Dear Folks,

It’s a classic November day, veering between bright sunshine and snow squalls so thick I can hardly see the barn. We’re at that critical point where the balance between freezing and thawing is shifting definitively toward freezing. Snow dusts the ground, it melts when the sun hits it, but then more falls and it stays. The pond in the pasture seizes up more every night and liquifies less during the day. I’ve been waiting for the moment when I have to bring the geese up to the barnyard because the night ice can support a fox. (The geese sleep on an island, which keeps them safe from predators — as long as the predators can’t get to the island.)

Yesterday I decided it was time to move the geese. And this morning Sylvia decided it was time to move her horse Beebie up to her new place in South Royalton — so now we can call the Spains’ move complete. Where Sylvia’s horse is, her heart is.

The Spains have been fading away gradually over several weeks, shifting more and more of their time and stuff over to South Royalton. The gradualness has made the transition gentle. Even with Beebie gone, Sylvia and Don have reasons to pop back here — they haven’t taken their bicycles yet, and they’ve still got roosters to slaughter. But, just as the ice is beginning to be more with us than not, Sylvia, Heather, and Don are now more not with us than with.

The house is very quiet. And The Great Foundation Farm Cleanup has begun!

We didn’t need to wait for the Spains to move out to clean the place up, of course. But whenever one element of a human community changes, everybody else wakes up, because nothing can be done habitually any more. Furthermore, I have a need to turn lemons (the loss of the Spains) into lemonade (improvements will be easier during this low-population window on the farm). So John and I are turning the place upside down, and we’re having a wonderful time at it.

I started systematically last Saturday at the north wall of the kitchen. After a full day of work I had only got halfway through the kitchen — I hit some prime regions of deep unconsciousness, like the storage place below the sink where salad oil spills had mixed with molasses spills. At this rate, the cleanup is going to take all winter, but I don’t mind if it does. With “Saturday Afternoon at the Opera” playing on the radio, with soup bubbling on the woodstove, with snow squalls blowing outside, I’m delighted to be creating order in this big old house. And I have the inner pride of being one of the few people on earth who has a squeaky-clean space under her sink!

Yesterday, on the second Saturday of Cleanup, I decided to postpone the kitchen and to hit the high spots of disorder that were bugging me most — especially the ones outdoors, since any day now the ground will disappear until April. There ensued one of those farm days where One Thing Leads to Another.

First I decided to bring up the geese. I lured them out of the pasture with a grain bucket and marched them up Daniels Road, keeping them in line with a bamboo pole swung first to one side of the gackling, honking column, and then to the other. Cars piled up, creeping along at goose-pace behind the four huge, white, waddling, grumbling birds and me with my pole. One woman leaned out of her station wagon window and said, “I didn’t know you could herd them like that!”

When I got the geese to the barn, I decided I couldn’t put them in such a messy place. The roofers last summer had left piles of broken shingles, and there were cobwebs and dust and sheepshit and old hay to sweep away. So I swept out, and then I decided to get some hay to make a comfy nest for the geese and to have clean bedding ready for lambing come spring.

I took off with my big garden cart to neighbor Ruth’s barn, where Sylvia had left some broken bales of horse hay. I wheeled three bales to the barn, and then noticed that the boards closing in the goose stall were loose. The sheep could nose in and eat the bedding hay. By the time I got a hammer and nails and returned to fix the boards, the sheep were already nosing in.

I fixed the stall and then it occurred to me that the strawberries weren’t mulched yet. So I went up to Ruth’s barn for another load and scattered it over the big new planting of strawberries I put in last spring. Are we ever going to have berries next year!

While I was in the garden I discovered a double row of carrots I had missed while I was digging the weekend before. So I dug them up and put them in the root cellar — good thing I saw them, because a week from now the soil will probably be frozen.

As I wheeled the cart past the perennial garden, the irises and the old-fashioned roses called out to me and said they would winter better with a protective mulch. So I made another trip to the barn and brought hay to tuck in around the flowers.

While I was doing that, I heard honking down on Daniels Road. The geese had taken advantage of the open gate while I was moving hay in and waddled back down to the pasture! I grabbed my bamboo pole, ran down, and arrived just as our town cop Gordon pulled over in his cruiser, which the geese immediately attacked, hissing and gronking. (Too bad Sylvia isn’t here to give you a picture of that!) Gordon, who knows every animal in town and isn’t phased by any of them, was fumbling to open the pasture gate and let the geese back to the pond. I waved him off, lined up the gang, and marched them back uphill one more time.

Meanwhile John was loading random pieces of scrap metal and old wire and fencing into the truck, to take to the metal recycler at the dump. Then he started fixing the removable sidewalls of the truck, which were beat up and broken, to get ready for me to truck 11 sheep out of here tomorrow — 8 lambs to Sharon Beef, the local slaughterhouse, and one cull ewe and two underweight lambs to the Thetford Auction. When that’s done, we’ll be down to our winter breeding flock and we’ll have everyone all cozy up in the barn. No more daily trips to the ram lambs in the pasture. No more concern about the pond, except whether it’s frozen enough for ice skating.

It was such a beautiful day, as days go in November, with clouds scudding across the sky, sunbursts and snowbursts, and Mount Ascutney, 15 miles away, looking very close with the leaves all down and the air so clear. The dogs followed us around, soaking up the sun, rolling in the scatterings of snow. The winter birds called thinly from the trees — crows and jays and chickadees and nuthatches. It was warm enough to stop in the sun and pet the cats, but cold enough to feel good working hard, gulping down great breaths of clean air.

As evening came and it turned dark and windy, John and I began to work on the basement, the ever-junky basement, the working heart, along with the kitchen, of this farm. We have two root cellars down there, and John’s carpentry shop, and the wood/oil furnace, and our laundry place, and a potting table for indoor garden work, and canisters of grain for the animals, and shelves for the nails and paint and sheep medicine and garden hose and fencing tools and flower pots and copper pipes and scrap lumber and egg incubators and whatall that keep the place functioning. Over the summer the basement supports so much frenetic activity that it gets dirty and cobwebby and unorganized. It takes a real act of courage to wade in and start cleaning it up.

We had the courage. We started. We have a long way to go. But progress is already visible.

This spurt of enthusiasm is bound to falter eventually. But for now I’m LOVING it! I LOVE putting things into order. I LOVE doing the animal chores, checking on my woolly and feathery friends twice a day, shutting them safely at night into the chicken palace and barn. I was glad when Sylvia took the animal care off my hands, mainly because she took it off my mind. It let me concentrate on gardens, and on writing and traveling and Balaton, and I could feel marginally less scattered. But there is something steadying and satisfying about doing those rounds every day. It’s wonderful to feel that I’m caring for my farm again.

Note that these observations are made before it has turned to 20 below, and after a mere two weeks of the new regime. My mood may well change. But so far the message seems to be for me to turn inward, back to the farm, rather than outward to the world.

Ah, but then there were those audiences in Madrid, just three weeks ago. The Complutense University of Spain is celebrating its 700th anniversary (imagine!) with a series of seminars on world issues, and I was invited to the one on Environment and Development. Since my Economics Guru Herman Daly was invited too, and since it paid a handsome honorarium for the Balaton Group, I accepted. It was a lightning trip, one day of travel, three days there, one day back. I didn’t even feel the time change, because Spain operates on an East Coast schedule, though the clocks show European time. (Nothing begins before 10 AM, lunch is around 2 and supper around 10, and you go to bed after midnight. Since the hotel gets CNN, I watched Larry King every night, or rather morning, at 3 AM. It was the first time I ever saw Larry King.) Of Spain I saw nothing but a three-block section of central Madrid the whole time I was there.

And the people — they stood in long lines to get in, they showed up for discussion after discussion, they listened raptly for hours, they asked question after question. It was one of those audiences that make a speaker feel that the information is being sucked out of him or her. Spain is in roughly the 1950s when it comes to environmental awareness (and feminist awareness). But the people who showed up at our talks are eager to catch up. After the last presentation some of them came forward to say goodbye with tears and hugs.

How can I NOT go do these things?

I also drove down to Boston one day last week to speak at Brandeis, where the whole blessed freshman class has been forced to read Beyond the Limits. It’s interesting how different that audience was. Very sophisticated. A little bored with the possibility of global catastrophe. Met everything I said with interesting, complex arguments, mostly for the sake of argument. Deep cynicism and pessimism in this group. Most of their comments were essentially challenging me to prove that the world could be saved, that the human race isn’t just hopeless. This jadedness finally got me so mad that I pointed to it and went on to talk about intellectual arrogance and self-fulfilling models of humanity.

To my surprise, again at the end I was greeted with hugs and tears. That happened in Minnesota too, at Gustavus Adolphus.

So maybe the message is that, however frustrating it can be, however lovely is life on the farm, I am of use, perhaps even needed, out in the world.

Slowly, with time to reflect while sweeping out barns and scrubbing kitchens, I’m getting a little clarity about what should happen after the cleanup — though not yet enough clarity to put out an advertisement through the New England Organic Farmers Association, or whatever, for new housemates. I was helped by a visioning exercise I did recently with my friends Wendy and Sarah and Rachel. Wendy, who’s an old-time partner of mine, and I are accustomed to begin any new enterprise, whether it’s a conference or a book or a career or an organization, with a formal visioning exercise. We close our eyes and tune into our higher selves and picture, as best we can, what this enterprise would be like, if it turned out perfect. If it turned out to be, as Peter Senge says, “what you really want, not what you’re willing to settle for.” With no constraints from fears or doubts, with no limits on “feasibility.” Just what you want.

Visioning is astonishingly powerful for two reasons. First, when you let yourself vision, sweeping all limiting considerations away, you’re often surprised by what you see. And second, having seen that, you find opportunities, make decisions, and venture forth in surprising ways.

So Wendy and Sarah and Rachel and I, all of us on the point of one personal transition or another (some of us chronically so), got together to vision. We tried to picture ourselves at a specific time in the future — I chose 10 years from now, at age 62.

I could see myself with fully gray hair, looking vibrantly healthy. I was speaking in public. I was a constant presence in the public discourse, speaking in the mass media (probably television, but I couldn’t see that clearly). I was calm and quiet, not flashy, not charismatic. My purpose was to insert into the discussion as much perspective, as broad a space horizon, as long a time horizon, as ethical a position as I could. My goal was to be clear, loving, and wise.

I had no particular position or power in this vision, other than my willingness to show up and to speak truth. But — and here was the surprising and wonderful part — I was speaking from and for a community. This was a community in which I lived day to day. It was composed of people more clear, more loving, more wise, more spiritual than me. Together we studied and spoke about all the issues in the public discourse and tried to work toward to the clearest, most insightful position we could find. And then I was sent out (I was not the only one) to speak that position in public. The community prepared me for these appearances and critiqued them to help me do better next time. When I lost my way, when I got knocked off center, when I got scared or discouraged or angry, the community lovingly helped me find myself again.

I couldn’t see where we lived, on this farm or any farm, though it was clear to me that the community lived by the wisdom it preached. I did not see myself writing, only speaking. (That was weird. Maybe it was a recognition that hardly anyone reads any more.) As with every vision, I arched into the future without any concern about how to get there from here, so I have no idea whether I created this community, or found it somewhere and went to join it.

What I conclude is that all the speaking I’ve been doing and resenting is probably a preparation for something. And that I need to continue to accept speaking invitations, especially with the broadcast media, exactly the ones I always turn down, And that I must find or create a group of people to live with who are dedicated to a just, peaceful, and sustainable world, both in the way they live and in the way they reach out to impact the public discourse, the language, the context, the frame, the mindset of the larger community.

Well, who knows what will happen? Meanwhile, if there’s one more nice day outdoors I have raspberries to prune. If there isn’t, I have a basement to clean.

Love,

Dana