Four Seasons

I've been at Four Seasons Farm for nearly a month now. The family that runs it is the last remaining part of a community that moved here in the late 70's on the advice of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as part of the Shambala Buddhism movement because this area has a good energy, cut and shaped by the ocean and the elements. The old record collections and bookshelves at these farms are always my favorite feature and so naturally I've been listening to Billy Joel and reading a bit on Shambala and trying it out: a little daily breathing exercises and trying to foster a tenderness in my heart. Sounds a bit hippy when I say it out loud.

Then I try to practice it during the day. Results vary. The daily schedule is meals and work. We eat three meals a day together around a big family dinner table, seven to nine of us, simple breakfasts and lunches, taking turns cooking dinner. Eleven hours a day minus the oatmeal break in the morning and a one-hour lunch break is spent working, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the fields, sometimes in the greenhouses. Sometimes we work together, conversations fluid and varying as people move in and out as their tasks dictate, each person changing the dynamic and topics ranging from ridiculous to self-righteous to romantic, comments coming in from someone cutting arugula in the corner who gets it to someone cutting magenta right next to me who doesn't. Sometimes I work alone, sitting in silence, regretting or smiling about incidences past present or future or with songs surfacing and receding, the Mississippi delta, shining like a national guitar...on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese...and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all...moon river wider than a mile...slow down you crazy child, you're so ambitious for a juvenile...she only comes out at night, lean and hungry type...choruses, little excerpts, ones that I just heard or hardly remember from deep recesses of my mind that I look up and try to memorise.

On Halloween we dressed up as the farm, I as a chicken made out of cardboard boxes and went to the firehall to squawk at the Maitland Halloween Dance. One night it went from cold during the day to warm rain at night and we named the weather Cuba and walked through the forest to a house abandoned for decades, whips of warm air rolling through the field with the moon out. Everything feels immediate. The ocean makes the weather. Normal is a setting on the washing machine. This Nova Scotia farm experience is exposing me.

Shouldered by a Giant Turtle

We cannot know anything. That's what both books that I am reading proclaim. Book number one is the Modern Mind by Peter Watson, an unbelievably expansive summary of the movements in thought in the 20th century, mainly detailing how scientific thinking dominated our minds these past 100 years, infiltrating every discipline from art to music to philosophy. Yet it is starting to show signs that we may be at an apex, a peak that may signal a dead-end in terms of our ability to understand the universe through deductive logic. Bear with me if you can, I know this is heavy. Here's a comic:

The other book is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese scientist turned farmer who applies a Taoist philosophy to agriculture, advocating do-nothing farming consistent with his philosophy that nature cannot be improved upon by man and that we know nothing and the best way to think and act is with a non-discriminating knowledge which is not arrived at through critical analysis and deduction. That means accepting wood as wood and not examining it from it's most basic building blocks. The books are more nuanced but these two wise men are in agreement on at least one point, that deductive thinking has flaws and science cannot provide an answer to everything.

Watson's book goes further, summarising the ideas of John Maddox, a long-time editor of the academic journal Nature. No one can deny that science has brought technological advance. But the progress in pure science (mainly physics) and the search for a Unifying Theory of Everything while trying to dissect everything down to the smallest pieces is exposing limits to our understanding. Maddox, a lifetime scientist and editor of the most recognisable science journal says that at this stage, concepts like the big bang, string theory, quarks (and neutrinos and whatever we discover next that proves to be even smaller) and the multitude of other concepts that most of us laypeople don't understand, that even to scientists these are just extended metaphors for scientists to try to make sense of the universe.

http://www.xkcd.com

How can anyone picture what came before the universe or what is beyond space or what an electron is made of? These are unanswerable questions to which science attempts to answer with increasingly inexact theories. String theory is completely unsubstantiated. Merely the process of observing electrons in orbit around an atom introduces error making it only possible to know the probability that the electron is there. So the universe isn't being carried on the back of a giant turtle nor was it created in six days, but where does the big bang get me? I've been having this feeling lately that you can choose what you believe in regarding the big questions (like the existence God, what happens to you after you die, what's the point of it all, the inherent good or bad of people etc.) and you won't ever be proven wrong. Of course, it's not easy to choose to believe something so we look to the world around us to clue us in the right direction.

So what do you think happens after you die? My grandfather recently passed away, the first time I have experienced the death of a loved one and certainly not the last. I saw the life force slowly ebb from his body and though I didn't see the ultimate end, I knew where it was leading. It's funny that we have the intellect to contemplate our own deaths but no way to know anything about what happens after that last breath. And it's the biggest elephant in the room, the great unknown, the after life, the thing that few people can ever accept despite it's inevitability.

It's also fall here in farm country, a beautiful time and harvest time. Time is up for the annuals, plants whose life cycles last one season are returning to earth in decomposing stalks and dispersed seed. From dandelion to corn to beans, how do they feel about death?

Quoting Wikipedia, "precise medical definitions of death become more problematic as science and medicine advance." Is plant death like human death? Just because we're smart enough to think about it doesn't mean we experience it any different. A termination in function of the heart and the brain means you're dead but many of the cells of which you are constituted are still alive. A person can be revived by a defibrillator after being clinically dead for several minutes. A person can be brain dead while the rest of the body functions are kept alive. Where is your soul held? Where were you before you were born and where will you go after?

What I'm questioning is how much the acceptance of science as the only authority is helping us come to terms with the world. Consider death as the permanent cessation of of vital bodily functions vs. death as the soul leaving the body.

In the final chapters of One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka revels in the joy that is held in a grain of rice come winter though the rice plant has withered away. People can't prove most of the things they talk about today yet most would dismiss this without a second thought. And this is where scientific thinking fails us, telling us no evidence means no reason to believe. I think an exuberant grain of rice sounds nice, and if you want, you can see death as just a different expression of life. Science won't ever reassure us about death, resolve our queries of whether our spirits live on or if humans are inherently good. Science won't give us faith in karma or that someone is smiling down on you from above. But just because you have no evidence to believe in something doesn't mean there's nothing to believe in.

Urban Agriculture

It's the wave of the future.

How's this for a good idea?

Young Urban Farmers

Carbon Tabulating

Part of my decision to come out here was to see how hard or easy living with less impact would be. After all, the say that all you need is love...after you've got food, shelter and water of course.

Well, Kawartha Ecological Growers is the organisation I'm working for. We co-ordinate the produce of twenty different small family farms to be delivered daily to members in the city. Many of the farms we work with are Amish and well-versed at living self sufficiently. The Amish make a deliberate effort to live a slow and luddite lifestyle, forbidding use of electricity and fuel. The only phone the community uses is at their school house. Mark and Shannon take orders and communicate with them via handwritten notes or face-to-face communication. For refrigeration during summer months, they harvest huge blocks of ice from ponds they have dug during winter, then store it in an insulated trailer. Tractors and carriages are all horse-pulled. Their food and clothing is all self produced and their lifestyle is the definition of simple. If a community member is sick, everyone will donate to pay the hospital bills in cash since they do not use OHIP cards. They refuse to cash in government cheques and stockpile them as proof of staying independent of the government and "maintaining the importance of brotherhood."

Meanwhile, I've been trying to live on as little as I can, in a cabin with no running water or electricity. (Well not anymore, see footnote below). All my food is locally grown and travels an average of 15 food miles I would guess. Raw milk, yogurt and eggs have been consistently available since I came to the farm. My diet in those early weeks of April was a lot of non-perishable things like bread/pasta or stuff that would keep like potatoes, canned or frozen beans, tomatoes and zucchini from last year's harvest. Then as the season began, more variety was introduced like wild-harvested items (fiddleheads (pictured above) and nettle), leeks, as well as the early and frost tolerant lettuces, beets and rhubarb. Then came more variety like aspargus and strawberries. Now it's a feast of the harvest and also the canning and preserving for the winter months.

Abundant bounty of fresh corn and beans and peas and peppers and broccoli and melons and tomatoes and garlic and more. The occasional grass fed beef or free range chicken too. And I would say it was all produced in a manner that minimizes or eliminates use independent of fossil fuels and improves the soils. It has been a great season as most crops like wet, hot and sunny conditions.

Showers consist of well-water, rainwater or lakewater. Drinking water is store bought as are a few other items like cooking oil, bananas, dish soap, soya sauce, salt. I drive all over the place to deliver groceries to our members and to get to different farms for work and on weekends I go to Toronto for a vacation from the solitude of the simple life and revel in a frenzy of bright lights, noise and friends.

Sustainable living is a lifestyle designed for permanence. The difference between my lifestyle and the Amish lifestyle in some ways is a difference in degree and in some ways is fundamental. I can do my best to use little and produce what I can but I won't be able to shut out the rest of the world, the innovations in technology and the constant march of progress even in this dark and cosy cabin. I don't have the community to do so and I don't think it's realistic or progressive to hope to create a community that would eschew modernity. On a few levels there would be benefits to returning to only face-to-face interactions and leaving behind the distractions and comforts glowing from our digital displays. We could slow right down and be happy, happier even, but the brotherhood I know and have isn't about that and it won't ever be. You can't unring a bell.

So food, shelter and water matter but so does love. We all cry, laugh, lose loved ones and think that we're the only ones who have dealt with this before so don't forget that we're in it together, all of us in these modern times.

****

I wrote most of this before I left for Hong Kong in early July. I came back one month later to find that I'd been kicked out of my cabin due to a dispute between my boss and the owner of the cabin which is unfortunate but doesn't surprise me. So I'm working mainly on Les' farm now, the coolest of the farms. Les is a 60 year old man who manages a few hundred acres on his own, has animals and a tractor and a wetland on his property. We use the tractor and machinery much more.

My Other Speed is Slow and Doesn't Have Time to Care What You Think About My Shoes

I hand write by candle light onto pad now. I forgot how different it is writing just for yourself until I started doing it again.

I leave the farm most Fridays for the city and burn up the energy that comes from working hard all week. It's a whirlwind of cell phones, jazz bands, dance floors and cheap chinese food, until Sunday when it takes me an entire evening to slow back down to the pace of a different life.

It can get lonely at nights in an unconnected cabin. No music or radio, no TV or hot shower or internet to distract from the enveloping darkness. The sky darkens and the moon takes over, sending out beams of solitude and I swear to you the coyote's howl out of the neighbouring forest sends chills through you like a wind through a wind chime.

The days are of course beautiful and seemingly endless. Farming is basically working your ass off for next to nothing (monetarily) but getting rewarded in a different, more traditional and more whole-wheat way. Wildflowers smiling at the sky, swaying in the wind and hearty meals and hardy dogs playing with country-bred kids and planting and digging and haying and their respective rhythms and idyllic looking clouds and jokes about the weather until christmas and donkeys and trying to ride donkeys and learning about wild tea and zucchini flowers and pollinators and long shadows over seas of wheat or canola and exploding sunsets over the huge Canadian horizons and all that kind of thing.

I chase something entirely different on weekends, consuming and looking outwards for something to fulfill me, that smile, those laughs, those eyes, that night out, that awesome concert and that attitude of 'people like me and you should too and what do you think of my shoes.' I want to fill a hole with a whole lot of fun and I'm definitely not the only one trying that out. And so it takes me all Sunday evening to change gears. Alone with the dark and the quiet, I have nowhere to look but inward and maybe it is slowly forging strength.

So I think I can do this. It's beautiful, healthy, and colourful. It's sustainable and fulfilling. But I don't think I can do it alone.

(Donkeys, haying, wildflowers)

It's a Life

It's been a whirlwind of a week. Farm life has 80's tones. This old house has sloping floors and the sheds and bookshelves are filled with things from previous decades. For the first week we had only one tape and one speaker so I repeatedly heard Paul Simon sing "These are the days of miracle and wonder,this is the long distance call."

Now things are starting to swing as my body learns to handle this life. No longer nervous around the creepy gang of pervert-weirdo chickens that are more free range than I am. My back is stronger and new muscles are getting sore and recovering every day - thumbs, wrists, balls of my feet. The pent up energy I had to do things, to exert myself fully has been spent building plotting digging pushing shimmying hammering lifting paddling climbing.


Always always outside except feeding time, three times a day when I stuff my face with the freshest home grown holy goodness I've ever had the pleasure of mowing down. And then sleeping time. Like a hefty log. It's a pretty good life if you like the simple things.

Good Signs

Arrived on the farm today and played capture the flag barefoot in the sunshine, a good omen if there ever was one. Have internet and electricity at the house for a few days while I get settled in and until I move to the cabin. Went out for a mosey after dinner and got re-acquainted with the stars. They were out in full force tonight as were the bright lights of Toronto 15o km to the south-west. Guess I won't be needing the North Star for orientation.

Also, to everyone who donated to Katitawa School for the forest project that I wrote about a few weeks ago, thanks so much. We raised the 500 dollars we needed. Check the link.