Dear Folks, It’s the day after the solstice. The sun has turned the corner and is heading back our direction. (OK, OK, I know it’s really the earth that has turned the corner and is beginning to tip its northern hemisphere back toward the sun — but that’s not how it looks or feels, is it?) We won’t notice any difference till the middle of February. We know perfectly well that the six coldest weeks lie directly ahead. But still it’s a comfort to think that the days are getting a bit longer. We feel as if we’ve survived something, getting past the winter solstice.
We are all tucked in, sheep in one barn, horses in another, ducks and geese reduced to their breeding population and caged in the barnyard (protected against owls, raccoons, and Emmett), wood in the woodshed, chickens in the chicken palace. Lester our borrowed Border Leicester ram has gone back to his owner, leaving lamb embryos to unfold slowly within our thick-wooled ewes. Last spring’s unsold lambs have gone to the butcher, and now I’m trying to find meat customers with freezers. The hides of the slaughter lambs, thick with brown or white fleece, are stretched out on the basement floor, scattered with salt, drying so they can be shipped to the tanner. Stephen has piled the back porch with firewood for the kitchen stove.
We’re glad to have Chrissie and Scot back from the Northwest, though we get them for only a short while. They leave tomorrow to spend Christmas with Chrissie’s folks in Pennsylvania. Then right after the New Year Scot will depart to help teach a winter term tropical ecology course in Jamaica and Costa Rica. (Awwwww, poor Scot! Actually, he says, he’d rather stay here and work on his thesis. But he’ll be back in March.) Kerry has to work at the Co-op on the days before and after Christmas, so she and Stephen will be away only for Christmas day, when they’ll drive down to Stephen’s folks in Massachusetts.
I’m ready to begin my holiday fast, which I’ll start on the 24th and continue till I feel like stopping (usually 5-6 days). I’m looking forward to it, the slowdown, the quietness. I light white candles and play beautiful music to my heart’s content and take time for inner work — about the only time I ever do that. I’ll walk the half-mile into town on the first evening of the fast, Christmas Eve, for caroling at the Plainfield church. (We only have one church. I have never properly introduced you to downtown Plainfield, which consists of a church, a general store, a library, a grange hall, a town hall, a post office, and maybe 20 houses.) I have, of course, an overambitious list of things I’d like to get done this coming week — the winter Balaton Bulletin, six radio spots, the paper on our commodity model, two pairs of socks, a massive basement cleanup and, of course, a column or two. But the good thing about a fast is that I get slowed down to the point where I accept that I can only do what I can do. So maybe it’ll just be one pair of socks and a lot of reading and long walks with the dogs and some good inner work. That will be fine!
It has been an unusually gray, stormy approach to winter, even for New England, where gray and stormy are to be expected. We haven’t had below-zero cold yet, but we had early deep freezes, so it seems like forever that we’ve been hauling water to the animals and chipping ice out of their feeders. It’s been raining, sleeting, snowing, and occasionally thawing, so Blow-Me-Down Brook has been almost constantly bank-full or in slight flood. (That makes us nervous, because of all the gardens we have on its floodplain.)
Two weeks ago we got a dump of two feet of heavy, wet snow that took down trees and power lines all over the valley. It put our electricity out for 24 hours and uprooted the old wild apple tree in our sheep pasture. That tree never had good apples, but it was pretty when it was covered with blossoms in the spring, and it shaded the sheep in the summer, so I’m sorry to see it go — though we always have the comfort, when a tree comes down, of turning it into firewood. Apple is the best. (Burns hot and smells good.)
Kerry and Stephen had to weather that big snowstorm by themselves, because I was in Zurich. I snatched up my students’ final ethics papers on December 5, ran for a plane, and read papers on the move for the next ten days, starting with a Balaton Group steering committee meeting at the handy home near the Zurich airport of my friend Joan Davis.
The steering committee consists of six members elected from the membership, plus Dennis and me and Joan and anyone else who cares to show up. This year’s members are from South Africa, Thailand, India, Hungary, Austria, and the USA (the US member is Alan AtKisson, of Sustainable Seattle fame). We live at Joan’s house for a few days, cook for ourselves, sleep in her third-floor “dorm,” and manage to have a remarkably cheap and efficient meeting.
We settle any policy or financial matters and plan the coming Balaton year. The way this is done is indescribable, but I can’t resist trying to describe it. We hate bureaucracy and officiousness, we don’t have to posture with friends who know us so well, they don’t tolerate power plays, so our only tools can be truth and love. Balaton folks are bright and well informed and dedicated to sustainability. They don’t have to be reminded to work for the good of the group and the needs of the world. So we just get to work and talk things over in a straight, honest way, with a lot of laughter and fun. I don’t know how this miracle happens so predictably, year after year, even as the steering committee changes membership. I often wish I could package some of its stardust and sprinkle it on other meetings I have to attend. Actually I think that does happen a little, as we all try to carry the Balaton spirit into the world.
The hardest question before us is always: what shall be the theme of the next annual meeting? That question is closely tied up with: who shall organize the program? We always have a list of at least a dozen great themes suggested by members, so the choice comes down to which theme has a person behind it willing to make it happen. (It’s a general Balaton rule: whoever suggests that something should be done gets the responsibility of doing it. Anything that no one cares enough to do, doesn’t get done. So simple!)
This year the winning theme was Time — time and sustainability, time horizons, time as a resource (badly mismanaged), time as a limiting factor, time as something Balaton members never feel they have enough of. It’s a topic that’s been on our list for years, but no one ever offered to organize it. (It’s a hard one to organize! But then Balaton themes often tend to be gutsy — subjects we want to learn and think about, subjects we feel are important but under-examined, rather than subjects we’re already expert at.) Finally this year Alan AtKisson offered to take Time on, so we jumped at the opportunity. It means that I have to fill the next three coming Bulletins with useful background reading about Time, so if any of you have any good articles, cartoons, quotes, or whatever, let me know!
At a steering committee meeting we spend quite a bit of time making salads, or serving ourselves a gracious candlelight dinner, or doing dishes, but the work actually goes on more or less continuously, in small and large conversations, as we talk in twos and threes about our plans and hopes for Balaton and our various projects. Publications and computer software and ideas get passed around, plus presents for each others’ families. Because of airline schedules people tend to filter in early or leave late, so sub-meetings happen. This time Alan AtKisson left a few days late, and I was staying for another purpose, so we had another two days together with Joan, to talk about indicators and cultural reformation and other current obsessions. So useful, these meetings!
On Wednesday Joan and I took a train to Munich for a meeting of the Schweisfurth Foundation. Joan is on its board, and she had talked me into coming to give a public talk and a two-day seminar. I never would have done it in a thousand years — I just don’t do things like that any more — but it paid my overseas air ticket plus enough to cover some of the steering committee meeting costs — so OK, I told Joan, having no idea what I was getting into.
Turns out the Schweisfurth Foundation is located on the Schlossrundell in Munich — the enormous circle leading up to the magnificent Nymphenberg Palace. The palace spreads imperiously around about a quarter of the circle. The other three-quarters are the houses of the nobility, two of which are now occupied by the Schweisfurth family and foundation. In the middle of the circle is a lagoon filled with swans and ducks and geese, and behind the palace is a huge park. Not bad, I thought, as I was shown to my room overlooking the palace and the swans.
While the board met, I worked a bit on grading papers and preparing my talk and I met with what seemed like all the reporters and photographers of Munich. (Schweisfurth had employed a very active “green” PR agent.) The talk was given in a big lecture hall in the university — a harsh, unwelcoming place with bad acoustics. The Schweisfurths took us out two nights in a row to ultra-fancy restaurants where the courses keep coming long after you’re full, and no food is served without being sculpted into pretentious, unrecognizable shapes. (I ate my first ever slice of black truffle and wondered why anyone would bother.) The jokes were all in German. I wasn’t having much fun. Why do I do things like this? I was asking myself.
The saving graces were walks to visit the beautiful waterfowl in the park, and getting to meet Joan’s good friend Hermann, a prince of Germany (literally) who owns a whole province or so of forest and is throwing out everything he learned in forestry school and trying to manage the forest truly sustainably. He and I passed one whole interminable dinner deep in discussion of forest ecology and of the conference he organized at Chernobyl on the tenth anniversary of its disaster. Hermann’s amazing. I want to see his forest, I want him to come to Balaton. This must be why I came here, I said to myself, always looking for the Universal Purpose in things. To meet this nifty person. Reason enough.
Though he was at all the dinners, it took me longer to warm up to our host, Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth, who was being, I thought, entirely too extravagant and bossy. (He is, after all, very rich and the boss.) Finally at the third dinner I was seated next to him, and lo and behold, we had a terrific time. It helped that this dinner was an excellent one, served at the Schweisfurth Foundation, entirely from organic foods raised at Schweisfurth’s farm in a nearby village called Hermannsdorf. The bread was baked at Hermannsdorf, the beer was brewed from organic barley and hops at Hermannsdorf (best beer I ever had), the beet soup came from the Hermannsdorf garden, the schnapps was made from Hermannsdorf plums.
As I exclaimed over all this, Karl Ludwig told me about his life and his farm. He started as the son of a butcher. When he was 25, his father sent him to the US to learn the modern way with meat. He came back with visions of feedlots and assembly lines and packaged meat sent out in frozen floods to the world, and his father told him to make it happen. He did and became the Hormel or Armour of Germany, the founder of a great meatpacking empire. And then, about 10 years ago, in the middle of a Christmas fast (got to watch out for those!), he decided that his empire was all wrong.
The animals were raised in an unsound way, pumped with chemicals, treated like industrial parts. The workers, each making one kind of cut on an assembly line, were bored to death. The food industry should be sending out life and health, but this one was sending out illness and death, Karl Ludwig said to his wife Dorothee. I’m going to sell the whole thing and start over.
Which he did. With the money he started the foundation, which funds organic agriculture projects. He went back to train personally as a master butcher of the old school, one who sees each animal all the way from death to the customer, respecting its individuality and quality. (Karl Ludwig can speak almost religiously about killing animals, a habit that gives my vegetarian friend Joan the shivers.) And he founded the Hermannsdorf farm. Its motto is “ecological quality” and its purpose is local production of fresh organic food for local needs. No more sending preserved food all over Europe. Nothing travels more than 30 km to or from this farm.
Now I was getting very excited! This was an operating version of my dream for our new farm! I began to bombard Karl Ludwig with questions. How does he market the produce? (He has two restaurants and five stores in Hermannsdorf and Munich.) What kinds of cheeses does he make? (Camembert, brie, parmesan, Emmentaler — he has hired European master cheesemakers.) How is the bread made? (Out of fresh-ground whole-grain flour, in brick ovens fired with beechwood.) How does he brew the beer? (He has a microbrewery that turns out 100,000 liters per year. The equipment cost $250,000. He expects a payback time of 5 years. The beer is sold in returnable bottles within six weeks of brewing, so it needs no preservatives, no additives of any kind. He buys organic barley and hops from twenty surrounding farms.)
He started pulling out pictures of his farm, and I pulled out pictures of mine — both my present farm and the ones we hope to buy in Hartland. We jabbered away about soils and compost and climate and markets. I told him about our dream. I asked if, once we got going, we could please send apprentices to train at Hermannsdorf in beer-making, bread-making, cheese-making.
Wow! Now THIS was clearly why I had been summoned to Munich!
Meanwhile the seminar was going on at the foundation — about twenty selected Munich residents, businessmen and theater producers and professors and journalists, friends of the Schweisfurths who had been at these events before. There is a strong New Age dimension to the reformed Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth, which came out strongly in the seminar. Most of my leads about specific content and action were ignored, but my leads about emotion and spirituality were picked up and toyed with endlessly. (Since I always lead strongly in both those directions, that was OK with me.) The conversation was about 95% in German, which I understand very imperfectly and speak so ungrammatically that it’s an embarrassment, but that turned out to be OK too — I found I could absorb almost everything if I just shut off my rational brain and went with the vibes. It was kind of fun, very moving at times. I liked these people. My heart went out to the ones who are trying to get a Sustainable Munich going (who didn’t get much help from this spiritual stuff, I’m afraid.)
It was all over and people were leaving, and the mood was loving. and my heart was full, when Karl Ludwig and Dorothee came over to me, Karl Ludwig planted his chair and sat down in a businesslike way, leaned over to me, and said, “You have a dream.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is just the same as your dream.”
“Dorothee and I would like to contribute $100,000 to it,” he said.
!!! I burst into tears and hugged him, even though he hadn’t even given me permission to call him “Du.”
So THAT’S why I was in Munich!
Well the very next day I got to fly home, finish up those ethics papers, and walk off the plane into a community meeting at my house, where I could tell everyone the good news. Money has been a huge issue for us, of course, especially since it looks like we will get one of the Hartland farms, if at all, only by paying its outrageous asking price. The day before I left for Zurich, I had upped our offer by $75,000, wondering where the heck that money was going to come from. So now I know.
As Robin Ellison, one of our group, said at the meeting. “Well, the spirits of this project do move in strange and powerful ways, don’t they?”
The Hunts, the difficult farm owners, have agreed to meet with us after the first of the year. (For the last six months they’ve been unwilling even to talk to us over the phone — we’ve been dealing only with their real estate agent.) They’re still difficult and I’m not sure that even this last $75,000 will do the trick. They want to subdivide off 10 acres and build a house on it. We’d love to have them and their experience with the farm close by, but we think they’ve already nibbled too much off that farm. But I’m cheered that soon we’ll know for sure that there is a possibility of a deal or there isn’t. Then we can either go on to the physical design of the community or stop wasting time on Hartland and get serious about some other land.
We’ll have to see what the spirits have up their sleeves.
Meanwhile, welcome the returning sun and stay warm and have a happy New Year.
Love, Dana
