The First Day of the Harmonic Convergence

Dear Folks,

Oh, it is the most spectacular weather, the best weather of the year, the cool Canadian high of August, with a little hint of fall.  The light is just about gone from the sky this evening, and out my window Mount Ascutney looks almost close enough to touch.  The sky is impeccably clear.  There isn’t a breath of a breeze.  Inside it’s cozy and warm, as it has been all day.  Outside it’s limpidly cool, going down to the 40’s tonight.  This morning was the first time in months I woke up and pulled on jeans and a warm shirt.  This is the weather when your blood gets stirring again and you rediscover your will to do heavy outdoor work.  In the garden the sweet corn is nine feet high and just earing out, and we’re bringing in the first ripe tomatoes, which usually don’t even get in the porch door before they’re slurped up by tomato-lovers.

I am not a tomato-lover.  I grow the things by the bushel because I think they’re pretty, and I like the way the plants smell when you rub against them, and I enjoy the ecstasies of the other members of the household when they eat them.  But I can take tomatoes or leave them alone.  They’re OK when they’re made into pizza sauce and covered with a lot of melted cheese.

Well, it has been a most interesting month on Foundation Farm, which I keep referring to jokingly as Transition Farm, because everyone here has been on the verge of some breakthrough in his or her life that never seems quite to happen.  Everyone but me has been on the brink of moving on for years, but no one has done so.

That stability is most unusual for us.  This newsletter has only existed for about three years, so most of its readers may have an impression of the farm as a rather stable place.  In fact, you have witnessed it in an unusual period, during which no one moved out and only one person, Kate, moved in.  She even turned out to be surprisingly stable, intending to stay for 2 months and instead staying for 18.  But Dennis and I recently counted up 52 people who have lived here for significant periods over the past 15 years.  That makes an average of 3.5 people coming and going each year.  The last 3 years have been an aberration.  Not one we intended — it just worked out that way.  On the whole I prefer stability, but change is more challenging, and we learn more from it.

I can’t explain to you why it occurred to me, about a month ago, that I should move out and go live with my next-door neighbor Ruth Whybrow.  I can make up lots of explanations, but the truth is that the idea just occurred to me in a flash.  It gave me a tremendous jolt (such an idea never seriously entered my head before), and then I knew immediately and with great calm that it was Right and that it Would Happen.

Every now and then an idea comes to me like that, totally unbidden.  It happened when I suddenly knew I would not return to my Harvard biophysics postdoc and would go work on the Club of Rome project.  It happened when I resigned my professorship at Dartmouth.  It happened simultaneously to Dennis and me at one moment in a seminar at MIT when we looked at each other and knew we would leave Boston and go find a farm.  Every idea that has come this way has been absurd.  The moment I have had it, I’ve had no idea what the mechanics will be, and I’ve had a terrible time explaining it to my friends.  But I have a strange history of getting hit from out of nowhere with crazy ideas and then following them, wherever they lead.  Does that happen to everyone, or just me?

Now I know there are some folks out there who are wondering why I’m so surprised and what took me so long.  A steady minority among my friends have been telling me that when you get divorced, you should get fully divorced, for Pete’s sake, and not go on sharing a farm with your ex-husband, even if you do get along peaceably.  And I have shared my frustrations in this newsletter about the way the farm is being maintained and my feelings that it’s beyond me to keep it farmed as well as I think it should be farmed.  I suspect that those thoughts, grinding away in my subcon-scious, had something to do with my decision.  But the real kicker, I think, was E.B. White.

When the idea hit me, I had been reading Scott Elledge’s biography of E.B. White.  The book entranced me, more than that, it thrilled me and empowered me.  I don’t think I ever saw before what a writer’s life looked like.  All kinds of ideas hit me, obvious to you, perhaps, and even obvious to me, except that I had never thought of them as applicable to my life.  For instance: a writer cannot bend to other peoples’ priorities and try to squeeze the writing in after everything else is accomplished — the absolute first and sometimes only priority has to be the writing.  And: a writer has a deep responsibility to say what she needs to say, the way she needs to say it, not the way some editor thinks will sell.

Wow!  What BREATHTAKING, WONDERFUL ideas!

I have been saying for years that I have to restructure my life around my writing, and I’ve taken significant steps in doing that, like resigning from teaching, getting divorced, and sticking myself with a weekly column.  But, you know, the really necessary change — the one inside me that said 1. writing is the first priority and 2. you gotta write what you gotta write — that change never happened.  Until last month.  And when it did, I saw that the remaining thing I have to resign from is the farm.  As long as I’m the one primarily responsible for it, I will always let farm needs take first priority.  I can’t put my mind fully on writing when there’s a sick lamb or a leaky roof.

I also can’t imagine not living on a farm, not living communally, not living in Plainfield, New Hampshire, not having some gardening or chores I can go do when I get stuck writing.  But someone else has to be responsible, so I can be responsible for my writing.  (E.B. White had three full-time employees to keep up his farm.  He was a much more successful writer than I am and could afford to.)

Ruth Whybrow is getting a divorce just now, and her two daughters are both in college.  She’s alone over in her big house.  She has a horse, chickens, cats, and a dog to keep her (and me) company.  She could use a little help with the chores and the rent, and we have liked and admired each other for years.  And my own farm will be just far enough away so I can get my mind off it, and just close enough that I can go over and help when necessary.  Ruth has agreed to the plan, and I’ll shift to her house in about a month, after I come back from the Balaton meeting in Hungary.

I’m thinking of this as a sabbatical from Foundation Farm rather than a permanent departure.  But I can’t tell what’s going to happen, because my announcement of this plan caused turmoil amongst my farmmates — wonderful turmoil.

First, every one of them said that they weren’t staying if I was leaving.

Second, all sorts of things started getting done.  The house got painted and it looks wonderful.  Nick came over from Maine to prop up the barn and Dennis spent a day or two helping him.  The lawns and orchards are being kept mowed.  Plans are even afoot to get the roof fixed before winter.

Third, as everyone started thinking about leaving, they began to get keyed into some of their larger agendas in life, things that have gotten put off in the comfort and shelter of living here.  Dennis is talking with a real gleam in his eye about going to start a company on educational gaming with his friend Dick Duke in Michigan.  John is talking about buying a house of his own.  Kate actually did move out, not back to Mark’s, as we had thought she would, but to a friend in Cornish who is a radical feminist.  I suspect that this is an important move away from Mark, one she has been trying to get herself to make for months.  The only person who seems to have moved more solidly onto the farm is Suzanne, who is clearer than ever about her job and her commitment to it, but who is now talking about doing it based here and not in Boston.

I have been watching this process with joy.  Every one of these changes seems to be in the right direction for the person involved.  I don’t know how many of them will actually take place or when.  But the kick I gave myself seems to have been a beneficial kick for everyone.

The last thing that has happened, at least to me, and I think to all of us, is that in what might be our last few weeks together here, we have mightily appreciated each other and this place, much more so than when we were taking it all for granted.  I am reminded of something a friend said once when he was about to leave Dartmouth, “If anyone had told me during the last five years any of the thankful and loving things they told me this last week, I never would have left!”  I felt sad when I heard that, thinking how seldom and how inadequately we acknowledge each other.

I would like to say we did better at acknowledgement on this farm.  But we didn’t.  We fell into life’s big trap of being more aware of the small dissatisfactions than of the enormous happinesses.  We were more aware of the unmowed lawn than of the splendor of summer in this place.  We remembered the petty disagreements more than the overwhelming areas of agreement.  We didn’t see how really decent, helpful, and fun each of us is, and how each enhanced the lives of all the others.  Or maybe we saw it — I think we did — but we didn’t say it, not nearly enough.

So now we’re seeing it and saying it.  And the farm is responding with what seems to be the most wonderful summer ever.  The garden is magnificent, spangled with flowers and bursting with produce.  The freezer is filling up, the pickles and jams and onions are going down to the root cellar, the sheep are fat on the better-than-ever pasture.  The house is full of glorious bouquets.  All sorts of old friends and former farmmates are showing up for visits.  We don’t know who will end up harvesting and eating all this bounty, but someone will, so we’re just going ahead with the normal routine.  I’ll put this garden properly to bed before I hand over the seed catalogs to whomever will take it over next year.  It might even be me coming back again to a renewed, maybe even transformed household.

I think this is what Harmonic Convergence looks like.  Change and upset that one welcomes calmly, because it means the opportunity to restructure your life around what you really should be doing.

Tune in next month for the next installment in the unfolding drama of Foundation/Transition Farm.

Love, Dana