May 21, 1998, Logan Airport
Hi Folks, Waiting to board a TWA flight to St. Louis, then to Tulsa, then to Tahlequah. Two reasons for this trip — my Uncle Edward is celebrating his 90th birthday, and Mom had a heart attack two weeks ago. I’m anxious to check up with her, and to help out if I can.
To my knowledge Mom never had heart trouble before, or any serious health trouble. She’s 82 and gardens up a storm, beats everyone at bridge, swings a mean tennis racket. But (she tells me after the fact), she had a chest pain for about 3 days, thought it was a hernia, finally went to a doctor, who popped her straight into the hospital. Then she went to the health center of her retirement village and finally was allowed to go home this week. I contemplated rushing out there, but she kept assuring me she was fine. “If this is a heart attack, I’m not impressed,” said she. That definitely sounded like my Mom.
She admits to feeling weak, and she’s been banned from the garden for awhile. So maybe I can pull weeds or something. My brother and his wife Lorna will be there too (remember their wedding last fall, the Halloween party?), and my cousins Eddie and Lois are coming for their father’s historic birthday. We grew up together, and I always look forward to seeing them.
AND it’s hard to pull myself away. I was planting corn last night until it got too dark to see. I set out seedlings yesterday — kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, asters, marigolds, dianthus — I hope it rains enough to keep them watered while I’m gone. At 5 this morning I fed my bottle babies for the last time — they’re on their own now.
I have bottle babies because a coyote killed their mother, down in the pasture by the pond. A guy from the town road crew found me out in the garden one morning and asked if I had a gun. A gun? I said. Yeah, there’s a coy-dog (that’s what they call them around here) feeding on a carcass in your field, he said. A CARCASS? I yelled, and called Gordon, the town cop. He arrived with a gun almost immediately (he lives around the corner), and at that moment the coyote dissolved into the woods. The carcass turned out to be my beautiful ewe Violet. I became the foster mother of her three-week old twins, Viburnum and Verbena.
We left Violet there, Gordon promising to cruise by and shoot the coyote when he came back to feed. He came back — everyone has seen him but Gordon. So I live in fear. I brought the flock up to the barnyard until I got the babies adjusted to the bottle, then I turned them onto the pasture right across the road, with an electric fence around them. We’ve watched coyotes cruise that fence before without daring to touch it, so I hope everyone will be safe while I’m gone. I’m going to have to keep the sheep surrounded by electricity all summer. I don’t know if I’ll dare, even with the electric fence, to put them back in the pond pasture. Too bad. It’s their favorite place.
Twenty years of sheep and I never lost one to a coyote before.
I’d say it must be time to move farms, but there are coyotes on the new farm too.
Whew! So MUCH has happened this month! No way I’ll find a logical order for reporting it all, especially while traveling. So forgive me, I’ll just let things come to mind as they come to mind.
My Dutch friend Wouter, whose experience with cancer I’ve shared with you, died on April 27. There’s a lot to say about that, some of which I’ll put into a column. The end was, like the journey, an extraordinary exercise in mindfulness and love.
I got an email from Nanda early in the morning of the 28th, saying his funeral would be on May 1. I had promised to attend if I could, and I couldn’t — I had a CNAD board meeting in Washington that day. I did, however, sit down immediately and draft a tribute to Wouter on behalf of the Balaton Group. I had tried to do this before, knowing I would have to eventually and not wanting to be rushed, but I had found myself completely blocked. My friend Joan in Switzerland told me to wait. “He’ll come help you, when it’s time,” she said. And he did. The words poured out of me. I sent them over the Balaton email network to get the comments and corrections of others. Words of sorrow and love poured in from all over the world. By the next day, the 29th, Joan and I had a final draft, which we sent to Balaton friend Wim Hafkamp in the Hague. He spent half of the 30th translating it into Dutch, and the next day he read it at the service for all of us. His report back to us of the service was so sad, so beautiful. It will go into the next Balaton Bulletin.
One of Wouter’s graduated PhD students is a Balaton member from India named Anupam Saraph, who may be the most heartbroken of all of us. He left some money in a Dutch bank when he returned to India, and he emailed offering that money for some sort of memorial to Wouter. We all thought about that for awhile, and the idea came forth to use it to hire a translator to turn Wouter’s book, which he finished just a month before he died, into English. Joan and Wim offered to add money and to oversee the translation. I’ll do the final editing and get it published.
That’s how Balaton works.
Two days after Wouter died, a baby was born into our new farm community, Willoughby Rousseau Forbes, called Willow for short. Her parents, Peter and Ann, have been among the first and most stalwart members of the community, gentle visionaries, beautiful people. We watched Willow grow inside her lovely mother for nine months and finally, at our last meeting, we could pass her around, snuggled in her blanket. Another community baby, Jenna Sawin Rice, now ten months old, burbled in the background.
A time of birth-and-death! Which, I guess, leads to the subject of the Buddhists.
I told you that the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh has bought a farm near our new farm in Hartland — it’s about a mile away by road, half a mile as the crow flies, up on a hill. The monks and nuns moved in last March. In early May they invited us to come for walking meditation and lunch.
I’ve read and loved Thay’s (that’s what his followers call Thich Nhat Hanh) books for years. On my last visit to Wouter, I read to him about the death of the Buddha from Thay’s wonderful biography Old Path White Clouds. I have no idea how this new Hartland community and ours will work together, but I’m sure they will.
Five of us went up there on a green, rainy day and were greeted by Sister Annabelle, the practice leader. She’s British and speaks the best English — the other nine nuns and three monks are Vietnamese. Sister Annabelle was the practice leader at Plum Village, Thay’s community in France, and has come over to establish the community in Vermont. In addition to the farm in Hartland Four Corners, they have a Mindfulness Practice Center in Woodstock, and they’re acquiring another farm on the Hartland-Woodstock border, where the monastery will be (at which point the Four Corners farm will become a retreat center for lay practitioners.)
We walked into a scene of intense, silent activity. They’re preparing for Thay’s imminent visit to give several public talks and a long retreat. So, shoeless, on shiny bare floors with almost no furniture, the head-shaved, brown-robed nuns and monks were stuffing envelopes, sending out videotapes, answering the phone, cooking lunch. As Sister Annabelle demonstrated to us, they walk slowly, coordinating each step with a breath, trying to stay in the Now. When the phone rings they all, without missing a beat, close their eyes and watch their breath until the fourth ring — a random equivalent of a temple bell calling everyone to mindfulness. We were going to walk outside, but it was pouring, so we watched our breath while sitting on pillows in the meditation room and then talked, slowly, mindfully, about their intentions and ours.
Lunch was served in the orderly kitchen, where the contents of every cupboard and drawer are neatly labeled in Vietnamese and English. There were steaming bowls of vegetables, rice, soup, and chickpeas, subtly flavored with mushrooms and herbs. About 25 people showed up for lunch, including American and Vietnamese lay supporters from the neighborhood. We sat in a circle on the floor, ate silently and slowly, returning our bowls to our laps after every bite, chewing carefully, concentrating on that moment, that bite, that taste. I’ve never really tasted carrots and cauliflowers before.
It was so peaceful. Maybe we can learn from these people how to slow down. Maybe we can grow Vietnamese vegetables for them, or help them manage their hayfields and sugarbush. Who knows? What amazing neighbors!
Meanwhile, back at Foundation Farm we have another new housemate, Jen Lemieux, who is precisely, to the day, the same age as Kerry and who works with Kerry at the Upper Valley Food Coop. Jen has already endeared herself to me by being a person who LIKES TO CLEAN! (From years of living in community, I can tell you that’s a RARE attribute!) She’s also a great vegan cook; she’s thinking of going to culinary school sometime. She moved in with a gorgeous stock of handmade Simon Pearce pottery and glass — she used to be a potter at Simon Pearce (a pricey, high-quality commercial producer), and her brother is an apprentice glass-blower there, so she has a collection of seconds that would be worth thousands of dollars, if they were firsts. All of a sudden our dinner table looks classy!
Just what we needed, a bit of class for the annual Dog Birthday Party. We know that Emmett and Basil were born in early May, so we’ve declared that the birthday time for Rudy too and for all the cats. Emmett just turned three, Rudy four, Basil fifteen, and the cats we’re not sure — Simon has been with us fifteen years, but he arrived as an adult, so we don’t know how old he is.
What you serve at a Dog Birthday Party is hot dogs. Emmett ate three, one with a bun and all the trimmings — and he ate four more the next morning. We cook up tofu burgers and turkey hot dogs for us and real hot dogs for the animals. The cats like them too, cut in small pieces. It’s the only time there are hot dogs in the house, and the animals think they’ve gone to heaven. Chrissie and Scot brought potato salad, and we made a green salad from the garden. I suggested a chocolate cake, a Chrissie specialty, but she declined, because Emmett has, in past inglorious incidents, scarfed down two just-baked, insufficiently guarded chocolate cakes of hers. (We thought chocolate was poisonous to dogs, until Emmett proved otherwise. He’s downed a few plates of brownies, too.)
Anyhow, a good time was had by all, even old Basil, who is mostly deaf and very stiff but still loves hot dogs.
The Sustainability Institute has received another grant to help support our commodity research, so now we’re fully funded for corn, half-funded for forests, and nearly out of money to keep the shrimp project going. We started shrimp first; I’m working now on an interim report on our first rough model. We’ve represented the wild fishery, which is depleting its stocks in many parts of the world, and the aquaculture ponds, whose production is rising rapidly but is randomly wiped out by diseases. They compete in a market where demand is rising rapidly. The fishery side is a perfect overshoot-and-collapse archetype, the aquaculture side is an oscillator, showing the dynamics that Dennis first modeled in his PhD thesis 30 years ago. When you get those two structures competing in the same market, you get some complex behavior! Will aquaculture take over fast enough to save the fishery from its own excess? Will the fishery crash fast enough to send prices high enough to bring aquaculture along? What happens if a boat limit is put on the fishery; if the aquaculturalists learn how to keep disease out of their ponds; if there’s a “green marketing” scheme?
Wheeee! This is complicated! And we haven’t even got the whole distribution chain in there yet, or the collapse of the Thai baht, or the connections between the ocean and aquaculture ecosystems.
We had an exciting meeting of the three modeling teams in Boston on April 30 — Phil Rice and Beth Sawin on corn, Jody House and Babette Wils on shrimp (and another new baby, Babette’s little Charlotte!) and Don Seville and Drew Jones on forest products. The corn and forest projects are just getting going. Drew and Don are also working on a neat model of city growth, which we hope to turn into a game and into a link with geographic data on real cities.
We haven’t got an office yet (it will be the Hunt farmhouse on the new farm), we’re scattered around the east coast and communicate by phone and email, but we’re cookin’!
The new community is cookin’ too. The issues of the month were Water, Site Selection and Layout. We had a great meeting with the Vermont water supply regulators, who seem to be open to the idea that an eco-village with composting toilets and low-flow appliances doesn’t need 150 gallons per day per bedroom. So if, when we drill for a well, we come out with less than 9000 gallons per day, maybe we can still get a permit. Our hydrologist was over there yesterday running a geomagnetic device around, tracing fractures in the underlying rock. He’s about to pronounce a site for drilling. Cross your fingers, or, as my German-speaking friends would say, press thumbs!
Site selection seemed to be going smoothly, with Jeff Schoellkopf bringing three mockups laying out 20 houses plus the common house in various ways on the first rise of land above the Hunt barns. (First Rise Farm? I’m always looking for our name). We talked eagerly about the pluses and minuses of a curving “street” layout, versus a central courtyard, versus several sub-courtyards. We debated duplexes, triplexes, and “pods.” It turned out, conveniently, that some of us want to live right in middle of things, some want to live at the outer edges, some want to be in or next to the common house. Everything seemed to be converging, until we took a land walk and some people started promoting a different site, much higher up.
So now it’s gorgeous views versus higher expense, privacy versus dependence on cars, being right in the village versus being screened from the view of the village. I’m sorry to say that some feelings got hurt in the ensuing discussion. Or maybe I’m not sorry, because it gives us a chance to learn what to do when a discussion like that erupts, and how to use hurt feelings and verbal bomb-throwing as learning opportunities. When you define your central purpose as learning, just about anything that happens is an opportunity!
I’m agnostic on the site selection, because I expect some facts will settle the matter — facts like the depth to bedrock on the various rises, the location of the well, and the cost of building and maintaining long uphill roads. We’re gathering those facts now. It’s a lot easier to get into arguments when we run on assumptions than when we know what we’re talking about. If it actually costs no less to build up higher, I would love to look out my window at that view. I would hate the increased car use. I think it would in fact cost a whole lot more. But I could be wrong. We’ll see.
May 23, 1998, Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Well, today’s the big day, Uncle Edward’s party. (The actual birthday was yesterday.) He’s fragile but in good spirits, still full of the clear thinking and refined vocabulary of the punctilious English teacher. He and my mother are responsible for my education in classical music, one of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me. Last night at his apartment we were looking at 50-year-old photos of all of us — what a hoot! Edward and Helen (Mom’s sister, now with us only in spirit) felling trees, skinning bark and building their cabin on a Minnesota lake. Us kids playing in the water. Eddie with the big tuba he played in the high school band.
Was everything more innocent then, or is it just that I was a kid? (It’s just that I was a kid — it was the time of McCarthyism, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and vicious segregation in South Africa and the American South.)
I’m encouraged about Mom. Her doctor tells me it was a moderate heart attack, but she “sailed through it” without complications. He’s cleared her for the trip to Alaska she and I have been planning for this summer. She’s a bit weak and taking it easy, at least while we’re around to weed for her. But her spirit is strong and her body is healing.
May 25, 1998, Foundation Farm
Home again to cool, leafy New England. I grew up on the plains with the song of the meadowlark and the roads all going due north-south or east-west, and I love to go back there, but now I feel more at home with trees between the sky and me.
In the garden the crabgrass sprouted by the gazillion while I was gone. No rain, so I lost some seedlings — just finished watering the rest. Time to move the sheep fence, vacuum the back porch, plant pole beans, put up pea supports, wash sheets, answer 120 email messages, get this newsletter out. I am slowly understanding that some people actually do live happily without even noticing, much less worrying about, all the things that need fixing and straightening and tending to in the world. It would be nice to be one of them. I’m not. Which means, I guess, that I’ll never run out of stuff to do!
Love, Dana
