Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 61

Presence, Not Praise

Canoeing at night

The boys and Penny returned from their four-day wilderness skills weekend with oodles of stories and small treasures. The boys had made some savvy trades at the trade blanket; their lodes of garlic, chaga mushrooms, and dried grasshoppers had proven popular, and they’d managed to wrangle a nice hand sewn leather belt pouch, along with a heavy bag of wild pears. Fin got his hands on a flint and steel, and showed me how he’d used it to start a fire. By gum, the darn thing actually works, which shouldn’t have surprised me. But then, I’m easily surprised by magic. Penny made a pair of buckskin moccasins and Fin advanced his flint napping, and I don’t even know what all Rye made. For my part, I did what I always do when they’re away: Knocked down a bunch of trees, sawed a bunch of lumber, did a bunch of chores, ate a bunch of bacon and steak, and listened to a bunch of  immature music turned up a bunch too loud. Oh, and got a bunch lonely.

I could see in the boys’ faces how good an experience it had been. They are crazy for this stuff; they spend almost all their days in the throes of some wilderness craft or another (I really can’t bring myself to call them “primitive skills” anymore, having come to understand that what’s truly primitive is the frequent callousness with which modern first world society conducts its business). They know how to sew leather and cloth, how to hone a knife blade and haft a handle for it, how to make cordage from cedar bark, how to hew a long bow, how to hunt squirrel with a slingshot, how to flesh and dry and animal hides, how to make a watertight shelter of sticks and leaves, and so on.

I have little doubt that for this period of their lives at least, this is their calling. Their affection for these skills and practices is almost entirely lacking in externalized attention or merit – no one is grading them, and rarely do they receive praise for their efforts. Penny and I are not big on accolades or other “rewards”; we believe that what children need most is presence, not praise. As such, I am secure in the knowledge that their love of these things comes from some place deep inside of them, and not from a desire to fulfill anyone else’s expectations. It is not even as if they have seen these skills modeled by us; although Penny is quickly becoming proficient in many of them, it is a proficiency she’s earning in tandem with the boys. And me? I’m about as capable as a bowling ball when it comes to this stuff.

The challenge, of course, is that there simply aren’t many kids their age with similar interests around here. Or around anywhere, I’m guessing. This is mostly ok; the boys rarely, if ever, articulate any sense of wishing more of their friends shared their passions. They have one good friend who loves these things almost as fiercely as they do, but he lives nearly an hour away, and has 5 siblings and his parents have their hands full just trying to keep some semblance of order, much less arranging visits. Anyway, Fin and Rye seem keenly aware that their interests are somewhat unique in 21st century America; they also seem entirely comfortable with that knowledge.

Still, I could tell how good it had been for them to be immersed in a group where their passions weren’t considered “neat” or “cool,” but rather were simply part of everyday living. There weren’t a ton of kids at the gathering, but Fin and Rye are quite happy in the company of adults, particularly if said adults consider a bag of toasted bugs to be nourishment.

I have no witty repartee with which to end this little story. There is no lesson I’m hoping to impart. Oh, wait, yeah, there is: Presence, not praise. How’s that grab ya’?

The Boundaries of What Matters

Once in a while, the boys are actually sort of sweet

I just finished an essay for an upcoming issue of Taproot based on our experiences with children and guns and, by extension, our views relating to risk and kids. I would tell you what these views are, or you could just scroll through the past couple years of posts. Or buy the next issue of Taproot… now, there’s an idea!

Sometimes I’m a little nervous writing what I truly believe, and this was one of those times. Held in separation, the subjects of children/parenting and guns are volatile enough. But put ‘em together, and the potential to foment strong emotional reaction isn’t really potential, at all: It’s pretty much guaranteed.

I’ve been publishing long enough to understand that no matter how carefully I choose my words, someone’s going to interpret them in ways I could never have imagined. I will never forget reading a pair of reviews of my first book (this being back in the day when I still bothered to do such things) that directly contradicted one another in their criticisms. One claimed I was serving as nothing more than a puppet mouthpiece for the new crop of Hardwick-area agripreneurs (I’m pretty sure the reviewer actually posited that these folks had paid me to write the book); the other took me to task for being needlessly critical of all the good people who comprised this new agricultural revolution, suggesting I must have had a personal axe to grind.

Anyhow. I have witnessed the same phenomenon in this space, and while I can’t say it never bothers me, I have come to understand it to be part-and-parcel of writing about things that actually matter to me. This was not always the case; for years, I wrote most innocuous ski travel stories and other such vacuity, and while it sure was fun in that way that all-expenses-paid-ski-vacations-that-you-get-paid-to-write-about don’t exactly suck, it wasn’t exactly, um, fulfilling.

The truth is, I am coming to a place where I can hardly bear to write a story that I don’t on some level care deeply about. From a strictly fiduciary standpoint, this is mildly problematic: There are a heck of a lot more editors looking for glow-y travel stories than there are looking for essays about buying guns for kids, and the former generally have far deeper pockets. Viewing things solely through the mentality of money, writing about what feels important to me is very bad business, indeed. And then there’s the simple fact that it tends to ruffle feathers, and that on some level or another, I have to figure out how to deal with the reverberations of those ruffles. One of the things I am learning about this space – a lesson I credit to Jon Katz – is that this blog is not an argument. But that doesn’t mean I’m not affected by unkind sentiments or, more profoundly, by the knowledge that my words did not come across as intended.

I try hard – with varying degrees of success – to avoid fretting about the future of my so-called career. Somewhere in the past three years or so, I took a hard left turn toward doing the only thing I’m capable of doing at this point in my life. There is no going back. There will be no more all-expenses-paid trips to Whistler. There are unlikely to be any more $2-per-word travel feature stories at all. This is not a calculated decision, and it’s certainly not because these things are bad, or wrong; it’s simply that I’ve become incapable of writing them. I just don’t care enough anymore.

What a privilege it is to write (and get paid to write) about things I do care about. I am currently working on not one, but two books that fall within the boundaries of what matters to me, and although the money ain’t great, it’s just barely enough. The property taxes will be paid. The cows will have hay and free choice kelp. The car will get winter tires. In January, sure, and only after having gotten almost inextractibly stuck at least twice, but it will get winter tires. Come deer season, there will be ammo for the guns. If there should happen to be a pre-holiday reissue of Van Halen’s 1984, complete with liner notes and never-before-seen photos of backstage antics, I might just be able to afford it. Really, what more can anyone ask?

Plenty, I suppose, and whether or not I can afford to continue walking this path over the long haul remains to be seen. But strangely, the older I get, the less I need to know what might happen tomorrow, or even later today. Strangely, the older I get, the less I need for other people to agree with me. And the older I get, the better I understand is that all I’ve got is here and now. For now, anyway, that’s enough for me.

 

 

A Life Instead of Merely a Living (and Number Three)

Caught!

Penny and the boys are out the door on their way to a four-day wilderness skills/craft retreat, unadvisedly leaving me in charge of, well, everything. The boys prepared small baggies of roasted grasshoppers for exchange at Saturday evening’s trade blanket; they drizzled them with tamari before roasting and then sprinkled salt on top, the result being that this morning I uncovered numerous grasshopper legs that somehow became embedded in the salt jar. Precisely how such a thing could occur escapes my current grasp of logic and reason, but of course the same could be said of many of the things that happen around here.

Ah, well. This is the life I have chosen, and if it happens to include grasshopper legs in the salt jar, so be it. It is a price I can afford to pay.

Having the place to myself, and having no shortage of tasks calling my name, I will stop there and leave you with a wonderful passage from a book I’m reading: The Earth is Enough, by the late Harry Middleton. It’s about his experiences living and fishing as a teen with his uncle and grandfather in the Ozarks. Find it. Read it. Your life will be better for it.

The land the old men worked, this land they had lived on for more than seventy years, had little to recommend it. Judged by the standards of modern agriculture, it was at best hardscrabble in character, a commercial disaster. Only the immense vegetable garden defied the laws of farm commerce and made the old men a handsome profit. Indeed, the garden’s fecundity mocked the rest of the farm’s herculean poverty. Rocky and feckless and only slightly more agreeable to commercial agriculture than 10,000 acres of concrete, the land yielded little that anyone but the old men considered important or of value. From it they harvested solitude, contentment, peace of mind, a way of life instead of merely a living. Which is the way they wanted it. The land was theirs, free and clear, and they had evidently made a decision decades before to keep it the way it was, to work with it rather than against it. A decision for trout and quail instead of beans. It seemed to them the world had too many beans and too few trout and wild turkeys. Their life in the mountains became a compromise, a balance of giving and taking…

… Although the old me warned me that a life devoted to the land brought heartache and ruination, although they chided me for taking what they considered an unhealthy interest in their lives and especially the natural world, once exposed to such a life, there was never really any serious hope of recovery, thank God. And the poverty didn’t seem all that bad; if it kept so much from their reach, they did not seem to mind. Indeed, they wanted it that way; doing without was the coin that had bought them the life in the hills beyond the backyard. Money, even in modest amounts, would have meant complications, and complications were something the old men had had enough of and didn’t want any more of. Complications took time, and time, they knew, was running out. They wanted only the solitude the land freely gave. The solitude of Starlight Creek soothed them; it was not a self-imposed prison but a natural sanctuary, real and boundless along the shadowy banks of the swift-moving creek.

Now that, my friends, is good writin’.

Number Three: Stay home

Number Two (and more)

A couple evenings ago, my friend Todd and I puttered up to Sterling College to hear a presentation by Mark Shepard. Shepard is the author of Restoration Agriculture and the owner of a 100-acre farm in Wisconsin that utilizes large-scale permaculture techniques to grow and harvest perennial tree crops. He grows a few acres of annual vegetables, mostly to satisfy his quota with Organic Valley, of which he’s been a member for nearly two decades. Also, he runs some critters in his “savanna” (that’s how he described it): Cows, pigs, chickens, sheepsies.

The thrust of Shepard’s point is that annual agriculture – based in large part on cereal grains and legumes – is killing the planet and, not inconsequently, us. “Every society that has depended on annual agriculture has collapsed,” he said, and I suppose he’s right, if you discount the society we currently inhabit. Although by some standards, it’s not terribly hard to see that even this society is collapsing. It’s just that collapse, like wealth, isn’t being equally distributed. In Shepard’s view, we desperately need to transform the way we do large scale agriculture in North America, utilizing woody crops that do a far better job of capturing sunlight and producing truly nourishing foods than do the soil and health-destroying plants upon which we’ve come to depend. He is downright dismissive of the homestead model of food production and the ways in which he’s seen the permaculture movement evolve to be largely about 10 x 10 urban garden plots and “mud ovens.” (He has a particular hair across his ass for mud ovens, which he must of disparaged a half dozen times or more) Oh yeah, there’s something else he’s not particularly fond of: Hand labor. He’s very big on mechanization, which does make one wonder what’ll become of all the people and even cultures who currently depend on hand labor for their livelihood. But that’s maybe a topic for another day.

Anyway. It was a great presentation; Shepard is a dynamic speaker and incredibly engaging. He’s outspoken and unapologetic, and he’s clearly brilliant. Despite the fact that so many of the practices we employ here (homestead scale, hand labor, and by gum we’re even building a “mud oven”), I really enjoyed his talk, and if you ever have the chance to see him speak, I highly recommend it.

With one exception. After the talk, someone asked Shepard how his financial model works. “Oh, I’m in ten times as much debt as I was when I started,” he said, before going on to describe a complex web of debt swapping, utilizing multiple creditors to leverage an initial loan into many multiples of that amount. “And you’re ok with all this?” I asked, and he said that he was very much ok with it, that this is how Donald Trump and anyone who truly understands the financial system operates, and that the choice was between gaming the system in this manner (which sounded a hell of a lot like a ponzi scheme, frankly) or “spending the rest of your life with a yoke around your neck.” Besides which, the need to reform agriculture is so urgent, it’s imperative that we use every tool at hand.

I mention none of this to denigrate the fellow. Although I don’t agree with his views on hand labor or debt gaming (let me put it this way: Whatever I see Donald Trump doing, I pretty much do the opposite), he’s clearly got a lot to offer. And it occurs to me that his embrace of mechanization and financial scheming is largely driven by his genuine love for the planet and the people inhabiting it. In other words, the end justifies the means. “Your problem,” he told me, “is that you have a concept that debt is bad. I’m simply observing that this is how the system works.”

The crazy thing is, he’s probably right.

Number Two: Do not fear terrorism. Do not fear death. Do not fear your government. Do not fear taxes. Do not fear strange men from Vermont who tell you not to fear. Do not fear because almost everything you might fear will not change because you fear it, but also, do not fear because almost every one of your fears is somebody else’s profit. 

 

 

 

Number One

Remember something Eliot Coleman told me a few years ago:

“It’s important for democracy to have a certain percentage of people feeding themselves so they can tell government to go f**k off.” 

 

The Advantage of Knowing

The pasture is going fast and the cows have been let loose to graze the fringes. They wander with noses bent to the ground, in search of what small succulence remains. We’ve got a week or maybe two of grass remaining before the daily ritual of hay throwing begins. It is ok. True, I like throwing hay less than I like moving cows, but if I never had to throw hay, I might not like moving cows so much, anyway. Moving cows without the knowledge of throwing hay would be like living without the knowledge of dying. Ok, so maybe that’s pushing it a bit, but you get the point.

Right now, this property is home to two chimneys spiraling wood smoke, and that is as sure a sign of the season’s change as the cows cut loose, or an apple tree folding under the weight of its own fruit (egads, what a year for apples: On Saturday, we gathered better than four bushels in barely an hour), or a sugar maple gone yellow, then orange, then red, then bare, like a butterfly crawling back into its cocoon. Right now, the boys are dyeing their traps over an open fire, preparing for the season to come. I both want for them to be successful and I don’t, and I suspect this is not the first time I’ll be faced with this conundrum in their lives, or at least the portion of their lives I’ll be privileged enough to bear witness to. Right now, Penny is cooking down a 5-gallon pot of chopped apples on the cookstove; she tells me she wants 50-quarts of applesauce, and when Penny says she wants 50-quarts of applesauce, Penny damn well gets 50-quarts of applesauce. Actually, she thinks it’s likely to be 60 or more, and I can see how pleased this makes her. Single male readers, my relationship advice can be summed up thusly: Find yourself a 60-quarts-of-applesauce-women. Your life will be ever so much better for it.

Two weeks ago, I was not ready for the weather to change. I do not know why, exactly; my fondness for winter is secured by equal measures of history and irrationality. But for a few days there, when the first series of sub-30-degree mornings were granted visiting rights by whomever grants such things, I experienced a small sense of dread for the months to come. It is gone now, and I am back to that cozy anticipation of flannel and wood smoke, of movie nights and reading, of early morning skiing and plow truck extractions from whichever ditch I happen to slide into. Whatever the case, you will hear no complaining from me; I have little patience for those who live in northern climates and then gripe about the weather. I mean, really: There are far, far easier places to live. If you don’t like it, you ought just get the hell out. (is complaining about people who complain about winter any different than complaining about winter itself? Hmmm.. I ‘spose I ought just shut the hell up).

So here it is. Not winter yet, but close enough there can be no doubting its intentions. There is still much to do: Kimchi to be made, pigs and lambs to be killed, potatoes and carrots and beets to be harvested, bacon to be smoked, gardens to be amended and mulched, firewood and sawlogs to be skidded, and so on. Each of these we’ve done so many times before, the motions are etched into muscle and memory and I suppose this, more than anything, is the advantage we hold over winter and what she will bring. It is the advantage of routine and ritual, of habit and practice, of sensing and feeling the when and the why and the how of all these tasks.

It is the advantage of knowing.

Needed

Lynn called and offered us 8 or 9 acres of standing second cut hay, and damned if that we were gonna let such an enormously generous offer fall by the wayside. We’ve got almost enough hay put up, but almost is… well, it’s almost, and almost don’t cut it with ruminant animals. I mean, you can have enough hay to get you through, say, middle April, which is mighty close to green up ’round these parts, but if you don’t have enough to make it into May, you might’s well pawn your critters now and save yourself a passel of trouble. And all for the want of a few weeks worth of hay come spring.

Anyway. The barn is full to bursting with square bales, so we worked a deal with Melvin to put the hay into wrapped round bales that needn’t be under cover. To be sure, the plastic wrap is a bummer and all, but sometimes concessions must be made, and this was one of those times. I’ve waxed poetic about putting up square bales more than a time or two, and I’ve meant every last word of it, but tarnation them round bales are handy as all get out under the right circumstances. So this morning after chores the boys and I trundled down to Melvin’s, hooked up the clamshell to his loader, hitched onto the wagon, and went bale gathering.

I hadn’t really expected the boys to help with wrapping. They’d never run the wrapper before, and it seemed easier to simply do it myself, despite the complications of wrapping solo. First, you gotta load the bale onto the wrapper; then, you gotta move the tractor, climb out of the tractor, wrap the bale, dump the bale, set the wrapper, hop back into the tractor, stack the wrapped bale, grab an unwrapped bale, and load the bale. Then you do it all over again. But complicated as all this sounds, I figured it’d be quicker and ultimately more efficient than taking the time to show the fellas how to operate the wrapper, as well as whatever time it took to undo any mistakes that were made. In short – and it sorta pains me to admit this – I just didn’t want to be bothered.

So yeah, I’d planned on performing the gyrations necessary to load, wrap, and stack the bales alone, what with Melvin still milking, but the boys were keen to prove their worth, and so I sighed and capitulated and gave them a few moments of instruction and climbed back into the tractor, all but certain I was making a mistake that would come back to bite me sooner, rather than later.

I’m gonna stop the story telling here, because I’ve come to the place where I can make my point, and that’s really what I came here to do. As I was watching the boys wrap the bales, conferring amongst themselves every so often when things got complicated (wrapping is a fairly simple task, but it is important to line up the wrapper correctly for both loading and dumping, and to be sure the bale makes 15 full turns, and the plastic wrap, which is self-sticking, can be a real bear to work with), it occurred to me how rare it’s become that children are able and/or allowed to contribute to their family’s well being in such a visceral manner anymore. And I was thinking of a passage from the book From Boys to Men (which is by Bret Stephenson, although the passage is one he  quotes from a now-defunct periodical):

We are the only civilization in history to have created a whole category of people (adolescents) for whom we have no real use. In times not long gone by, fourteen-year-olds helped on the farm. They assisted with the animals, cared for younger siblings, and helped get the crops in before the frost. If they lived in the city, they got into the shops and found jobs as apprentices, helpers, stock clerks, or custodians. They had a role in society – and they understood that hard work and responsible behavior were the keys to future success. They were in partnership with adult members.

Now, however, we have “protected” them out of jobs, and relegated young adolescents to the roles of pizza consumer and videotape junkie… Children this age need to be needed, but we have institutionalized our rebuff to their pleas to be of service.  

For the next hour or so, I loaded and stacked, whilst the boys wrapped, and darned if they didn’t make but one error, which was quickly remedied (and was one less error than I’d made the first time I used the wrapper), and darned if the whole task took maybe half as long as it would have without their help.

And darned if – and I’m pretty sure I’m not mistaken, here, judging by the look of satisfaction on their faces – my sons didn’t feel needed. As I know from experience, that’s a real nice way to feel.

More Than I Deserve

Picking wild apples. Fin can hit pretty much any apple at will.

The first hard frost arrived a few nights ago. When I awoke in the half-dark of predawn, the pasture was white and luminescent under the late moon. I kindled a fire in the cookstove and stood by the open door of the firebox, ostensibly waiting for enough light to see my way through chores. But of course I could have seen just fine; the truth was the truth whispered by all fires on all cold mornings: Stay. Stay. So I stayed.

It has been nice to abandon this space for a few days. Much has happened in the intervening week: I took a two-day long chainsaw/tree felling course known as Game of Logging, and for those of you inclined toward such antics, I highly recommend it. I have been using chainsaws for the majority of my adult life, which in truth only means that I have been establishing dangerous and wasteful habits for most of my adult life, skating by on a smidge of common sense, an inflated sense of my capabilities, and a whole passel of good luck, a trifecta that probably applies to more of my pursuits than I care to admit.

What else? Nate returned from three weeks in Minnesota, where he’d established a “rice camp” and harvested a preposterous quantity of wild rice. 450-pounds, if I’m not mistaken. Anyway, he happened to return the evening after I’d gathered a few pounds of premium chanterelle and hedgehog mushrooms and furthermore had set out a leg of lamb to thaw and so we feasted in a manner fit for kings: Piles of buttered wild rice, smoky and tender, a pan of wild mushrooms cooked in fresh butter, and of course the lamb, the fat crisped to perfection, the delicate flesh cooked just enough to be considered cooked. I think we ate some vegetables, too; indeed, I’m sure of it, but this is a season of plant matter abundance to the extent that they become almost unmemorable. Oh, another fresh tomato? What, more green beans? And so on.

Ah, except corn, which is coming in hard, now, and is quite memorable indeed, if only for its fleeting nature. Soon it will be gone, but last night we ate corn and only corn for dinner, four fat ears for each of us, the boys’ faces shiny with butter and flecked with yellow. (Ok, so Penny’s and my faces were shiny with butter and flecked with yellow, too)

We are ready for winter. The woodshed is full. The pantry is full.  The cows are fat and bred. The pigs are merely fat, 300-or more pounds each of walking sausage. The hay barn is full. The freezers are full. I have made 105-pounds of butter and strongly suspect I’ll hit 150 by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. Soon, the root cellar will be full: Potatoes, carrots, beets, kimchi, applesauce, green beans, sausages, and so on and so forth.

In a sense, this is what we have been working toward all summer, although it is always a little surprising to me to see the tangible and literal fruits of our labors, the rows of jars, the stacks of wood and lumber, the packages of steaks and burger and chops, the bales of hay to be fed out one-by-by-by-one. Honestly, it always makes me feel like I’m getting away with something: You mean I get to do the work and I get all this? One or the other seems fair, it’s plenty, it is all I could dare ask for. But to be blessed with both? Sometimes, it just plain feels like more than I deserve.

Then I Walked Home

Where bad smells live

This morning was an early one, what with Rye’s confounded cat Winslow having squoze his way through the gate through which he is not supposed to squeeze and prancing his way upstairs and settling into a spot directly to the right of my slumbering head, where he commenced to purr maliciously. It was 4:45 a.m., or thereabouts, so I tripped into my office and knocked out a few words, and then, just as soon as I thought perhaps I could make out the shaggy forms of the sheep in the predawn gloaming beyond my office window, I strolled outside.

It was eerie warm, the air soup-thick and rank with the smell of the skunks the boys had trapped for our friend Todd. Not for the first time (and certainly not for the last), I cursed my sons’ odd desires and also Penny’s and my willingness to accommodate them. I mean, really: Who in their right freakin’ mind would let their children trap skunks and skin them in the front yard? Who in their right freakin’ mind would let their children build a trapping shed at the junction of lawn and driveway, in plain smell of the house? Don’t get me wrong: I want to support my boys and all, but sometimes it just seems like it’d be a hell of a lot easier if they were into X Box and baseball. Sometimes, it just seems like it’d be a hell of a lot easier if we just said “no” a little more often.

So now the interior of our new-to-us Subaru, an extremely generous and timely gift from Penny’s folks, who have recently given up driving at almost precisely the same moment our old car failed inspection for structural rust issues, and the first vehicle we’ve ever owned that was made in this century, carries the faint odor of dead skunk. I have this fantasy that I’m going to stop for a hitchhiker and he’s gonna get one whiff of the situation and say something like “no thanks, man. I need the exercise, anyway.”

Whatever. I spent the remainder of the early morning moving from animal to animal as the sky went about its business of exchanging dark for light. Pigs, chickens (both meat and layers), and the new piglets, which are down in the nascent nut grove, rutting out the wild raspberries and spreading piggy fertilizer. I strolled down to the cows at the far end of the pasture, and stood under the big apple tree along Melvin’s boundary and ours, just watching. I’d had the idea I might gather some drops for the pigs, but I’d brought no bucket and hadn’t even worn a shirt from which to fashion a carrier, and I realized how foolish I’d been.

A minute passed, maybe two. It was not raining, but it felt as if might start, and I remembered the ending lines of Hayden Carruth’s poem “Cows At Night”:

 

But I did not want to go,

not yet, nor knew what to do

if I should stay, for how

 

in that great darkness could I explain

 anything, anything at all.

I stood by the fence. And then

 very gently it began to rain.

 

Then I walked home.

Free and Easy

Picking yellowfoot chanterelles

Crazy how short the days are getting now, and how quickly. Not so long ago, I was up and out by 5 most mornings; nowadays at that hour, I’m generally still deep into some unflattering dream where my children are bowing at my feet in supplication and my wife is asking whether I’d like my fresh-fried doughnuts sprinkled with maple sugar or perhaps with a dollop of butter on top? (the answer, of course, is both).

I always struggle a bit at this time of year, which generally marks the transition between the majority of my waking hours spent out-of-doors, engaging with the land and animals, and the majority of my waking hours spent indoors, engaging with the keyboard. I’ve done a fair job over the past years of compressing the bulk of my paying work into the colder, darker months, and this is swell, but the downside is the inevitable shift in focus of body and mind, and the fact that it’s not yet cold and dark enough to make this transition terribly welcome.

I have pretty much gotten over the idea that I’ll someday earn the bulk of our living off our land (although if I earn the bulk of my living off writing about living off our land – as increasingly seems to be the case – is that not the same? If our on-going dance with our land provides the fruits by which our need to earn a money-living is significantly dented – as increasingly seems to be the case – is that not the same? Hmmm…); this was once a small fantasy that crowded my heels like an annoying child, but I have come to understand that it is not my path. There are many reasons for this. That I’m too lazy and not clever enough should be obvious by now. But there’s also the simple truth that I (and by “I,” I mean “we”) find it increasingly difficult to consider commoditizing the gifts of this small piece of ground.

That is not to say we never sell what we produce; we have a handful of loyal and generous customers, and we are only too happy to take their money. It is even necessary that we do so, because of course while we might consider the fruits of our labors – and even the labor itself – a gift, most of the rest of the world does not operate this way. Or I should say, most of the rest of the human world does not operate this way. Because of course nature might just be the most givingest sonofagun around; she’ll give and give and give ’til she ain’t got nothing left. Or maybe it’s just that we’ll take and take ‘til she ain’t got nothing left.

I fully understand why folks want to make money working the land, and respect their decision to do so. I also understand that it’s my great fortune to be able to make money writing about how I don’t make money working the land (I mean, really: How freakin’ convoluted is that?). But I also know that the moment I started looking at our land as a financial profit center, my view would change. This is what I meant the other day when I talked about money being a claim on natural resources, because as soon as money enters the picture, those resources begin to look like something other than trees and soil and creatures. They begin to look like dollar signs, and as such, our relationship to them inevitably shifts. Generally speaking, that shift does not tend to support the long-term health of those resources, or of ourselves.

Charles Eisenstein talks a lot about the fact that our very lives are a gift, and that we didn’t have to earn anything to simply be born. Indeed, everything we truly need to survive and even thrive is fundamentally a gift because of course until all these things were commoditized they were available to all, regardless of ability to pay. Money and capitalism have slowly eroded the abundance of these gifts, until in many parts of the world even the air we breathe and the water we drink have become unfit to sustain good health.

I know this is not the way the world works today. We buy and we sell, we earn and we save, we seek profit and avoid loss. We see a forest and we think of all the lumber it can provide, and all the money that lumber will bring. We hear “amazon,” and we think “on-line retailer,” not river. We hear “apple” and we think “iPhone” rather than fruit. I write a story, and I think “hmm, maybe I can get someone to pay me for this.”

So yes, it’s true that the gift seems to be disappearing from the modern economy, that much is clear. And I have to wonder if one of the reasons we’ve become so resistant to selling more of what we produce on this little patch of ground is that it reminds us of our origins, of the fundamental truth that our very being was and remains a gift. It reminds us, however fitfully and inadequately, that holding onto this view – again, however fitfully and inadequately – feels a hell of a lot better than letting it go.