Dear Folks, I’m supposed to be in Africa, but because of various breakdowns, I’m not, and I can’t say I’m sorry.  I hate to miss a single day of the farm in June.

The first-ever regional meeting of the Balaton Group in Africa was scheduled to start tomorrow in Naivasha, Kenya.  Our African members picked as their topic “community resource management,” a striking idea for African elites and governments, though of course African communities have been managing their own resources for eons.  What’s new is the thought that elites and governments might in some way actively help communities to do that, or at least get out of their way.  This idea is well-honed in Asia, and the Africans invited some Asian members of the Balaton Group to come join the meeting.  I was going to be there mainly as scribe and to share the Balaton Group’s Fishbanks game, which is a great teaching tool about the “tragedy of the commons” trap in community resource management.

But it’s very, very hard to do international coordination from Africa.  Chris Macaloo in Nairobi has no email connection and a sputtering fax machine  Mail from there to here takes two months.  (Even airmail!  I don’t know how they do it!)  Michael Ochieng Odhiambo in Nakuru has sporadic email, but telephone connections in Kenya between him and Chris are iffy.  Then there were problems in communications and in arranging international air tickets for participants from Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa.  And Chris, Michael, and I, trying quite hard both in Africa and America, managed to raise not a penny in funding.

I was ready to fund it anyway out of my MacArthur grant, but at the last minute Chris informed me that some of the participants from other countries couldn’t come, that the air tickets hadn’t been arranged (and it was now too late to get cheap fares), and that Michael’s sister had just died.  So we tabled the workshop.  We’ll reschedule it, maybe for next winter, and take advantage of the lessons we’ve learned.  We’ve got to get Chris a modem and a small operating budget.  We’ve got to get invitations out and followed up much sooner (it’s probably easier to do that from here than from Nairobi).  I don’t know what to do about funding, but I’ll rewrite the proposal and try again, because the MacArthur isn’t adequate to cover the full expenses of this meeting plus the other needs of the Balaton Group.

So here I am on the farm in this green, green rainy June.  The hay isn’t cut — there has hardly been a good haying day all month.  The garden is growing like a rainforest.  In the damp evenings the fireflies light up the meadows like stars come down low to dance.  The night sound has shifted from the high-pitched spring peepers to the trilling toads, and we’re beginning to hear the dry buzz of the summer cicadas.  The strawberries and salad greens are at their peak, and there’s a bouquet of peonies on the dining room table.  The days are at their longest, the mosquitos are ferocious, the sheep are stuffing down all the good clover we went to so much trouble to plant last year.  Small green apples and pears are forming on the fruit trees.

(“The first half of your letter is always about farm stuff,” says Ralph Copleman, “and I used to plow through it without interest, waiting to get to the sustainability stuff.  Now for some reason I read the farm stuff too.”)

Chrissie and Scot, with a little help from their friends, have turned our big brook garden into a beautiful sight.  It’s more than twice the size of the garden nearer the house, and nice to work because it’s floodplain — pure silt, no rocks, level and fertile.  When you work there you can listen to the brook flowing around two sides of it,.  All kind of birds sing in the riparian brush.  But that riparian brush sends in noxious witch grass and Japanese knotweed.  And the place is poorly drained, because the water table is just a few feet down, except in very wet years like this one, when it hovers right at ground level.  In the early spring floods Chrissie went down and found the geese swimming happily in the garden!  And, conversely, in droughts like last year’s, we never had a way of watering the brook garden, except by laboriously dipping up buckets from the brook.

Well, Scot has fixed up a watering system now, and we’re tilling the heck out of the knotweed, and there’s been a lot of hoeing and double-digging to get at the witchgrass. Scot is being faithful about squashing potato beetles twice a day.  Chrissie’s onion plantation is enjoying the long days.  We have six kinds of potatoes down there and I don’t know how many kinds of dry beans (let’s see — garbanzos, kidneys, Vermont cranberries, Maine yellow-eyes, black, Swedish brown, and I think I’ve forgotten one or two others.).  There are tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, dahlias, marigolds, cosmos, sunflowers.

The upper garden isn’t doing so well, because of that planting in “wet cement” I did when I was out of patience with the soggy spring.  The slugs are getting bad.  I’ve been waiting to put the ducks in, because they’ve just hatched out ducklings, and I don’t trust big bouncy Emmett to be anywhere around them.  But that garden is producing good strawberries right now, there are lots of blueberries and gooseberries forming up, and the hoop house has been loading the table with salads for weeks now.  Ah, the salads of June!  The best ones of the year!

“How do you keep finding so many perfect people to live with you?” asks Carol Langstaff.   “Or do you actually have a lot of fights and you just don’t write about them?”  God sends the people, that’s how I find them, and not one yet has been perfect, but then neither am I.  We don’t have fights.  We have our share of misunderstandings and hurt feelings and personalities rubbing up against each other, but far, far fewer of these problems than people who don’t live in community seem to expect.  There’s active and daily work to keep communications open.  We don’t work hard enough at it, especially me.  The important thing is, we come at our work and each other with good will, and we know that.  If we do something thoughtless or say something harshly, it’s not because we’re trying to hurt anyone, it’s because we’re reacting and not thinking.  Slowly we’re learning how to deal with that.  It’s no different from dealing with a family or a workplace, except that it’s easier because, given the farm and me, only people with common values are attracted here.  If the values are common, the personality quirks can be worked out.

All this human relationship stuff is much on my mind, because we have been working hard this month on the expanded, bigger and better community.  What a process!  So many things to learn about!

First and foremost, there’s the seeding, nurturing, watering and fertilizing of the human community.  We’ve had two Saturday meetings at the farm this month for interested folks who could get here, which meant mainly folks from the Boston area and the Upper Valley.  About 18 people have come, and there are others who haven’t been able to make a meeting yet.  They range in commitment level from “can we start tomorrow?” to “I’m pretty sure this is not for me, but I wish it well and I’m here to help if I can.”

We started by floundering, of course.  Most  of us didn’t know each other, and we had no agreed-upon process for meetings.  It was kind of like a bunch of people gathering chaotically around Robert (whoever he was) before anyone came up with Robert’s Rules of Order.

But what was striking from the beginning was the Heart in these people.  The commitment to community and sustainability and somehow trying a better, more kind, less destructive, more sharing, more responsible and frugal and joyful way of living.  Though we were a bit strained, as people are at first meetings, most of us went away excited, knowing that, whether we all make a community together or not, we have found a group of neat people.  Brainy, too.  There is a striking and perhaps dangerous number of PhDs among us, but some of the group who have the least amount of formal education are also some of the most skilled and capable, at everything from foreign languages to farming.

By the second meeting, which was yesterday, we had not only evolved a workable process, but also, and amazingly, we came together as a group.  It was quite a meeting.  We were — imagine this — telling the truth.  We were listening.  We were slowing down and allowing moments of comfortable silence, out of which wisdom can arise.  We were constructively co-facilitating the conversation.  Above all, we were liking each other.  There were moments in which I was moved to tears by the willingness of people to struggle to express their doubts, their fears, their enthusiasms, their dreams, whatever — the struggle to REALLY communicate.  (I hate to split infinitives, but that one needed to be split decisively, in capital letters!)

There’s lots more meetings ahead of us — probably one a month for the foreseeable future.  In between there have been many little meetings.  I’ve walked a number of interested people around the Hartland farms, including John and Nancy Todd to help envision how constructed wetlands might work for wastewater processing.  I’ve been consulting with Peter Forbes of the Trust for Public Lands and Jeanie McIntyre of the Upper Valley Land Trust about how one constructs a formal offer for land when the circumstances are both complicated and uncertain.  A few of us went over to meet with the Hunts and listen to their concerns and hopes for their farm, so we can shape an offer that works for them and for us.

One evening we met with Wendy Walsh, Sarah Berger, and Anita Walling to do an eyes-closed visioning session, to open ourselves to what the spirits of the land, the community, and the Sustainability Institute want.  Some of us were intensely uncomfortable with the whole language of “spirits,” but went along with the process anyway.  I don’t believe in spirits for a nanosecond, but I was astounded at the explicit instructions they gave me, which contradicted what my rational mind had been telling me.  In a nutshell, what they said was, “We took you straight to the land.  We are manifesting the money and the partners that are needed.  What on earth are you waiting for?”

Well, what I’m waiting for is to get over my fears and to find wisdom.  Peter Forbes and I have independently drafted offer letters, but I don’t yet have enough certainty to put them together and send them.  Our offers are well below the asking prices, but they add up to a LOT of money.  And if accepted they will produce a LOT of farm to manage!  I need a bit more clarity about who is willing to join now, who might be willing to come in later, how the timing and money will work out, before I can send those letters off.  And of course offers don’t guarantee acceptances.  There could be long negotiations.  Someone else could buy one or both of those farms tomorrow.  There are other farms to look at.  And in any case we couldn’t manage a closing sooner than a year from now, preferably two years from now.  (We have to do a building design and go through Vermont’s Act 250 land use permitting process before we can close.)

So, the vision chugs on.  I feel as if it’s pulling me, I’m not pushing it.  Most days, I haven’t the slightest worry about it, I’m just trying to figure out what needs to happen next, so I can serve it.  (On other days, not many of them, thank heaven, I’m terrified.)

I was greatly strengthened and centered in this process by an extraordinary meeting in Maine at the beginning of the month, at which another vision struggled to be born — or more accurately, at which an old and well-manifested vision struggled through a succession transition.  Most readers of this newsletter must surely know about Helen and Scott Nearing, the great homesteaders whose writings (Living the Good Life, The Maple Sugar Book) were central to giving Dennis and me — and probably many others — the idea of moving to a farm.  (The very best Nearing book was published much later, in 1992, Helen’s Loving and Leaving the Good Life.  If you haven’t read it, do, do, do!)

Well, Scott died in 1983 at the age of 100, and Helen was killed in an auto crash last fall at the age of 91.  Four days earlier she had willed their four-acre Forest Farm (with the last of the many stone building she and Scott built — when she was 65 and he was 85) to the Trust for Public Lands (TPL), to be turned into some sort of public Center for the Good Life.  Peter Forbes was the person at TPL who worked with Helen to plan this transfer, and now it’s his responsibility to make the new Center happen.  He invited me to join the new Center’s board.

The meeting at Forest Farm in Cape Rosier, Maine, gathered together many friends and devotees of the Nearings to ask Now What?  It was the first time I had been in the Nearings’ space — I knew them only through their books.  The four acres that TPL now owns, on a cove looking out onto Penobscot Bay, was, in essence, the Nearings’ retirement home.  It has a small garden and greenhouse and orchard, but no woodlot.  It’s too small for a real homestead.  Next door, now in other hands, is the large farm they occupied for 25 years, with the 450-foot stone wall around the garden (which took them 14 years to build) and the beautiful pond, which Scott dug by hand, wheelbarrow-load by wheelbarrow-load.  Though I had never seen these things, they were all in my mind because of the books.  “Scott’s pond” is a mantra to me, whenever I start on a seemingly endless task.  If he in his 70s could patiently dig a pond by hand, what on earth am I doing, ever getting discouraged?

Around the Nearings on Cape Rosier there grew up a rural neighborhood of like-minded people, the most famous of whom is Eliot Coleman, who has written another series of books that are bibles in our house — The New Organic Gardener, the Four-Season Garden.  Eliot is a younger replica of Scott, an inventive gardener, whose passion these days is to learn how, with clever use of greenhouses, to produce market crops and/or vegetables for the table every month of the year in New England without fossil-fuel heat.  Eliot is now married to Barbara Damrosch, who is a well-known flower gardener and landscape designer.  I got to spend an afternoon gardening with them at their place, which was an inspiration.  On one side is Eliot’s domain — greenhouse, walled garden, straight rows, right angles, strict crop rotations, and nothing but vegetables.  The other side is Barbara’s — gracious curving sweeps of flowers, gentle transition from garden to forest, carefully blended colors and shapes and textures, a work of art.  Left brain/right brain.  Yin/Yang.  It was great to see and to learn from both gardens!

Back to the meeting.  It was worth going to, just for the terrific people there (Paul Winter, Bill Coperthwaite, Chuck Matthei, Bob Swann — and many more.)  It was worth going to, just to be in coastal Maine in June.  And it was great, but not easy, to try to fashion a common vision of what the Center for the Good Life can be.

One reason it wasn’t easy was that many of Helen’s friends are still in deep mourning for her.  Another was that Helen and Scott made a remarkable team because they were so very different from each other (the same yin/yang differences Eliot and Barbara demonstrate so well in their gardens — in Enneagram terms, the combination of a strong 1 with a strong 4) but their friends, most of whom tended to be attracted to Helen much more than Scott or vice versa, don’t necessarily get along together.  And different people were attracted to different parts of the Nearings’ vigorous belief system — to socialism or vegetarianism or pacificism or organic gardening or spirituality, but not to all of them at once.

(Hardly anybody but Eliot seemed to be attracted to the Nearings’ penchant for discipline and hard and patient work.  Eliot told a great story about going out with Scott to start clearing the land for the new house.  Scott never approved of power tools, so he took his hand saw, calmly cut down a small tree at one corner of the lot, and proceeded to chop and sort the parts of the tree into useful pieces — the trunk for firewood,  the large branches for poles and stakes, the small branches for pea supports.  “My gosh,” thought Eliot, “This man is 85 years old, and we’re supposed to be clearing a house site here.  This is going to take forever!”  Scott went on deliberately, carefully, to cut down the next tree.)

So one of the disturbing things that happened at the meetings was competitive myth-making.  It was chilling to watch.  With neither Helen nor Scott around any more to make their own myths and to soften those myths with their own living complexity, different factions were trying to immobilize them into simplified statues.  “Never have anything to do with unearned income,” some would quote Scott.  “But in their later years Scott and Helen lived from a trust fund,” others would counter.  As soon as someone would praise Helen’s soaring spirituality, someone else would cut in with a story of her brusque practicality.  She was a militant vegetarian, and he didn’t believe in “keeping animals in captivity,” but in her old age Helen loved ice cream.  This game of matching opposing anecdotes was amusing, because I learned so much about the Nearings, but it made me shiver at the sight of what we do to our loved ones after they’re gone.  We use them to prove our own points; we club each other over the head with them.

Well, we came up with lots of visions for the Center for the Good Life, ranging from a shrine to the Nearings and an archive of their works to a demonstration site for their way of life, where visitors would participate in stacking wood and hoeing the garden, to a living community of people who would not be demonstrating the Nearings’ principles in a museum or school or tourist sense, but would be living them in an ongoing and evolutionary way, appropriate to the changing world around them — which of course is what the Nearings did, and what Eliot and Barbara and many others who live around there still do, and what we dream of doing with our new community.  Some of those larger visions would require the re-acquisition of the next-door farm.

Peter and I have discussed somehow linking our new community with the community at Cape Rosier.  Nothing is settled yet.  But, as Wendy would say, the spirits are circling around, calling forth some manifestation of the vision.  Here at Foundation Farm, at the Hunt and Curtis farms in Hartland, at Cape Rosier, in Washington where Betsy Taylor is pondering the Center for the New American Dream (which I have described to you previously as the new lower-consumption organization called Enough!) — all over, it seems, the spirits are circling around, calling forth the manifestation of vision.

Love, Dana