Dear Folks, My mind feels like a logjam.  So many things are bursting to get out and be told that I don’t know where to start, so nothing comes out, so I spin my wheels.  Let’s see, how to create order here?  Maybe by listing topics first, to be sure I don’t forget any.  Then I can start on one thing and let the others rest, assured that their moment will come.

A. new car

B. alone on the farm

C. harvest time

D. Balaton meeting

E. column news

F. moving out

There, that looks workable.  Might as well start from the top.

A. I have a new car!  This may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but it is the first car I have ever bought and owned all by myself, actually the first I have ever taken much interest in.  When we were married, all machines were Dennis’s area of responsibility, and it was a good division of labor.  I like plants and animals much better than machines.  He likes machines.

But divorces force new and wonderful learning experiences.  Though both Dennis and John were full of advice and eager to help me negotiate for a new car, somehow I decided that the moment to buy a car was during the two-week period when neither of them was around (see “B. alone on the farm”, below).

Since we are still driving our 1976 Toyota with 150,000 miles on it, I am pretty sold on Toyotas, but I was willing to think about American cars too — I thought they might be cheaper.  But I looked up the Consumer Reports repair records and ruled out all American cars and even all European ones immediately.  Those repair records are a stunning tribute to Japanese car manufacturers.

I stopped in one fine morning at the place where we bought our Toyota and started cruising the lot (you wouldn’t believe my ignorance; at this point I knew nothing about sticker-prices and add-ons and overhead cams and service contracts and turbos and idiot lights and all the rest of that exotic language).  I almost fainted at the prices. I downsized my desires very quickly and discovered that affordable Toyotas are hardly to be found in the state of New Hampshire.  I got the brochure and found the model I wanted (Corolla LE sedan) and called all over the state and found exactly two cars available and no willingness on the part of any Toyota dealer to bend on prices — they can’t keep the things on the lots, why should they waste their time bargaining with paupers like me?

So I visited Subaru and Nissan and Honda and entered into the strange and elaborate dance of the car salesmen.  What fun!  What a lot of bull!  Fortunately, I had good training in the bazaars of the Middle East, so I imagined them as carpet salesmen doubling their prices the minute they laid eyes on me.  I developed a condescending attitude toward their merchandise.  I remembered that the First Law of the Bazaar is to walk away from every proposed deal with a disgusted snort, waiting for the salesman to run after you (in the U.S. they call back that evening).

They had some great tricks of their own.  The Test Drive — what a come-on!  The minute I got behind the wheel of any car, I began to imagine owning it, and as I surged down the road I would get almost drunk with greed, it was always so much cleaner and niftier than my clunky old Toyota.  I not only wanted it, I wanted to drive it home that minute.  That feeling played into another trick, the Rush Deal.  Every time I appeared seriously interested in a car, it turned out that another customer was about to call for it, and I had to make up my mind right then and there, because it probably wouldn’t be on the lot tomorrow.

Well, I’ll spare you all the gory details and reveal the punch line.  I ended up with a Honda Civic wagon, real-time four-wheel drive (which means it shifts automatically into 4-wheel if the wheels start slipping), color champagne.  It’s the cheapest, smallest wagon around.  I bought it because it looked like it would function in snow, hold a lot of feedsacks and golden retrievers, and get more than 30 mpg.  It cost me $10,165 with rustproofing and no extras.  As I drove it home, I didn’t feel all heady like I did in the test drive.  I felt like I was propelling a fragile $10,000 bill, and everyone was out to smash it.

Now the dust has settled (on the back window), I’ve installed a radio and cassette player and registered it and paid the insurance and gotten it inspected and hauled a few retrievers and feedsacks, and there are some burdocks in the carpeting (from the dogs) and insect splats all over the front, and it’s a serviceable car, not a $10,000 bill.  I love it.  I volunteer eagerly to do errands that require driving.  I’m feeling that new-car seduction that is the downfall of our nation.  It’s cute and shiny and all mine!  I can go anywhere I want!  What freedom!  I forget the pollution pouring out the exhaust, the depletion of fossil fuels, the negative trade balance, the hours of work to earn the $10,000, not to mention the future earnings necessary to keep the thing running.  I just like to rod around!

Pardon me for enthusing about this very ordinary American experience.  I never had it before.  I don’t know if I made a good choice or got a good deal.  But I sure had fun.  And if this car is as good as the last one, it’ll be another eleven years before I buy a new one again.

B. I spent the last two week of August alone on the farm.  Kate moved out, John and Brenna went on vacation to the beach, Dennis and Suzanne went hiking in the Alps, and I was left alone to manage the flood tide of tomatoes, cucumbers, and sweet corn.  No one planned that mass exodus at high harvest season, but it’s the way it worked out.  I felt sorry for myself for the first half-day, and after that I had a terrific time.

The farm is at its best in August.  The garden is burgeoning, there are flowers everywhere, the nights are beginning to be cool and the bugs are beginning to be gone, but it’s still warm enough in the day to go swimming.  I like the work of canning, pickling, and freezing.  Doing a bit every day pretty much handles the flow and piles up satisfying rows of jars in the root cellar and quarts in the freezer.

Above all, I liked being alone.  I’m almost never alone; I haven’t really been alone ever in my life — like buying a new car, it’s an experience I surrendered when I got married.  And especially in the last 15 years of communal living, I have never had things stay where I put them, had only my own messes to clean up, had my day come out the way I plan it, been able to explore my own, real internal states without being influenced by the states of others.  I don’t mean to demean the joys of communal living.  I love it, and I expect to continue it.  But my life has been a little unbalanced in the direction of community, a little lacking in the direction of my own individual needs.  I didn’t know that, until I felt what it was like to organize things myself for two whole weeks.  I had a peaceful, beautiful time, and I got a lot done.

Even that time was well balanced with friends.  Debra Rein showed up for a short visit from California.  Norman and Wendy Marshall popped by regularly to help me freeze green soybeans, mow the lawn, and eat sweet corn.  Several times I had friends over for dinner, partly for company and partly to get rid of tomatoes.  I spent a lot of time with car salesmen.  And Brenna and John came back several days early.  So the time passed quickly and taught me that I need more time like that.  Well, of course, I’m about to get it.

C. Harvest time is in full swing.  There is much more to do around here in the spring and the fall than in the fullness of summer.  We are preparing for the first frost, which could come any time in the next three weeks.  That means curing pumpkins and squash in the sun, picking tomatoes, shucking dry beans, digging potatoes, freezing spinach and corn, picking apples, raspberries, grapes.  The baby chicks have grown into ready-to-lay pullets; some of them have to be sold, others introduced to the Big Hen house.  Suzanne, John, Wendy, and Norman separated the rams from the ewes while I was in Hungary (so we don’t get lambs in January — we’ll put them back together in November for April lambs).  The biggest job of all, putting up the winter’s wood (14 cords), still remains to be done and will be the focus of attention every weekend now.  Storm windows have to go up, potting soil has to be put away for winter seed-starting, all the separated daffodil bulbs replanted.

We are going on doing these things, right on schedule, though the future of the farm is still uncertain (see below, “F. moving out”.)  I’m so used to answering the call of the season that I would go crazy if I didn’t.  Who knows whether I or someone else will need potting soil to start peppers and petunias in February?  Better have it there, just in case.

The first leaves are turning, just a hint of the glories ahead.  The sumac and Virginia creeper and red maples are the first to go and the brightest; they’re already glowing.  The main mass of sugar maple is still holding back, but the green of the leaves looks tired.  The sun has swung a long way toward the south, the mood in our heads is autumnal now.  These last few clear, warm, sunny, green days are especially precious, like these last few weeks of being on the farm together, because we know they are limited.  We’re paying more attention, being more awake, experiencing the finitude of all experience, knowing the inevitability of change.

Bittersweet days.

Bittersweet time of year.

More sweet than bitter.

D. The Balaton meeting was the best ever.  I always have trouble summarizing those meetings for people who weren’t there.  It would take pages and pages to describe completely what is always an incredibly full intellectual and emotional week for me.  I see my friends from all over the world who work on environmental and resource issues.  Many of them are very good friends — there’s a lot of hugging and good long talks.  We have business to do, planning joint projects, catching up on each others’ work, keeping the network running.  We work hard, in large and small working groups, writing reports, learning from each other.  And we have a lot of fun.

We’re called the Balaton Group because we meet every year in a resthouse on the shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary.  We come from North, South, East and West, and what we share is a dedication to the planet, to the sustainable use of resources, and to the welfare of all people.  The group is one of the loosest, most flexibly-run organizations in the world (it fills our East-Bloc friends with awe — by their standards, we are close to an anarchy, and yet things run pretty well).  The purpose of the network is to serve the members, to help them all be as effective as possible when they work at home.  So we exchange information and people and computer programs and data and literature with each other.  We raise funds for each other.  We develop teaching tools, workshops, books, that we all can use.  Mostly, we teach and inspire each other.

I can’t possibly describe the whole meeting.  Maybe I can describe just one day of it.

Thursday morning started early, like the other mornings, with Dennis organizing the jogging expedition.  That day he had a race derived from the annual Plainfield Turkey Trot (run every Thanksgiving), in which you can start any time you want and the winner is the person who crosses the finish line closest to some pre-set time, 7:15 AM in this case.  Oddvar Lind from Norway was the winner, to great acclaim by all.

Then we had breakfast, which, like all the meals is a time to sit with someone you haven’t seen in a long time or someone you’re getting to know for the first time and catch up on all the news.

Mornings at Balaton are always plenary sessions; the group meets as a whole to hear presentations and have discussions about subjects of general interest. Sometimes they’re subjects we’ve talked about a lot, like energy conservation or organic farming, and we hear the latest developments.  Sometimes the subjects are new to us.  We started two new and exciting topics this year — resources and peace, and how to communicate effectively through the media about resources.

On Thursday morning our plenary session was on the business of the Balaton Group — we have one such session at every meeting.  Part of it was reports from working groups on projects underway or being planned.

The European members are working together to come up with a scheme that shows how Europe can provide its electricity needs with no nuclear power and no fossil fuels (generating the power from renewables, and using it tremendously efficiently — Amory Lovins had showed us earlier in the week some new light bulbs, for instance, that deliver as much light as a 75-watt bulb but that take only 8.5 watts).

We are launching a new project on sustainable agriculture, that will monitor the economic and environmental performance of farms in six countries — the USA, USSR, Hungary, West Germany, Thailand, and Costa Rica.  We spent much of the meeting working out just what to monitor, and on Thursday the list of indicators was presented to the members for their comments.

We are working together to make a book of good news stories about resource use, and we discussed progress on that.

We talked about making resource atlases for our countries, and providing more environmental data for economic planning.

We elected new members to our steering committee, set up the next meeting, talked about better ways of documenting and publicising our work, talked about the process of adding new members, talked, as we always do, about our basic purpose and how to do better at achieving it.

This sounds like a boring list, because I’m not able to convey the flavor of our discussions.  There’s an energy, a commonality, an active listening to each other, a commitment that I simply can’t explain.  I guess it comes from the quality of our members, and our deep respect and affection for each other.  And also probably from the fact that most of the time we work in arenas where our voices, sticking up for the environment, for the poor, for the next generations, are in the minority.  It’s a treat and an inspiration to spend a week with people from different cultures who are fighting for the same things, all in their own ways in their own countries.

The afternoons of Balaton meetings are free for working groups to organize themselves.  On Thursday my group on agriculture had finished its work, so I spent some time with Carlos Quesada copying down some interesting data he had brought about Costa Rica, for a column I’ll write (ha! you wonder where I get the ideas for my columns?  Credit the Balaton Group!)  Then I spent some time with Ferenc Rabar looking over Chapter 3 of his hunger book.  Then I got into a discussion with our members from Thailand and India about a workshop they were planning on resource management in South Asia.  They were having a disagreement — one of the few disagreements of the week — and I was trying to mediate.

By that time it was 4:00, when we had been ordered to assemble for a “surprise” from our Hungarian hosts.  The surprise turned out to be children from the local school, dressed proudly in traditional costumes, doing Hungarian folkdances for us.  They were very skilled, and at the same time innocent and spontaneous, as children always are.  We were all touched.  Somehow having beautiful, ordinary, precious children at our meeting was wonderfully appropriate — it reminded us of what our work is really about.

Then there was a break for the First Annual Balaton Group Soccer Game, followed shortly thereafter by the Sixth Annual Balaton Group Volleyball Game (in which the score is always 7-8).  Then everyone got dressed for dinner and we had a Rock Ceremony.

Last year the Hungarians planted a tree for us at the resthouse, to mark the Balaton Group’s fifth anniversary.  In front of it they put an enormous rock, taken from a bauxite mine, with a plaque commemorating the event.  This year many of us had brought rocks from our own country to join that one and make an international rock garden.  I don’t know why — it’s just the kind of thing the Balaton Group does.

We had never done a Rock Ceremony before, so we made it up as we went along.  Each person told a bit about his or her rock, where it came from, why it was selected for the long trip, and then put it down by the Hungarian rock.  I found the collection of them surprisingly interesting and moving.  There was black schist from Germany, red sandstone from the Rocky Mountains, light pumice from a Costa Rican volcano, limestone with seashells in it from Portugal, heart-shaped granite from Switzerland, smooth, round sea-polished rocks from Denmark and Lithuania (and a hunk of white quartz from my garden at Foundation Farm).  They were colorful and beautiful.  They spoke of the variety and mystery and ancientness of the planet that holds us up so uncomplainingly while we do the most ridiculous things with all the resources it offers us.

Thursday night was our final dinner together.  We give speeches and toasts, and Joan Davis from Switzerland, with the help of Bert DeVries from Holland, devised silly awards to give various members who have distinguished themselves during the week.  This is always a hilarious session.  Some of the awards aren’t so silly, like the money we collected during the week for Chirapol Sintunawa to take back to help make concrete forms for building houses in poor villages in Thailand.  At the end of the award ceremony Bert taught us a lovely, simple song about mother earth, and we all ended up singing it, arms about each other, swaying back and forth.  Then we ended the evening singing songs from our home countries for and with each other.

One of my Hungarian friends told me afterward how moved he was by the whole day.  He said he’s not used to letting his emotions show in public, he’s even a little uneasy about unstructured, spontaneous displays like that.  He was raised to a more heady, formal, intellectual, predictable, guarded way of doing things.  But he loved it.  He wished the world could be more like the Balaton meetings.

I don’t see why the world can’t be.  All week we were together, our nations sworn enemies of each other.  Russians, Americans, Germans, Hungarians, Central Americans, Africans, Asians.  And what was important was not our nationalities — it’s amazing how seldom nationalities come up at all in Balaton meetings.  When they do, it’s as a contribution, as in songs or dances or rocks or data that are different and that can be shared to make the whole picture more colorful and more complete.  What’s important is who we are as people, what we stand for, how we can learn to serve to make a better world.

It’s not hard to be like that, it’s the most natural thing in the world.  As a little song from “South Pacific” says, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year, it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you’ve got to be carefully taught.”

You don’t have to be taught to love.  The Balaton meeting gives me a safe space both to think and to love, to be challenged intellectually, and to let myself be mushy and hug people and sing and play with them without holding back my feelings.  I feel released there, to be what I was put on this planet to be, loving, unguarded, natural, emotional, happy.  It’s a most wonderful feeling.  I came home glowing and strengthened for another year.

E. There’s some progress on the column, but not enough.  Meanwhile, back on the farm, and back in the hard-knocks economics of life where it’s not OK to be mushy…

I started out this year with a change in strategy — I picked ten big papers like the L.A. Times and the Denver Post and started trying to sell to them, knowing that the syndicates will never take me seriously until I’m accepted in the major markets.

It’s been a discouraging strategy.  Big papers have their own staff writers, they have big budgets for subscribing to syndicates, they have much more stuff to choose from and no more editorial-page space to put it on, and they are arrogant.  They are especially impatient with little free-lancers who come at them out of the blue from Plainfield, New Hampshire.  Most of the ones I approached cut me off immediately.

But a few told me to keep sending the column to see what happens, and two of them, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have taken columns recently.  Even selling them a few columns does wonders for my income — they pay $50 or $100 per column.  And it helps my resume, too, not to mention my self-confidence.  So, encouraged, I’ve approached the syndicates, again, with a nice package of column samples, cut from a whole variety of papers, including the impressive new big ones.  I haven’t heard back yet.

The column is getting an ever-better reception in the smaller papers.  The Brattleboro Reformer just wrote saying it would take the column every week (it had been picking and choosing) because it was so popular with the readers.  I’m going to launch out to a new bunch of smaller papers.  My energy and confidence are up, after being in the doldrums for a long time.  I have to get to work very hard; I’m a long, long way from this year’s goal, and I’m getting tired of being in the minor league.  One of the purposes of shaking up my life right now is to swing out with my writing.  And I feel ready to do it.

F. I move out in two weeks, to the farm next door with my neighbor Ruth Whybrow.  Lots of you have written me since I announced that last month, and I appreciate all the care and concern and comment.

How far away is next door? some of you have asked.  A few hundred feet is the answer, within sight through the trees.  The Whybrow’s house is the only house you can see from our house.  For how long? you’ve asked.  The answer is I don’t know, maybe for a few months, maybe forever, maybe this is the first step toward a move much farther away.  Maybe the farm community will use this upset (and it feels like an upset to all of us) as a way of reconstituting itself into a wonderful new configuration.  Maybe I’ll start a new community myself, or find another one to join, or one will rise on Whybrow’s farm.  I can’t tell what will happen and I have no plan.  I’m just taking things one step at a time.

One thing is sure, my vision of living in community, of living close to the land, of living a life of environmental stewardship is as bright as ever.  This is just one more experimental step in search of that goal.  Foundation Farm has always been and is still very close to that goal.  And something has been stuck, growth and evolution have somehow stopped here, and something had to be done to get things moving again.

Are you really happy about this move? you ask, kindly and candidly.  Yes and no, of course.  I’m devastated to leave the farm, the animals, the people I love, my home for 15 years, a place that we have all shaped to be amazingly comfortable, workable, productive, and welcoming, a place that is so much a part of me.  I already feel tremendous grief, and I haven’t even moved yet.  I’ll be in mourning, probably for a long time.  And I’m scared because the future is so unknown.  And I don’t really know that I’m doing the best thing for me or for my farm-mates or for the farm.

And part of me is also rejoicing, because it still feels right to do this, to take this risk, to let go and see what happens, to trust the universe, to challenge myself and my friends.  I can hardly wait for my life to calm down and center itself around my writing.  I’m excited to find out what happens when, as Thoreau says, I stop dragging a house and a barn, animals and pastures, housemates and budgets around with me and just face the world unencumbered.  I need badly to live my life farther away from Dennis now, not because anything has changed in our relationship, but because both of us have to move on beyond our relationship.  I’m ready for this next step, whatever it brings.  I expect ups and downs, times when I’m sure this was the wrong decision and times when I see whole new paths to follow that I could never see while I was at the farm.

That’s life, after all.  I used to have a cartoon on my office door that said, “Life is like spaghetti.  It’s a terrible mess.  But it’s so good!”

Sorry this was such a long letter.  This newsletter is turning out to be more than what either you or I bargained for.  But so many of you out there are good friends, and I enjoy this chance to share with you.  I hope you don’t mind.  After all, you asked for it — you subscribed!

You’ll hear more in a month, written from my new life next door.

Love, Dana