great expectations

I’m going to write for two hours every day.  Preparing that garden bed will take me three hours.  I’m just going to read for 20 minutes then go to sleep.  This will be a quiet week.  I have five full days free for garden work. Let me just look online for a few minutes to compare prices.  I can write that letter this afternoon. I’m going to walk in the woods every day.  And meditate.  And get up early.  And . . . 

I have a running list of expectations for myself.  Some are big resolutions, and others are just little hopes for how the day is going to go.  Looking at this list, it seems they have a lot to do with the idea of “managing time.”  But I can’t really manage time.  Or, at least, if I’m trying to manage time, I end up projecting myself into the future and critiquing my handling of the past, and I’m not really experiencing the present moment.  I have recently learned that I walk around with a furrowed brow, looking angry (I’ve seen pictures!), without even knowing it.  And all because I’ve set myself up by making expectations about how things are going to be, or how they should be, instead of just accepting how things are.

I am struggling a lot with this problem right now.  Every new beginning offers a chance to make a change, whether it’s a big move, a brand new job, or just an annual New Year’s resolution or Lenten observance.  I tend to put a whole bunch of great expectations on my plate all at once, and then--surprise!--I get stressed out.  That doesn’t really help me in making the changes I seek.  Instead, I turn inward, blaming myself, wondering why I can’t make good on my intentions.  That starts a vicious cycle, because then I end up promising myself that I really will make good, that I really can keep my resolutions, that this plan for the day really should work . . . More promises, more good intentions, and more blaming and criticizing myself later.

Who’s with me on this?  I want to grab a pitchfork and go marching right up to myself and say “Stop it!  You’ve been trying this method for 40 years, and it doesn’t work!”  This constant seeking to do better, do more, make a better plan--it’s all just so much stress.  And as one of Anne’s friends once wisely remarked, “What good is stress?  You can’t eat it.”  

A friend recently lent me a thin volume by a Buddhist author, Cheri Huber, entitled There Is Nothing Wrong with You.  It’s a great book.  The basic idea is that in our society, we’ve been taught that we always need to better ourselves, and this has resulted in a constant stream of internal criticism and attempts at self-discipline.  That negative barrage blocks out our deeper voice, our true impulses, which are inherently good--and if we could only get out of our own way, we would end up acting in ways that are caring to ourselves and others.  I imagine there would be a giant, global sigh of relief if we all could surrender to the idea that, at heart, we are essentially good.  That we didn’t have to try so hard to fix ourselves, to do better, all the time.

I have moments, from time to time, when I can shut off the flow of “shoulds” and just get in the flow of present-moment-life.  When I do that, things are simply easier.  The tasks get done, relations are warm, difficulties unwind themselves like a knot loosening and simply sliding apart, falling to the ground.  And I wonder, “why did I think this was going to be so hard?”  But most of the time I forget this wisdom, and sit there battering myself with unkind commands and judgements, as if straining and struggling and pushing harder will loosen the knot. (Pssst:  it doesn’t.)

So here I am, another morning, looking out upon the rolling hills, and faced with a choice: I can be peaceful and grateful and accept the day as it comes, or I can berate myself for not getting up earlier, for having coffee instead of doing yoga, for all the things on my to-do list I thought I’d get done yesterday, or the day before... Giving up all those great expectations means letting go of so many things--the idea that I’m really in control of whatever happens (I’m not!), the belief that I need to always do more and better, the notion that life as it is, in this moment, isn’t already just fine.  Engaging the present moment as it is means letting go of any expectation that it should be different.  The great Zen poet Gertrude Stein* said it best, “It is what it is what it is.”  And my long-time favorite Ani DiFranco has a lovely lyric about this very thing, in her song “As Is”:  

When I look around, I think this, this is good enough.  

And I try to laugh at whatever life brings.  

‘Cause when I look down, I just miss all the good stuff. 

And when I look up, I just trip over things.

*Just kidding.

awareness, in limbo

I've been in a kind of extended liminal phase since leaving Bluestone Farm, living in the guestroom here, boxes all around me.  I'll move into the farm's attached apartment next week--it's currently occupied by Barb, a friend of the farm, who's sharing animal/household/carpooling duties with me while Emmy (the farm's owner) is traveling.  I wondered how I would respond to being in-between for a few weeks, and I am pleasantly surprised to find that being in limbo can be kinda interesting.  

I haven't been able to dive into setting up my space, getting subsumed with unpacking, rearranging, and putting everything in its place. The ground here has been too wet for working the soil, which has prevented me from diving into farming, and exhausting myself with outdoor work.  And this farm has a somewhat slow internet connection, making it difficult to stream TV or movies.  I'm left with watching myself in transition, and learning what I can in the process.

In addition to taking care of the animals and carpool duties, I've been cooking up a storm, which is like meditating in a way.  I get so much pleasure out of making good food!  We've used up some of the farm's stores of meat for Shepherd's Pie, meatloaf, breakfast lamb chops, Hoppin' John with ham, and spicy sausage ragout.  And creamed kale, roasted root veggies, and lots of butternut squash everything.

And it's while I'm standing there, chopping vegetables, pots simmering away, that I mull over what happens each day, my reactions and hesitations, my enthusiasms and doubts.  It's a challenge to pick yourself up and start again with a new group of people.  But it's also an opportunity, a chance to peel back another layer or two of the onion, to try to be the best self you believe you can be.  I think, in my heart, that I can be more easygoing than I have been in the past, that I can learn to let things go, that I can live well with uncertainty and things in disarray.  I think that I can learn new things without a lot of guidance, that I can figure out how to fix things, use tools, find my way around, see what's needed and respond.  And that I can finally stop trying to win people's approval, and just be.  I've watched myself, in the last two weeks, bump up against life-long patterns--my desires to control things, to make sure people like me, to make everything good and safe.  And I've watched myself deal with long hesitancies, the holding back, feeling insecure, not wanting to make a mistake.  In this liminal space, I can see that getting beyond these things is the key to my opening up creatively.

Being in limbo has given me just the right amount of discomfort, and the quiet hours, to bump into all these feelings and take a good look at them.  Walking in the woods, in the slippery snow, I see my fear of falling down and "looking stupid," and how much that actually stiffens my gait, makes me totter.  Standing in a well-used kitchen, with jackets and homework and hay on the floor, I sense my desire to create order, and I can feel how that desire can actually distance me from what's happening with the people right there in the room with me.  Getting a lesson in pruning trees, my need to "do it right" nearly gets in the way of being able to make any cuts at all.  Seeing the pile of winter squash in the back room, I can feel a compulsion to pack it up and freeze it, in the hopes that doing so will "win me points" somehow, from someone, I don't know who. Being in limbo makes me see that I'm having a whole conversation in my head about falling, cleaning, pruning, the squash--and that it's all just projections, phantoms, the same old demons.  

Rather than trying to be the good girl, the neat girl, the one who doesn't make mistakes or look foolish, I'm working on letting go, just being me, and remembering that the more interesting my life has grown, the more I've fallen down and the messier things have become.  So here I am on the waning of this liminal phase, seeing glimpses of my better self, and feeling ready to start.  I'm going to grow these gardens, build some things, get confident with the animals and the tractor, and make some art.  

To everything there is a season...

I’ve been struggling for a few weeks to come up with words.  This is not a typical problem for me, as my friends and family can well attest.  But here I am, trying for the third week in a row to gracefully express the fact that I’m leaving Bluestone Farm, and that I am sad and excited and grateful and nostalgic, all at once.  I’ve been combing through poems and song lyrics, pondering the precise image, aiming to find the most eloquent, most perfect thing to capture the happy melancholy that I’m feeling, but it looks like I’m going to have to just speak for myself. 

So here I am, making a change again.  I’ve been invited to participate in the work of a small farm and learning center in western Massachusetts, called Open View Farm Educational Center.  The farm is dedicated to fostering inclusivity, peace and justice, and creativity, and it has a special focus on GLBTQ issues.  With a flock of sheep, a llama named Lily, and pastured hens, the farm creates opportunities for people to enter into a deeper relationship with nature, to slow down, and to interact with some of our fellow creatures.  

My role will be to design and create teaching gardens, to help build farm infrastructure including a pole barn and an earthen oven, to be an woodshop apprentice to the farm's owner, Emmy, and to help out with the household, including Emmy's two teenage daughters and a young-adult friend of the family.  I’m thrilled about these new learning opportunities, which will challenge me to build on the experience I've gained at Bluestone Farm.  To top it all off, one of my best friends from high school, Leslie, lives with her family just a quarter mile down the road.  I’ve long loved western Mass, ever since I lived there after college.  It’s where my partner Anne and I met and started dating, way back in 1994.  Returning there feels in many ways like a kind of homecoming, though, ironically, Anne will still be in New York, where her job is located. Being apart during the week will be difficult, but we’ve lived semi-apart before, and we know that not only will we make the most of our time together, but we’ll also learn and grow as individuals in our time apart.

But I am also sad to leave this life at Bluestone Farm.  The community here has supported me through an amazing period of transition, from leaving academia to embracing my full range of passions: food, farming, spirituality, building, Earth, and writing.  I’ve had the space here to deeply engage with my struggles with religion, to wrestle down those desires and discomforts, and to see what lies underneath.  And I’ve discerned that, in the end, at least for now, organized religion still is not home to me.  I had hoped that my time here would prove otherwise, would allow me to dive with abandon into tradition, community, and ritual. Although the Sisters weave the new cosmology, with all its wonder and appreciation of the universe into their theology, and although I can now interpret more traditional liturgy in the framework of unitive consciousness, and although the Sisters have, with great love and compassion, invited me wholeheartedly to share in their worship, I somehow still find myself on the outside.  In the end, it’s time to go.

And with what a debt of gratitude!  I have learned so much in the two years since I first visited the farm in mid-March, 2009.  I was in crisis, needing to be connected to nature, needing a new vocational direction, and Anne said, “Why don’t we visit these nuns I know, on this farm nearby, to get you out of the city for a day.”  It was just after St. Patrick’s Day, and we ate Reuben pizzas, with leftover corned beef, homemade sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on rye-dough pizza crust.  And we stayed the night. On the train home, we marveled that we laughed like we hadn’t laughed in a long, long time.  After that visit, I returned nearly every weekend, my center of gravity shifting from the cubicle and the treadmill in all that concrete to the soil and the sky.  The farm, and the community here, created a space for me to dig deep into myself, to learn to listen again to my own inner wisdom, to reconnect.  

And then there’s all that other stuff I learned!  How to sow seeds, transplant seedlings, harvest and preserve food, make yogurt and cheese, collect maple sap, make compost tea, cook with whatever’s on hand.  And all the subjects and practices to which I’ve been introduced--the new cosmology, permaculture and edible forest gardening, peak oil, transition towns, the gnostic gospels, nutrient dense farming, silent retreats, natural building, humanure, tenebrae, plainchant, meditation.  It’s been more than an education, it’s been a whole new perspective on being human. I will miss this place, and these people, more than I can even anticipate. 

So here I am, like Ouroboros, a snake eating my own tail, cycling back again.  Jung wrote that Ourobouros slays itself and then gives birth to itself again, and in some ways, that’s what this feels like.  Time to die, time to be born.  

I am so grateful for all the midwives in my life . . . 

all we see is kids on buses, longing to be free...

I awoke this morning to some lovely news: a band I greatly admire, Arcade Fire, won the "Album of the Year" award for "The Suburbs."  It somehow feels like an affirmation--not of my exquisite musical taste, but of the pain I felt growing up.  The album seems to assure me: "That did indeed happen. I know."

I first really gave the album a listen while I was at Yestermorrow taking my natural building class, and I've been playing it over and over and over again every since; it's been a continuing, intense experience.  The orchestral, thrumming sound, and the lyrics of anomie and longing...it's like being transported back to being 15 years old.  I feel myself writing furiously in my journal, spending hours and hours in the art rooms after school, feeling trapped, arching toward elsewhere.  

There's something about being 15 in the suburbs.  It felt like there was nowhere to go, nothing to do, like I might explode.  I imagine all that pent-up feeling is part and parcel of one's emerging independence, the growing separation from parents.  But it's then complicated and exacerbated by a sense of total dependency, because you need a freaking car to go just about anywhere.  You can't just go hide out in a field, because they've all been developed and are "property," and you can't just hang out on the end of the street, sitting on the curb, without the police coming and telling you to move along.  If I had been more rebellious, I would have found ways to get away, but mostly I was a good kid, abiding curfew, getting good grades, seething quietly.  

Anyway, the beauty of the Arcade Fire album is that they capture the whole stinking cauldron of white, suburban middle-classness, serving it up as if they had walked every step with you.  That is the affirmation I am feeling: my younger self is recognized.

And the truth is that I love this album because it makes me remember, viscerally, that I wanted to be an artist, a painter, a writer.  I knew that truth when I was young, but I beat it down over the years.  I justified: Oh, I'm not good enough to make it.  Oh, I'll be an organizer, I'll help make change.  I'll be an elementary school teacher, a noble profession, that's how I'll contribute to society. I'll be an anthropologist, I'll help us understand each other....Oh, and I'll study street art...

But now I think that, starting back in 2007 when I began taking ceramics classes, taking photos, delving into cooking, learning to farm, and now learning to build, I've been spending the last few years winding and wending my way back, coming closer to full circle.  I want to make things.  I need to create.  This is the piece that was missing for me in academia, in education, in activism...in all those earlier professional incarnations, I tried to wiggle my way toward creativity, to find opportunities to design websites, to create posters and flyers, to rearrange, even to tweak text in terms of language and layout... 

So it seems fitting that I traveled down to Philly last weekend to learn about natural paints and finishes, as an addendum to my natural building class.  Taught by two of my instructors from Yestermorrow, Ace and Deva, the class was a hands-on opportunity to learn how to make earth- and lime/casein-based paints, to create tinted paints with mineral pigments, to practice "color studies," and to apply what we'd learned by painting a small hallway in the church basement where the class was held.  It was a great class, organized by the ReVerse Foundation--if you're in Philly, do check them out, they are doing great things with natural building and community!  

There is something deeply satisfying about DIY (do-it-yourself) projects.  Making your own paint is not only empowering, but also creative--mixing and testing and swirling and playing with texture and color.  And then there's the added bonus that the paint is safe on your skin, and that there are no fumes!  Imagine that.  

I think this that love of "making things" is part of our long human experience.  For tens of thousands of years we have been playing with earth and clay, with pigment, being expressive, making meaning, creating beauty.  It's in our blood, in our bones.  

And somehow this journey of the last few years has helped me find my way back to the art room, after school.  I've opened the door, and I see my 15 year old self is still there, sketching, painting away, composing poems, singing like crazy about The Suburbs, and I think I'm ready to join her.  To the canvas, the lumberyard, the garden...

"First they built the road, then they built the town, that's why we're still driving around and around; and all we see is kids on buses, longing to be free..."  --Wasted Hours, Arcade Fire

being decisive (with a chainsaw)

Ace demonstrates how to create an angled strawbaleThat's right: with a chainsaw. Turns out that a chainsaw is a handy tool if you're building a strawbale house.

Strawbales have a super high insulation value, being so densely packed and thick (18"). The walls are strengthened by installing the strawbales like bricks, called a "running bond," where the end of a bale in one layer rests on the middle of the bale beneath it. Once all the bales are up, plaster is applied to the inner and outer surfaces, to keep the straw airtight and prevent bugs from finding a home. 

But getting the walls up is harder than you might imagine. To make plastering smooth, the bales need to be plumb and level, otherwise you might be applying 6" of plaster in one spot and 1" in another. Not only would that be a waste of plaster but plaster is very heavy, and it's likely that applying a coat of plaster that's two inches or thicker will end up sagging. 

When installing the bales, you want them to be as well aligned as possible. And, at the same time, you want to get them in as close next to each other and the frame as possible, compressing them tightly into every nook. 

But the fact is that strawbales are unruly. They are not uniform in dimension, and they can be more or less densely packed. And, to make things just a bit more complex, you sometimes have to resize bales to fit into certain corners or gaps. But turns out that's pretty easy, once you do it a couple times.  The harder part is re-shaping them into angles, or cutting notches into them to make them nuzzle up close to wall studs. That's when the chainsaw comes in.

I'd never used a chainsaw before, and I was pretty nervous. Everyone tells you how dangerous they are. Well, I don't know if anyone actually ever told me that directly, but it seems like I must have heard that a thousand times.  Not only are they considered dangerous, but as a girl, and then as a woman, I had never been encouraged to try using one. Recently, we have had a wonderful permacultural designer named Andrew Faust doing some improvements to the farm, including cutting down some trees to increase the sunlight to the main garden. One day at lunch, he and Bill, another resident companion at the farm, were talking equipment, using numbers. Something like, "What are you using, an 18, or a 20?"  

I realized at that moment, which took place just after I signed up for the Yestermorrow course, that I was going to have to get comfortable asking a lot of basic questions, because even though I could make an educated guess that they might be talking about the length of the blade (or maybe the size of the engine?), I really wasn't sure at all.  I was going to have to get used to asking questions like "What does that mean?" "What do you call that?" and "Can you show me how?"  The Yestermorrow course gave me lots of opportunities to get comfortable asking all my "newbie" questions.

And I got to try out using a chainsaw.  I have to say, it was really fun.  Assessing where and how much you want to cut is one thing, but then, at some point, you have to just dive in and start cutting.  Ace and Deva showed us how easy it was to re-strap a bale, so when someone accidentally cut through the strap, it was no big deal ("low-stakes" exercises, in learning/educational jargon).  But even though I knew that the bale could be easily fixed, I dreaded the possibility of cutting the strap.  All my "good girl" training came out in full force; I didn't want to "do it wrong."  

As I sat there wrestling with that particular little demon, I realized that I was never going to learn to shape a bale if I didn't start actually cutting.  So I took a deep breath, got into a balanced stance, and began.  It was so cool to see all the straw go flying, and to feel the resistance of the bale against the blade.  I learned that you had to apply some pressure in some spots as well, or the straw would just sort of yield to the blade, bending, and thereby avoiding being cut.  Ace was a great mentor, going beyond just telling me how, but staying with me and guiding me until I got my sea legs.

I learned that I had to be decisive, even if that meant that I might not do it perfectly.  And as I practiced on my second and third bale, I got better at seeing the negative space of the angle I wanted to create (geometry!), and at leaning into the cut.  Like a lot of things in life, there are precautions to be taken, and you have to cultivate a certain awareness, but in the end, you have to take action.

I plan on getting comfortable with power tools; there are courses at Yestermorrow designed especially for women to learn how to use power tools, and to learn carpentry skills.  It's incredibly empowering to pick up a skill that you were probably never really encouraged to even want to have.  My last carpentry experiment was in 7th grade, I believe, when I made a tiny little bookstand, maybe about a foot long.  I remember that class, and wanting to fit in, and wanting to learn how to use a saw, and wanting to please the teacher, and not wanting to make a fool of myself, and wanting the boys to like me.  All these desires were like a storm within me.  I'm so thankful to be an adult now, to be able to recognize my internal conflicting voices and desires, and (usually) to not let them paralyze me.  I can quiet my mind, and simply ask myself, "What do I really want to do?" And I can be decisive in pursuing the answer.