learning in my skin

"So what did you build, anyway?"  

Since I've returned from my Natural Design/Build class at Yestermorrow, this question has been asked of me a number of times.  Let me tell you about "The Cube."

I knew that the class would be partly lecture/discussion, partly drafting and designing, and partly hands-on building, but I really didn't know how we'd go about building in Vermont, in the middle of winter.  The solution: a practice building! 

The Cube was a 10'x10' skeleton of a structure with an array of problems to solve.  There were three different framing set-ups (stud, double-stud, and timber-frame), a window, a door, and a roof eave, all of which provided us with the opportunity to make and install different insulating walls (strawbale, light straw clay, and woodchip clay), to figure out how to achieve airtight seals around windows and doors, to try plastering over different substrates, and to figure out the detailing of roof eaves, window trim, and bottom wall flashing.  

Tacking back and forth between lectures/discussions and hours of hands-on work in The Cube created a fantastic learning environment.  Each day we saw our learning become manifest in The Cube, and we would review and discuss our work as a whole class after each new skill was practiced.  The vitality of this experiential style of education reminded me of the work of James Gee, one of my favorite critics of our conventional educational system.  I've discussed his work before on this blog, and he's definitely worth reading if you're interested in what we know about learning.  His basic argument is that our educational environments should be designed to be as compelling and engaging as video games--that teachers have a lot to learn from video game designers.  In a video game, players "level up," or gain mastery over a set of skills and are then a presented with a greater degree of challenge.  Leveling up builds confidence, but more importantly, keeps the player interested because as soon as they gain skills, the game gets harder.  Learning is engaging and fun when you can gauge your own improvement, and when, just as you get comfortable with one thing, there's a new problem to solve.  Video games also encourage trial-and-error exploration, because they have low-stakes consequences for failure (you can just choose to play again!).  Exploration in this manner promotes creative approaches to problem-solving; high-stakes tests, in contrast, stimulate students to figure out what the teacher wants, to take the safe route, to memorize and regurgitate. 

Reviewing the lath and plaster wallGetting to play with The Cube was akin to the learning environments created in good video games.  The consequences were fairly low, so we felt free to experiment--in one of the walls, we varied the proportion of straw to clay, to see how that would affect the strength and mass of the wall.  And our learning was "scaffolded"--we learned one thing, practiced it in The Cube, and then were introduced to a more complicated aspect of it.  By "leveling up," we gained familiarity with the basic workings of the structure, and were not overwhelmed by the more complex problems.  Greater complexity was presented to us, but only after we'd grown in skill and confidence, and had the tools to begin to think about the new challenge.  I think if I'd been presented early on with the three types of roof eave/wall transitions, I might have wondered if I was really up to the task.  But by the time we got there, I'd already accomplished a number of new and challenging things, and was learning to say to myself: "Well, let me see...how can I figure this out..."

And this brings me to what I loved most about this introduction to natural design/building: the realization that it's all about problem-solving.  Well, perhaps that's a stretch--it's also about beauty, and social justice, and the creative impulse, and community, and being in tune with Earth.  But the primary cognitive and creative activity of designing and building, I realized, was that of problem-solving, or puzzling.  Design/building means understanding a situation, having a vision, and then figuring out how to realize that vision as fully as possible.  Sometimes the questions seemed mundane--how can you make a flat plane when you have an uneven substrate?  How can you make an unruly substance fit into an angular, tight space?  Can you create a clean angle in a strawbale without breaking the bands?  But then other puzzles were complex and multi-faceted: what are the pros and cons of building with this material in this particular situation?  If we construct a wall in this way, what kind of transitions are possible between the roof and the wall, and what does that mean for insulation, sunlight, or rain splash?  The design portion of the class gave us an embodied understanding of the value of iteration--of drafting, solving problems, discovering problems, and starting again, refining and refining until the various, interconnected, sometimes invisible problems or puzzles have all been solved.  I suppose you could say that there was a kind of learning iteration, that went between the discussion table and The Cube, because a problem that seemed intractable in theory would become clear in practice, and vice versa.  

The embodied learning that took place in The Cube was valuable to me in multiple ways: it gave me a better understanding of the physical puzzles to be solved, an appreciation of the complexity and art and history of structures, and it also enabled me see myself as a builder.  James Gee, and many others, talk about the importance of embodied learning--that learning is most likely to occur when the subject matter is not abstract, divorced from concrete experience, or outside of what a person can imagine him or herself doing.  In The Cube, I learned about how plaster sticks to straw, and how it can fall off hanging metal lath, how it can easily fall to the floor, or be marred by the trowel if you turn suddenly...And I learned the pleasure of making a smooth plane, of trial and error and the discovery of solutions, and the wonderful ache of my arms.  

And I know that it's the happy ache of my arms and the satisfaction of making a beautiful surface that I'll carry with me and remember, not the ratio for mixing plaster ingredients.  I mean, I can always refer to my notebook for facts.  But what will inspire me to build is the learning that I can still feel in my skin, and that I can imagine in my mind's eye...

Building...

Strawbale cabin and sheds at Genesis FarmOne of the things I've loved the most about my post-academic life has been the physical labor.  Getting up early, being outside, and using my body--these were not the main themes in my life a few years ago.  I was surprised by how good it felt to be a little sore.  It was empowering to push myself, to find myself capable.  And I think that increasingly being in my body has changed my imagination, reshaped the contours of what I think is possible.  

At some point in the last year, I began to be interested in building.  I imagined a little bit of land somewhere, and dreamt of taking the time to build something by hand.  One of the workshops I attended last year at NOFA-NY (Northeastern Organic Farming Association of NY) was given by a young man, maybe 30, who was totally inspiring.  Without previous building experience, he went about rejuvenating an old farmstead, renovating the house, adding on a new wrap-around porch, and constructing some out-buildings including a new pole barn.  I left that session with my heart racing, his words jangling around within me: "If I can learn to build, so can you.  I mean it."  

In my experience, it is precisely that which is exhilarating that also proves to be the most easily, and quietly, pushed aside.  The doubts come in, those old voices that confidently shoot you down.  Mine said: "Come on, you haven't used a saw since middle-school shop class.  You can't really learn all this now.  It's too much.  You're too old."  The exhilaration that I felt at that NOFA workshop lasted all of about a week, before the "voice of reason" (i.e., insecurity) won out.

But some ember of desire persisted, and I kept hearing more about "natural building"--a method of using earthen (cob and adobe) and strawbale materials.  I visited Genesis Farm in the fall, and got to see a strawbale building close up, and it was simply beautiful.  I started looking at a few natural building books, and reading about it on the web.  Because of my love for making pottery, I was drawn in particular to cob, a mixture of clayey soil, sand, and straw--I could see myself sculpting my own little house.  And I could actually even feel it, in my body's imagination.

And all that while, I kept encountering the word "Yestermorrow."  Yestermorrow is a design/build school in Waitsfield, VT, where you can take classes in timberframing, drafting, plastering, home design, solar energy systems, earthen ovens, carpentry, and natural building, among others.  I had stumbled upon its website when I first started searching for natural building courses.  Then I met someone who was wearing a Yestermorrow t-shirt, and we got to talking about it; he was an instructor there, and could vouch that it was a fantastic place. And then, while at Genesis Farm, I met someone who was planning on taking a class there in January; he told me that he was a total newbie, like me, which assured me that at least I wouldn't be alone.

I have the sense to notice, most of the time, when the Universe is trying to tell me something.  And I was pretty sure that Yestermorrow was emerging in my line of vision for a reason.  So I came home and looked at the course list, and got totally excited . . . and then had to wrestle with those inner voices some more.  ("What makes you think you can build? Do you really think you're fit enough? What if you're not good at it? Shouldn't you be saving money, not spending it?"  You get the idea.)

But even as the inner doubts persisted, I kept dreaming about building.  I thought about it as I harvested, while I rode the train, during the three-day silent retreat I took for my 40th birthday.  At the end of that retreat, I had made a decision: I would go ahead and sign up for a class, I would spend the money, I would take a chance.  What did I have to lose?

Well, one thing I wish I had lost was all that insecurity.  I arrived at Yestermorrow a bundle of nerves, and entered a new group of people, some of whom had substantial building experience.  It took me 10 days to finally relax and fully be myself.  Just in time for the class to end.

But I did it.  I jumped in with both feet, carved strawbales with a chainsaw, swung a sledgehammer,  used a hammertack, got my hands in some plaster, asked a million questions, and even did some basic drafting of floorplans, sections, and elevations.  

The ten-person class was energetic, enthusiastic, and hungry for knowledge and experience.  They were also patient, generous, and helpful with one another.  I am so deeply grateful to have been a part of that particular constellation of people, and to have had the amazing teachers that we did.  Ace, Deva, and Jose were incredibly encouraging and challenging at the same time, and I learned so much about teaching from them.  I couldn't recommend them highly enough.

This evolution has been building in me for some months, and has contributed to the recent quietness of this blog. But now I'm back, energized, and ready to share what I have learned.  I'll be writing more about natural building in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to close with a few words about the larger meaning of building.

Just as our mainstream culture has become largely distanced from the growing of food, so much so that kids  and tweens can't recognize common fruits and vegetables like tomatoes and potatoes, I would stipulate that most of us have little familiarity with the making of our very own dwellings.  Our food and our homes have become something outside of our own bodily imagination--outside our physical sensibility of what we are capable of growing or making.  And with that comes a lack of understanding of what it takes, both in terms of labor and materials--to make a home.  My Yestermorrow class taught me that natural building is seriously hard work.  If you're not going to rely on pre-fabricated materials, you and whoever joins you will have to expend a lot more energy.  But that labor can be meaningful, an investment of intention and creativity, and the product can be a cherished embodiment of human effort.  Imagine looking at your home, and saying, "I made this."  Imagine what the experience of building can teach you about appreciating the true costs of materials, of labor, of maintenance.  I think we just might opt for somewhat smaller, simpler buildings if we were going to build them ourselves.  

There's too much to say right now about gender and building, so let me just say this: learning to build is empowering. My ability to imagine what I can contribute to the world has increased.  And as someone once said to me--if I can learn to build, so can you.  I mean it . . . 

A new cosmology

The past five weeks, since I last posted here, are a bit of a blur.  Anne and I took a short vacation, I got sick for a week, Anne and I went to a "Introduction to Transition Town"weekend at Genesis Farm, and then I returned to Genesis Farm for an "Introduction to the New Cosmology" course.  And sadly, I neglected this little digital nook that whole time.  

In between trips, there was the garden, with its seemingly endless fertility.  We've been harvesting baskets of husk cherries, tomatoes, and tomatillos, and we've still got 10 beds of potatoes to bring in.  And now we're prepping the ground for garlic-planting, and are actually a few days behind our ideal schedule.  The last month has been exhilarating and exhausting, and I'm really ready for the quiet of winter.

I want to share some of what I learned during my time at Genesis Farm.  It's a wonderful place for getting in touch with the land, and exploring how to respond to the challenges we currently face on our planet.  The Farm was founded 30 years ago by Sister Miriam MacGillis, a Catholic nun of the order of St Dominic, located in Caldwell, NJ.  Miriam was introduced to the work of Thomas Berry, a Catholic monk and scholar, in the 1970s, and the Farm is a way of furthering and living out his ideas.  

Berry, along with his mathematician colleague Brian Swimme, sought to understand how humanity--especially industrialized societies with a long tradition of Judeo-Christian values--could end up poisoning ourselves, our Earth, our home.  The two worked together to integrate what all the science of the last century can tell us about how the Universe came to be, how it works, and humanity's role within these processes into something now called "the new cosmology," "the new story," or "the Universe story."  

Berry, a historian of religions and professor at Fordham University, began this exploration after the publication of Rachel Carson's  important 1962 book "Silent Spring," which detailed the effect of DDT (a wartime chemical repurposed for a time into a pesticide) on bird reproduction (and which arguably catalyzed the work leading to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts).  (Boiling down 40 years of inquiry into a few paragraphs is a fraught enterprise, and I encourage you all to read his work for yourself...The books The Dream of the Earth, and The Great Work, are good places to start.)

Berry's basic idea, which I find incredibly compelling, is that modern humanity has become deeply alienated from nature, and that the roots of this condition can be traced back through a long history to Ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian cosmology (cosmology means "a story about the origin of the Universe").  A shared theme in these cosmologies is that there is a perfect God or Gods who created a perfect world, where humans were supposed to live in happiness.  But then something happened--Pandora, Eve--and the perfect world was spoiled.  In this cosmology, death and suffering were not supposed to be the lot of humanity--we only got stuck with them because someone goofed.  This planet, Earth, with its death and suffering, then, is not where we are really supposed to be.  It is just a temporary place, an imperfect place, and, as such, a place we feel free to mess around with, to use for our benefit, and to try to improve upon.  Re-shaping the flow of the Colorado River, blowing up the tops of mountains for coal, playing around with genetic codes--all of these activities show a deep sense of separation between humans and the rest of the natural world.  The perception of such a gulf between humans and nature is what has allowed us to pursue human progress at the expense of the health of the planet.  

Berry and Swimme looked to the last century of science to help formulate a new cosmology, a new story that would portray humanity as a part of nature, rather than outside of it. It is a powerful idea, and one that frames, for me, a meaningful re-engagement with science.  During our weekend, we learned about the origins and evolution of the Universe--and it's fascinating!!  Seriously, fascinating.  Did you know that all the galaxies were formed at the same time?  That there are billions and billions of galaxies out there?  That the periodic table tells a history, because the burning of hydrogen stars released helium, and that when those stars died, as supernovas, they created the elements that follow?  That the iron that is in your body was created during one of those supernovas, and has been recycled through billions of years in the form of stardust, rock, then soil, then living thing?  Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's old refrain, "We are stardust, we are golden..." is actually true!  

I can't adequately convey here what immersing oneself in this history of our Universe feels like.  But to deeply understand that humanity emerged out of the life and the incredible evolutionary diversification of Earth makes me feel more connected to this little planet, and this vast, incomprehensibly vast, Universe.  Our little planet, with its thin veil of atmosphere that allows life to flourish...it is such a beautiful thing, such an amazing thing to have come to be.  It's taken nearly 14 billion years to create, and I feel passionately about doing what I can to ensure that the conditions for life to continue on Earth are maintained. 

Humans lived on Earth for thousands and thousands of years without damaging its biosystems--the seas and rivers, soils and plant life, the air and the climate.  We forget this.  We think that the way of life that we have right now is the best way to be.  But, for just one example, the Lenape tribe lived on the land where Genesis Farm now is for 11,000 years.  Think about that.  11,000 years.  How did they do that?  Their cosmology was quite different: everything was filled with spirit, everything had value.  And so they took only what they needed, and they did so with respect.  And in just 300 years, in the name of manifest destiny and progress, we've invented 80,000 new chemicals that the planet never evolved to heal from.  We've torn down the old growth forests, quarried the land, and dumped our waste everywhere.  

We've not treated this land as our home.  We've not respected what we've been given.  We thought we were supposed to have a perfect planet, without death, without suffering.  But death and suffering are part of the package--the death of one being allows for the elements and materials of that being to be upcycled into new life. 

This is our home.  It's our only home.  

Lying down in the grass at Genesis Farm, I felt part of the Universe.  Slowing down, I heard the sounds around me.  I could sense the deep-time history, get a glimpse of how my life is just a blip, not even a nano-second in the whole history of Earth.  I felt related, felt kinship to all that surrounded me.  And the truth of it, as the mystics long knew and as scientists have been discovering, is that we are related.  We're made from the same stuff, from those same elements of carbon, iron, calcium, and nitrogen that were created when our grandmother star, Tiamat, exploded in a supernova.

My hope is to somehow integrate this perspective into my daily life.  My hope is to share this perspective with others.  More than simple facts about pollution, this perspective, this new story about our origins, may be able to help us change the way we're living.  I can't keep living as if I was separate from all other life on this planet, as if plastic was a natural thing, as if fossil fuels were infinite and problem-free.  I want to make sure this beautiful planet can be a home to my niece's grandchildren, as well as the future generations of all creatures and living things.  

Part of this, for me, means deeply learning the history of place--Miriam introduced us to Genesis Farm not by taking us on a walking tour of the buildings and fields, but by having us sit and listen to her tell the story of the land.  How it was created through geological time, how western New Jersey was once covered by a warm shallow ocean, and how over millions of years, and tectonic shifts, and glaciation, a valley and ridge came to be, with a layer of limestone buried under the soil.  Limestone, I learned, is made up of trillions of tiny sea creatures--their bones, to be exact.  Their bones, which are high in calcium.  Their bones, which are fired into a powder, and then spread on fields to fertilize crops.  

We are alive thanks to all that has come before, and this deep-time knowledge makes me want to live at a more creaturely scale, be part of the ecosystem, to get off the grid.  To appreciate simpler comforts, to be grateful for all my ancestors, to walk carefully, with respect, and with love on this living Earth. 

harvest time

The gardens are ripe.  There's food of all sorts coming in every day, to be eaten, dehydrated, processed into sauce, frozen, stored.  Tomatoes!  Eggplants!  String beans, haricot vert, edamame, yard-long red noodle beans.  Dried beans--kidney, cannellini, black turtle, and more.  Tomatillos, husk cherries, zucchini.  Hundreds of heads of garlic are in, cleaned, and socked away in 5 lb bags.  Onions and spring potatoes are drying on racks.  The barn is full.  And there's so much more to come in!

I spent the last week away from the farm--first to Boston, to celebrate a friend's 40th birthday.  Then, to Amherst, to attend the New England Organic Farming Association (NOFA) conference.  Anne and I stopped in to visit an old friend of mine, who now lives near Amherst in a rural area, on a gorgeous bit of land that's been well cultivated and tended.  Then down to Washington DC, to meet my new niece, and to help out my sister and her husband for a few days.  And then to Philly, on my way back, to see one of my oldest friends, who's recently moved to a new home.  A bit of a whirlwind tour.  I would have loved to spend a month with them all, to get to know their children better.  Milo, who's cutting teeth and toddling about.  Elias, the builder, and Rosa, his sweet sister.  My own niece, Isabel, working to hold her head up by herself, and intent on observing everything around her.  And Eli, who's has grown so fast I can barely believe it.  So many wonderful children to love!

And parents to support.  I spent the most time with my sister, cooking for her and her family.  I was swept by a powerful urge to feed them healthy food, to nourish them, in a way that I've never felt before.  I wanted to pour all my love and hope and good energy into food, and pack it away for them, so that they could eat whenever they needed, and rest easy.  That's the kind of job I'd love, actually, to be a home cook for new mothers, preparing nutrient-rich, healthy foods for them, packing their fridge and freezer full for the week... 

And after all that cooking, now I'm back at the farm, holding all these babies and their parents in my heart.  Thinking about the harvest here, wishing I could feed all those little ones from the fruits of this garden.  It's sad that we're all so spread out.  I know that mobility and independence are highly valued in our culture, but I'm especially aware right now of what we lose when our families and friends are dispersed...

broken records

Everything we know about civilization . . . whether you date it from Eden or the Buddha or Shakespeare or however you define it, that's all 275 parts per million CO2. We're at 390 parts per million right now.

--Bill McKibben

Anne and I took a little time this week to listen to NPR's program, "Speaking of Faith," which featured a moving interview with Bill McKibben, a professor at Middlebury College who's been advocating for action to address climate change for decades.  The title of the talk was "The Moral Math of Climate Change," and you can listen to it or read the transcript here.  He has founded 350.org, which is a global movement to instigate action.

You probably don't need or want any more facts about the way our climate is changing.  You've probably heard it all.  You probably know that this has been the warmest decade on record, the warmest 12 months on record, the warmest spring on record, the warmest June and July on record.  You probably know that Russia is literally on fire, about 10% of it aflame.  That Pakistan's been flooding, and suffering landslides now, with 1500 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.  That a chunk of ice three times the size of Manhattan just broke off the Arctic ice shelf.  That the amount of phytoplankton (the marine life that is the essential, necessary base of the aquatic food chain) has been radically depleted--decining 40% since 1950.  We can put all these things together, though we may not want to think about them, and see that we're dramatically affecting the planet.  It's not a theory anymore.  We're breaking records nearly every day. 

And that those of us who insist on talking about climate change can sound like a broken record.  You might be fighting the urge to click on a different website.  But bear with me, because something Bill McKibben said in this interview is worth considering.

Although I grew up in a practicing Catholic family, and attended church and catechism classes every week until I was about 16, I often feel like I'm hearing some of the Bible readings for the first time.  So it was when Bill McKibben discussed the "Book of Job" in the interview:

Everybody knows the story. Job finds himself cursed by God. He's lying in a dung heap at the edge of town, covered with oozing sores. His flocks are dead. His family's dead. You know, he's in a world of hurt.

And his friends arrive to help him work through this, and he keeps lamenting what's going on and calling it unjust. And his friends keep saying, "Oh, no, no. You know, you sinned or one of your children sinned. This is how it works and that's why you're being punished." And Job, much to his credit, is not the patient Job of legend. He keeps demanding that God appear and explain why this thing has happened to him. And God finally does.

And I think the soliloquy that God delivers in the last three chapters of Job I think is the longest sustained speech that God gives anywhere in the Bible… Old Testament or New. And it's a remarkably interesting speech because it doesn't answer any of the questions that Job has set out.

Instead, God gives this incredibly beautiful biologically accurate, crunchy, sexy tour of the physical universe. [About] All the kind of interesting animals and, you know, and [told] in very wild terms. You know, [God] asked Job, "Do you hunt prey for the lion and her cubs? Do you help the vulture find … carrion on which to feast?" "If you're so smart, you tell me, where do I keep the wind? Can you tell the proud waves: 'Here you shall break and no further? ' Do you know where the storms are, the warehouse for the storms?"

Well, you know, after listening to this for two or three chapters, Job basically says, "Sorry I asked." And sits down....

The message seems to be, "Job, you're not the center of things."..."[Y]our questions about justice and things are kind of puny. You're a small part of something very large and beautiful and that should be enough," and for Job it appears to be enough.

So the shocking part in reading it now is realizing that for the first time in human history we're no longer in the position Job's in...Now we just spit right back at God. You know, "Can you tell the proud waves where to break?" "Hell, yes. We think we're going to raise the level of the ocean a couple of meters in the course of this century." "Do you know where the storms are kept?" "Yeah. We're pushing cyclones one after another across the Pacific. You know, we've got our thumb on the scale." In a very short order we [humans] got very, very big. Human beings have always been in Job's position — small — and our job is to figure out how to get smaller again. And I think it's essentially a theological task, at least as much as anything else.

 So I went to read some of that speech that God gives Job, and it's a doozy.  A sample:

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone
while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'?

God's got some attitude!  Listen: "Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, 'Here we are'?"

I've long thought about the moral dimension of climate change, centered on the notion that we should take care to pass on a liveable planet to future generations.  But there's another moral context here, made visible in Job, that seems worthy of further meditation:  Do we really think we're in charge?  Who are we to mess with God's creation?  We are blundering through the planet, thinking that we know what we're doing.  But we don't.  We clearly don't know how to drill at the bottom of the ocean.  We are only just beginning to glimpse how the oceans, winds, atmosphere, planetary orbit all work together, and we shouldn't be messing with the basic formula for life.  We know that all human life has existed at about 275 parts per million, that that's the magic number for humanity to flourish.  Yet we think we can just flaunt that, somehow, without consequence.  We aren't in charge here, no matter how much our brains and egos would like us to think we are.  We're just a small piece of a majestic puzzle.  A big dose of humility seems appropriate.

But instead of humility, I keep hearing more talk of "geoengineering" to address climate change--giant carbon vacuum cleaners, global domes...I love McKibbens' take on these "solutions":

I mean, I think that physically it's not possible to do that and I also think at some level there's something silly and ignoble and almost blasphemous about trying it. I think that the response we need is to figure out how to restrain ourselves, how to pull ourselves in. It strikes me that religious thinking back at least as far as the Buddha and probably farther, has centered mostly on the idea that we become most fully human when we don't put ourselves at the center of everything.

The world is changing around us, and we should stop arguing about whether or not the sands are flowing through the hourglass.  It's not only a political issue, though of course I pray that our politicians will stop being so spineless.  It's about the place of humanity within this amazing gift of a planet.  Can we curb our appetites to bring ourselves within the parameters for life?  Can we adjust our habits to get back into the flow of history?

One last snippet from Bill McKibben seems appropriate, where he discusses the recent surge of interest in farmers markets and local food:

It takes a lot less energy to move a tomato five miles than 5,000 miles. And not coincidentally, it tastes better. I mean, I traveled 2,000 miles yesterday. I know how I feel. That's also how the tomato feels.

But the real [and interesting] reason... that we like farmers' markets, I think, turns out to be they're different. Sociologists followed shoppers first through the supermarket, then through the farmers' market. Everybody's been to the supermarket. You know how it works. You walk in, you fall into a fluorescent light trance. You visit the stations of the cross around the perimeter of the supermarket. You emerge with your items. That's it. When they followed people around the farmers' market, they were having, on average, 10 times as many conversations per visit.

Cheap fossil fuel, you know, heated the planet. It made us rich. But it also, maybe most profoundly, made us the first kind of our species who've had no practical need of our neighbors for anything (italics mine). We tell ourselves, you know, what a great chic thing we've invented, the farmers' market.

In fact, that's how all human beings shopped for food until 50 years ago and 80 percent of the planet still does. No wonder it feels good. I mean, this is what we're built for.

This is, for me, the crux of the matter: what are we built for?  Are we built for relationship, for community, for neighborliness?  Are we built to appreciate beauty, to experience awe, to feel love and gratitude for life?  These seem, to me, to be the essence of being human.  Our culture's just gotten so disconnected from the basic impulse of life, and from one another, and we're in danger of not only breaking all records, but of breaking the foundational formulas, the conditions that allow life to exist on this planet.

One of the biggest surprises of the past year on the farm is how much pleasure I've gotten out of simplifying my life: getting rid of the TV, growing food, shelling peas, making my own yogurt and cheese, telling stories with friends, rising and resting with the sun.  Things that humanity has done for millenia.  Turns out that stuff feels good--like it's part of our DNA, part of our human makeup.  Maybe we would do well to remember that we're part of a long history of humanity, and that our ancestors' way of life had value.  What if we all shut off the lights when it got dark?  Would we fall in love with the stars, with the universe?  Would we rest, and fall in love with one another again?

I'm reminded of a quote by Paul Hawken:

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television."