Big Love

I work with some real bonafide mothers here at at Acorus Restoration, a native plant nursery and ecological restoration in Walsingham, Ontario. When my big city friends ask, I says these ladies are small-town and live in a little bubble like and that they sure as hell can tell great stories and boy do they love to talk all day and gossip. My friends think I'm talking bad about them but I'm not. These women here, they pour all their love and energy, and there's a lot of it let me tell ya, into them bubbles, their family and their community and their homes and it's nice to be around. They know their plants and the conservation areas and concession roads, and they recognise all the bird calls and love their dogs, they know who's dating who and who's marriage is having problems and who's got high blood pressure now and who they just seen the other day working at the pizza place and who's doing drugs. I ain't saying they're perfect, they've got their prejudices too like everyone else but they're fussy about living right. And they care a plenty. City folk like to look down on country folk, call them rednecks and hicks, but there's a lot to be said for loving where you're from and taking care of it.

Don't Talk About the Year As If It's Over

So I'm settled back in Montreal with an absurd head of hair. Snow's on the ground, hockey season's here, farming season is certainly over. I went back for a quick visit to the Ontario farms yesterday. The fields were white with snow, the farmers unhurried. There’s time to take it easier until the weather starts to turn. A full season under the belt is not enough experience to speak about farming with authority but it counts for something. Here's my take.

P.S. In the picture below, that big puffball mushroom was edible and unbelievably delicious.

Old farm houses act as a reservoir of many things, collecting things as years and people pass through; old couches, old books and old record and cassette collections, old and new ideas, old and young people. I dusted off and read a book from Les' bookshelf, published in 1976 called The Promise of the Coming Dark Age. It talks about how the breakdown of the Roman Empire was followed by the Dark Ages, a period normally associated with chaos and lawlessness. Yet this was an important period because it was during this time that our modern day institutions of democracy, fraternity and equality were built. I see a similarity on these farms, an incubator for energy and action combined with varying degrees of disdain for the New Empire. It's a lively space away from the monopolizing effects of the city and a place to build a way out.

You find all types of people on the farm and you see the uniqueness of each one because you have the time to really feel them out. You see the way they act when under-slept, how they eat oatmeal to what makes them tighten up and what makes them beam inside. Initially everyone's new and you put your best face forward as you feel thrilled to meet all these independent and intelligent people. Then as usual, familiarity doesn't always breed contempt but it diminishes courtesy and admiration. After all, everyone is human and not everyone is always happy or at peace all the time and there’s more interaction, less isolation. More frustration and laughs and friction, less apathy and boredom. Make-up is a ludicrous idea for a day on the farm, laundry and showers are suggestions, there's more examination of inner qualities, less on outward appearances. The cooking and cleaning and working together is a big laughy chatty Kathy pow-wow or a pet peeve, depending on the day. There's less screen time, certainly less noise but more music and radio. More talk and more action.

I met three young boys on the farms, Elliot, Luke and Nate who are between three and five years old. They are just explosions of questions and energy. We theorized that it must be because everyone that they meet is a friend that comes to the farm and it makes them unabashed, carefree, energetic crowd pleasers with scuffed knees and elbows. There's a real purity to them, distillations of the farm life.

________________

At the end of the season, I got into a slightly heated argument with David, the owner of the farm in Nova Scotia, as I haggled to get paid $250 for the work of two months of 11 hour days. He told me I wasn’t cut out for farming and that I don’t have the energy, that I should consider practicing the traditional kind of Tai-chi where your hips stay facing forward to straighten out my spine. I was taken aback but I respect his opinion. His perspective is often sharp and clear, a product of experience and wisdom. Maybe farming isn't for me. It's not that I doubt my ability to work hard, nor my endurance. I can work but I analyse and think a lot too. What David saw in me was a waning motivation towards the end of the season as I began to question certain practices and their efficacy. I think in his view, to be a farmer you need the work ethic that never quits. Every day is a long day and the work is repetitive but needs doing. I’m an abstract thinker, mentally strong but a dreamer added the farm manager when I asked her opinion.

When I told Les this yesterday during my one-day return trip to the Ontario farms, he said that the idea of not being cut out for something is contingent on the idea that there is a set way to do things, that things don't change, that times don't change.

Well we all know how it goes. "You better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone" sang Dylan. There are movements rising and receding everywhere. There's a real groundswell of urban youths seeing what it's like to try and grow food, temporary buoying the profitability of organic farms with enthusiastic, idealistic and cheap labour, just eager to learn and willing to sacrifice pay for education. There's a trickle of people starting to see the worth in paying two dollars for a bulb of garlic. Meanwhile, technology has reached a deafening pitch. There's a whole generation simultaneously drowned by and trying to stay abreast of cellphones that Facebook. What is considered absurd is a fluid notion, changing by the day. Every new generation is a wave of the most book-educated, mentally-stimulated, self-conscious and self-critical groupthinkers crashing onto the uncharted shores of the 21st century, bumping up against the truths held to be self evident by an old guard that did the same thing. The movement of Shambhala Buddhism to Nova Scotia decades ago is still quietly rolling off eddies.

I'm not convinced my generalisations are necessarily accurate. I don't know what's going on in other parts of the world, in the financial and political circles, in the Middle East or California or Europe, in the newest developments in nuclear energy or computer technology, in the tracking of planets in our solar system and beyond, in the oceans and the skies and the heavens, in the efforts of corporate social responsibility. But it's all moving and I've got faith that what I'm doing will work out.

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)