen (Island Press) is in the bookstores at last and you should go out and buy copies for all your friends.