Gardening Words on a Rainy Afternoon

November 2, 2003

Today is the day I will write my big essay about agriculture--the one that will explain everything. It will tie together the micro scale and the macro scale, our personal relationship with every bite we eat and humanity's relationship with the planet and the cosmos. It will give a global perspective, and also be full of personal stories. Taking as grist my own experiences working in farming, gardening, and gardening education, it will make the odd behavior of gardeners and farmers understandable to everyone. Never again will I or any other soil-worker feel under-appreciated or un-supported. Our national and global culture will undergo a transformation in which entering into a co-creative relationship with the land in order to sustain the life of people and the planet will be a laudable, rather than lowly, occupation. My essay will spark a revival of interest in small-scale, community-based agriculture--and not only interest, but an intense desire to participate. After reading it, everyone will want to get their hands in the soil. Gardeners and farmers will no longer be the lonely shepherds of a widely forgotten art as we pass through the "dark ages" of the industrial food system, but will be joined by everyone in creating a much more hopeful future. We will all be gardeners and farmers, and we'll all be applied ecologists, because by engaging with the earth directly we will learn the lessons that no amount of abstract information about the environment can give us. In short, it will be heaven on earth...if only I can write that big essay.

Today would be a good day to do it. Rain has been falling all day, and I'm huddled next to the woodstove in my yurt. Yesterday would have been a good day to do it too, but I knew rain was coming today, so I had other priorities. I wanted to clear the dead squash vines and borage plants from the beds in one of our gardens, which will make replanting them with something else easier. I also wanted to harvest our yacon tubers before the soil turned to mud. I had to make sure the greenhouses were sufficiently ventilated during the sunny parts of the day, and buttoned up against the cold once evening fell. I also had some laundry I wanted to wash and hang outside on what may have been the last line-drying day for a while. I wanted to spend at least a little time playing the guitar, and to go to a musical performance in town in the evening. I did all of those things. But I didn't have much time to write. And I didn't write.

About a week ago, inspiration also struck, and almost took me somewhere, but again real life interrupted. This is how my essay started:

All modern-day food gardeners and farmers live in a world of paradox.
On September 10, 2003, South Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae martyred himself in protest outside the World Trade Organization's fifth ministerial in Cancún, Mexico. Like hundreds of thousands of small farmers every year, he had lost his farm four years before to the forces of corporatization and international trade.

I planned to continue by talking about the thousands of farmer suicides that have resulted from the "get big, get modern, or get out" policies of our government and of corporate agriculture. The only way many despairing farmers see to save their families from economic ruin is to kill themselves (often through on-farm "accidents") and let their survivors cash in on their life insurance policies. Less dramatically, many farmers are dying a slow death of the spirit, as they see the communities that once embraced and shared food-growing disintegrate into a farmer-hostile, earth-alienated, profit-driven, highly-consumptive, sped-up society of economically fragmented individuals and families. The lessons of gardening and farming are so alien in this world of all-you-can-eat fast food, all-you-can-absorb information, all-you-can-stand TV, all-you-can-consume everything, and all-you-can-feel emptiness, that the serious gardener or farmer can't help but feel like a stranger in a stranger land--or rather, like a familiar in a familiar land surrounded by strangers prone to destroying the grounds of our collective existence.

I think I must have been feeling kind of down to have started my big essay that way.

In some ways, true enough, it had been a difficult year, during which I myself had experienced this endemic "disintegration of agricultural community" on a small scale. My fellow staff member in our gardening apprenticeship program had left midway through the season (one month into a two-month apprentice group's stay) to pursue her path as a solitary artist, and I had dropped almost everything else (including writing and working on this magazine) to try to hold the program, as well as the garden, together. It turns out that perhaps that wasn't the best choice, since, during that second month, neither I nor the apprentices and short-term interns had the variety in work or social environment that we probably needed to create a healthy, satisfying balance in our lives. I realize that I sacrificed my well-being out of a sense of responsibility, as well as from a passion for seeing our garden through to the end of the season. The garden I oversaw was--and is, as I write this on a rainy Sunday afternoon--incredibly abundant this year, but the result of my taking on too many roles at once was that in some of those roles (such as attempting to keep everyone in the program happy while maintaining sight of the "big picture" of the garden), I, frankly, didn't always excel. I did well with the garden part, but, in the role of facilitating the well-being of these particular six people, all in their early twenties, all with different needs and many with frequently-changing plans and moods, I (two decades past my early twenties, and quite different in temperament) was far from expert.* [*In all fairness to myself, it could have been a lot worse. In many faming/gardening educational settings with which I am familiar, it is frequently worse. And at the very least, everyone agreed, we took some great field trips this summer.]

It takes a village to raise a child, and ultimately it also takes a village to run an educational program or grow a garden sustainably. One of the lessons from this year for me was that when food-growing becomes an isolated task, cut off from the people who are consuming the food, it can transform from a source of joy into a source of burnout and resentment. I was happy this year whenever I had people to work with in the garden. I was especially happy when community members took the time to walk past the meadow, across the creek, and into our main gardens to see what was going on. Those who pitched in earned an extra measure of gratitude. Whenever we had visitors, I saw that we gardeners and gardening students were not alone in this community! Someone else had discovered, even if just for a moment, the joy of working with plants, soil, worms, and bugs, being serenaded by birds, feeling the effects of sun and clouds as they moved across the sky, dodging raindrops, getting hot, cold, sore, reinvigorated, having free-flowing conversations with the wind, with ourselves, with each other, with the earth. Someone else was touching the magic we had discovered. Someone else was finding the walls breaking down between ourselves and the rest of the earth community. Someone else was re-indigenating, re-connecting with the land, becoming immersed in the constant exchange of energy between the constituent parts of one big, miraculous whole. It was bliss.

But too often, it seemed that weeks went by when everyone else in the community was too busy to come out. Somewhat like the dwindling number of farmers in the larger society, the people involved in the garden apprenticeship program were cranking out vegetables for the rest of the population. When my co-facilitator left and the feedback went somewhat sour in July, few other community members had any real connection to what had been happening in the garden. Sadly, this is not just a small problem confined to one intentional community whose members tend to get overextended and/or have other preferred ways, besides gardening, of spending their time. What happened this year at Lost Valley is merely a mild, solvable microcosm of a less-easily solvable, growing worldwide epidemic of disconnection from the sources of our food and from the people who produce it.

The "paradox" that original essay referred to consists of this: there is nothing more joyful than that connection to the earth (and by earth, I mean the entire earth community, which includes one another) that gardening and farming can bring. At least, there's nothing more joyful in my experience. It's not necessarily a bounce-up-and-down, broadcast-it-all-over joy, since gardeners and farmers have to conserve energy for the ongoing tasks that will invite their attention for as long as they're alive, but more of a sustained, quiet joy, a sense of deep, abiding communion. It's a peacefulness inside, a knowledge that, ultimately, all is right with the world, that turkey vultures, sparrows, earthworms, millipedes, butterflies, deer, and we are all brothers and sisters, and that dandelions, squash plants, blackberries, tiger lilies, and fir trees are our cousins. It transcends language, and in fact can make it very difficult to write, since writing always seems like a pale imitation of the reality of life, a vast oversimplification and breaking-up of a complex, interconnected oneness that would need millions of words at once--and none--to explain it.

The other half of that paradox consists of the fact that there is also no work, apart from other forms of hard physical labor (coal-mining comes to mind) or being a soldier in combat, that is potentially as demanding and difficult in a purely physical sense, and that puts one so at the mercy of the elements, of largely unpredictable and uncontrollable weather and other forces of nature (pests, diseases, invasive plants, etc.). Like various kinds of work caring for people or animals, gardening and farming demand constant attention; one can't set aside the "vegetable-growing project" for six months and come back to it where one left off, the same way one can put a building renovation, an essay, a Ph.D. thesis, or a painting on hold (all other factors being equal). And, adding to the physical demands of sustainable farming methods, and the constant attention required, is the general cultural ignorance about agriculture that I've already mentioned, society's general neglect of the farmer. So just as being a farmer or gardener can be exceedingly joyful, it can also be exceedingly difficult and even depressing, given the wrong combination of circumstances.

The activity of food-growing requires multiple leaps of faith, and an ability to surrender ego: one can never be certain of the results, and the results are always temporary. The gardener or farmer must love the process, and must love the work, because in the end (usually 100 years or less into the future), we and everyone else we fed will be dead, and the land we cultivated will quite likely have reverted to a weed patch, leaving no physical monument to our accomplishments. These words I'm writing now might conceivably be preserved for as long as time exists (not that I'm suggesting they should be), but the kale and lettuce I'll be harvesting tomorrow morning will be eaten before the end of the week, cycling through several dozen people who will take that energy into the world in hundreds of different ways, most of them not directly traceable to either kale or lettuce. But tomorrow morning, what will be more important to me: harvesting the kale and lettuce, or working on this essay? I'm sorry if this disappoints you, but it's the kale and lettuce. This is partly because I can't eat my words, and neither can the community of people who are being sustained by this garden's bounty. It's also because harvesting the kale and lettuce puts me in direct relationship with a world that is ever-changing, yet far more enduring and real than the words I piece together in an attempt to explain it.

I have to admit, though, that putting these thoughts into the form of words is a satisfying way to spend a rainy afternoon in front of the woodstove.

I realize that I wandered off into paradox before finishing my "microcosm" story. So to complete the tale of this year in the garden, I was blessed with an extremely dedicated apprentice in August, and several very helpful work-exchangers in September and October, who arrived just when I feared that isolation in the garden and an imposingly impressive number of seasonally necessary tasks would overwhelm me. During the last few weeks of October, especially, the weather was benevolent, and a number of Naka-Ima participants helped out for several days both before and after their weekend workshop. This is the most exciting development for me yet this year, because Naka-Ima is without doubt our most successful program, and yet the missing element in this personal growth workshop has always seemed to me to be some concrete connection to on-the-ground, physical sustainability. The free flow of energy that has now started between Naka-Ima and the garden, the chance for attendees to participate in both, provides a model for the kind of integrative work that Lost Valley has always aspired to, and that I myself want to be part of. Gardeners and farmers need connection to other people just as much as anyone else does. Our society has left them "out standing in their fields" for too long.

It's time to erase the boundaries that separate agriculture from the rest of life--to see that "agriculture" and "culture" are inextricably intertwined, for better or for worse, and to consciously choose the "for better" option. When we all either get our hands directly in the soil or take even a small role or interest in the growing of our food, that "for better" option will become the dominant reality. When we're each intimately familiar with the life history of what we put into our mouths, today's earth- and people-alienated, corporatized, industrialized food system will seem like a bad dream from which we are glad we awoke. It will be a new day in the garden, and on the farm, and we will wonder how we ever denied ourselves this fundamental connection to the ground of our being. But this is all dependent on my writing that big essay, which will cover many more issues than those I have mentioned above, from nutrition to ecology to the preservation of native cultures and everything in between, yet will be so artfully concise that it will almost instantly convey everything I know I'd like to say. It will take the connections found in hundreds of garden conversations I've been part of or witness to over the years, and create an integrated picture of our individual and collective relationships to food and food-growing that anyone can understand. It will transform lives, lead the masses to enlightenment, and yet convey the humility that has heretofore prevented me from tackling it.

I hope I will be able to write it soon. But that definitely won't be tomorrow morning.

As a deliberate exercise in spontaneity and an affirmation of the perfection of non-perfection, Talking Leaves editor and Lost Valley gardener Chris Roth recorded the above musings, except for the italicized passages and a few minor word changes, within a five-hour period, including breaks, on a Sunday afternoon. The next day, he was back to the kale and lettuce patch, where he could finally think clearly again, put aside delusions of literary grandeur, and set himself on tasks that are actually accomplishable.

Although he hasn't yet written that big essay, more garden-related ruminations can be found in his review and essay, "Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening: Between the Covers, and Between the Rows." See also "Bringing the Food Economy Home" by Helena Norberg-Hodge and Steven Gorelick on pages 12-15 of our Summer 2003 issue.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Giving In to Cabin Fever

Hibernate: vb.
1. to pass the winter. 2. to pass the winter in a torpid or dormant state

I have always envied bears, bats, and gophers for their natural instinct to hibernate during the winter. For years, I have been jealous of their ability to say good-bye to family and friends, give up all responsibilities, and leave their problems unresolved come time for their annual retreat. When they disappear for months no one questions their motives, no one wonders how long they will be gone, no one asks when they will return. That is so unfair.

For many years, I have said that I will hibernate for the winter. I usually fail in my mission within a week when I join a basketball league, organize a book club, and pick up a new hobby in a desperate attempt to fight Cabin Fever. This year, however, I have been given a golden opportunity, and although one month in a dusty old house can hardly constitute an entire winter of hibernation, it's the closest I might ever come to the real thing.

Living by myself on the Long Beach Peninsula of southern Washington, I have put forth my best effort to stay inside and remain unseen. I have created lists to keep me occupied and on task: Writing Goals, Personal Goals, People to Write, People to Call, Pies to Bake, Gifts to Make. I have also developed little daily rituals to keep me sane: Yoga in the mornings, a walk to the local book store, bakery, or Ace hardware, a midday run or stroll along the beach, and--rain or shine--I watch the sun set behind the waves from a different vista point each day. But aside from these short but important outings, the other twenty-one and a half hours of the day are spent alone, inside, hibernating.

I have no alarm clock, no answering machine, and no mailbox. I go to sleep when I am tired and I wake up when I am ready: the sun is my alarm clock and the clouds are the Snooze. As a result, my coffee cup is getting a little dusty and power naps are a thing of the past. The phone rings at most, twice a day while I am here and when I am not, it just rings. This afternoon Stan--the "S" in B-S Body Shop--called to see if I, by chance, had a windshield that needed repairing. Most evenings, a friend calls to check up on me. At home, they curse me for not having a cell phone; now they confess their jealousy. "I kinda wish I was living in a tiny town on the coast with only a bike and a pair of legs to get around. It sounds so exotic." I bet Stan would think that was funny.

The soup recipe that I have been meaning to try since last winter tasted wonderful with the bread that I finally got around to baking. My box full of pictures is empty and my three year-old photo albums are now full. The list of story ideas at the end of my journal is now covered in checkmarks and slashes. This morning, after two grueling hours, I wrote my first poem in months. The balls of yarn that have been fading in the attic are starting to resemble something like a sweater. I made flashcards to learn Spanish.

When my mom called the other night to say hello, she asked me what could be so hard about staying inside on a cold day and writing, reading, cooking and sleeping. For my aunt who has arthritis, hibernating is easy. For my sister who just started taking night classes after work, hibernation is a necessity. For my best friend who just had twins, hibernation is a fantasy off limits. But for me, a twenty-something, athletic, outdoorswoman, hibernation feels more like a sentence. Like fluoride at the dentist's office, dog-sitting for my neighbor's leaky poodle, and cleaning the toilet every two weeks, it's good for me: it will make me stronger.

At the end of the month, I might have disappointed a few of the locals for never introducing myself, for staying home during football games, and for choosing not to attend the Lion's annual pancake feed. But for the first time in my life, I am not giving into the pressure of getting involved: no basketball leagues, book clubs, potlucks, cocktail parties, Poker nights to pass the winter painlessly. I am fighting the inner voice begging me to call the women at the Visitor's Center and invite them over for soup since I have about five gallons simmering on the stove. I am ignoring the teen-agers playing soccer on the beach even though they could use another player. I am pretending that I do not know about the contra dance at the Community Center this weekend. I am hibernating.

When I said it out loud to my mom, she told me that I sound like I am in a rehab center not a vacation home. My name is Becky and I am a recovering workaholic.

When bears come out of hibernation they are often thin and very hungry. After crossing "Apple, Pumpkin, and Sweet Potato" off of my "Pies to Bake" list, I am not sure that I'll have this problem. While bats are hibernating, they often appear to be dead because their body temperature drops so low. Since I have the heat cranked and drink three cups of tea a day, I think my temperature is just about normal. When gophers emerge from hibernation, they give birth within a month. Hmmm...unless I have an Immaculate Conception, I can forget about that one. So perhaps I am not truly a creature of hibernation: if someone conducted a study on me, I would fall short of most criteria. Yet when I burn the last log in the fireplace, say good-bye to the last sunset, make a toast to my final poem, and close my laptop for the last time, I think my envy for the bears will be quenched.

Becky Brun is a freelance writer from Portland, Oregon who is spending the month of November in Long Beach, Washington as the 2003 Elisabeth McPherson Award For Female Writers recipient. Her work has been published in Nervy Girl!, the Portland Tribune, and the Willamette Weekly.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Letter to Friends of Lost Valley

Dear Friends of Lost Valley,

We'll make this short and sweet:

 

Non-profit public-service membership organizations like Lost Valley rely on financial support from their members in order to survive and thrive.

 

A strong network of friends and moral supporters, now numbering in the thousands, is actively involved in, aligned with, benefitting from, and/or contributing to our mission and our work of helping people and the planet toward inner and outer harmony. If you are reading this magazine, you are probably one of them (one of us).

 

Yet our network of financial supporters and official "members" numbers only a few hundred.

 

To Lost Valley, every member, and every donation, makes a difference! Our goal is to build our base of financial contributors past the one-thousand mark. Every dollar you send helps us maintain and expand our ability to offer our unique gifts and services to people from all walks of life.

 

At the end of 2002, in the midst of our last financial crisis, members contributed generously and we emerged stronger. This winter, as we face similar financial shortages and imminent layoffs, we need you to come through again.

 

Beyond short-term needs, we are also moving toward establishing a land trust at Lost Valley to protect the land in perpetuity. Your support will help us toward that goal.

 

All donations are tax-deductible. (And donations made before April 15, 2004 can still be claimed on your 2003 tax return.)

 

Please send us your donation today! See further details here.

 

Money issues aside, please enjoy the rest of this issue. Thank you!

PS: A donation of any size will bring you a year's subscription to Talking Leaves magazine. Also available as membership gifts are copies of The Beetless' Gardening Book , Organic Prayer, Talking Leaves back issues, Richard Oddo art prints, and homegrown organic garlic braids--all available at our offices at Lost Valley Educational Center, and also by mail if you include an extra few $ for shipping costs. (Email or call if you have questions.) We're sorry, but we've exhausted our supply of Talking Leaves and Lost Valley organic cotton shirts. Even if you can't make a donation, your moral support and non-financial appreciation still do make a difference to us. Thank you.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Letter to Talking Leaves Readers

Dear Talking Leaves reader:

Recognizing that TL has always been at heart an educational project and a service rather than a commercial venture, we have revamped Talking Leaves' distribution strategy, In an effort to maximize readership and get TL into the hands of everyone who wants to read it, we are discontinuing most newsstand sales (where most copies get discarded, unsold) and instead we are asking you to answer the question: who should be reading Talking Leaves? Instead of charging a set subscription price, we are offering year-long subscriptions for a donation of any amount to Lost Valley Educational Center--simply tell us that you want to be on the Talking Leaves mailing list. Do you also know of friends, organizations, or libraries who would benefit from TL? Please send us their names and addresses, along with whatever donation you feel able to make. (For international subscriptions, we must unfortunately still ask for a minimum donation adequate to cover the high shipping costs.*)

As part of this effort, we are seeking sponsors for Talking Leaves: individuals or groups who believe in our project and would like to support its basic operation. The more support we receive, the more energy we will be able to put into creating the magazine, and the more effective we can be in spreading copies of Talking Leaves to where they need to go. We also plan to post more of each issue on our website, as time and funding allow.

We estimate that we'll be producing three issues per year. Please help keep Talking Leaves: A Journal of Our Evolving Ecological Culture alive and thriving through the many cultural transitions ahead. TL is your magazine. Together, we can help it make a difference in many people's lives. Thank you for your readership and support,

Chris Roth
Editor, Talking Leaves

PS: Attention: Librarians and Non-profit Groups:
To receive an ongoing complimentary subscription to Talking Leaves, please email [email protected], call 541-937-2567 ext. 116, or send a request to our mailing address.

*$8 minimum donation for Canada/Mexico, $20 minimum donation for all other countries.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Lost Valley News: Highlights of 2003

As always, this year has been an eventful one here at Lost Valley Educational Center. Among the highlights of 2003:

 

Naka-Ima Changes

The Naka-Ima program experienced its most successful year yet, as it switched from a set fee to a donation basis for attendees of Naka-Ima 1. Almost every course filled to capacity, with a waiting list, for both students and assistants. Extra dates were added to accommodate the demand. Two sessions of the Practice, a Spirit of Relationship course, Artgasm!, a Teacher Training program, and an extra Naka-Ima held in California were further evidence of Naka-Ima's growth this year. For details about next year's offerings, see the Lost Valley Educational Center website.

 

80K by May Campaign: Pay Off the Land!

We launched a fundraising campaign to help pay off the last debts secured against the land. Once we have raised $80,000 for this purpose (it may not be by May, but the rhyme makes it easy to remember), we will be able to take the next steps necessary to protect the land in perpetuity by putting it into a land trust. We also started raising money to put in a new floor in the large classroom. And, as we hit financial hard times and had to lay off staff at year's end, we put out a fundraising appeal to members and supporters (you).

 

Sustainability Programs

We held several apprenticeship sessions in Organic Gardening in Community, and in Permaculture and Community. We also hosted a Permaculture and the Sacred workshop with Starhawk, several Papercrete workshops, and our 13th annual Permaculture Design Course. For next year, we are planning a two-month Permaculture and Sustainable Design Course Apprenticeship, as well as a season-long Organic Gardening internship (work-trade) program and a series of Sustainability workshops (see our website).

 

Internships, Visitor Programs, Conferences

We were joined this year by numerous interns in areas such as Service and Sacred Space, Maintenance, Kitchen, Office, Land, Garden, and Food Processing. We also hosted several Community Experience Weeks, regular Visitor Days and monthly Sunday Tours, and specially arranged visits from various groups, many of whom offered invaluable help in major projects in the garden or on the land. We also continued to host outside conferences and other special events, including a workshop with Sobonfu Somé and many other courses, retreats, and gatherings of groups aligned with our mission.

 

Community Membership Transitions

We experienced some major changes in our membership this year. Several long-term members left, and several other prospective long-term members joined us. Karin moved to Eugene in the spring after nine years at Lost Valley, and Matthew and Grace joined her there when the school year started in the fall; they still visit Lost Valley on weekends. Jarret and Hunter also moved to town in the fall, and Russ departed for the South Pacific just before Thanksgiving. The Whites announced that they will be leaving by the end of next summer, and entered a period of transitional membership.

New arrivals this year include two families: Becca, Mike, Tristan, and Havana moved into the six-plex, and Deb, Vince, and Eli moved into one of the newly renovated units there too. Some of this year's interns may also be moving into the membership process. As evidenced by the list in the left-hand box on this page, many wonderful people are now lending their energy at Lost Valley.

 

LVEC on the Bookshelves and Newsstands

Lost Valley is featured prominently in Diana Leafe Christian's new book, Creating a Life Together (excerpted and reviewed in this issue). Larry's article on relationship appeared in Communities this spring, and Cami has been writing a regular column for the 20-Below section of the Eugene Register-Guard. Most unusual, perhaps, was a visit from contributors to the French edition of Rolling Stone (whose contents are entirely different from the American version). 50,000 copies of an issue containing an 8-page spread highlighting Lost Valley hit the newsstands of the French-speaking world on December 1.

We have also started to schedule our offerings for the coming year. As of press time, we had still to set specific dates for many of our workshops, but here's an overview of some of what we are planning for 2004 (see our website for up-to-date info.) :

Sustainability Courses and Workshops at Lost Valley:

(all dates subject to change; please contact us for full details)
* limited scholarships available

Permaculture and Sustainable Community Design Course Apprenticeship

mid-June to mid-August

This dynamic two month residential course will provide a holistic introduction to creating sustainable communities. A certified Permaculture design course, this program also includes Ecovillage design, natural building, appropriate technology, deep ecology, interpersonal communication, and community organization. Living at Lost Valley will provide apprentices with hands-on experience of community living, connecting theory and practice. This program is ideal for people of all ages, backgrounds, and experience levels who would like to learn to create communities that care for the Earth and people. College credit may be available; please contact us for details.

There will be three main subject areas of the course: "Land and Garden" will include Permaculture design certificate training, organic gardening, and eco-forestry. "Built Environment" will include eco-building, energy efficiency, renewable energy, appropriate technology, and Ecovillage design and planning. "The Human Element" will include deep ecology, personal growth work, nonviolent communication, and community organization.

In addition to this core, instructors will help apprentices to develop individual projects. A wide range of guest instructors and field trips will add to the holistic exploration of sustainable community. Workshops with visiting instructors, as well as Lost Valley's popular personal growth workshop, Naka-Ima, will be available to apprentices at little or no extra cost.

Cost: Sliding scale, not yet determined* (see website or contact us for details).

"You can!" Energy- and Water- Self-Reliant Homes

3/13-14, 5/22-23

Ready to power your home with renewables? Have you minimized the demand yet? A unique opportunity to gain and practice the hands-on skills needed to implement a variety of energy/water efficiency measures (e.g., caulking, installing low-flow showerheads, insulating). Also, learn how to prioritize energy and water conservation in your home. Two fun-filled days that will enable you to significantly cut your energy and water bills and environmental impacts. Fee: $185.*

Papercrete: A Sustainable Construction and Sculpting Material

6/25-27, 9/10-12

The art of building well-insulated, durable homes with recycled paper. We are again offering workshops on Papercrete, introducing various application-specific material combinations (for blocks, plaster, mortar), as well as the Papercrete-making procedure, and how to build a mixer/blender for yourself. The workshop offers a great hands-on experience for people of all skill levels. Fee: $250.*

Reduce Your Urban Environmental Footprint

2/28-29, 9/25-26

Want to save money and the planet at the same time? Let whole-systems thinking guide you toward minimizing your lifestyle's environmental footprint on a shoestring budget, in areas such as your home, appliances, shopping, eating, and transportation. Through a lively combination of interactive workshops and hands-on practice, learn how to prioritize your efforts, and also gain some essential practical skills necessary to take big steps in improving your environmental record. Fee: $185.*

"You can!" Sustainable Mobility For Everyone

4/10, 6/19

A unique opportunity to gain/refresh the hands-on skills for minimizing your vehicle's fuel consumption. We will discuss the environmental impacts of various transportation modes, and acquire and practice the skills necessary to cost-effectively reduce those impacts in our own vehicles. Also, we will learn about fuel-efficient driving, appropriate rain gear for bike commuting, making bio-diesel, and will check out a Hybrid car. Fee: $110.*

Naka-Ima Programs at Lost Valley:

Naka-Ima 1: The Basics
Living in the Present

1/23-26, 2/13-16; additional dates to be announced

Naka-Ima is a Japanese expression that means "here-now," or "inside the present moment." The essence of Naka-Ima is the practice of being present with your whole self: your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and, beyond that, the part of you that is connected to everyone and everything, and from which your dreams and visions spring. When you are present with yourself, you can be present with others and with the situations and circumstances in your life.

During the Naka-Ima weekend, between 50 and 60 people come together in supportive, loving community, and through a blend of structured exercises and individual and group interactions, explore how to be fully and authentically ourselves: alive, in the moment, and deeply connected with others.

Naka-Ima 1 starts Friday evening at 7 pm and ends Monday no later than 4 pm. The course is now being offered by donation, with no minimum or maximum donation required. Please contact us for more details and to register.

Naka-Ima 2: The Practice
A Course in Creating Intimacy and Community through the Practice of Honesty

dates TBA

The Practice is an opportunity to develop your skills in showing yourself and seeing others authentically, and creating alignment with others for mutual empowerment and fulfillment. We understand that Naka-Ima 1 can be like a whirlwind of emotions, insights, and connections, and that it can be challenging to integrate these into day-to-day life. In The Practice, our intention is to give you a deeper experience and understanding of these tools and concepts so they are more easily integrated and readily accessible in your life.

The Practice starts on Thursday at 5 pm and ends with lunch on Monday.

A $175 deposit/fee covers lodging and all meals, with the opportunity for additional donation. Please contact us for further details and to register. (Prerequisite: Naka-Ima 1.)

We also offer the following Naka-Ima-associated programs; please contact us for further details:

Artgasm!
A Tribal Celebration of Cultural Creativity

dates TBA

Artgasm is a creative adventure in which we will engage with our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls through theater, movement, music, ritual, writing, and visual and three-dimensional art.

The Spirit of Relationship
Sexuality, Sensuality, and Intimacy

dates TBA

In the Spirit of Relationship we come together as men and women, as spiritual beings, as individuals with needs and desires, to focus on love, intimacy, sensuality, attraction and how it manifests in our relationships with our partners, friends, and selves.

Naka-Ima Baja Adventure!

1/8-19

Please call for info. if interested!

Other Community Programs:

Please contact us for full details and to register

Sunday Tours & Visitor Days

dates TBA

We offer free Sunday afternoon tours, from 2 pm to 4 pm, approximately once a month. We also host monthly Visitor Days, starting at 2 pm on selected Thursday afternoons and lasting through lunchtime on Friday-an opportunity to spend the night and join us for a tour, a community work party, and three meals.

Community Experience Week

2/17-22, other dates TBA

For those who want to stay more than a day, this week provides a vivid experience in intentional community living as well as specific information about Lost Valley. It is a first step for those who want to live here, and is also available to anyone who seeks to learn more about living in community.

Staff Internships and Volunteer Opportunities

Throughout 2004 we will have positions available for staff interns and/or volunteers in at least some of the following areas: Sustainable Building and Maintenance, Permaculture and Land Stewardship, Vegetarian Cooking and Kitchen Coordination, Organic Gardening, Service and Sacred Space, Grant Writing, Office Assistance, and Organizational Development. Please contact us for details, specifying your areas of interest.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Masked and Anonymous: It's Life and Life Only

"Beware of the majority. You must be skeptical of the majority..."
--Fortune Teller to journalist Tom Friend, from an excised scene in the Masked and Anonymous screenplay

If I had believed the majority of critics, I never would have ventured to the theater to see Bob Dylan's new movie, Masked and Anonymous. I am glad I did not listen to the critics. Unfortunately, most moviegoers and theater owners did. The movie played in Eugene a scarce week (during which I saw the movie twice); other runs, where they even occurred, were similarly abbreviated.

For those who have not seen it, Masked and Anonymous is a film that spills out of almost any box into which one might attempt to put it. The film follows a washed-up rock star (Jack Fate, played by Dylan) as he is sprung from jail to play a benefit concert to help the victims of a war-torn nation presided over by a dying dictator (who turns out to be his father, long estranged from him). The setting, judging from all the evidence, is an intensified, gestalt version of here in the USA, right now, or in the very near future.

On one level, the movie is a political and social satire about modern America. On another, it's a dreamlike, archetypal personal journey full of metaphysical allegory. On another, it's a portrait of the intersection of fame and art in our culture, and how that affects the main character, Dylan (a.k.a. Fate). On another, it's pure autobiography, seen through a kaleidoscope of creative shape-shifting and inspired lunacy.

Music saturates the film, mixing cover versions of Dylan songs by artists from around the world, singing in a variety of languages, with new live recordings by Dylan and his band (here called "Simple Twist of Fate") performing on the set's soundstage. Even without considering the many other dimensions of Masked and Anonymous, music in this film is no less important than it is in A Hard Day's Night, and the soundtrack is at least as compelling and infectious as those early Beatles tunes--and certainly more thought-provoking and adventurous. The two plots are also similar, tracing the events leading to a big concert which almost (or actually) goes somewhat awry, due to technical difficulties, musicians "missing in action," and events beyond anyone's control. Just as A Hard Day's Night is a portrait of Beatlemania, and the trials that John, Paul, George, and Ringo endure as musical celebrities in a world gone mad around them, Masked and Anonymous examines what it's like to be Bob Dylan, four decades after he acquired the fame that he's never been able to shake. In true Dylan form, Masked and Anonymous does not attempt to present a purely literal, realistic representation of his life, but rather a story dealing in crazily exaggerated distillations of the forces at play beneath surface details (examined less superficially, these distillations can be seen as not exaggerated at all, just an unmasking of what actually goes on in the world).

Like A Hard Day's Night, Masked and Anonymous is also suffused with a droll humor, with the Beatles' youthful exuberance replaced by the older Dylan's darker, slyer exuberance. Some of the humor is visual (Tom Friend, the superstar reporter, wears an electronic monitor on his ankle, from which his Editor frees him only when he has a big story to pursue), some of it verbal (wordplays and off-handed jokes abound), some of it in the form of outrageous caricatures, bizarre plot twists, and surrealistic details (on his way down a shadowy corridor between the backstage bathroom and the soundstage, behind a door marked "Man-Eating Chicken," Fate encounters a man eating a huge bucketful of fried chicken). Some of it is generally accessible (when an employee asks, "So, why a benefit concert?," network executive Nina Veronica answers, "Well, how else do you get rock stars to do television? Either give 'em a cause or give 'em an award"). And some takes the form of "in jokes" requiring at least a basic familiarity with Dylan's career (when Nina worries, "Are his songs going to be recognizable?," promoter Uncle Sweetheart reassures her, "All of his songs are recognizable, even if they're not recognizable"; at another point, Tom Friend asks Jack, "What about Hendrix, Jack? You remember Hendrix at Woodstock? I'm just curious; you weren't there, were you? Why? Where were you?").

 

To their credit, most critics have acknowledged the high quality of the music, but that's where their appreciation stops. Judging from the reviews, this is a movie filled with big-egoed, big-name actors, vying with each other for attention while the central character, Dylan, "doesn't act," and apparently doesn't know how.

I experienced the film differently. Since I watch almost no Hollywood movies, I recognized none of these actors. I saw no "ego wars," only a bunch of people having a good time with an extremely creative, unusual script. A comparison of the written screenplay (revised draft, 5/21/02, credited to Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine, pseudonyms for director Larry Charles and Bob Dylan) with the final film version reveals that a fair amount of improvisation occurred during filming. Each actor was obviously given her or his part and told to run with it--much in the spirit of Dylan's live concerts, in which no song is ever played exactly the same way twice. An extremely low-budget film shot in just three weeks, all in Los Angeles, Masked and Anonymous looks as if it was a refreshing change of pace for these actors. Could the perceived "ego wars" and "vanity" of the participants possibly be a projection on the part of the critics? Could it be the critics who are actually insecure, engaging in ego struggles, trying to puff up their own self-images by putting others down? I may be naive, but watching the movie on its own terms, without much familiarity with Hollywood conventions or Hollywood stars, I didn't see any of the alleged infractions.

Nor was it my impression that Dylan "couldn't act." To the contrary, he seemed to play himself perfectly; he certainly knows the character better than anyone else. In real life, as well as on film and on stage, Dylan is by all reports an introverted, extremely quiet person, his face and his body language revealing a complex inner life that does not always find its way easily into spoken words or into a reassuring, demonstrative, outgoing demeanor. His music is where he most easily uses words to speak, and in this film, as well as in life, it is during the musical performances where he seems to feel most free, where he can be himself without feeling hemmed in by circumstances (shady business dealings, political corruption, social repression, and a raging civil war) or by others' limited imaginations and distorted perceptions of him. In Masked and Anonymous, he lets many of the other actors speak for him (in this dreamlike world, every character can in fact be seen as a facet of Dylan himself), but the words he gives to Jack Fate are consistently insightful, and also frequently laced with the kind of koan-like riddles for which Dylan is known (and which are the bane of literal-minded critics).

In short, in this movie, the central actor acts and reacts just as Bob Dylan (or Jack Fate) would act. And, despite many critics' inability to perceive this, he seems to have been enjoying himself immensely--which is as it should be, since the results of his creative and comic genius were playing themselves out before his eyes at every moment of the filming. Unbelievably, some critics have even cast Dylan as an unwilling participant in this project, due to his taciturn style--which is his style, since there is too much going on below the surface to craft himself into a simplified "sound bite" personality. "If my thought-dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine," he once sang, and, having seen the visual evidence of Dylan's thought-dreams in Masked and Anonymous, that's what many critics seem to have been doing.

Another complaint voiced by critics is that the film is "disjointed," "confusing," "too difficult to understand." It is said to exist in an "alternate universe" with only a tenuous connection to reality. The plot is said to be hard to follow (hard to follow? it's pretty simple!), characters come and go, sometimes never to reappear in the story (does this remind anyone of anything? maybe real life?), and the time and setting are unclear (only, I think, to someone who can't add or subtract, knows no geography, has been following no current events, and has been living in a sensory deprivation chamber).

 

So what is this "alternate universe" that so confuses and infuriates critics? What are Dylan's thought-dreams saying? And why doesn't the mass media want to listen?

One clue may lie in the film's treatment of the mass media itself. "Newspapers are all a false map of the world," journalist Tom Friend tells his girlfriend, Pagan Lace. Nina Veronica remarks that "these [television] network heads are the gods....They play on our dream states like a concertina," to which Uncle Sweetheart replies, "They're not gods, they're nothing but preachers and lawyers and hired agents and professional speakers. They all have vested interests." In a segment excised from the final version of the film, a "Man on the Run" reports, "They're filming a TV show back there. You watch TV for any considerable length of time, you think that everybody's either rich or that he's about to die a horrible death." And in his first speech following the death of Fate's father, new president Edmund declares, "As you know, we have captured the cultural institutions of this country. The institutions that shape the souls of the young. The schools, the colleges, the movies, music, and the arts. They all belong to us now. At the moment, we are giving people a new identity, and erasing the collective memory. We are rewriting the history books."

In this setting, the price of dissent is steep. The president demands allegiance, and despite his brutish persona, he receives it, at least within the ranks of the government. Early in the film, bitter about the state of his nation's politics, Uncle Sweetheart greets two bill-collectors as "the dark princes, the democratic republicans... working for a barbarian who can scarcely spell his own name." Just before the benefit concert is scheduled to begin, Jack Fate encounters an apparition: the ghost of Oscar Vogel, a prominent banjo player who'd died under mysterious circumstances after speaking out against the excesses of the dictator's regime. "Everything was going great as long as you kept your mouth shut. But your father was doing things that were wrong. His desire for retaliation and revenge was too strong, which caused a lot of injustice, lies and bad things. I was the only one in any position to say anything. Everyone else was too scared. I had the show. I had a forum. So, I spoke out. It's not what goes in the mouth, it's what comes out that counts. They said it was an accident. Some even said it was a suicide."

Denial is endemic in this world. Those who are able to, hide from their society's disintegration into violence. Like someone turning a blind eye to the daily war-related deaths in Iraq, or to the ravages of gang warfare in this country, one of Nina's network employees seems oblivious to what is happening. And the senselessness of this cycle of violence is obvious to anyone willing to look:

Dion: What war?
Nina: What war? Are you kidding me? All the wars. The futility of war....There's shooting and killing. How do you define a war, in this day and age?
Dion: What are they fighting about?
Nina: I don't know what they're fighting about. Do the Hindus, Jews, Arabs, Irish, Muslims, Buddhists, know what they're fighting about? ... The last person who actually knew that was killed years ago.

On a bus taking him from jail to the benefit concert, Jack Fate sits next to a Soldier, whose tale sums up the stories of many sincere, "righteous" combatants who fall prey to the inherent contradictions of a "just" war: "I'm from a small village in the mountains. We don't even have a doctor. So I joined the rebels....Pretty soon, I saw the rebel movement was corrupt. The leadership were lying to the people. They wanted to replace the old government with a new government which was just as bad....A small army of counter-revolutionaries grew to battle the rebels in the mountains....I changed sides. No one ever noticed. This new movement was fighting for the truth the rebels supposedly believed in but really didn't. Then I realized that this movement was funded by the very government I wanted to topple. By that time, I realized I didn't want the government to fall...I joined the government forces....Then one day, we wiped out a small village. We were told something about rebels having infiltrated. But it was a lie. The men were already dead or old. All that was left were women and children. It was my village."

In a speech that could come straight from the pages of 1984 , the new President, Edmund, advocates the heightened use of force, neatly and un-self-consciously laying bare the absurdity of violence as a solution to anything: "Nothing was more important to our President than bringing peace to this war-torn country. Peace, a lasting peace, can only be achieved through strength. So, in my first act as the new President, as the leader of the new government, this new regime, we will begin to deploy troops immediately to the southern regions, we will resume the bombing in the jungle. We will begin executing and enslaving prisoners, and that includes those who have preached diversity but who have never practiced it, and those who decried intolerance but were the least tolerant of all. We shall deal with them in a harsh manner."

Does this logic sound familiar? Anyone who has not kept his or her head in the sand for the last three years may indeed experience some glimmers of recognition here. Could the mass media's role in promoting recent US policies have anything to do with their general reception of this movie?

The government in Masked and Anonymous wages war against its own people, and imprisons all those who step out of line. As the Radio Preacher explains, "The only power the government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, you make them. You make so many things a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws." The prison guard reminds the newly-freed Jack Fate that "Keeping people from being free is a big business."

But literal imprisonment is not the only means by which people lose their freedom and dignity. According to the Animal Wrangler, "In most societies they used to sacrifice animals. Bulls and sheep and things. In place of human beings. But today we do it the other way around, we sacrifice the human being. Like the Aztecs, the Incas, like the big corporations." Nina observes that "The government only exists to help business." In an excised scene, Crew Guy #1 declares, "I'm getting weary of living by this clock. It's all smoke and mirrors. I want to live in real time, in the terms of day and night. I'm sick of this merchants' time, businessman's time, clocks and bells signaling the hours." But since, as Uncle Sweetheart asserts, "money is the mother's milk of politics," those with the money are controlling the political life, and thereby the daily life and culture, of this society.

In another excised scene, the Fortune Teller warns Tom Friend, "You're living in a nation that's dying a slow death. Look at the faces on your money. Slave owners and Indian fighters....Every commitment, every truth, every ideal, everything of beauty, all these things are being stripped away." And Uncle Sweetheart gives some historical perspective on this cultural disintegration: "You know when the Roman Empire fell? You know what Caesar and the rest of them Romans were doing when the barbarians were at the gates? ...Shooting craps and gambling."

 

Against this bleak backdrop, however, we do find reasons for hope. Among other things, Masked and Anonymous is an ecologist's movie, and the earth and its creatures offer redemption from human pathologies. The Radio Preacher reminds his audience that "The earth was here long before these gods were." When pressure from the network threatens to remake Fate's setlist, his sidekick, Bobby Cupid, declares, "Screw this so-called concert, Jack. These cats are just addicted to lights and sound. Let's go someplace where we can see the earth and sky." Again in an excised scene, the Fortune Teller tells Tom Friend, "There are a few things you should be concerned about. Things could take an upward turn, but you will first have to give up your high-tech lifestyle."

The Animal Wrangler is among the most eloquent voices in this movie. Reviewers have characterized him as a "loony," and in some respects he is, but he is also in touch with basic truths apparently forgotten by most in his society. Speaking about animals, he tells Jack that "They have no time to bother with success or getting rich. They have no fantasies of glory. They don't borrow money to buy things that decrease in value while they own it. See, they're beautiful 'cause they just are. They do what they do. A lion don't try to be a tiger. A rabbit don't do an impression of a monkey. They don't try to be what they're not. Unlike us. Us human beings....These animals, they were here first. They roamed freely, each one with its own identity and place. Animals should be cherished. They bring joy to the world."

Although the Wrangler's love for animals veers into misanthropy, into a separative extremism rather than an integrative ecological worldview, his questions and misgivings about human beings must be shared, at one time or another, by every concerned, aware person witnessing human effects on the planet: "You know who's destroying the earth? Not the animals. The tiger, the lion, the cheetah, the snake, the monkey, the baboon, the giraffe, the bear, the panther, the dog, fish, the birds, all perfect in their original forms. Then--man came in. Who created him and for what purpose? Still a mystery. Why is he here? A mystery. He's a trespasser. Doesn't know his place....A spoiler, an agitator, stirs up trouble wherever he goes. The zoo, the aquarium, prisons for animals....I avoid looking at human beings. They disgust me so much with their atom bombs and blow dryers and automobiles. They build hospitals as shrines to the diseases they create. Human beings are alone with their secrets. Masked and Anonymous. No one truly knows them....The only righteous human beings in my book are the children and the elderly."

 

In a voiceover later in the film, Jack Fate offers a more hopeful take on the human presence on earth, affirming that wholeness and meaning are within each person's reach: "If I know nothing else, I know at least one thing is true: that the sacred is in the ordinary, the common things in life. They tell you that everything is nonsense, that the laws of nature are nonsense, gravity is nonsense, relationships don't exist, jobs don't exist. Everything is up for grabs and there's no cause of anything. That's what they'd like you to believe."

But "they" will not necessarily have the last word, if Jack Fate or the six-year-old who momentarily steals the show with her rendition of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" have anything to do with it.

Society is disastrously off course, and most of its members are captive to some form of illusion, yet this is clearly not a case of good people falling victim to evil people, or of villains battling heroes. "Us vs. Them" is exposed as a miserably myopic worldview and a terrible basis for public policy and individual action. While in some senses the characters in Masked and Anonymous are caricatures (Tom Friend, for example, plays the self-involved, sixties-obsessed journalist on steroids), they are also all sympathetic figures in that we understand that they are all damaged, "bent out of shape by society's pliers." No one is inherently evil; rather, each individual struggles with circumstances somewhat beyond personal control. The megalomaniac Edmund has risen from a childhood of servitude, and doesn't know when to stop taking back his power. Uncle Sweetheart's sleazy business dealings are a response to foolish investments gone sour, an attempt to keep food on his family's table and protect his wife and children from the horrors around them. Even the henchmen and armed guards of the military state have clearly taken those roles just because they need a job.

As a result, nearly every character, at one point or another, has something profound and true to say about life. This exchange is typical:

Tom Friend: What's bugging me? The absurdity of a lifetime of futile labor. That's what's bugging me. Condemned to some pointless task. I'm trying to track down some guy and ask him the meaning of life....Life itself is the meaning of life.
Pagan Lace: Your problem is you're looking at the bug on your windshield, Tom. If you keep looking at it you're going to miss the scenery and have an accident. You gotta look through the windshield, not at it.

The fact that "everyone in Masked and Anonymous is a philosopher" has annoyed some critics, who would apparently be much more comfortable with a set of characters who do not question or search for meaning, who "get with the program" more easily and with less reflection or complaint.

Instead of seeing people as divided into "good guys" and "bad guys" (a central tenet of some rather prominent political players of late), Masked and Anonymous suggest that we are all fallible human beings attempting to cope with the sometimes hostile environment of the modern world. Hemmed in by tragic circumstances, the characters in this film respond with varying degrees of grace to the mass psychoses gripping their society. It is difficult not to feel compassion for them, and easy to agree with Fate's conclusion:

Uncle Sweetheart: Look Jack, I'm doing my best. Gimme a break. I'm only human.
Jack Fate: I know. It ain't easy being human.

Awakening compassion, too, is the acknowledgment that suffering (or at least pain or loss) is in some sense a condition of existence, and that we don't "deserve" it--it just is. In an exchange that again embodies the movie's droll humor, the newly-freed Jack Fate muses, with a straight face, on the sometimes arbitrary nature of loss:

Prospero: Two eagles just killed a pregnant rabbit.
Jack Fate: Rabbit must have done something.

Both Uncle Sweetheart and Bobby Cupid warn that "The more you know, the more you'll suffer," and yet this movie does not seem to advocate keeping oneself ignorant, but instead becoming conscious of the reality, however painful, that surrounds us. Happiness is not guaranteed, and not to be achieved through grasping. As Jack Fate observes in a voiceover late in the movie, "Some of us pursue perfection and virtue, and if we're lucky we catch up to it, but happiness can't be pursued. It either comes to you or it don't. You can always say, if only this, or if only that, but 'if only' is a state of mind we get into when we feel deprived."

 

Masked and Anonymous never left me feeling deprived. It struck me as a rich, creative endeavor far more worthy of popular attention than most movies with hundreds of times its budget. Even if the rest of it escapes you, it's worth the price of admission for the music alone. And, as I hope this essay has demonstrated, if the rest of it does escape you, a lot has escaped you. Apparently, you're not alone in that--but in a world full of enlightened critics who had learned to look past the bugs on their windshields, you might be.

Posterity may yet smile upon Masked and Anonymous, and likely will, if we as human beings make the changes necessary to survive into a recognizable posterity.

 

My thanks to David Vest for his assistance in obtaining a copy of the screenplay, which can be found in its entirety (by those with sufficiently up-to-date internet browsers) at http://www.peterstonebrown.com/M&A/Index.html.. David's own excellent essay, "Masked and Anonymous: Bob Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America," reaches many of the same conclusions I have reached. It originally appeared in CounterPunch and can be found at http://www. counterpunch.org/vest09202003.html. David's CD, Way Down Here, recorded with The Willing Victims, is reviewed on page 59 of this issue.

Chris Roth edits Talking Leaves. His previous Dylan-inspired article, "An Ecological Future: How Does It Feel?" (in the Winter 1999 TL) treats similar themes from a different, five-years-less-mature-but-not-entirely-invalid perspective. He spends his discretionary income on guitar strings.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Notes from the Editor: What's Up With This Issue?

Regular readers may have noticed that there was no Fall 2003 issue of Talking Leaves. This gap occurred mainly because the editor's (my) other, garden-program-coordination hat this summer became too large (see "Gardening Words on a Rainy Afternoon"), which meant my Talking Leaves hat had to become very small to compensate. (Both hats have now resumed reasonable dimensions, and, having learned from the experience, I am now sworn and equipped to keep them that way.)

As a side benefit, waiting to produce this special double issue, once time made itself available for the work, has resulted in a considerable savings in total printing and shipping costs, as well as what we hope to be a higher quality, more well-rounded magazine.

We plan to continue this less strictly scheduled, more "organic" approach to publishing (already announced in the summer issue), and are also implementing a number of other beneficial changes, which are discussed in the letter on the back cover. Here are some of those changes, and why we are making them:

 

We are withdrawing the magazine from most newsstand distribution, mainly because of the waste involved. (In the newsstand distribution business, stores overstock, and sometimes the vast majority of copies are destroyed unread.) Also, some wholesale distributors we have been supplying have been extremely unreliable and, through tacked-on fees, have actually been charging us for the privilege of supplying them with magazines (the more we send them, the more money we lose). They are also charging the stores through whom they sell the magazines. We appreciate the need for distributors to stay in business, but this does not seem to us like the way the world should work.

Instead of haggling over dollars in a business that seems rigged against the small publisher (us), we've decided to take a radically different approach. We want READERS and PARTNERS in this publishing venture, not CUSTOMERS that we try to convince to pay a set amount for our product. We want everyone who wants to read Talking Leaves to be able to do so. At gatherings like the annual Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, CA (which we attended again this October), we see the level of interest in and enthusiasm for Talking Leaves, once it is made available to the people who are its natural readers. Those many hundreds of copies that we have been sending into the apparently black hole of wholesale distribution would be much better sent to people who definitely want them.

 

As a cost-saving measure, we have decided to produce this issue, including the cover as well as the inner pages, entirely on a web press, instead of having a separate cover produced on an offset press. While it entails some trade-offs in materials used and production quality, this decision will allow us to get this issue into many more hands, at greatly reduced cost.

 

Because Talking Leaves is ultimately a service and resource that we want to share with people, rather than a product we want to sell them, we have decided to offer it on a donation basis rather than for a set subscription price. Certainly, we still need to cover the expenses of creating, printing, and shipping the magazine, but we would like the support we receive to be freely given, according to the ability of each reader to pay, and we would also like Talking Leaves itself to be offered in the spirit of giving, regardless of readers' financial resources. We trust that the financial support we receive will be just as abundant as under the old set-fee system, wherein those who couldn't afford the $20 low-income or $35 regular membership fee often ended up not seeing TL at all. We hope those who want to support what we are doing, and can afford to pay more, will do so. Talking Leaves has had major sponsors in the past (individuals and foundations who liked our work and gave us substantial grants), and we would enthusiastically welcome that kind of sponsorship again.

As for this issue, it evolved organically, with no pre-announced theme. Nevertheless, each piece of writing which follows does flow in some way into the next. I like this issue a lot, and hope you do too. And since I'm out of room, I'll let it speak for itself now.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Practical Idealists Unite! (and stay together)

Creating a Life Together:
Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

by Diana Leafe Christian
Foreword by Patch Adams. 2003, 252 pages.
New Society Publishers, PO Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC, VOR 1X0,
1-800-567-6772,www.newsociety.com

Appreciation.

That is the word that best describes my reaction to Diana Leafe Christian's Creating a Life Together. I had anticipated this book eagerly, especially since I knew that Diana had interviewed two Lost Valley community members extensively while writing it. A communitarian herself, and editor of Communities magazine for the past ten years, Diana seemed the perfect person to put together this guidebook, which is intended to help anyone who is thinking about pursuing the dream of starting an intentional community or ecovillage.

It turns out that Diana was indeed the ideal person to write this book. Since becoming involved in the communities movement, she has heard numerous tales of community failure, as well as many success stories, and in this book she sets out to describe the key elements of creating a successful venture in shared living while avoiding the all-too-common pitfalls.

Part One, "Planting the Seeds of Healthy Community," contains six chapters addressing the initial aspects of community formation. "The Successful Ten Percent--and Why Ninety Percent Fail" (which we excerpt in this issue), sets the tone of the book by relating real-life stories and then drawing lessons from them that can be applied to any group seeking to create community. Other chapters in this section explore the role of founders, tips for "getting off to a good start," community vision and vision documents, and power, decision-making, and governance.

Part Two, "Sprouting New Community: Techniques & Tools," delves further into the set of essential elements in the unfolding process of growing a community. Agreements and policies, establishing legal entities, finding and buying land, dealing with zoning, financing, and sustainable development issues, determining internal finances, property ownership models, and non-profit-specific issues are all explored in great detail.

For experienced communitarians who have already addressed many of these issues, portions of these first two sections may invite browsing or speed-reading. Someone whose group already owns land and never expects to be seeking it again has no pressing need to know all the steps involved in taking a property off the market by "making an offer with contingencies" or by "offering an option." On the other hand, the stories of different communities' adventures and experiences in all of these areas are consistently fascinating, even (and perhaps especially) to readers who have already lived through some variation of them.

Part Three, "Thriving in Community--Enriching the Soil," is broken into two chapters, both of which I believe could be beneficially read in their entirety by every communitarian. "Communication, Process, and Dealing with Conflict: The Heart of Healthy Community" again starts with tales from Lost Valley, then draws examples from other communities, and offers a wide range of valuable communication and process tools. "Selecting People to Join You" is also essential reading; unless a community has decided to close its doors to outsiders forever, this chapter's stories, guidelines, and suggestions should help any group deal a bit better with the often challenging process of incorporating new members.

Finally, several Appendices and a Resource Section provide even more tools for prospective and in-process community-growers.

After more than two decades of off-and-on (mostly "on") involvement in community-living and -working groups with varying levels of intentionality, I see how all of these groups could have benefited in some way from what Diana offers in this book. Even well-established communities and well-travelled communitarians occasionally forget how far they've come, or what's helped them get there, and it never hurts to have reminders in book form. In fact, part of the appreciation that this book provoked in me was an appreciation for how much work has been involved in getting Lost Valley to the point where it is now, warts and all. I was filled with gratitude especially for the work of Lost Valley founders Dianne Brause and Kenneth Mahaffey, whose indomitable spirit and faith in the process overcame numerous obstacles. Their patience, as they went through the seemingly endless paperwork and negotiations involved in the formation stages, established the vessel that now holds an ever-evolving community of participants. Beyond the often consuming details of how to maintain a community day-to-day, it is good to step back and recognize that we are blessed with the incredible opportunity of even having a community experiment in which to participate.

Diana Leafe Christian's book will help afford that opportunity to many more aspiring communitarians, wherever community pioneers absorb and incorporate some of its time-tested advice. It's true that many older communities still surviving today never had access to this kind of information in their early stages, and even lacked some of the key structural elements Diana suggests. Some community explorers may still choose to proceed mostly by "instinct," and may decide to ignore some of this material. But Creating a Life Together provides the option, not always available in the past, of actually making those choices, rather than falling into them by default. If learning-everything-anew-or-from-difficult-to-find-sources continues to be the dominant model of community formation, the 10% success, 90% failure rate seems destined to continue.

Community living is not about "going it alone." This book can be an invaluable ally in a challenging but richly rewarding adventure. I recommend it to anyone thinking about or already involved in establishing an intentional community or shared-living group of any kind--and also to all those in the midst of an ongoing experiment in community living. Wherever it's read, I predict a ripple effect whose ultimate results in people's lives will be:

Appreciation.

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Rhythms of the Planet: An Interview with Mickey Hart

(interview conducted June, 2003, in Occidental, CA)

Along with being a member of one of the longest running '60s rock hippie bands, The Grateful Dead (recently renamed simply, "The Dead"), Drummer Mickey Hart has had a 30-year passion for in-the-field recording using the latest in portable high-tech audio equipment. From his early work as a part-time music ethnologist, Hart has evolved into a leader in the effort to preserve endangered world music. The Northern California-based Hart is on the leadership committee of Save Our Sounds and is integrally involved with America's Recorded Sound Project at the Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress, which is in the process of digitizing the Folklife Center's publicly owned, deteriorating music collection. Hart took a break from rehearsing with the other members of the Dead for their Summer 2003 tour to speak with me.

DK: You just finished and had published a book for National Geographic, Songcatchers: In Search Of The World's Music. It talks about the first collectors of native peoples' indigenous music. Who were the first Song Catchers?

MH: The first in the field was Harvard zoologist Jesse Walter Fewkes. On March 15, 1890, in Calais, Maine he recorded the Passaquoddy Native Americans' salutation and harvest songs. That was the first field recording on the Edison treadle. It was operated like a Singer sewing machine but was rolling wax. Not a disc, a wax cylinder. Berliner a few years later developed the disc. The book tells the history of the amazing men and women who went out into the field to capture the sounds of indigenous languages and music. The tales of their adventures, often at great personal risk and usually burdened with cumbersome equipment, are fascinating. The many types of recording machines that were created over the years are amazing. We were able to collect great photographs to illustrate this book. It is important that we know and understand about the world's musical heritage and our ongoing efforts to preserve it for our future generations.

DK: Do you see yourself carrying on the mission and work of Alan Lomax?

MH: Well, we were on the same trail. I came in with Nagra (recorders) and digital domain, stereo and high fidelity and supersonics. We have done the same thing, recording indigenous music as best we can with the equipment of the day. We did it for different reasons perhaps. I don't see myself carrying on anyone's legacy. My involvement with The Endangered Music Project is along the same line. With Rykodisc, I was able to create a series of recordings that are designed to cross borders and expand musical horizons. Many of the cultural traditions practiced by the people on these recordings are in danger of extinction; others have vanished altogether, leaving only the recorded songs behind. I believe that world music tells us where we have been and where we are going.

DK: What are the major challenges, in the Library of Congress "Save Our Sounds"' effort to preserve endangered recordings?

MH: Two things: preservation and access, those are the two challenges. To locate collections in crisis. We have over a million and a half hours of music at the Library of Congress. Nobody can listen to all of that in a lifetime. A lot of the material has just been given to us, bequeathed to us, making it the greatest music archive in the world. The sound engineers and the archivist are carefully looking at these collections and finding the ones that are deteriorating through oils and molds and viruses, disintegration of the medium on which they were recorded. Transferring them, while we can still play them, into a medium that will remain forever, which is digital domain, is one challenge. The other challenge is to allow access to people. Some of the music is available on the internet at www.loc.gov. Click on the national digital library and go to the American Folk Life Center; there is all this music that has been digitized. Hundreds and hundreds of recordings have been put on the internet; same with Folkways. A lot of archives are starting to go digital.

DK: What have you found are the political implications of promoting world music to ethnic people?

MH: It gives them back their identities, their stories, myths, dreams, and cosmology--which was ripped away from them, taken away by war, revolution, social movement, economics, the Church. When the missionaries went to a culture they would give the people a new bible and a new music. When you give music back to a culture, like my Indonesian experience which I relate in the book, it was like a prisoner of war or a long-lost relative returning home. They thanked me for helping bring back to them one of the greatest achievements of their culture, their music and their art. They hadn't practiced it in 40 or 50 years; everybody had died or moved on and their music was forgotten or lost. These were their greatest creations; they heard about them from their grandparents, but had never heard them. We did the same thing in Hawaii. One of the most beautiful things you can do for a culture is to give them back music which was taken from them.

DK: What is your view of the late Baba Olatunji's impact on world music?

MH: I would call him the Johnny Appleseed of world music. He was groundbreaking, he brought powerful trance West African multidimensional rhythms here, and he introduced those hot syncopations to the streets of New York and influenced generations of many musicians like Coltrane, Carlos Santana, and Bob Dylan. He was a big influence on Western music in general. He was a nice guy, a sweet man. He linked drums with a lifestyle as opposed to performance--good rhythm with good health. He fantasized years ago that there would be a drum in every home. He didn't live to see that, but there are thousands and thousands of drums in homes today because of him.

One of the most important things about Baba was that he introduced drums and percussion on a completely different level. He introduced the West African rhythms. He brought that culture and formed a new gumbo--in a missionary kind of way that we could understand because not only was there rhythm, there was melody. He was as good a singer as he was a percussionist. He created melody over powerful drum rhythms that were totally irresistible. He made this beautiful, magical record, "Drums of Passion" and lit the whole subculture on fire. His impact was international. I was in Spain, France, and Germany and I saw the whole European Jet Set dancing to Baba in 1960. At all the parties, they were playing "Drums of Passion." He sold a huge number of copies. It was unprecedented; no one had done such a thing before.

Besides being a great drummer and a great vocalist, he was a great person, and he had a lot of enthusiasm that was infectious. Baba would give rhythm seminars at his clinic in New York, to women and children. Through his method of teaching, he was able to bring the essence down to an understandable place so non-musicians would be able to enjoy percussion, without having to learn specific beats. It was mostly the rush of group rhythm that Baba was really into and that is what I have always been into. He introduced a whole rhythmic nomenclature to the West that was irresistible. He really left his mark. He truly passed on a lot of his rhythmic seeds, far and wide.

DK: And his impact on you personally?

MH: Let me put it this way: when I heard "Drums of Passion," that put me on a whole other path of wanting to explore the world's rhythms and being able to enjoy and understand them. That talking drum sound he made on the first record, I still can't get it. I have been chasing it for 40 years; that's the archetype, for me.

DK: When did you adopt rhythmic evangelism as your life work?

MH: I never really adopted it, it just happened. I never set out to do that. I am just really enthusiastic about the power of rhythm. I see the world in rhythmic terms, the relationships I have with my wife and children are in rhythm, so I know when I am out of rhythm. Everything that lives has a rhythm. The rhythm of life, of the body, yoga breathing, it is all about rhythm. When I play, I try to get into the code, into the trance. I've always been after the trance. Trance is the big thing for me. If you don't play for trance, then you are just performing music that won't reach the soul.

DK: When did you come to understand the trance?

MH: The trance was realized when I was a kid, when I was really young. 5, 6, 7, I was playing alone, listening to my dad's practice pad. It was hollow, it had a hollow sound to it, and the tone of the pad was reverberant. It attracted me and it riveted my attention. That was puppy trance. I didn't realize it then, but I was entraining with the rhythms. Then I caught myself listening to trolleys and street noise, and the rhythm of the city. My mother would call me inside, and I never wanted to come in. I always wanted to stay out and listen. In the rain, I'd always want to be out listening to the rain. That was the catalyst for this evangelist thing of mine. I didn't tell people about it. They wouldn't understand. Nobody else in my neighborhood played. It was my little secret and it was beautiful because I could keep it as my own, no one could get in, it was my private world. Separate from everyone else, retreating and going into trance. At the time I didn't realize what trance was, even how to spell it.

DK: How have you experienced drumming transforming individuals?

MH: It makes them better persons, and if you are a better person and more aware, then you bring beauty into the world and you make it a better place to live. You won't be greedy or hateful, because good rhythm is the antidote for hate. I see it in those terms. I see this as a medicine, an elixir, as opposed to a performance medium. Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa performed some great, beautiful drum solos, but the good stuff, for me, was never with the virtuosos, it was more in the group pulsing.

DK: What benefits have you noticed from your playing practice as you grow older?

MH: It keeps me young. Look at me, I am almost 60 years old and I am really in solid physical shape; I feel great. I love to play the drums; I'll go for 3-4 hours. This is not cocktail music, this is power drumming. It feeds me, it nurtures me, it nourishes me, and it makes me whole. I can't imagine my life without playing drums. It wouldn't be worth living for me. I want to do this until the day that I die. It gives you a sense of well being and heightens your creativity. It makes you walk with a little spring in your step. It keeps you out of trouble.

DK: You've said you know the rhythm of Washington, DC. How did that come to be? How did you develop that?

MH: I tried to entrain with it, get in its rhythm and I try to understand it instead of fighting it. I hang out with great lawmakers and I work at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. It is amazing to see what these people go through to try to create a government that functions, that is responsive in some respect to the people that live in this nation. I have great respect for some of them, the archivists, and the people at the Library of Congress who you never hear about. There is no better place in the world to do serious research than the Library of Congress.

DK: Lately, you seem rather engaged politically, actively supporting Boxer and Pelosi. Is this newfound, your direct involvement in electoral politics?

MH: It is newfound. I never knew any politicians. I never voted until a few years ago because I didn't know any politicians, and if I didn't know you, I wouldn't vote for you. Getting to know them has been the only way to seriously give my vote and mean it. I know Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi. I support them, I know them to be great warriors, and they are fighting for the underdog, for the oppressed, for civil liberties, from where I sit. That is my politics. I do have Republican friends. I do, and we don't agree on some things. But I can hang out with them.

DK: Your thoughts on the present political rhythms in the world?

MH: It's awful, it's a mess. It's chaos, nonsense, makes no sense; you have rhythms colliding, cultures colliding over money, over land, over Gods! I always thought everyone had a right to believe in what they wanted to. But we are dealing with a legacy of thousands of years, so it's not like we started it. Islam and the Christians and the Jews have been spreading their message through the sword; everybody is fighting each other. There is hardly anyone who doesn't spread their gospel through fear and intimidation and threats, and sometimes killing, mass murder. The world is very seriously out of rhythm, very seriously out of rhythm.

DK: There has been a tremendous increase and interest in drumming recently. What do you think of the phenomenon's broad impact?

MH: People want to get together and they want to have a common experience which we can all enjoy--kids, women, men, and older people. It is a great equalizer. In the eyes of rhythm, everyone is the same. In a drum circle, communal drumming, you get a chance to create a community. All you need is to bring a drum to a drum circle and play it. It's no organized religion; though it does have spiritual overtones to me, rhythm is a different kind of church. You are the pastor, the rabbi, the Ayatollah and you get what you can get out of it.

It is another way of communicating with someone that is non-verbal. You reach someone's soul more than their head. We have drum circles with Alzheimer's patients, with older people in wheelchairs who have dementia, motor impairment problems, and we do it in cancer wards to help people with their spirit and help them come together. We get them off the television and cards and bring them together and watch them come alive. The physiological and neurological impact of this is really important. We are finding out now that 40 cycles is missing universally with the motor-impaired. That means, when you put those 40 cycles back in, they start to come alive again, they start to talk again, start to dance, remember things. When the beat stops, they go back to their darkness. So that is the power--that kind of power is something you cannot turn away from. People like Dr. Connie Tomaino and Oliver Sachs are doing all these great things with rhythmic stimuli.

DK: Have you discovered any specific rhythms which are more powerful?

MH: There are many rhythms that are powerful, I find the clavé to be one of the most powerful rhythms, besides just the straight back beat or 4-4. It has to be simple enough like the clavé. These rhythms are West African; they came up through Bahia, Cuba, and New Orleans. Those are a lot of powerful rhythms. It has to do with the sonic quality of it as well as the intent, the passion that is brought to bear while you are making the rhythm. Those two things are very important to make the power potent. But one universal? No, because sometimes you want to get up and dance yourself into rapture. Other times you want to go into the ecstasy of it all, the quiet side, which I love. I play quietly a lot, more than I play loud. I just sit there and get into the zone.

DK: What is an example of a miraculous experience people have had using music as therapy?

MH: My grandmother was a perfect example. She had advanced Alzheimer's and she couldn't speak, not even say my name, for the last six months before she passed and at the last stage, she was pretty gone, she couldn't do much. But the connection to her soul was made by me playing the drum. She lit up when I played. I played the drums for half an hour, and then she said my name two times. It was amazing! She spoke! How could she do that? So I put those two things together, rhythm and healing, and to bring someone out of that darkness. That was the first time I had seen it one-on-one, the healing power. I have played hurt, with broken fingers or the flu and by the time it was over, I couldn't feel the pain. It came back after I stopped but while you are playing you can transcend the pain. I've seen many things like this, but my first experience was with my grandmother.

DK: What new developments in music therapy excite you?

MH: The science of it. Now we have machines to measure brain wave function and what the brain looks like before, during, and after an auditory driving experience. The synapses are firing through the mid brain, the mid brain is sending signals out and you are reacting to it. The big thing that is going to happen this century is watching the brain "on music" and seeing what it does, and finding out exactly what rhythms do what. A CAT scan can now measure the brain wave function without getting mixed up with other parts of the body. That was always the problem with EKG's, they couldn't separate the impulse power, from the movement of the limbs, and it would confuse the machines and not see the brain wave function. Now we are getting pure imaging, and people are starting to write papers on alpha wave production.

We know music and rhythm works, but how do they work? Can you do it on a daily basis? Can my doctor prescribe a rhythm for me? That is what I look forward to within my lifetime. A doctor will be able to write a prescription for music therapy and specific rhythms in music that will do a specific thing to get a certain kind of result. We haven't known the code. In the next few years we are going to bust the code. Doctors are now taking "the rhythmic arts" seriously.

DK: Has neuroscience been able to derive certain healing functions through specific rhythms?

MH: Absolutely. There are studies now that point the way. They are primitive. We know that certain beats, anything related to the heartbeat, are healing. Usually I feel my own heartbeat before I play. It is the mother rhythm, the rhythm that your mother gave you and her mother before her. Remember, your mother's heartbeat is beating an amazing tattoo on you for eight, nine months, you hear this great bass sound beating while in the womb. The one thing that was constant, was the heartbeat. Then you came out and emerge into another sonic world, a different rhythm world, but you are still holding that tattoo, that beat.

DK: Is the physiology of sound a potential substitute for prescription drugs?

MH: It is not a substitute but another aid. This is another, different kind of medicine. It serves its own purposes. Percussion and rhythms and music in general serve to heal in a parallel universe.

DK: Tito Puente and Machito were early on very influential in your professional life. How was it for you visiting Cuba, the nation that contributed so mightily to the percussion of contemporary music?

MH: It was very satisfying to go to Cuba and to just hear the clavé being played in the home of that kind of rhythm. The music caressed me and soothed me. I walked through the streets and the whole city was playing music. You never hear that here! It was coming out of most homes, or people were jamming on the street, musicians with percussion, a guitar or trumpet or flute. It was thrilling. And hanging out with Castro until 4:30 a.m. was cool.

DK: What did you think of his character, charisma, take on politics?

MH: We talked; he has his own way, his own fears. He doesn't want to see a bunch of McDonald's on his island. He understands the power of music. Music and revolution is what we spoke about, trance and the spirit world. He wore me out. He was a good hang, very charismatic. He knows about chicken gizzards and he knows about AIDS, reforestation, literacy, a lot of things. You can't be free in Cuba. It is really sad, but we had great dialogue. It was very friendly and open, but I never forgot who he was. I know what is going on there. Just think, if he let everybody into that little island that is so beautiful, that place would be overrun in a second. Look what the mafia did. You feel that ocean breeze and smell that ocean. The people are just lovely people. He has got a lot of political problems. I had a good time there, but I am not Cuban and I don't have to ask him for my visa.

I was a cultural emissary there and an honored guest. That was a different kind of experience than you would have being a Cuban, wanting to express your views in a free state. We tried to talk about things of mutual interest. He invited me back, asking me to bring musicians and make music with Cubans and take that music back to the US. We actually liked each other. We had a certain rapport. And afterward I was told he learned from me that music was one of Cuba's greatest commodities and exports. He didn't understand how popular Cuban music is around the world.

DK: What do you think of the impact American music, the pop music machine, the monoculturization?

MH: The world of cookie cutter phony music is being spammed. That is what corporate rock is like. And the airwaves circle the globe. You have to get out of the phony and search for the real stuff that really moves you. To a nine year old, Britney Spears is a music experience. There is good in every sort of music--I always believed that. Even in the corporate rock stuff, there are people out there getting turned on to music. There are many musics for any culture.

DK: If rock and roll and folk music have been the language of social change in our culture, in this country and around the world, what would you say the implications are for the expansion of world music around the world, socially, politically, and culturally?

MH: The main thing is that you are able to hear other people's sensibilities and be able to understand and appreciate them and be able to honor and enjoy them. Music is the great calling card. It opens doors. That is one of the major implications, finding out that music in Iran is not devil's music, that it is beautiful music, there is beautiful music in all cultures. There is some Bedouin music that is just sublime. In every culture there are musicians of varying quality, whether it is a nomad or a city slicker. There is a lot of bad music out there and a lot of good music too. Your job is to search it out and find the music that resonates in you. That is what this is all about.

DK: What does your crystal ball see in the next 10 years as to how music will be created, distributed, listened to, and sold?

MH: Internet, internet file sharing, file sharing. But of course there will be copyright laws in place where you won't be able to steal somebody's personal property. If anybody is making money, it should be the artist, not the people who cash in on other peoples' work. You have to pay for people's music. Musicians have to pay the rent, put food on the table, and make a living.

David Kupfer is a writer, environmental consultant, and teacher who lives in the Yuba River Watershed in the Shasta Bioregion of Northern California. His articles have appeared in Progressive, Whole Earth, Earth Island Journal, AdBusters, Yes, Earth First! Journal, Diva, Backpacker, and elsewhere. He was employed by the California Office of Appropriate Technology and the University of California AT Program under the Jerry Brown administration. He has also worked in various capacities to "green" Hollywood, Tassajara Zen Center, Bill Graham Presents, and assorted musical events. Several of his articles can be found at http://wildnesswithin.com/kupferz.html.

 

 

©2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony

Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening: Between the Covers, and Between the Rows

600 Pages of Good Stuff

The new training manual from the Center for Agroecology and Sustain- able Food Systems, Teaching Organic Gardening and Farming, is a major, probably unparalleled resource for teaching sustainable agricultural skills and concepts to students. It represents a milestone in the development of instructional materials in this area, and will stimulate anyone who has worked in this field to reflect on our own lessons taught and learned.

Over the past 35 years, the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden Apprenticeship has trained over a thousand apprentices, including many of the farmers and gardeners I know (and including me, in 1986), in an intensive six-month residential program which combines classroom instruction, small group field classes, hands-on training, and student-directed reading and projects. Drawing on this wealth of practical instructional experience, and following closely the curriculum of the Apprenticeship, the 600+ photocopyable, three-hole-punched pages in this manual amass a rather incredible amount of information, teaching tools, and resources, organized into sensibly sequenced, manageable units.

Each of the three major sections--Organic Farming and Gardening Skills and Practices, Applied Soil Science, and Social and Environmental Issues in Agriculture--is broken down into discrete units, focusing on topics such as Managing Soil Fertility, Transplanting and Direct Seeding, Selecting and Using Cover Crops, Soil Biology and Ecology, and The Development of US Agriculture. The eighteen units are comprised of multiple components, including introductory overviews, abbreviated lecture outlines for instructors, more detailed lecture outlines for students, practical-demonstration outlines, step-by-step sheets, hands-on exercises, assessment question sheets, answer keys, suggested readings, resources sections, appendices, and glossaries.

This is a manual for instructors, not a gardening manual for the general public. While the detailed lecture outlines and many of the other sheets are appropriate for students, they, in and of themselves, would not constitute an easily absorbable, comprehensive course for a beginner. Amazing amounts of material are laid out in a compact form, but, as is well-understood by the editors, most of the information, concepts, and skills presented here require discussion and practical implementation in order to be fully incorporated into a budding gardener or farmer's understanding.

Nor is this a manual intended to teach the subject itself to instructors; it is a tool to help those already familiar with most of the material to present it in a way that those unfamiliar with it can understand. As I reviewed several of the specific lecture outlines, I was impressed by how they covered virtually all the major points that I myself would want to present in those areas (although, of course, there is always more to talk about related to any agricultural topic). Choices facing the farmer involving such things as tillage, compost-making, and propagation techniques are presented in their full complexity, including both advantages and disadvantages of each choice.

No resource can be comprehensive or present the subject from all angles, and certainly every agricultural training program has its own set of biases. The UCSC Farm and Garden Apprenticeship (now officially a project of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems) grew out of the work of Alan Chadwick, a strong proponent of the French-intensive method of cultivation. The material here is still inspired by that general approach. Now, however, much more than when I was an apprentice nearly eighteen years ago, a broader perspective seems to be included in the curriculum. The balanced presentation of both benefits and drawbacks of even the most cherished French-intensive methods is a welcome alternative to the suggestion that "this is the one and only right way to do things," which, intentionally or not, was one of the implied messages I sometimes took in as a young, impressionable apprentice. A dedication to certain gardening fundamentals remains, but it is joined by a greater flexibility and a more realistic assessment of the tradeoffs that many organic farmers and gardeners must choose among as they attempt to survive in the modern world.

This welcome flexibility also opens the door to other approaches not specifically covered here--such as more permacultural methods of food growing, "wild gardening," and the like--that may be oriented more to local food self-reliance and a new economy rather than to survival as a conventional organic producer in today's dominant economy. Instructional materials in Permaculture, for one, are already well-developed, and can easily be used to supplement the intensive gardening and farming focus offered here.

Developed to accompany the CASFS's own program, these materials are also designed to be adaptable to a variety of settings, including other college and university courses, community garden and farm training programs, farms with internships or apprenticeships, school gardening programs, international training programs, and master gardener programs. The manual is available free online in PDF format (www.ucsc.edu/casfs); ordering the entire manual in printed form is also well worth the investment (see end of article for details).

 

 

Further Thoughts: Getting Down and Dirty

 

For the benefit of those who have never taught this subject, and believe that this training manual should make the job easy, I feel impelled to add some additional observations. The existence of a well-presented, meticulously organized resource like this, sponsored by a university and funded by multiple foundations, may give the impression that, hands-on exercises notwithstanding, "Organic Farming and Gardening" is a subject that can actually be conveyed effectively in a conventional academic setting, in much the same way as Geometry, Physics, or English Grammar.

I believe that it cannot--not to any significant depth, at least--and I think the manual's editors would agree. Farming can indeed be studied, in the abstract, by students of agriculture, in the same way that various cultures can be studied by students of anthropology. However, actually learning how to be a gardener or farmer is considerably more complex than simply assembling mental information about gardening and farming. This training manual is fully intended to facilitate teaching of people who want to actually do, not just know about, food growing, but there are many realities that its uniformly sized, three-hole-punched, black-and-white sheets cannot address.

To illustrate some of the challenges here, I'll use my own experience as a gardening student-become-gardening teacher.

In 1986, before the start of my UCSC Farm and Garden apprenticeship session, I received two thick volumes of photocopied articles and information, of roughly the same total thickness as this new manual. I read virtually all the material in those readers, plus two other recommended books, before I arrived at the program. And I retained almost none of it, since it can be learned effectively only in context.

Then, during my six months at UCSC, I took notes furiously on the information we were given, but as a beginning gardener, I often felt overwhelmed with new information. I had thought somehow that food-growing would be simple--as simple as planting corn, beans, and squash seeds in the ground, as I imagined our Native American forebears did. Instead, I learned that, in this day and age at least, our exotic tastes and the extensive changes we settlers have wrought on the landscape make food-growing far from that simple. And there was much more to learn than simply information: there was a whole new way of being, of perceiving, of using one's body, of assessing and responding to one's environment. There were new ways of relating to people, since the thirty apprentices were working, living, eating, and learning together in a setting that required much different forms of cooperation than what many of us were used to. At the end of six months, I knew that I had entered a new world, one that I wanted to explore much further, but I was still quite a newcomer and stranger to it.

It took repetition and experience over the course of a number of gardening seasons for me to feel that I had fully absorbed and understood most of the information I'd first been exposed to that summer. And it also took years for that new way of being, of relating to the environment, to others, and to myself, to begin to feel like "second nature," to be in my blood.

I learned by doing, and I also learned to help train others by doing. I worked in educational, community, and farm settings where I often became a de facto teacher or guide because I had the most experience (although, at first, that experience was still pitifully small compared to that of anyone who'd grown up in an agricultural society). Ten years ago, I started teaching more formally, in one-to-three-month gardening apprenticeship programs. I've used many different teaching resources, and tried many different approaches, from presenting lots of information to emphasizing basic experience with gardening (noticing that, for many students, information cannot be absorbed until genuine interest has been established, and then can be easily obtained, as needed, from many sources). I've come to the conclusion that, while teaching resources like the CASFS training manual can be extremely helpful, they are only one part of the puzzle of how to create a successful experience for participants.

 

 

A Different Kind of Beast

 

Organic farming and gardening differ in fundamental ways from many other subjects of study. Imagine, for example, trying to teach multiplication using multiplication tables that could wither or inexplicably disappear overnight unless properly cared for (and that caring for them involved ongoing, successful multiplication, not always easy for those who haven't yet learned multiplication). Or imagine teaching writing to students who were using computers that, every day, scrambled, deleted, and inserted words into the students' essays. If these things are difficult to imagine, imagine teaching gardening, with the plants as your finicky multiplication tables, and with the garden as a whole, and every project undertaken in it, as essays that are constantly scrambled and changed by the mischievous forces of co-creative life.

Or imagine teaching in a classroom whose furniture grows, crumbles, and rearranges itself around you in unpredictable ways, whose roof springs unpatchable leaks, whose heating system regularly goes haywire, and which, on top of all that, is being counted upon to supply much of the rest of the school with furniture--or even with food! Imagine that this classroom requires hard physical labor in order to exist in any recognizable form at all. And imagine trying to introduce your students to the concept that this strange, constantly changing, sometimes uncomfortable classroom, not the temperature-controlled, physically undemanding classrooms they have been used to, actually represents "real life," and is the only appropriate place to learn about farming and gardening as a serious pursuit rather than just as a casual interest.

This is all a way of saying that, in real-life teaching of farming and gardening, multiple challenges arise. For example, in addition to those I've suggested above, teachers are quickly confronted with the fact that, although every textbook or teaching manual has a "beginning," there are actually no clear beginnings or endings in any gardening process. "Which came first, the metaphorical chicken or the metaphorical egg?" is an unending, unanswerable question when dealing with the seed-to-seed cycles of vegetable crops, or with the coalescence of soil, water, air, and sunlight into plant material and then back again into compost, moisture, vapor, and energy. Every beginning (such as planting a seed) is also tied to an ending (the previous saving of that seed), and every ending (such as pulling a weed) also involves a beginning (for example, of a compost pile). Teaching about one part of these cycles without bringing in the others is almost impossible. A math teacher can teach addition without ever bringing up calculus, but separating subjects in gardening is not so easy. Ultimately, the gardening instructor has to start somewhere, but will also find that everything is related to everything else.

This interconnectedness is one of the joys of gardening, but for students who are more accustomed to learning in distinct units, it can be a challenge. No matter where they start in the gardening cycle, it is already "in motion." The inevitability of this is actually fortuitous, since most gardening apprenticeships take place in existing gardens that need to be maintained regardless of where they are in their cycles, and the student gets beginnings, endings, and everything in between no matter what. However, for those who are most comfortable with a Step A-Step B-Step C-you're done progression, or who prefer areas of study that seem less totally interconnected (not to mention virtually limitless in scope), organic gardening and farming can be incredibly frustrating subjects.

 

 

Making Peace with the Elephant in the Vegetable Garden

 

However, the biggest challenge of farming and gardening education, already hinted at, is the one perhaps least amenable to coverage in a training manual: the "people" factor.

Model, idealized students, who set aside everything else in their lives in order to learn all they can about food growing, are rarities--as are farmers and gardeners with perfectly-honed teaching skills and an easy fit between temperament and the teaching role. Nor will enrollees in working-learning apprenticeships necessarily all have the same needs, be adept at communication, have dealt with all their personal issues, or be fully functioning, cooperatively oriented, empowered individuals. Rather, teachers and students alike will be diverse, flawed, fallible human beings with a lot to learn about how to live on the earth, with themselves, and with one another harmoniously.

Furthermore, the cultural context within which these educational programs occur is quite likely to be not fully supportive or understanding of the endeavor--often the opposite. For example, the CASFS program itself has had numerous struggles with the administration of its parent institution--after a number of "honeymoon years," the relationship had become seriously strained by the mid-1980s, when we apprentices were instructed to assemble the ugliest bouquets we could for the chancellor's weekly staff meetings (an "in" joke that likely passed right over the head of the aesthetically-challenged chancellor).

The "people" factor may not loom as large in less intensive, non-residential programs, such as master gardener courses, where the bulk of instruction takes place in the classroom and the hands-on aspect is left up to the individual students. However, on a farm or in any other residential, working-learning setting, individual, interpersonal, and group dynamics may play a larger role in the educational experience than any other single factor. At Lost Valley, we've designed all of our programs with this human dimension in mind, consciously placing attention on personal and group well-being (with regular, at-least-weekly check-ins) and communication skills (the model of nonviolent or compassionate communication has proved particularly helpful). We try to incorporate the lessons learned in intentional community living and in personal growth workshops such as Naka-Ima into our on-the-ground sustainability work, including gardening and permaculture internships and apprenticeships. And even so, we run into challenges.

I believe these challenges are inherent in this kind of endeavor, and can be managed but never entirely eliminated. They can, in fact, serve to enhance the learning experience. In no real-life situation will students be able to garden or farm without dealing with the same kinds of human factors that they encounter in these training settings.

The teacher in an intensive farming or gardening program will dependably encounter every one of the following phenomena:

1. Students have quite different learning styles: some are oral learners, some visual learners, some tactile learners; some like to be sociable, some like to work in silence; some want lots of information, some prefer much less; some like to ask questions, some want to be told what they "should" know. Using a mixture of instructional approaches will help to address, but never entirely eliminate, the fact that at any one time, some students will be getting their needs met, and others will be wanting something different.

As a result, each shift in one direction (e.g., "more formal instruction," "more organization") will likely produce requests for a shift in the other direction (e.g. "more hands-on," "a more organic flow"). Teachers need to realize that this is the nature of the beast, and attempt to be flexible while avoiding running around in endless dizzying circles trying to please, or becoming dejected when all attempts to produce 100% satisfaction fall short. 100% satisfaction is as common as a weed-free garden. One day you may achieve it, but a few days later, weeds will spring up. This is the nature of gardening, and of gardening education.

2. Students will likely have varying levels of experience. In a society where agricultural education were much more valued and widespread, there would be plenty of students to go around, and students could select programs that corresponded to their levels of expertise. With many fewer opportunities to select from (and with a much smaller pool of learners for farms and other programs to choose from), most programs resemble more closely a K-through-12 one-room schoolhouse than a single-grade class. Attempting to tailor educational presentations and experiences to meet the needs of all of these different levels can be difficult, although the variety in skill and knowledge levels has the added benefit of much more inter-student teaching and learning.

3. Students often enroll for widely diverse reasons, and may have much different learning agendas. Some students want to start a farm after they complete the program; others just want to know how to grow a backyard vegetable garden; others may simply be curious about gardening or hungry for some sort of group experience. Again, it is important for the instructor to recognize that, no matter how many times a program is fine-tuned in an attempt to meet the needs of individual students, someone is probably not going to be 100% satisfied.

4. Students will enter the program with personal issues that will sometimes clash with those of other students or of the instructors. Authority issues are particularly prevalent in this setting, since the teacher is often the same person who guides students in the actual garden work, tells them what needs to be done, and can therefore be perceived as being "the boss." The communication and relationship skills necessary to work through these personal and interpersonal issues are frequently insufficiently developed within those involved. Programs and farms are often under-staffed, adding to the strain on both facilitators and students or apprentices. Placing deliberate attention on personal and communication issues will not entirely resolve them, but may help participants start to learn skills that will help them not only