Dear Folks,

Day after Christmas. Six in the evening and the outside temperature is already down to zero. The wind is slamming against the west side of the house, and the radio is warning of a wind-chill factor of -50 degrees. I did my evening chores an hour ago, when it was half-dark. I have never done them so fast. The geese were eager, for a change, to be bedded down in their stall, and nary a chicken ventured out all day long. This is one of those wicked winter nights, the kind that’s in our minds all October as we pile up the wood and put on the storm windows.

But I’m sitting cozy in my study with a candle shining, and the woodstove ticking softly, and a cup of hot hazelnut-vanilla tea. I lit a fire in the kitchen stove too, to be sure the pipes don’t freeze on the north end of the house. On each side of me a big dog is snoring on the floor and I have two purring gray cats on my lap, Simon stretched across my knees, and Poppy draped against my shoulder. This is my first day back after more than a week away, and the house animals are clinging to me — either they missed me, or the sound of the wind makes them nervous, though they sure don’t look nervous at the moment.

I’m not only cozy, I’m experiencing the secret pleasure that we northerners never admit to dwellers in more moderate climes — the smug superiority of being comfortable while the elements rage around us. We love to complain about our mud season, our black flies, our nor’easters and our frigid winters, but in fact we get a perverse satisfaction in pitting ourselves against the elements, and we suspect that anyone who hasn’t done the chores in a -50 degree windchill and then come in to a warm kitchen is missing one of life’s great experiences.

(Save. I’m saving this file after every paragraph, because in fact, I’m aware of many vulnerabilities, chief among them a tree branch falling on an electric line. There’s about a 100% chance of that happening tonight, at which point my water pump stops, my furnace shuts down, my computer crashes, and I feel not so smug after all.)

I have been deliriously happy all day, all week actually, but let me start with today and work backward. It has been a completely ordinary day, filled with the kinds of tasks one has to do upon returning home. Unpack. Read the mail and pay the bills. Listen to the phone messages. Do the laundry. Fill the woodbox. Water the plants. I don’t know why I’ve enjoyed it so much, except that there’s always more pleasure in the daily chores after some time away from them. And I’m ending a fast, which makes me high. I broke the fast at noon today with a small potato, a stalk of celery, and a carrot, boiled together to make a simple soup. I have never tasted anything better.

(Save.)

Part of the fun is that John and I are evolving a whole new routine around here. Things are in new places, the rules are changing, as always happens when the community changes. It wakes one up.

John and I share a passion for pushing the electricity bill lower and lower, so we’ve given up the dryer, except in dire emergencies. We normally hang wet clothes outside in the summer and use the dryer in the winter, but now the basement is uncluttered enough to hang clothes in, and I take pleasure in doing it. I also bought my first microwave oven, with deep suspicion, but knowing it’s a more efficient way to heat up cold pizza than our electric oven. Even better, of course, is the oven of our kitchen woodstove, but we don’t always happen to have that heated up when the pizza needs heating up.

(Save. Wow! The wind is really wooshing out there!)

John is determined to get our trash output as close to zero as possible, so our recycling setup, which was already amazing, has become manic. We already had four categories of paper — news, white, colored, and coated (magazines and junk mail catalogs). Now we’ve got two of cardboard (corregated and un). Four of plastic (PET, polystyrene, polyethylene, and all other). Plus steel cans, aluminum cans, batteries, and glass. The kitchen compost goes to the chickens, the yard waste goes to the compost pile. We have a lot of containers on our back porch, but it’s working — we haven’t been able to fill up even one garbage can this month.

Little improvements are showing up everywhere. While I was gone, John took it upon himself to get new shower curtains (we needed them) and to clean the mess on top of the refrigerator — one of the black holes I hadn’t gotten to yet. I have all — well, nearly all — the cobwebs out of the basement, and the laundry space is more orderly than it’s been for years. John’s been clearing brush. I’ve organized the garden tools. We have flowers everywhere, because with our dark winters, I expect any houseplant worth keeping to flower — Christmas cactus, azalea, cyclamen, jasmine, geraniums. Today I started up paper-white narcissus and amaryllus and lily-of-the-valley pips, for blooms in January and February.

So the control freaks have taken over Foundation Farm. It’s more and more of a pleasure to work and live around here, even as the throughput goes down.

The cost of control, in any system, is the loss of ferment, surprise, evolution, and learning. So when we get the cleaning and fixing done and the lower-throughput flows functioning well, we will have to swing the balance toward more liveliness with more people, hopefully with children. I’m especially aware on a night like this, alone in the house, that this place is meant to shelter a lot of people, not just one or two.

I’m alone because John has taken off to upstate New York to be with his family for a few days — a reward he richly earned by taking care of everything alone (Brenna is with her mother for Christmas) while I was off in Zurich.

I was in Zurich for the steering committee meeting of the Balaton Group, which always takes place in Joan Davis’s house. I described that house to you last year, when I was there for Joan’s Christmas fast, but now it’s a new place. Joan has finally been able to buy a house. (In Switzerland that’s a lot harder than Americans can imagine — not only in terms of money, but in simple availability. The Swiss are a lot less mobile than we are.) But in another sense it’s fully Joan’s house, whatever physical shell it’s in, because Joan inhabits a place so distinctively and thoroughly and graciously. The candles were lit, the hand-painted marbled gift-wrapping paper was spread out over the floor, the music was playing, all flat surfaces were covered with papers, the stairs were lined with carefully selected smooth stones, the windowsills bedecked with live plants and bouquets of dried flowers — Joan’s house.

Six people are elected to the Balaton steering committee every year, and Dennis and I are ex officio members, and then, in typical Balaton fashion, anyone else who cares enough to show up gets a vote too, so there were ten of us at this meeting. They were from Costa Rica, Denmark, Hungary, India, the Netherlands, Russia, and the U.S. In terms of position or title they included a dean of research in a national university, a physics professor who has just founded a new political party, a consulting engineer specializing in energy efficiency, a former deputy director of UNEP, etc. — but the feeling was like a happy family getting together for a holiday. Lots of news to exchange, hugs, people chatting in the kitchen while preparing a meal or doing the dishes. Old and good friends, working together for global transformation.

We settled the topic of our next annual meeting (sustainable human settlements) and planned program and speakers. We went over the budget. We had a long, long discussion about membership policy and decided, as we always do, not to have a membership policy. We are a community, not an organization, and in communities the members define themselves. We did a formal visioning session to picture the world and the Balaton Group ten years from now. Most of us saw the future world in terrible shape — apparently we haven’t much confidence in our efforts, and that’s a problem that weakens our efforts — though it’s hard for any rational person NOT to picture the world of ten years from now in terrible shape. It’s our responsibility, however, to glimpse the light, however dim, at the end of the tunnel, and to keep pointing it out to those who see nothing but tunnel.

The meeting lasted the weekend and I spent the next two days capturing it in my computer for the next issue of the Balaton Bulletin, while beginning my fast. Joan has been fasting over Christmas for years now. She tells her friends not to call, not to invite her to parties, and she stays home, lights candles, drinks herb tea, plays sacred music, and putters, cleaning up her desk, sending letters, putting her life in order for the new year. It’s a special time for her, and I feel privileged that she let me join her last year and this.

So the two of us puttered. I knitted and read and typed the Bulletin and took long walks up the hill to the edge of town, where there is a forest and fields and one place where, when the clouds clear away, you can see a range of Alps all the way to the Säntis. We ran errands (mailing letters, paying the phone bill) by walking the other direction, downhill, into town. I wandered the streets checking out the Swiss woodpiles and the Swiss gardens.

Every piece of wood in a Swiss woodpile is cut to exactly the same length and stacked so precisely that the edge of the pile looks like a finished wall. The tiny gardens contain an amazing variety of plants, in layers, with apple trees on top, decorative bushes in the middle, and vegetables at the bottom. Leeks and cabbages were still being harvested. A surprising number of bushes were BLOOMING in December — a wildly fragrant pink viburnum, a yellow vine — and others had bright berries, including a shiny purple berry that I could swear was a color not in nature’s palette — but nature is full of surprises. Pansies were in bloom on the ground level. There were, of course, NO weeds. John and I are amateur control freaks, compared to the Swiss.

Church bells rang, the city got quieter and quieter, and Joan and I delighted in our time together and our friendship. She sails in and out of fasts as if nothing has changed at all. I have a hard time on the second and third days (I always get a migraine), and then I feel better every day thereafter, with more and more energy. I know at some point that energy would run out, but I’ve never fasted that long.

I flew home on Christmas day, which must be the most laid-back day of the year in the airline industry. I have never seen fewer people in either Kloten in Zurich or Logan in Boston, except for the domestic terminal of Kloten, where piles of people were on their way to ski slopes.

So I’m home and the electricity hasn’t gone off and it’s time to check the woodstoves and go to bed. It’s time to break the fast and the quiet, too, because this week I’ve got to plan my winter term course, clear piles of paper off my desk, order the seeds, do my year-end accounting, and get going on Chapter 15 of my textbook.

Happy New Year to you all. May it be the turning year, toward a global transformation to sustainability, compassion, justice, and peace.

Love,

Dana

P.S. I’ve gone back to a 12-point Palatino font for those of you who have asked for larger type!