Dear Folks,
It’s Sunday morning, gray and misty. The summer continues cool. The garden is in slow motion. Only a handful of cherry tomatoes have ripened. The pepper plants have not even set fruit. The melons sit and shiver. Some of the cucumbers are molding on the vine — something I have never seen before. The sweet corn has been on the verge of ripening for two weeks without making any progress. I can tell it’s not ready; the raccoons haven’t raided it.
On the other hand, because of the regular rains, the greenery is amazing. The buttercup squash have run their vines all the way up the bean poles. The pole beans are fighting back with cascades of white blossoms, which the hummingbirds love. The red Mexican beans are twining up the sunflowers. The tomatoes have come out the tops of their five-foot-high cages and are flowing down the sides, making an impenetrable thicket.
The flowers bloom and bloom and don’t get blasted by heat or sun. The bouquets in the house at the moment are of cosmos and phlox, dahlias and zinnias, gloriosa daisies and goldenrod, and bachelor’s buttons. To have bachelor’s buttons, an early flower that is usually gone by July, at the same time as goldenrod, symbol of autumn, is to me a striking example of what a wierd year Pinatubo has blessed us with.
The cool-weather crops are thriving. I have never had such harvests of peas, berries, cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, carrots, potatoes. The fall spinach I plant in July often has a hard time germinating in the heat; this year it’s lush. The green beans and the zucchini came in two weeks late, but now they’re coming and coming and coming.
John is making a long-held dream of mine come true. He’s building a harvest kitchen out on the screened back porch, so that when the summer flood of vegetables comes, we can process it in the cool of outdoor breezes, and without getting in the way of cooking dinner. Yesterday I used the new kitchen for the first time — spent the entire day out there, in between picking forays in the garden. I made crabapple jelly, I froze four different kinds of beans (White Dutch Runner and Romano from the poles, Haricot Vert and Bush Blue Lake from the bushes), I made zucchini bread, I washed a basket of cukes for pickles (but didn’t get around to the pickles — I have to do that today).
I was marveling, as I was struggling through the squash/bean jungle, at the explosion of vegetation that has resulted from those little seeds I put into the ground last May. Imagine what this farm would be like if we had such growing conditions year round, instead of having a six-month shutdown! Given the wealth of vegetables and flowers we produce in a small space in a few months, think of what can be produced in the tropics! Surely the warm parts of the world ought to be the rich places, the superpowers of biomass! I guess it would be that way, if we hadn’t dominated the world with fossil-fuel technology.
I have been reveling in the farm and in my writing this month, except for two short trips. (After the Beyond the Limits blitz, just two trips in a month feels like a reasonable travel schedule!)
One was a whisk to San Francisco, one of the last publicity journeys for BtL, I hope. I spent a day getting out there, woke up early the next morning, and went to four radio programs, one TV program, and one interview with the SF Chronicle. Then I got on a red-eye and flew back. I was home (exhausted) less than 48 hours after I left. I enjoyed the publicity part — interesting hosts, fairly intelligent discussion. I always enjoy being in California, which wakes me up because it’s so different from the East. But there’s something obscene about going so far so quickly and then not taking the time to be there. I would have stayed long enough to arrive, to visit friends, to make contact, if it weren’t that every minute of summer on the farm and of quiet writing time is so precious to me.
It was with equal reluctance that I let my friend Priscilla pry me away last weekend for three days at Kripalu, an ashram in western Massachusetts. We have always talked about going there and probably never would have done so if Priscilla were not addicted to Boston Symphony concerts, and if Kripalu didn’t happen to be across the road from Tanglewood. So we spent our days doing yoga, walking in woods and fields, swimming in the lake, and eating New-Age-veggie meals, and our evenings listening to Seiji Ozawa and Kathleen Battle. I have to admit, it was heavenly.
Kripalu is a much bigger place than I had envisioned. It’s in a former Jesuit monastery, an ugly, modern, red-brick, right-angles building on the site of an older estate that burned down. It sits on a hill with views of mountains and lakes, and with acres of sweeping lawns and forests and gardens. The resident guru is called Gurudev; he’s 60 years old and looks 40; he’s tall, slim, muscular and charming. I saw him only on tape, but I liked his tapes — he strikes me as one of the most believable gurus I have run across. (And I seem to run across them regularly.) Three hundred and fifty people live at the ashram. They run it with the precision of a Marriott Hotel, though at lower rates and with more human warmth. There are on average another 350 guests, who are there like us for three unstructured days of R&R, or for week-long seminars on all sorts of topics (women and yoga, body work, juice fasts), or for month-long training sessions for holistic health practitioners.
The emphasis at Kripalu is on yoga, which, through them, I have come to see for the first time not as exercise, but as meditation. I loved doing yoga there. It is very slow, centered on being in affectionate touch with every part of your body, listening to its wisdom. The essence is to hold a posture just at the point of slight discomfort, and in that position to practice the art of silent witnessing, neither suppressing the discomfort and pretending it’s not there, nor giving in to it and breaking the pose. That, says Gurudev, is the formula for all the tough inner experiences of life — anger, fear, hurt, the call of an addiction. Don’t suppress and deny it, or it will burst out later. Don’t give in and indulge. Just be a silent witness. Don’t label, don’t judge, don’t accept or condemn, just breathe deeply, wake up, and watch. Then the feeling will lose its hold on you, and you will know naturally what is the appropriate action.
I never put those pieces together before. I never saw yoga as practice for life. I look forward to going back to Kripalu.
I’ve had a disappointment this month, one I am watching as a silent witness, waiting to find out what is appropriate to do. Last April the Washington Post Writers Group called to ask for copies of my column. It is the best syndicate in the country, the one that handles George Will, Ellen Goodman, Mary McGrory. It is known for the quality of its writing; being syndicated by them is one of the three secret Great Goals of my writing life. (The other two are to get published in the New Yorker and to win a Pulitzer.) I went to meet with them when I was in Washington for the presentation of BtL. I didn’t tell you about it, because the interview went well, I was hopeful, and I wanted to spring it on you as a wonderful surprise when they decided to take me on.
We love your stuff, they said. It’s a WORTHY column. The only problem is whether we can make money from it. We’ll call around to the editors who run it (about 20 of them now) and find out how they like it. Be patient with us; we take on new columnists only rarely and after considerable reflection. Meanwhile FAX us your work every week, so we know what you’re up to.
That I did, praying. I felt honored and blessed even to be considered by the august Washington Post Writers Group. I waited patiently. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.
Finally I wrote, asking what they were thinking. I got back a nice letter saying they weren’t going to take me on; they didn’t think they could make a go of it. I was stunned — if THEY, the pros, can’t sell my column, how am I supposed to do it? I called up to ask for the real reason for the decision. Is the column not good enough? Is there anything I can do to make it better? I wanted to hear that the fault was in the column, because I couldn’t stand the idea that in their professional judgement it was in the editors; that a global systems column just can’t be sold.
I’m not sure they told me the truth. What they SAID was that the fault was not in me but in the world. We need a guarantee of five major city dailies to break even, they said. Philadelphia said they weren’t sure they could fit it in the budget. St. Louis said maybe. Los Angeles said no. (These are the only big city dailies that run my column now, and they do it rarely.) The little papers don’t pay enough. So we can’t take the risk.
Five big dailies? You don’t think you can sell even FIVE big dailes? I asked. That jerk George Will can get into all of them, and I can’t get into five? Sorry, they said.
What I first felt as I hung up the phone was despair. Well, it’s clear the column-writing is just not working out. If they can’t sell it, it can’t be sold. It’s probably time to give up this nonsense and figure out some constructive way to use the time I put into the column. Seven years is long enough to test an endeavor; this one has failed. Time to quit.
Next up was fury. What gutless chickens! Why can’t they help me in this quest? Why can’t they create a market in the long-term whole-system perspective the world so badly needs? They should at least have given it a try!
Next came resolution. Well, if THEY won’t do it, I WILL!!! Five big dailies! Piece of cake! Since I was leaving for San Francisco, I resolved to walk into the opinion editor of the Chronicle and make my first sale.
At first they wouldn’t let me in — I had forgotten that on big papers the editors are guarded against free-lance interlopers as if they were the gold of Fort Knox. I insisted and found that the op-ed-page editor was on vacation. I asked to see the managing editor, who finally, reluctantly, appeared, received my sample columns with a yawn, promised to deliver them to the op-ed-page editor, and told me the paper just didn’t have the budget to take on new columnists in the foreseeable future.
I’m different, I said. You need me to have a Green balance on your page. I’m an authority and a good writer. I’m on the verge of being syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, and you can help make it happen.
Yes, he said, that’s what they all say.
It had been a long time since I went out to sell my column. I had forgotten what it’s like. That is the job the Washington Post Writers Group people do every day, poor things. As they say, they have only 1000 customers, the editors, the gatekeepers of the newspapers. No column is easy to sell, and mine, being unclassifiable on the regular political spectrum, is an especially difficult product.
So — I’m honored to have been considered. I’m grateful that there are twenty editors out there who have the courage to run my column. The Washington Post Writers Group did me a favor by assuring me that my work is good enough for them to consider, and by making me think again about a part of my life that had gone automatic. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but this incident has got me thinking.
The question is the same as always — how can I best use my time and energy to further the transition to sustainability? I’m thinking about talk radio (which I really enjoy). Or maybe, instead of an opinion column, a feature column on the science of the environment. Or a question-and-answer format like Dear Abby. Or maybe TV, though I would guess not, because I can’t seem to appreciate TV from either side of the camera. I don’t know. What is clear is that now is the time for silent witnessing and openness to all possibilities, not the time to make the decision.
Now is not the time because I’m leaving Tuesday for 10 days in Germany and Switzerland and Hungary. Then I’m home for the month of September. Then I go to Oregon for the Pew Scholars meeting. Then I leave for South Africa and a brief consulting visit with the Institute of Future Studies there. Then to Germany for two months, from mid-October to mid-December. I’ll be working with my friend Hartmut Bossel at the University of Kassel on a book on systems thinking. Clearly this is not a time to start any more new endeavors. But I’ll be open, witnessing, mulling, intending to come to a decision sometime next winter. Meanwhile, somehow, even in Germany, I’ll keep the column going.
I’ve been having a lovely time with my textbook. I just completed a chapter on the affluent society (to be set alongside the chapter on poverty already written). It talks about the low birth rate of the rich, and the high pollution rates. It tells the stories of Los Angeles air pollution and Rhine River water pollution and acid rain. And it ends with some of the feedback loops that keep driving the rich, against all sense, to continue to strive to get richer. I like the way the chapter has come out. And now I’m starting one that is tough for me, because I’ve never tried to write it systematically before — sustainable and unsustainable economics.
Well, I have September to finish that, and then there will be another break to write another book. It takes me a long time to build up momentum on this textbook, and at the moment my enthusiasm is high. I hate to stop. But that’s how it goes. So what I have to do is not suppress, bewail, oppose, approve, judge, or label. Just be present, as a silent witness.
Love, Dana
