Dear Folks, 7 PM, IT’S A BOY!

The first lamb of 1991 was born half an hour ago, on Good Friday evening, just at dinnertime, on a sweet, mild night that is supposed to turn to a howling snowstorm by morning.  By then the lamb will be dry and warm.

It’s exactly 150 days since we turned Ferdinand the ram in with the ewes — evidently he didn’t waste a minute.  Just yesterday we set up the lamb watch — last one to bed (usually Sylvia) check the barn; first one up (Stephanie on her workdays, Don on fishing days, me otherwise) check the barn; anyone waking up in the night check the barn; everyone all day check the barn.

Tonight when I came home from work I saw Rosemary way back in the barn, pawing the hay, looking that unmistakable hangdog way.  “We’re going to have a lamb tonight,” I said and went in to have a cup of tea.  My rule is never to interfere with a lambing until I’ve taken time to have a cup of tea, find a clean lambing towel, get the molasses ready (for the warm molasses water the ewe gets to drink when it’s all over).  That gives the ewe time to do the job herself, if all is well.

By the time I got back out there Rosemary was down and straining.  Stephanie was just serving dinner, so I sent everyone back in to eat and climbed up to the hayloft to watch — it’s the best place to see without being seen, so the ewe doesn’t get nervous.  Within 15 minutes out he came with a sploosh, black as night, all wobbly legs, a big strong fellow.  His mother is white, his father is black.  That’s how sheep genetics go — unpredictably.

I let Rosemary lick him for awhile and fall in love with him.  This is her second lambing — last year as a yearling she surprised us with a funny gray-nosed white ewe, whom we kept and named Camomile, and who may be having her own lamb this year.  (We can’t be sure of that — yearlings don’t always breed.)  When I was sure the bond had been made I scooped the lamb up in a towel, helped dry him off a little, and slowly coaxed Rosie to follow us into a stall, where there’s clean hay for them to bed on, lights so we can watch them, and protection from the storm.  The human family came out to admire the little guy’s first steps, which came within half an hour.  In an hour I’ll go out to see if another lamb has come — he’s big enough to be a single, but Rosie’s round enough to be carrying a twin.

I love it!  Lambing, though it can be sometimes terrifying and sometimes sad, is the best thing that happens all year!

We’re in flat-out mud season, a doozy this year, because we had little snow, which means the ground froze deep, which means the water sits on the surface, freezing at night, thawing in the day, and making mud.  It’s been mud since mid-February this year.  And it’s been gray and stormy all March.  This season gets everyone’s spirits down, much more than the cold winter, because of the wild ups and downs, I suppose, and the mud, and the gray.  Thank goodness for lambs and maple syrup and returning robins.  We need signs of cheer.

My spirits aren’t down, though.  My teaching term is over, and I’ve been traveling, on a sort of vacation that has refreshed and awakened me.

March 29, 1991

5 AM,

IT’S A GIRL AND A GIRL!! AND A GIRL!

Karel just came to wake me up and say that Dahlia had produced twins and Dot was down.  By the time I got outside Sylvia, Don, Karel, and Stephanie were there, and Dahlia was already in her stall drinking her molasses water.  She has two beautiful ewe lambs, one white, one black (she is black).  They must have been born in the night; they were already up and nursing.  Thank goodness it has not started snowing yet or even turned cold.  Weather forecasters don’t do very well this time of year in New England.

Meanwhile Dot was grunting and grumbling and I didn’t like the looks of her, so I broke my rule about the cup of tea and asked Sylvia to help me right away.  I found what I feared, a head out (white; Dot is black) and no legs.  That’s one of the toughest malpresentations.  Usually by the time I find it the lamb is dead.  This one was struggling to breathe, though, so there was hope, if we could get it out fast.  I groped in Dot’s capacious birth canal (this is her twelfth lambing) without success, but Sylvia found one little leg, which was all we needed.  With a leg and a head I could pull the baby out.

Dot refused to come into the barn with the lamb.  She’s done it 11 times before, but I think she has rheumatism and couldn’t get up the step.  So I left them in the three-sided outside shed.  Poor old Dot, this is her last lamb.  I meant to get rid of her last year, she’s so old, but I couldn’t do it.  She’s the queen of the flock, with the nicest fleece, the greatest wisdom, and a lambing record studded with twins (one of whom, Dahlia, just twinned).  This year, though I have to do it and not put her through another lambing.

Rosemary did not have another lamb last night.  We let her and her little guy out of the stall just now, to make room in the maternity ward.

So here we are, Saturday dawn.  I can go back to bed or go on writing.  Adrenalin’s up; I guess I’ll go on writing.

*  *  *  *  *

I started my journey on my birthday, the 13th, with a trip to San Francisco, stopping for two days to see my mother in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.  I hadn’t seen her since she came out here exactly a year ago to nurse me through my hysterectomy, so it was a joyous reunion.  She and my stepfather Karl and my uncle Edward took me out for a birthday dinner.  They all live in Go Ye Village, a retirement community, founded by missionaries, though my mother would have me assure you that she is no missionary and that she refuses to pray over the popcorn.

I knew nothing of such communities until my folks moved into one, and I have to say, I’m impressed.  Mom and Karl live in a duplex, a good-sized apartment with a garden — as essential for my Mom’s health as it would be for mine.  She has hauled out rocks and filled up her space with peas and pansies, dogwood and strawberries, and Karl has added his bird feeders.  She also has a vegetable patch in the big community garden.  And none of that is enough for her, so she’s started in gardening the empty lot next door.  (Those of you who have laughed at my own expansionary garden tendency now can see where I got it.)  She cleared the lot by burning the weeds, and the fire got away from her in the Oklahoma wind and burned up the neighbor’s lawn.  By the time the firemen got there, Mom had put the fire out.  That little story tells you a lot about my Mom, who I think is the funniest and most resourceful person on earth.

Go Ye Village has a variety of accommodations, including smaller apartments in a big main building, where there is a cafeteria and meetings rooms and a chapel and a medical center.  The place is buzzing with life.  Mom took me to visit her favorite neighbors, to afternoon coffee at the cafeteria, to a sick friend in the med center.  I missed out on the bridge game and the bell-ringing session and the mens’ breakfast with a local speaker.  We visited some of the Indian places in Tahlequah, which is the capital of the Cherokee nation — I hope to see more of the Cherokees next time I come.  The daffodils were in bloom and there were doves and bluebirds at Karl’s feeders.  It was a wonderful break from a winter of teaching and writing!

*  *  *  *  *

While I was writing the paragraphs above, I was making a classic mistake in the lambing business — ASSUMING.  I was assuming that old Dot could produce no more than one lamb.  I just went out to check on her and found the second one, another white eweling, perfectly formed, dead, still neatly wrapped in its amniotic sac.  Dot didn’t have the strength to lick it free so it could take a breath, and I wasn’t out there to help.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  I’m kind of glad that she doesn’t have two to feed, but that doesn’t make my mistake forgiveable.  Darn it!  Nearly all the trouble I get into in the world comes from ASSUMING.

*  *  *  *  *

In the San Francisco airport I met a friend, Steve Viederman of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and we drove to Commonweal in Bolinas.  Spectacular drive over the Golden Gate bridge and over Mt. Tamalpais (because the coast road is still closed from the earthquake, they tell me).  California always looks so much like a movie set I can never believe it’s real, especially after mud season in New Hampshire.  Eucalyptuses can’t be living trees.  The Pacific Ocean must be a painted backdrop.  The sun doesn’t really shine like that!

I’d better back up and tell you about Commonweal.  Last fall I got a call from a reader of this newsletter who lives in California, who was being treated for cancer, and who wanted to talk about alternative treatments.  I told her what I know, which isn’t much, and asked her tell me about places she learned of on the West Coast.  A week or two later she sent me materials about Commonweal.  I was thrilled by them.  The director, a Dr. (Ph.D., not M.D.) Michael Lerner, was the second person I had found, after Deepak Chopra, who writes about cancer treatment the way I have come to see it — with great respect for both the medical and the alternative therapies and a burning desire to help cancer patients take advantage of both.  Commonweal runs a week-long retreat to supply cancer patients the things that medicine neglects — meditation, yoga, deep psychological support, good veggie cooking, walks by the sea, hugs, tears, empowerment, and a wealth of unbiased information to help people make informed decisions about their therapies and their lives.

Wow! I thought, as I read the Commonweal literature one November morning.  I have to find some way to get to San Francisco to meet this Michael Lerner!

That evening at dinnertime the phone rang, Stephanie answered it, turned to me, and said, “Dana, it’s Michael Lerner.”

He was calling to invite me to a conference at Commonweal, not on cancer, but on a global sustainable future.  He already uses Commonweal as a place for healing disturbed young people and cancer patients; now he also wants to use it as a place to heal the earth.

I accepted his invitation of course.  Everything about cancer in my life is sent to me directly by a Higher Power.   I never question it, I just follow the path.  It’s clear to me that the path is about both inner and outer healing, and Michael Lerner’s work is about that too.  So that’s why I was driving over Mt. Tamalpais with Steve Viederman, who is another powerful partner on the path.

Commonweal sits on bluffs above the Pacific Ocean; it’s partly pine forest and partly windswept heath where wild irises bloom.  Part of it is an “aerial farm,” a place where RCA planted aerials for ship-to-shore radio communications.  Michael Lerner talked RCA into giving him a 50-year lease on the place and permission to fix up the abandoned buildings, and now it serves his healing purposes.  He has an amazing staff of yoga instructors, psychologists, doctors, cooks, artists, gardeners, who make Commonweal a welcoming community to a traveler from New England’s mud season.

The conference brought together what I can only describe as Michael’s eclectic circle of friends and acquaintances, each a remarkable person working in a unique way to make the world better.  To illustrate their caliber with the ones I already knew, they included: Bill Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project; Don Michael, whom I’ve known and loved since the early Club of Rome days; Michael Clark, the president of Friends of the Earth; Dan Deudney, a geopolitical scientist who cycled through the Senate energy committee and Worldwatch Institute before coming to rest at Princeton; and Conn Nugent, whom I first met at New Alchemy Institute.  It was an intellectual and talkative bunch, weighted more toward international politics and toward New Age spirituality than most conferences I go to.  That was a difficult combination — the head people didn’t always appreciate the heart people and vice versa — but I loved the mix.  I thought it represented just what the world needs, and Michael did a brilliant job of holding together and honoring both kinds of human skills.

It was the kind of conference I like most, meaning one I didn’t have to run.  I had no responsibility other than to be there and enjoy the remarkable people, the windy beach, the pine cones and mushrooms in the forest, and the library on cancer Commonweal has put together.  I felt the way I have felt at New Alchemy and Meadowcreek and Rocky Mountain Institute, that this is one of the transforming places on the planet, a place that is home to me, a place I will watch and support and come to, not only because I may be able to serve it, but also because it can center and heal me.

It’s beyond my powers to summarize the discussion, and I don’t know what will come out of the meeting, beyond new and renewed relationships among the “sustainability community,” which is, to my thinking, a sufficient result to come out of any conference.  I hope it will help Michael Lerner see clearly where he fits in the community and what his special contribution will be.  Someday, when I’m working on my cancer book, or just because I need it, I’ll go back to Commonweal and either observe or take part in their week-long cancer workshop.  If any of you happen to be interested, Michael’s wife Sharl has made a beautiful half-hour tape about the cancer workshop, and there’s also plenty of written material (available from Commonweal, P.O. Box 316, Bolinas CA 94924, 415-868-0970).  I brought the tape and other materials home to the Cancer Resource Center we’re setting up at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health Center.

Easter Sunday

No new action in the barn, all mothers and babies doing well.  When I went out to check at 1:30 AM the four woolly blimps who are still ladies-in-waiting were spread out patiently under a full moon, chewing their cuds, otherwise motionless, like immense rocks, listening to the mysteries within them.

Heather found an Easter basket with a fuzzy stuffed duckling in it and chocolate eggs and a chocolate bunny and a sparkly new bracelet.  The chocolate was the part she was most interested in.  Later she found Easter eggs hidden all over the front lawn.  Basil found one of them before she did and carried it around in his soft bird-dog mouth without hurting it at all.  Stephanie and Karel have invited Stephanie’s parents to come for Easter dinner.  They’ll cook a ham and I’ll add butter-fried parsnips, which we are just beginning to dig from the garden as the soil thaws.

It’s a beautiful sunny day.  The snowstorm forecast for yesterday came mid-morning, turned the ground white, stopped, and within an hour the white was gone.  By afternoon it was so beautiful that I was out climbing the apple trees, swaying in the breeze, doing a good job of pruning for a change.  We can still see plenty of snow on Mount Ascutney.

I haven’t told you that Sylvia has A HORSE again!  Well, actually he’s Jenny Kemeny’s horse, a huge beautiful creature named Beau Geste, who was a behavioral problem at the stable where Jenny had been keeping him.  Sylvia happens to be especially fond of horses that are behavioral problems.  So Jenny moved Beau Geste to Ruth’s barn, and Sylvia is calmly reasoning with him and taking him out on gentle rides through the spring-wakening countryside.  Both Sylvia and Beau seem to be delighted by this arrangement.

*  *  *  *  *

The weekend after the Commonweal meeting I was at another one, this time within driving distance, in Essex Massachusetts, put on by the Harvard Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age.  Other than Steve Viederman and I there was no overlap in participants between the two conferences, except that their subjects were virtually the same, namely: what the heck can we do to make a sustainable, just world?

The people at the Essex meeting were inclined to look for the answer to that question inside the human mind.  Why do we seek to meet our urgent nonmaterial needs with more STUFF instead of more love, more community, more service, more spirituality?  Why do we so easily hand over our power to others, and to unvirtuous others?  How can we answer the fears and doubts within us, console ourselves for our losses, and express our curiosity, our ingeniousness, and our joy in life without trashing the planet in the process?

Well of course I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that they’re the important questions, and that all the Clean Air Acts and energy policies in the world won’t help, if we don’t get to the bottom, and to the top, of our cravings and strengths.  We have to create a society that draws upon the best in us, not the worst.  It was refreshing to talk honestly for a weekend about these central matters with powerful, committed people.

As at Commonweal, I made reconnections with some folks and new connections with others, and by the end of the weekend they all seemed like friends.  As at Commonweal there was an appreciation of and also a tension between the inner and the outer work, the active and the contemplative.  There were calls for outrage, drama, demonstration, organization, for strong use of the media and the political process.  Also calls for retreat, support, networking, and the creation of small practice places away from the centers of power.  Mainly — here’s the tricky part — calls for balance between the action and the contemplation, the yang and the yin.  I came to appreciate my yin side a little more; like everyone else in this society, I tend to devalue it and think of the yang in me as the useful part.

Well, there’s much more to tell you, but this letter’s already far too long.  After that little vacation and two inspiring conferences I’m back to work with renewed energy.  Last week I burrowed back into my textbook again.  I had fun trying to clarify the types of air pollution and the trials of Los Angeles.  Next week I start on the revision of Limits to Growth.

For those of you waiting for The Global Citizen, you can order it from your bookstore now, but it looks like its official release is going to be delayed until mid-May, in order to allow a publicity campaign to be designed.

We’ll all have to wait a little longer to find out what’s coming from the four, maybe five, expectant ewes still out in the barnyard!

Love, Dana