thinning, in order to grow

There’s a technique in gardening called “thinning.”  If new baby plants are coming in close together, you pull out a few of the plants in order for the others to flourish.  In one of our gardens, a broccoli raab plant had gone to seed in late summer, and dropped hundreds of seeds in an area about 7’x10’.  Hundreds of baby plants came up, and I spent one morning removing some of them and leaving the strongest, healthiest looking in the ground, with about 4” of space between each.  Thinning plants gives you some tender greens to eat while the plants mature, and allows for the remaining plants to make the most of the available nutrients in the soil.  I wasn’t able to finish the whole patch that morning, and when I went back recently the difference was striking: where I had thinned, each of the plants was sturdy and a strong green, while the others that were still packed in close together fared less well.  Some were pale, withered or stunted, others had brown spots.  That patch of soil simply couldn’t nourish all of those plants…they needed attentive tending, pruning, thinning.

I’ve been thinking about thinning in relation to my own growth lately, what it is I’m removing, what it is I’m trying to help flourish. 

There were clear choices to be made when I prepared to leave a stable job, to depart from a recognizable career path.  Anne and I knew our financial situation was going to change, and that we would need to discern what really mattered to us, and what didn’t.  In some ways, the economic crisis that became apparent in September 2008 helped me begin preparing to make these changes, as I began to take stock, go frugal, and begin saving in earnest.  Buying non-processed food, cooking almost all our meals, curtailing our shopping, repairing instead of replacing, getting rid of cable…all of these helped me get clearer on how I wanted to live, what I valued.  Those were some easy plants to thin.

And since I began coming to the farm in March, and more intensely since I moved here in August, I’ve been occupied with doing another kind of  “thinning.”  It’s like I entered a kind of natural New York Public Library, with stores of knowledge available to me, and I’ve been winnowing through the possibilities and picking out a few stacks, at least to begin with.  I now see that there’s many ways to be involved with the “good food revolution” as Will Allen calls it: food policy, food activism, food-related public education, food distribution, commercial production, community-supported agriculture, and “homesteading” (small farms, to feed family and neighbors, possibly with some farmer’s market activity).  For me, I think my heart is drawn to the idea of homesteading, which is basically what we’re doing here at Bluestone Farm.  We grow our own food, from corn and oats to honey and eggs, from bok choi and kale to kidney beans and celery.  Herbs and spices, roots and greens.  We save our seeds and tap our own maple trees, make our own hominy and our own yogurt.  And the Sisters are learning to weave scarves and cloth towels, with visions of weaving their own simple clothes.

I still entertain the idea of diving deeply into a specialty, perhaps medicinal herbs, or mushroom cultivation, but I’ve always been kind of a generalist and I’m strongly interested in systems. I am pretty clear now, based on what I’ve learned so far, that I’m most drawn to learning how to grow a wide variety of vegetables, how to preserve and store foods, and how to plan a diverse garden throughout a whole year’s cycle.  I’m also interested in learning which plants flourish together, and which insects and flowers work in harmony with a vegetable garden.  And what I really value is being off the grid, being healthy, feeding and cooking for my friends and family, having a spiritual practice, and making a simple living. 

Those kinds of thinning have been pretty easy, I see now.  Although life here is pretty packed, there is time to meditate and pray every day, and in that spaciousness I have come to perceive that there’s more thinning to be done.  A kind of gnarled psychic understory, complete with dead branches and thorns, is in competition with all these new young plants I’ve been cultivating.  I think I naively believed that I could just press the “restart” button on my life when I came to the farm, and that the rhythms and the rituals here would shape me into the person I want to be, the person I know I am (somewhere deep down!).  I easily managed to bring only a few small bags of clothing, and a handful of books.  Turns out I just as easily brought a bunch of less useful baggage as well: insecurities, fearfulness, embarrassment, cynicism, doubt. 

I saw this all too clearly just recently, and the abrupt recognition of this old baggage actually caused me to laugh out loud.  The last few months, I’d been spending a good portion of my free time exploring various finance-tracking software.  I tried a bunch: Mint, Moneywell, Quicken, Moneydance, various Excel spreadsheets, and more…  I began the project with the notion that, in addition to monitoring our new budget, if I had a better idea of how we spent our money I could see if we could save even more.  All well and good.  But somehow that question got twisted up with various attachments and fears…See, I had saved up a bunch of money before I left my job, in order to be able to pay my not-insubstantial student loan payments every month.  I put that money in an account, and thought that these funds would provide me with some security, some freedom to really explore what I want to do in the world, to find my new path.  But somehow that money just seemed to loom larger in my mind, until it was nearly yelling: “what will you do when I’m gone!”  Because I am trying not to live out of fear, I kept just pushing that thought away.  And then going to the computer and playing with financial software.  I was getting more and more frustrated, as no one software seemed to do all the things I wanted it to do: track every expenditure, update automatically, show all the balances, create detailed budgets and reports…I spent hours manually categorizing various expenditures, correcting items, trying to convert a csv file to a qif file…on and on…None was meeting my needs, I was getting more and more frustrated, getting stressed out…losing sleep. 

And then it hit me.  I was trying to find a perfect software that would somehow alleviate my fears about the future, about how I would pay next year’s student loans.  And no software was ever going to do that.  I had more money in my savings account than I’d had in years, and yet I was stressing about how I was going to pay bills a year from now.  When was there ever going to be enough?  Was I worrying about money just out of habit?  I saw, in an instant, that my anxiety about money is related to a larger, deeper lack of belief in abundance, and that no amount of accounting can dispel that fear.  And then I just started laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. How many hours did I spend, trying to fill in a hole with bubbles?  Driven by doubts, I push so, so hard to arrange the world, toiling in vain attempts to ensure that things will turn out ok.  I’ve got to learn new ways of being in the world, of having faith and trust that good things will come.  So here I am, working to clear out this old, old, old brush, to find the stillness within, to cultivate the good soil, and to flourish.  Keep those garden gloves nearby, I may ask for your help.

350 (living as if everything matters)

You may have seen references to the number "350" in recent months, in connection with concerns about climate change.  I've seen many of my "tweeple" (twitter contacts) who are involved in green issues and the good food movement talking about it, and finally checked it out.  

And here's the deal:  In a few short days, an organization by the same name (number?) will coordinate an international day of action, with almost 4,000 events currently planned in more than 160 countries, all around the world.

So what's all this about?  Nothing less than our common future.

One of the measurements used in calculating global warming and climate change is how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is in the atmosphere.  Right now, scientists have determined that there are 387 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Doesn't seem like much, right?  Well, they also have determined that the amount of carbon dioxide that allows for the maintenance of a liveable planet for humanity is 350 parts per million.  (More explanation here.)

Right.  So we're currently OVER the sustainable level.   What does that mean?  Well, it means that our climate is changing, ice caps are melting, weather is getting wilder, and droughts and floods are affecting the lives of people all over the globe.  It's already happening, now.  This is key:  many of the projections that scientists were making a few years ago have been blown out of the water--now, scientists think that the Arctic ice will melt completely in the summertime in just a few years (2011-2015) rather than 85 years from now as was projected just a couple years ago...

So are we just doomed?  Thankfully, no.  But we have to get the concentration of carbon dioxide moving in the other direction, and we have to start now.  We need to stop these current changes from taking on a life of their own, and if we don't get the levels down, the climate will change too much for us to be able to reverse.

350 describes it this way:  

We're like the patient that goes to the doctor and learns he's overweight, or his cholesterol is too high. He doesn't die immediately—but until he changes his lifestyle and gets back down to the safe zone, he's at more risk for heart attack or stroke. The planet is in its danger zone because we've poured too much carbon into the atmosphere, and we're starting to see signs of real trouble: melting ice caps, rapidly spreading drought. We need to scramble back as quickly as we can to safety.

If someone wants to argue that the economic costs are too high, or they don't believe the science, I don't know what else to say except that this world is too precious to gamble with.  I don't want to roll the dice and hope that the projections are wrong, do you?  (This You Tube video by Gary Craven goes over the logic of our various choices pretty clearly.)

So, what can you do?  

• For starters, you can get involved on October 24th, by attending or organizing an event near you (find one here, organize and register your own here).  The goal of these events is to bring attention to this issue, to raise awareness, and to pressure our politicians to act.  There's lots of info, ideas, organizing plans, and resources on the website.

• You can also tell the people you know about 350, and encourage them to get involved (social network linkies here, too).

• If you want to make concrete changes to reduce your personal carbon impact, try out this carbon calculator and find ways to reduce your output.
  
  
• Take a look at the example of "No Impact Man," a guy in Brooklyn, NY who decided to see what it took to lead a zero-emission life.  We don't all have to go that far, but we can take a few small steps and have a big impact--which is why he started the No Impact Project, providing concrete, doable actions that we can all take.  A movie about his experience just came out--learn more about it, here.

• There are also petitions and other political actions on the We Can Do It, Repower America website.

• And you can follow what's happening on the road to Copenhagen, the site of a major international conference on climate change taking place in December.  

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the scale of the problems we face...but, then, what's the alternative?  Sitting back and just flipping the channel?

One of the first times I came to visit the farm, I caught sight of a sentence highlighted on their brochure, which spoke to me so deeply I could hardly think about anything else for weeks:

Let us live as if everything matters.

Because it does.

And that's the truth of it.  I think we know it deep inside when we let ourselves grasp the enormity of the situation.  We were entrusted with an amazing gift, this tiny, unique, bluegreen orb out there in the vastness of the universe, our only home...and how we live here matters. 

knowing, forgetting, and making change

As the fall season settles in, I'm finding myself with a little more time to read in the evenings.  I've got a few things on the bedside table, but the one that's occupying my thoughts most right now is a book by Elizabeth Kolbert called Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change.  It's a journalistic account of what's happening to our planet, with first-hand reporting and interviews with residents and scientists around the globe, in the Arctic, in Holland, in Costa Rica, in Vermont...

I've just started the book, and I'll tell you, it's a challenging read. I had read a series of Kolbert's articles in the New Yorker, a few years ago, and they were shocking, actually.  I mean, we hear about global warming and climate change, and we have been experiencing increasingly unsettled weather in recent years. I've read about vanishing glaciers, and endangered polar bears.  But this knowledge hasn't really penetrated my visceral, immediate worldview.  Somehow, it's possible to know something--in this case, the vast dangers of global warming to our planetary ecosystem--but then to compartmentalize that knowledge away from everyday decisionmaking.  Kolbert's articles were shocking, they hit me hard, and I tried to share them with people ("You've got to read this!"), but soon thereafter, I forgot about them.

Our ability to forget such things, or compartmentalize them, is one of our real human weaknesses.  I smoked cigarettes for years.  I knew they were toxic, I knew they were lethal.  Yet I continued.  In the final year that I smoked, I would treat myself to a smoke after going to the gym, some kind of sick reward.  We humans are strange and complicated beings.

When we allow ourselves to fully integrate such scary knowledges--like the dangers of smoking, and the vulnerability of our planet--we can make real changes in our behavior.  But this is hard work, and perhaps why there is so much resistance to acting to slow down climate change.  (I'm referring here to change at the individual level, not the corporate/organizational/political level, which has another order of challenges...)

Personally, I'm working to integrate the knowledge that I've been gaining about eating meat: the tremendous strain placed on our environment from producing a meat-heavy diet, the miserable and fetid lives of animals that are raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (and the diseases that thrive unders such conditions), the difficulty in finding meat that is sustainably and humanely raised and slaughtered...

We can take smaller steps, like participating in Meatless Monday, a campaign to cut out meat one day a week in order to improve our health and reduce the stress on the environment.  We can make sure we understand the manifold connections between food production and climate change (watch Food, Inc, if you haven't already), and pass on what we know.  We can support local farmers, and get to know the people who produce our food (check out the USDA's new website, "Know Your Farmer" and find farmer's markets near you).  We can choose organic, pesticide-free and heirloom varieties of food, to diversify our food supply and reduce the number of toxins added to our food and to the earth.  And we can start, all of us, to grow a little of our own food.  (There's an app for that: "Botanical Interests" can help you start gardening with your iPhone; thanks Urban Gardens for the find!) 

There's so much more we can do--we can step away from plastics, carpool and buy fuel efficient cars, press our government to invest in public transportation, and compost our vegetable waste, just for starters...

But mostly I think we have to let ourselves deeply integrate the intellectual knowledge we already have, and let a global perspective shape our vision.  The scientific community is very concerned, as each year, new research is outpacing earlier projections.  The icecaps are melting faster than we thought, there are redoubling effects that were unforeseen, and each year we are breaking more and more funky weather records...(If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, the movie explains why weather will get more and more extreme and unsettled, rather than simply getting hotter.) 

All the knowledge in the world, though, isn't going to change our behavior, until we see ourselves as part of, integrated into, the natural world, rather than separate from it.  We are each of us organic matter, part of the universe, connected through the air we breathe and water we drink.  These elements cycle through us and swirl around us.  What I do to the air and the water impacts that planetary swirl.  We are woven together, and we are creating our future, at every moment, with every breath.

(This post is in alliance with Blog Action Day, focused on Climate Change)

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

a new rhythm

On August 1, I began my new work with Bluestone Farm, a small organic farm in Brewster NY, which is run by the Community of the Holy Spirit, an Episcopalian order of nuns. I've been volunteering here all spring almost every weekend, and finally decided that it was time to dive in, to learn what I could learn, to support their work, and to make a new way for myself. I've been writing updates about the farm and this transition on Facebook and Twitter (and posting photos on Flickr), but now will be writing regular posts to this blog.

There's a long story to tell here, involving my own awakening to sustainability and our shared future on this planet, the sisters' eco-spiritual project and their relation to the larger food and environmental movements, the many people who visit and are touched by the nuns' work, and my reviving spirituality.

But I don't have a coherent narrative yet, so perhaps a blog is the best way to "write down the bones" and see where the writing takes me.

So: to begin. A brief description about the rhythm of the farm, a new rhythm for me. This weekend began as the last eight or so have, with an early morning harvest that we prepped to sell at the local farmers market. The market is small, with five stands: the bakers, the honey guy, the Italian cheese/meat/pasta folks, and another (larger, non-organic) vegetable stand. Click here for pictures of previous weeks.

We like to call our produce "twice eaten" because, as you can see it's a bit holey--it's been munched by bugs, and then it gets munched by us.

We start harvesting at 6:30, after a short chapel service called "Lauds." Then we head out with our scissors and baskets, and harvest lettuces, kale, chard, collards, mustard greens, carrots, beets, herbs...whatever's ready. We also sell duck and chicken eggs, spices, jams and maple syrup. All organically produced, although we're not "certified organic" because of the cost involved.

Market runs from 9-2, then we've got to pack it all away, see what we can cook or store of anything we didn't sell...it's a busy day. We're usually done with that in time for a bit of a rest from 4-5, then chapel again for Vespers, and then a relaxed dinner. But by 9pm I am d-u-n, done. Early to bed is the rhythm here...

The day is packed with farmwork, but satisfying. The best part, for me, is talking with people at the market who are kind of new to vegetables. They know they should be eating more greens, but aren't really sure what everything is and how to prepare it. I try to give everyone simple recipes, involving only a few ingredients...One of the things I hope to do with this blog is set down some of those recipes, along with pictures of yummy dishes we make here.

This Sunday, we harvested oats...something new for all of us. This is the first year the sisters have grown oats, so we all are finding our way around how to harvest and dry them. We had hoped for sun, but it was cloudy and started drizzling about an hour in.

We were able to bring in more than half of the field, load it in the truck, and then bundle it into shocks back in the barn. The barn smells amazing now, as the oats are drying out and getting ready for threshing.

This is a new rhythm for me, to be sure.

Taking a longer view on things, seeing the onions I planted back in April finally getting ready for harvest, planning how to store the harvest for the eventual winter...it's not just getting up with the sun, or walking to the fields instead of the subway station...

I'm getting glimpses of a rhythm that's following and responding to large, powerful forces--the sun, the seasons, the cycle of life. It's a rhythm available to all of us, if we take a minute to comprehend just how small we are in this universe, and if we stop, and look, and appreciate just how beautiful this world is.