Dear Folks, Around here March is the poopiest month of the year, Mud Month, a month of deceptions, when the sun rises earlier and sets later but is always covered with storm clouds, when the animals’ water buckets no longer freeze over, except for occasional nights when the temperature suddenly dips back down to zero and they freeze solid.  March wouldn’t seem so bad if it came in December, but somehow after the darkness of winter my defenses against gray, mud, and cold are weakened.  March to me is a month of depression.

Just to make things perfectly awful, I have lost one of my beautiful yearling sheep, because of a sequence of stupid mistakes.

All winter on nice days I would let Aida and Pamina out of their stall to run around in the snow.  They loved it.  They got some exercise and sun, and though the Whybrows have no sheep fence, they never strayed.  Mostly they would hang around with Freckles the horse.  The duck would go with them.  I’d look out the window and watch the funny company, a big white horse, two round bouncy brown sheep, and a loudmouth duck, basking in the winter sun together.

What I didn’t notice was that as the snow slowly disappeared, the sheep were less and less naturally confined.  They never went anywhere — sheep are creatures of habit and they stuck close to Freckles.  But if a dog came or something scared them, they could have bolted, which, I guess, is what happened.

I came home one night and there were no sheep, also no duck.  I heard the duck quacking over at Foundation Farm, where she (and I and the sheep) used to live.  It was late and dark, I had a headache, and I couldn’t figure out immediately how to herd them all home.  So I told myself I’d get them in the morning.  (Mistake #2)

In the morning I found the wanderers down by the Foundation Farm chicken house, and they meekly followed me home.  They wouldn’t eat anything and I thought, oh oh, I hope there weren’t any open grain sacks in that chicken house.  But I didn’t go to see, and I didn’t start right then and there treating the sheep for bloat.  (Mistake #3)

By the next evening Pamina was wobbling and Aida was down, and it was obvious they must have had a pig-out on chicken grain.  It can be fatal for sheep to gorge on a new, rich feed, because the bacteria in their four stomachs can’t handle the load, it gets stuck, and there’s no way to regurgitate.  I got some vegetable oil down their throats and went to bed hoping they wouldn’t die in the night.  They didn’t.  In the morning the vet came and we started the full treatment.  More vegetable oil, injections of Combiotic and Banamine, drenches of Carmelax, which is awful wintergreen-smelling pink stuff, the sheeply equivalent of Pepto-Bismol.  Aida could hardly hold up her head, Pamina was still on her feet and looked fairly good.  So we directed most of our attention to Aida.  (Mistake #4)

For three days I poured pink stuff down Aida’s throat and tried to get Pamina to eat.  Neither of them got any better or any worse.  Every time I went up to the barn I expected to find Pamina down and Aida dead.  Instead, on the fourth morning, I found Aida down and Pamina dead.  I could hardly believe my eyes.  Until that moment my mental model of sheep health had been: any sheep that’s down is likely to die, any sheep on her feet is sure to live.  Sometimes I think that sheep exist just to shatter my mental models.

Aida gamely tried and failed to get to her feet for nearly two weeks.  I went out several times a day to bring her water and salt, Carmelax and Combiotic.  Jadene the vet finally thought of giving her a paste of Lactobacillus acidophilus to repopulate her gut, and that seemed to help.  She started picking at some hay.  Every day her attempts to stand were a little stronger.  She is a tough little sheep with a lot of determination, and we had some determination too.  Suzanne came over and gave her a massage and considered becoming an acupuncturist for animals.

After two weeks Aida got up and stayed up.  When she gets a little more strength, I’ll take her back to the Foundation Farm flock where her mother and sisters are.

This winter has been long, dark, and sad for me, partly because winters around here are long and dark; partly because of the still-incomplete sadness of leaving the farm; partly, I suppose, because sitting alone with a word-processor every day makes time pass introspectively and slowly.  Many days I have felt like I was falling apart, having left everything I’ve built and loved, having lost all sense of direction, having, for the first time in my life, lost track of who I am.  None of the internal conversations I normally have (everyone has such conversations, I suppose) saying I’m this and not that, strong here and weak there, none of it made sense any more.

I didn’t really feel unhappy, just lifeless, without energy, unable to make any decisions, and there were important decisions to make.  I was plenty busy — there’s so much momentum in my life that I don’t have to do a thing to stay busy, stuff just comes at me.  But I was reacting to that stuff, not shaping it.  Here in the house of Peter Whybrow, one of the world’s experts on wintertime depression, and of Ruth Whybrow, a practicing clinical therapist, I was going through a classic depression.

In January Dennis suggested that we go together to a therapist to work out some of the issues that were still unsettled from our marriage and to find a better way to go on working together — our lives and commitments are so interconnected that we will always be working together.  His request was music to my ears, something I have wanted to do for a long, long time.  Ruth recommended a good therapist and we went a few times.  I found it very difficult, and very helpful.  It started some wonderful, healing conversations between Dennis and me.

Dennis got impatient with the process, or maybe he felt complete with it; anyway, he decided to stop, and I, to my surprise, kept going.  I had to overcome a lot of good old Middle-Western considerations — only really crazy people go to therapists, why should you spend good money just to get someone to listen to your troubles, you should be strong enough to pull out of this yourself, it’s not that big a deal to leave your husband, your job, and your farm, you decided to do it so why aren’t you happy now, think of all the real troubles in the world, come on, now, just cheer up for Pete’s sake.  You know how it goes.  But having started on the therapy path, I wanted to go farther and learn more, and I was not having much success cheering up by myself.  The time has come, I said, to create a whole new life, and this is one step that might help.

So this month I have been working with a therapist.  I’m finding it interesting, frustrating, revealing, sometimes painful.  Since I don’t have either time or money to waste dillydallying around, I’ve been plunging into all the great issues of life, money, sex, relationships, values, identity, self-worth, food.  Food?  A great issue?  Well, it is for me, maybe the greatest one.  It took only two sessions before the therapist said, “You know, you might be a compulsive overeater.  You have thought all your life that you were sometimes in control of your diet and sometimes not, but the truth is you never were.  When times were good your weight went down.  When they were bad it went up.  You eat for comfort, not for nourishment.  Food controls you, you don’t control it.”

It was one of those moments when you can only think, “Bingo!  I have finally heard the truth.”  A truth that had never occurred to me before.  The minute I knew I was going to get a divorce I started gaining weight, and I have been furious with myself for not doing something about it.  Being furious has not helped at all.  Nothing has helped.  On that subject I am helpless.  Just like, precisely like, an alcoholic.  It’s a disease, not a matter of self-control, and when I look back, I can see that I’ve had it ever since I can remember.

The therapist told me about Overeaters Anonymous, which I had never heard of.  It’s an offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous, uses the same techniques and the same literature.  If you go, you’ll be amazed, he said.  The people you find there won’t be fat.  They will mostly be women.  They’ll be intelligent, capable people, used to being in charge of their lives in every way, except food.  The hardest thing for them to admit is that they’re not in control.  But admitting it is the first thing they have to do.

I had no trouble admitting it, so I went to a meeting the very next night.  I was amazed to find OA chapters all over this rural valley; they are everywhere and I never knew it.  I can go to three meetings a day somewhere around here if I want to.  (Makes me wonder how many AA meetings there are).  After just a few meetings, I am very impressed.  The thing is so simple, just mutual help where self-help is impossible, just human sharing and support, openness and anonymity.  No power trips, no money trips (it’s free), no hoopla, no advertising, not even many rules, everything based on voluntarism, trust and love.  I feel like I’ve come home.  When I told Dennis about it, he said, “that’s one of the things Americans really do a great job of — local, unpretentious, voluntary, mutual support.”

I suspect I will be telling you more about OA later, as I learn more.  I debated mentioning it here at all — I may be violating an OA rule about disclosure; I don’t find it easy to say publicly, “I am a compulsive overeater”; and I wonder why anyone should be interested in these gory details of my inner life.  But this is a letter to my friends about my life, and that’s what going on in my life this month.  I guess if you weren’t interested, you wouldn’t be subscribing.

Suzanne has returned to Foundation Farm after two months in India, relaxed and tan but with a bad flu.  Her work in Auroville has been going brilliantly.  After talking about it for years, she has finally applied to acupuncture school, which may mean that she will leave the farm and spend full time in Boston, at least until she becomes a licensed acupuncturist.

John Zimmer has quit trying to make a living as a carpenter for awhile, and has decided to make some money.  He has become a crack salesman for Northern Energy Homes, a local company that provides designs and kits for super-energy-efficient houses.  He is wearing ties these days and driving a brand-new white Volkswagen, and if you know him, you know that’s an amazing transformation in his life.

Binky Long is still living at Foundation Farm and has a good job with Jake Guest, a local produce farmer.  Right now she’s starting up millions of seedlings in his greenhouse.  Her sister and brother-in-law are coming here and she’s looking for a place to live that can house them all — close to us, we hope.

Dennis has received a Fullbright fellowship that will allow him to spend next fall at Moscow State University with Dmitry.  Dmitry is becoming a good vegetarian cook; he is jogging every day with Dennis and Basil; all three of them are looking great.  Dmitry has just finished a big chunk of his thesis (in Cyrillic on the Macintosh).  He says he’ll take a breather now to spend more time working with Dennis and enjoying America.

I used to joke that Foundation Farm should be called Transition Farm, because everyone was in a permanent state of transition, trying to find their way to Something Else.  It was the stuckness of those transitions that made me leave.  And it seems that slowly, for all of us, the stuckness is dissolving.  Some day maybe we’ll call the place Transformation Farm.

Now that I think about it, this depressing month is actually perfect, for March.  We’ve had a long string of day thaws and night freezes, which are giving us the most prolific maple run in years.  The snow is going off very gradually, so we will not have a sudden melt-off and flood.  On the south-sloping bank by the house the snowdrops are in bloom and the bulbs Ruth and I planted last fall are poking up.  In the evening sky, when I go to do chores, Venus and Jupiter are doing a magnificent slow dance with the stars and sometimes with a crescent moon.  Every clear night I stop to look at them, and for some reason I take strength from their amazing, cold brilliance.  Maybe never again in my lifetime will they be in that spectacular conjunction.  Why are they so, just now, in this particular, wonderful, awful March?

I will be away April 1-26, on a trip to Singapore, Thailand, Kenya, Tanzania, Germany, and Switzerland, working with various members of the Balaton Group.  It will be the first time ever

Love, Dana