March 23, 1998, North Holland

Dear Folks, I’m on a train somewhere between Groningen and Amsterdam, looking out at early spring in the incredibly fertile Dutch countryside.  Forsythia are in full bloom, and ornamental plum trees with delicate pink blossoms, and narcissus.  The canals and ditches are swollen with spring rain.  Very round sheep are grazing everywhere, few lambs, but it looks like lambs are imminent.  I’m surprised at how late they do the lambing in the Netherlands.

Back home it’s snowing.  I know that because when I left two days ago, on the first day of spring, snow was predicted — typical for us in late March.  Foundation Farm was still all white when I left, though the snow was ever so slowly disappearing, and there were crocus buds on the south side of the house.  I heard robins call for the very first time as I got in the car to drive to Boston.  I was treasuring all those beginning signs, but they were just bare beginnings.  So it was wonderful to emerge from an all-night flight, get into a train, and find myself riding through actual, full-out, blooming spring!

Maybe it was the spring that made this trip so joyful.  I hadn’t expected joy.  I came on a flying visit as soon as the term was over, leave on Friday, back on Monday, a crazy trip, to say good-bye to Wouter.

You may remember I wrote a column about him last fall, shortly after I returned from what we all knew was his last Balaton meeting.  Wouter Biesiot is 47, tall, slim and blonde, a professor at the University of Groningen, head of a research group that does detailed analysis of energy consumption patterns.  It’s to Wouter that the Balaton Group turns for figures on how much energy could be saved by driving smaller vehicles, eating more fresh and less processed foods, wearing natural instead of synthetic fibers, using less packaging.  At the last Balaton meeting he showed precise scenarios for how the Netherlands can meet its Kyoto greenhouse gas targets and beyond, based on modest changes in the habits of Dutch households.

So it’s an exquisite irony that I flew across the ocean for the weekend to say good-bye to him.  I teased him about it.  But he asked me to come, and I came.  If fossil fuel should be used for anything, it’s for purposes like this.

Wouter was diagnosed with colon cancer four years ago.  He had a difficult surgery and a year of chemo, which was tough, but probably bought him two years.  The last time I visited him and his family was on his birthday in January 1995, just as the chemo was over.  He was weak and thin, but triumphant.  It was an accomplishment just to get through those treatments.  He went back to work, hopeful but wary, as all cancer survivors are.  He was totally focused; he knew what he wanted to do.  He had seven bright graduate students to get through their PhDs.  He had ideas and data to process and write up.  And he had been tempered by his ordeal.  He had always been a quiet, gentle. good person.  Now he was becoming overtly spiritual.

All went well until last spring, when they found a spot on his liver and advised exploratory surgery to see what was going on.  Reluctantly he submitted to that (he has developed a low opinion of the manipulations of “med docs”).  Again it was a hard operation.  They found a large tumor on his vena cava, which they couldn’t fully excise.  They told him there was nothing more they could do.  Aside from pain medication and an occasional cat scan, he’s avoided the med docs ever since.

Wouter has been totally open from the beginning about his disease and his trials of coping with it.  His global network of Balaton friends keep in touch with him and each other constantly.  Every time he and I exchanged a message by email, I shoot off copies to Joan Davis in Switzerland and Anupam Saraph in India (one of the seven PhD candidates, now graduated and back home).  Chirapol Sintunawa sends herbal medicine from Thailand; Joan sends nutritional advice and vitamin supplements; I don’t have much to offer except recycled Buddhist philosophy.  In December Wouter’s wife Nanda sent out a request for poems, jokes, pictures, notes, to make a 1998 calendar with every day a page from a friend.  I’ve just seen the calendar — it’s a wonder, with many pages from the Balaton Group.  In February Wouter asked me for a copy of the group picture taken at our September meeting.  I sent out an email request, to the Balaton list, and a high-resolution digital copy appeared over the Internet within days from Lazslo Pinter in Canada.  (Everyone got it, not just Wouter.  Joan Dutoit in South Africa sent a thank-you note, saying she had turned the picture into the background on her computer screen “so I get to see you guys every time I boot up.”  Ruta Vaiciunaite in Lithuania wrote that she had done the same.)  Every day at 12 noon where I live, 6 pm in Europe, we sit quietly, in our various parts of the world, and have a small, prayerful Wouter Time.

Maybe we’ve helped, but I think Wouter’s and Nanda’s own good care gave him many extra months.  From the first diagnosis they made their diet extra pure.  They both love exercise, so they went hiking, bicycling, and skating all they could.  It wasn’t till November that Wouter told me he couldn’t hike any more, the pain was too bad.  In December he had to quit speed-skating — that was a terrible blow — skating was almost a form of meditation for him.  Soon he couldn’t bicycle either.  Now it is all he can do to pull himself up a flight of stairs.  He has a stool on the landing, so he can sit and rest when he gets there.  When I give him a bear-hug, I can feel every bone in his shoulders and back.  His legs are swollen with fluid, probably because a major vein is partially blocked.  His belly is swollen with liver tumors.  His face is gaunt; his eyes are huge and full of pain.  He can’t sleep without morphine.  He has a few alert hours around mid-day; the rest of the time he’s exhausted.

How could this have been a joyful visit?  I don’t know.  I surely didn’t expect it to be.  But I learned the hard way, when I was a cancer patient myself and had to spend six months hanging around with cancer patients (which I, like many healthy people, had avoided like the plague before then), that there’s no better way to cut right to the essence of life and love than to be with a person who is facing their certain and imminent loss.  People dying of cancer, if they are willing, as Wouter is, to be present and open in their pain, don’t waste time, they don’t do small talk, they tell the truth, they say what needs to be said.  It’s an incredible privilege to be in their presence.

And Wouter and Nanda, more than anyone else I have known in their situation, are being so beautifully present, so open and sharing and honest and loving, that they radiate healing to everyone around them.

So, from the minute I stepped out of the taxi in front of their house, I felt blessed.  I was smiling all weekend, often through tears.  How lucky I am, to have been able to make this trip!

Three weeks ago Wouter attended the thesis defense of the last of his seven graduate students.  While I was there he completed the last edits of four out of the five chapters of the book he is writing, which summarizes his energy research and his message to the world.  It is in Dutch so far, but I’m committed to arranging an English translation, and the Balaton Group will publish it, if we can’t find anyone else who will.  It sounds like he’s really going for it in this book, all the way from energy input-output tables to a reminder that the only way we’ll do the outer work we have to accomplish to live sustainably, is to do our inner work too.  It’s going to be an unapologetically honest book — what has Wouter got to fear?  Why does he need to stay academic and careful?  I was reminded of Annie Dillard’s great quote in The Writing Life:

Write as if you were dying.  At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.  That is, after all, the case.  What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?  What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Wouter’s nine-year-old daughter Marijn is illustrating his book.  She was working on her drawings all weekend, and they’re great!  Marijn is a happy blonde lark in the middle of this situation, trying out a new bike, going to the movies with her friends, learning to crochet, singing songs, making everyone laugh.  Wouter and Nanda are in no way shielding her from what is happening.  She’s a bright kid; she understands.  And she also somehow understands that the best contribution she can make is to go on living her happy kid’s life.  The most unbearable part of the picture for me is the thought that this little girl will lose a wonderful dad so soon.  I used to hate that thought, especially because in the beginning Nanda was fearful, fragile, uptight, easily upset.  But Nanda has grown too — enormously.  She’s now calm, facing the future with eyes wide open.  We had some long talks while Wouter was sleeping.  She’s impressive!

Wouter seems to be creating space around him within which all the people who love him can grow.  He’s set himself the task of finishing not only his professional work, but his human work too, cleaning up every mess and incompletion.  It hasn’t been easy, and he doesn’t know himself how he does it; but he intends for healing to happen, and somehow it does.  He has by his first wife two beautiful older daughters, Hester and Janna, both now at university.  Janna has been open and loving, tearful and present throughout her father’s ordeal, but Hester has been in pain and denial.  Until recently.  About a month ago Wouter sent me a poignant email telling me of the day Hester broke open the dam on her emotions, everything broke out in a flood, and after that there has been peace and love.

The same thing happened just a week ago with his father — that was the tough relationship in Wouter’s life, and he wept as he described it to me.  His father said just one thing last week — “I’m proud of you” — something Wouter had yearned to hear all his life.  He sobbed when he told me about it.

Wouter may have prepared the way for his father’s breakthrough by one of his own.  In a phone call a few weeks ago he told me he had been making a list of everything in his life he is proud of.  “And it’s a long list!” he said in surprise.  He discovered two consistent patterns of which he is particularly proud.  Whenever he was faced with an apparent conflict between his career and his children, he chose his children.  And whenever he was in a position of power and was tempted or pressured to abuse that power, he refused to do it.

Aren’t those great things to be able to say on your deathbed?

Such a wonderful business, to clear the accounts of life.  Such an enormous difference little admissions of truth make — admissions to ourselves, admissions to others.  How difficult the truth is — and yet how simple.  What wide highways open up, once the truth is spoken.

Stephen Levine, from Who Dies?, one of the books Wouter and I have been reading:

Finishing business does not so much mean a totaling of old accounts as it does a canceling of them.  It means finishing relationships as business.  No longer relating to others on a profit or loss scale.  Letting go of accounts that magnify the separateness and pain.

You don’t have a moment to lose to share the anger and the love.  So you can go beyond and arrive together at a place of oneness.  You don’t have a moment to lose to start letting go of what keeps you separate….  It isn’t that anger or fear , doubt or confusion are absent.  There’s just no pulling or pushing.  No loss or gain.  Just a going beyond, in a soft awareness that meets each moment with compassion instead of fright.  With quietude and stillness instead of agitation and grief for a life that has dissolved behind us.

Life and death are much, much more simple than we make them out to be.  Wouter and I ran into that fact over and over as we talked this weekend.  Every time we stumbled on another example of it, we broke out laughing.  This man is not sinking into defeat from cancer.  He is soaring into mastery of life.

Wow!  I am so lucky to know him.  And to have shared this last time with him.

Flat green fields outside the train window, carefully bordered with drainage ditches.  The Dutch labor constantly to keep the water running off their land.  The old houses and barns rise with gently sloping overhanging roofs, looking like small hills, looking like they belong.  The new buildings, encroaching over the farmland everywhere, factories and tightly bunched clusters of houses — such an overcrowded country! — are angular and sharp and look like they don’t belong anywhere.

I’m paying a lot more attention to architecture, now that we have to figure out how to put twenty houses on our new farms.

March 29, 1998

Well, I got home, feeling as if I had spent the weekend in deep meditation, and I’ve enjoyed this week immensely.  I turned in the final grades for the ethics class, so this has been the first week in three months in which I had no grading, no class preparation, no two-hour classes to meet.  Not even any students in the office — they’re home for spring vacation.  They’ll be back next week.  Some of their final papers, which I graded on planes and trains on the way to and from Europe, were wonderfully open and moving.  Just like Wouter, if I open up, my students open up.  One of them, age 20, told me with shining eyes, “This course is bringing back all that great idealism I had when I was 16.”  I was shocked by that statement and asked what had happened to her since she was 16.  “College,”  she said.  I apologized on behalf of Dartmouth, and all colleges.

I’m still digging out from under the term, discovering what’s on my desk, trying to prioritize the many tasks that have stacked up — get out Sustainability Institute proposals, finish the Balaton Group indicators paper, get out a Balaton Bulletin, go over the commodity models, get back into the textbook.  I was doing fine, getting my life in order, until serious spring hit here two days ago.

I mean serious!  Fifty, sixty, SEVENTY DEGREES!  Robins, killdeer, redwings, SONG SPARROWS SINGING!  Great wedges of geese flying north.  Snow going off in sheets, brook turning into a raging river.  MUD!  CROCUSES!  Suddenly all the chores I couldn’t do — pruning the raspberries, cleaning up the garden, putting up the greenhouse — are clamoring to be done all at once.  What fun!  Goodbye, desk!  Hooray!

Over at the new farms, Ken Hunt has been sugaring, showing the ropes to our Peter Forbes, who will take over the operation.  We discovered we have become the owners of a town ritual.  When the steam started pouring out of the sugar shack, the four-wheel-drive pickups pulled into the muddy barnyard and a neighborhood party began.  Ken not only stokes the boiling sap, he sets up a grill and everyone stands around eats, drinks, tastes the syrup, tells tales.  We hope we can keep the tradition going, and keep Ken in on it.  He’s living with his father Roger (brother of John Hunt, the farm’s former owner) on a trailer on the place — we’ve given Roger lifetime rights to keep the trailer there, and we’re getting fond of Ken, so there will probably be Hunts in our lives for a long time.  Somehow I’ve always pictured it that way.

The Curtises, too, the former owners of the neighboring farm, came back last week to go on a nature walk with us, all over both farms.  It’s so good to have the people who have lived in this place for that past 40 years still connected, advising us, feeling they’re welcome back.

Community meetings are getting into real planning, starting with site selection for the 20 houses and common house.  That means an understanding of the whole property, the slopes and soils and water flows, the eventual flows of people, vehicles, cows, sheep, chickens, vegetables — and places to protect from any flows other than those of nature alone.  We have had hydrologists, foresters, engineers and architects tromping over the land.  Now, with the snow going off and the mud at its worst is just the time to see the drainage patterns best.

Though 250 acres sounds like a lot, there aren’t actually many places we can build.  We’ve ruled out all the good cultivable bottom land, of course.  It’s right by the road, well drained, the obvious spot for a normal developer, but it’s also our livelihood, so it will be protected by easements forever.  At the top of the ridge is all the forest, great views, we could build there and the neighbors would never see us, but it would mean long, steep driveways, pumping water way uphill, and invading the only semi-wild space — just not practical.  So we’re really limited to the first tier of upslope, just above the bottom land, mostly facing due east.  We’ll probably build right above the old Hunt barnyard, so it’ll be an easy run downhill for the farmers to get to the fields and the animals.  That’s nearest town, least private, noisiest, but most neighborly, and easy when it comes to driveways and wires and such.  But there’s a long stretch of first-rise hillside, so we’re still thinking, making lots of drawings on tracing paper over contour maps.

I’m not the only one in the group who feels overwhelmed, never having even planned one house before, much less a whole community.  But we have good professional help, and I’m thrilled by the quality of the people who are committing to joining this venture.  We had a meeting yesterday just to share our visions, our deepest sense of what community and sustainability mean, and how they might look in physical form.  Whenever we get to that level of vision, we discover how easily we share the same values.  We may not be clear exactly how to manifest those values on the land, but we’re sure it will be an evolutionary process, a constant learning.  As long as we keep centering on the values, we’ll be OK.  Even our mistakes will be educational.

On Foundation Farm Mary Williams has moved out to join her friend Donny in Hartland (she still pops in on Wednesdays, when she volunteers at the coop and brings over discarded greens for our chickens), and Kim Christiansen has moved in.  He’s a jewelry designer and insurance broker from Lebanon.  He answered my ad for a “handyperson,” and is already proving so — plus he made a mean blueberry pie for dinner last night.  He is working out a trial separation from his family — not an easy time for him, or them — so he may be with us just a few months.  One of those things we can’t predict, we just have to see what happens.  My weekend with Wouter plunged me so thoroughly into that space of surrender that I feel almost at home there — a rare thing for a control freak like me to say.

We had a triple birthday party in the middle of the month, for all our March birthdays — me and Kerry and Scot (he and Chrissie now live next door, and we still all carpool in to Dartmouth).  We made a typical communal farm feast.  I baked fresh baguettes (I’m in a French bread phase), which Kerry covered with avocado and salmon, and Scot with a special olive spread.  I made rice and two curries, one with lamb and one with hard-boiled eggs, both with potatoes, all (lamb, eggs, potatoes, onions, garlic) from the farm.  Mary and Donny brought a big salad, and we had two birthday cakes — chocolate made by Chrissie, cheesecake made by Kerry.  Wow!  And Alan AtKisson happened to be visiting and HE has a March birthday too, and he ended the evening perfectly for us by getting out his guitar and singing our requests of his wonderful songs.  It was snowing hard and after dinner the electricity went out, but we had lots of candles burning anyway, so we didn’t care.

Next Sunday, Palm Sunday, I not only ring in the handbell choir at church, I’m the organist too.  And for Easter the following Sunday.  Our regular, ancient, cheery organist has had a stroke; she seems to be recovering, but we need substitutes, and on those two Sundays organists are hard to find.  So I’m dusting off skills I haven’t used for 30 years and rediscovering how THRILLING it is to fire up an organ full tilt, all stops out, and launch into “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”  Pianos are wonderful, but organs THROB.  If I didn’t have to save the world and stuff, I’d volunteer to be the church organist all the time.

Wouldn’t it be nice, if I had to do was play music and tend the garden and work on the community?

I could, of course.  I’d just have to drop the writing and the Institute and the commodity modeling and the teaching and the Balaton Group.

Doesn’t sound too likely, does it?  Maybe in the next lifetime I’ll be wiser and more restrained and less cussedly enthusiastic.

Happy spring!

Love, Dana