Dear Folks, There are two times of year here that so overwhelm the senses and emotions that they are simply indescribable. They are the times of rapid change and natural glory, the beginning of October and the middle of May.
A month ago when I last wrote you there was a little green on the pastures and the daffodils were in bloom, but it was still a basically brown world with frequent frosts. Not a lot of life was stirring — there were new lambs and the peepers were singing down at the pond, but there were no insects apparent, the birds were still in the process of arriving, and even the people were only beginning to stir from their winter hibernation.
Now the whole place is green and blooming and throbbing with life. I always say that the leaves come out on the trees here precisely on May 9. Of course they come out over a long period, but there is a moment of explosion when one day they’re just a bit of puny lacy stuff on the ends of the branches and the next day they dominate the landscape. That day actually occurred on May 10 this year. Not only did the whole Valley change color, but every view in every direction changed, as the leaves closed in vistas and directed attention to nearer things. Our brook and pond began to drop on that day; the water flow of the Valley shifted away from runoff and into the enormous sucking updraft of transpiration from all those trillions of hard-working leaves.
The apple trees are in bloom. The dandelions are making all the pastures gaudy yellow. The lilacs are perfuming the yards. The rock gardens are in their glory — pink creeping phlox and purple aubrieta and blue forget-me-not and brilliant Alyssum saxatile, the basket-of-gold. There are violets all over. The lilies-of-the-valley are just opening. The woods are full of red trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit and wild ginger.
I’ve just begun to hear the songs of the last birds to arrive, my favorites, the invisible thrushes and the flashy orioles. Their songs are associated in my mind with the enormous pleasure of working in my garden downhill from the house at Foundation Farm, which is where I spent all day yesterday. The orioles’ liquid warble goes on all day, and the males flit around in the trees near the garden so I can get a good view of them. A month from now they’ll be tending babies and I’ll neither see or hear them. But in May they’re incurable show-offs. I never see the thrushes, but I hear them in the morning and the evening, and on cloudy days even in the middle of the day. There’s the wood thrush’s “ee-o-lay” and the magical, mystical pan-pipe of the veery. They are the special music of that garden. Down in the brook garden the music is different — the sweet twitter of goldfinch and the cadenzas of six or eight different kinds of warblers.
The other songs of May Saturdays are people-sounds. Everyone in Plainfield seems to be outdoors. Kids shout at each other as they ride by on their bikes. Motor sounds are continuous, many of them coming from our own farm. Yesterday Suzanne and I were using the rototiller, Suzanne was using the lawnmower, Dennis was running his brush-zapper, which sounds like a chainsaw, and, loudest of all, Dennis spent most of the day happily on his Kubota tractor, cleaning the sheep manure out of the barn with the front-end loader and clearing up brushpiles with the chipper. It’s a wonder I could hear any birds at all, but my memory of the day is more the sound of birds than of motors.
The bugs are out too, of course. The blossoming trees are full of bees, the fleabeetles have decimated my first planting of radishes. I cleared a lot of tent caterpillars out of the apple trees yesterday. It’s impossible to work in the gardens without Cutter’s Lotion to keep off the blackflies. When I first moved here I couldn’t imagine how anyone could survive the blackflies of May. I didn’t understand that people’s whole lives simply adjust to incontestable realities like blackflies. You try not to go out on warm, still, muggy days. You can be out as long as you like when there’s a stiff breeze. Any time you go out, you keep moving. If you absolutely can’t keep moving — if you’re trout fishing, for instance, or painstakingly transplanting little onion seedlings as I was yesterday, you get out the Cutter’s. God bless Mr. Cutter, whoever he is. A month from now the blackflies will be gone and we’ll be into deerflies and mosquitoes.
We’re moving into high planting gear as the probability of a last killing frost decreases (we have to be wary of that possibility until well into June). All the early things are in — peas, spinach, onions, carrots, beets, parsnips, leeks, chard, lettuce, radish — and the potatoes are in, and Suzanne started putting in corn yesterday. Next weekend we’ll plant the frost-sensitive seeds, the beans and cucurbits and numerous flowers, and the weekend after that the frost-sensitive started plants, the tomatoes and peppers. Then planting time will shade off into weeding time.
It’s been an eventful month in our little community. A lot of decisions that have been stuck and unmade for a long time have suddenly gotten unstuck. Things are moving as fast in our lives as they are moving in the unfolding spring outdoors.
Dennis has just accepted an offer to become the Director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. That’s on the seacoast at the other side of the state, about a two-hour drive from here. He is thinking of starting in September and postponing his Fulbright to Moscow until the spring (a much nicer time to be in Russia anyway). It’s a wonderful post for him, at a bigger university, with a bigger budget, with more authority, and with the opportunity to create a unique center for applied research of the sort he never could have had at Dartmouth. His decision resolves a major period of stuckness in his own life, and it puts the rest of us into motion too.
Suzanne has been offered the job of Director of the Merriam Hill Center, which is where she’s been working for several years. I suspect she’ll take it; it lets her consolidate the learning programs at Auroville in India that she’s devoted to — and it’s the logical next step in her own growing administrative ability. It would mean she would work full time in Boston instead of only part time as she has been doing.
It looks as if I will be spending my time over the next two years working with WGBH-TV in Boston on the State of the World telecourse. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that in this newsletter before — it’s a ten-part TV series and an accompanying textbook and study guide on environmental science, with a strong slant toward seeing systems whole and managing them sustainably. I will be responsible for the textbook, and for working with Jim Hornig and Colin High at Dartmouth on the study guide, and I’ll be an advisor to the television producers. This is a project that has been in fundraising and preparation stage for a long time, and it seems to be coming together at last, with an excellent, congenial team of people, all of whom have tremendous dedication to making this a powerful set of learning tools. It’s getting exciting!
What does all this mean for the farm, the column, the Balaton Group, Dennis’s consulting company, etc.? Well, we’re still trying to figure that out. I will probably move back to the farm in September and go to Boston for a day or two every two weeks. Dennis will move to Durham and Suzanne to Boston, and the farm will become a retreat for them. The column will certainly keep going, though I’ve already noticed my energy shifting toward the textbook rather than all the work I used to put into selling the column and keeping editors happy. This is the moment when a syndicate had better come into my life and take over that job. Dennis is thinking of opening a branch of the consulting company down in Durham. The operating center for the Balaton Group could be there, or I may continue to operate it from here, with Dennis creating a new resource policy center there which would be a Balaton Group member. I will certainly need help running the farm, and that means reconstituting a farm family with some real farming competence.
This is one of those times when you have to blindly commit yourself, push forward, and trust that the universe will provide! The new center in Durham WILL be brilliant, Merriam Hill WILL be better organized than ever, the TV series WILL be great, the farm WILL flourish, the column WILL get into the newspapers — somehow. I have a deep sense of rightness about all these moves, though, as usual, I have no sense of the HOW of them, how they will all work. When I look at them objectively, I feel overwhelmed. We’re all stepping up our responsibilities and stretching ourselves, and we already felt pretty stretched. Have we gone over the limit into pure insane overcommitment? Can we actually pull it off?
The thing that pushed me out of stuckness and into these commitments was the realization that I often hesitate about whether I can pull off whatever I really want to do. I don’t really go for it, in fear that I can’t pull it off. Somehow recently I’ve had the strength to be more in touch with my commitment and less in touch with my fear. Not that the fear isn’t there. “You can’t possibly handle all that. You’ll frazzle. Draw back. Protect yourself,” I say to me. “Shut up and get to work, you’re doing exactly what you love,” me says back to I. The farm, the column, the Balaton Group, the TV project are all important, and they fit together and enhance each other. My evolving, loving, difficult partnership with Dennis and Suzanne, my sense of community with all who live on both farms, they are important too and need work, and that work, too, is part of the whole picture. God knows how we are all going to handle the flow of the next few months as everything gets resettled — but then I guess God is the only one who has to know. It will be revealed to the rest of us as we live it.
It’s gray and rainy now, which is just what my newly-transplanted seedlings need. A blackfly bite is itching on my ankle. Overeaters Anonymous seems to have cured my sugar addiction and I’m still slowly losing weight, and feeling much, much healthier. Just outside the window by my computer a pair of starlings have a staging area where they land with strands of hay they’ve stolen from Freckles the horse, and which they are putting into a nest. Arlyn the cat sits on my stack of printer paper (recycled, from Earthcare paper) and watches them with her tail flicking. Life is pretty good when, as they say in OA, you just take it one day at a time.
Love, Dana
