Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 68

Ill Logic

Ah, late May in Vermont!

Last night Rye and I slept in a tent next to pen that houses the boys’ goats. Rye’s doe, Flora, is due to kid any day (or night) now, and Rye, being of the caregiving sort, darn well plans to be there when it happens. So for the next unknowable quantity of nights until she comes forth with however many impossibly small creatures of the caprine variety she’s carrying, the tent is where I slumber. Which ain’t so bad, really, particularly on these cool, clear, bug-free nights, the rain fly left wadded in the grass so that we might see the stars through the tent mesh and wake in the morning with our faces damp from dew. I can promise you, there are worse things in the world.

I have been thinking a lot about logic, particularly since I posted a couple weeks back about how we’re not always particularly logical in our decision making. The more I think about it, the more I realize how wrong I was: We do think and act logically. It just may not always appear that way.

Here’s what I think (for now, anyway): Our culture’s definition of logic seems to have become linked to expectations set by contemporary economic arrangements. In other words, we determine what is logical or illogical based in large part on what the market tells us is logical or illogical. It is illogical to keep cows, because milk and butter and beef are so plentiful and cheap in every supermarket. It is illogical to spend two hours tromping through the forest in a fruitless search for morels, because of course time is money, the latter of which those hours could have been spent earning. And what do you have to show for those hours? A bunch of bramble scratches and a stubbed toe?

It is illogical to repair a tool or appliance, because tossing it and buying a new one is easier and cheaper. It is illogical to educate your children at home because to educate your children at home, you must forgo whatever income you might otherwise be paid. It is illogical to pursue your passion, because your passion does not pay. Better to make a practical career choice, and perhaps when you retire, well, maybe then you’ll get to do what you really want. Maybe then you’ll get live the life you truly want to live.

The definition of logic is reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity. Which makes me wonder: What are my strict principles of validity? It seems a worthy exercise to determine what these might be, for if we don’t even know what they are, do we not risk having them determined by external forces, and won’t those determinations be made with someone else’s profit in mind? I think we do, and I think they will.

So then. For the record, and perhaps to be continued, my strict principles of validity:

1) Time is not money. Time is life.

2) Ergo, I would prefer to retain control over as much of my time (life) as possible.

3) Ergo, I would prefer to not relinquish portions of my life to pay for shit I don’t really need.

4) My family is important to me, my children are growing fast, and I love their company.

5) Ergo, I wish to spend as much of my time (life) in their company as possible.

6) Ergo, I will educate them in a manner that enables this.

7) I am most satisfied in body, mind, and spirit when I am able to spend a portion of each day laboring or simply being on the land.

8) Ergo, I will arrange my life in such a manner as to make this a reality.

That’s a fairly short, off-the-top-of-my-head list. But already, I see how it transforms my notion of what is logical and what is not. Already, I see how I needn’t allow my personal sense of what makes sense to become a victim of forces that don’t necessarily have my best interests at heart.

Ergo, to allow others to define what is logical, my friends, would be simply illogical.

There’s Something

Yesterday I had a long conversation with Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods. This was for a story I’m working on –  not the book, but another project relating to children and nature and education. It’s funny how this stuff tends to crop up for me.

Anyhow, my style of interviewing is pretty informal (goodness, imagine that!); I prefer to have conversations with the people I’m interviewing, rather than work from a script. The benefit, of course, is that you end up going places you might never have predicted. Such was the case with Richard, because pretty soon we weren’t talking about kids and education and nature. Pretty soon, we were talking about fear.

“You know, parents have such fear that their kids are going to be left behind in the economic race,” Richard said. “I never judge people for that fear, but we’re up against economic forces so strong, only a mass movement can stand up to it.”

He’s right, of course. Fear is an incredibly powerful motivator, whether it’s fear of death, poverty, social acceptance, or – perhaps even more affecting – our children’s death, poverty, and social acceptance. This is all entirely understandable, perhaps in part because these things really are worth fearing, but I suspect in some cases because we’ve been taught to fear them. We have been socialized to accept and even embrace these fears, and I think this is largely because these fears help fuel the economic race Richard speaks of and in doing so, generates profits for those at the head of that race.

Later in the conversation, we got off onto another tangent, about sensory perception. “You know,” said Richard, “it’s widely accepted in science that there are a lot more than five human senses.”

Oh yeah, I said, how many?

“Conservatively, 10. But maybe as many as 30. And the crazy thing is, a lot of these other senses are the ones we end up pushing away because we don’t give ourselves the freedom to experience them. We don’t give ourselves the ability to feel and to be fully alive.”

Later on, you know what I thought? Now, there’s something to be afraid of.

No Bother At All

I was thinking the other day – always dangerous, as Penny is ever-keen to remind me – about how most folks probably come to this site because they’ve read one of my two food-related books. And how it might be sorta confusing that, once here, what they find is primarily anti-establishment ranting about parenting and education (as if the two should rightly be separated) and money and not really all that much about food or food systems or any of that jazz. Which is not to say these things aren’t all connected on some level or another, because of course they are. They very much are.

Still and all and because I’m working on a section in the new book that’s about our place, and because when I’m out and about people often ask me to describe our homestead-farm-smallholding-whatchamacallit, I’m going to do what I often do in this space, which is use it as a ceiling upon which to hurl the imperfect pasta of my thoughts and see what sticks. Wow… how’s that for an extended metaphor?

As I’ve mentioned, we bought this place as 40-acres of bare land in ’97. The first farm-related endeavor was the planting of 100 bare root blueberry plants. This was before we even had a roof up, and I thought it was pretty much insane to be planting blueberries before we even had a dry, warm place to lay our heads, but as usual, Penny was wiser than me and the berries got planted and ever since about, oh, 2001, we’ve gone hardly more than a day or two without eating blueberries either fresh or frozen. As an added bonus, the plants have paid for themselves many, many times over with what we’ve sold as pick-your-own.

We also got laying hens right around this time, as well as a couple of piglets. We had Melvin till up a couple of nice-sized gardens. Not too terrible much later, we got the cows. More pigs. Another garden. And so on.

Our primary intent for our place is not so much for it to serve as a means of income – we do realize a few thousand dollars in farm-related income each year – but as a cornerstone in our personal economy. And by “economy,” I do not mean the portion of our life that relates to money, but a more holistic sense of the word (the origins of which have nothing to do with money, by the way) that relates to how we manage our lives. Of course, money is a part of this, and given that we raise the majority of our food on this land, and given that if we weren’t doing so, we’d be spending a whole heck of a lot more on groceries, there’s no question that our food-related endeavors impact our financial bottom line.

But the truth is, that’s not really a motivating factor. Primarily, we’re motivated by the fact that both Penny and I enjoy the process, as much as the outcome. In other words, we like the work. This morning, I was up and out by 5:20 or so, preparing a fresh paddock for the ever-hungry cows, when a thunderstorm came in fast and the sky got lit by a flash of lightning of a color I’d never before witnessed. It was pink, or nearly so, and for a moment, the whole place – even the cows, waiting impatiently by the single strand of poly wire separating them from their breakfast – was awash in that strange light for a half-second and it was… hell, it was amazing. I love these little moments; they happen at least once or twice a day, and almost always in the context of some farm-related task or another.

I am glad that we do not have to farm for our primary income, although there are times when I can imagine it, or at least some form of it. But because we do not live under the onus of meeting profit expectations, we are able to run our place exactly as we wish, with all the absurd diversity that gives us so much pleasure. Right now, we have 7 cows, 9 sheep, 15 or so laying hens, 2 pigs, and of course the boys have their goats. We have the 100 blueberry bushes, 3 extremely large and productive gardens, and 3 unheated hoop houses (1 for tomatoes, 1 for melons, and 1 for winter greens). We tap about 70 sugar maples. Every summer, we raise 100 meat birds on pasture, although given the grain those little buggers go through, we’re probably going to cut back. We prefer to consume meat that eats grass, or in the case of our pigs, primarily waste milk. Which of course is mostly grass, having been produced by ruminant animals. We have been planting large quantities of fruit and nut trees. We do quite a bit of foraging: mushrooms, nettles, fiddleheads, and so on. We make kimchi, sausage (fresh and dry-cured), bacon, and gobs of butter. Penny make a nice soft cheese and though every year we promise ourselves that we’ll figure out how to make a decent cheddar, it never seems to happen. Our guiding nutritional philosophy is that high quality saturated fats and fermented foods are crucial to good health and that pretty much anything that comes in a box or can is best avoided.

Reading over this list, I’m struck by how it might seem as if all this is a whole heck of a lot of work. Inconvenient. And I can see how, from a certain perspective, this is true. But it has been our blessing to have arranged our lives in a way that does not make any of this seem like work, or like an inconvenience. There are trade-offs, of course. There always are. But in a strange way, even those are a reminder of how much we value this life. Because if we weren’t willing to give up anything for it, how much, really, could that be?

 

Too Short to Drink Milk

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“Camp Dubbins”

Penny and the boys were away for the weekend, helping her parents pack up their condo in MA in preparation for a move to VT. Her folks want to be closer to me, of course.

With the family away, I went into git ‘r dun mode. Both mornings I was up and out the door by 4:40, doing what chores could be done in the spectral half light of the four o’clock hour: Feed the chickens, slop the pigs, give the cows a fresh paddock, heat a bottle for Foster, and so on. Then, as light filtered into the sky, milk Apple and Minnie, pausing every few minutes to shake out hands and forearms, all those small muscles reorienting to the task. After milking, a piece of toast (I am making some wicked good sourdough these days, if I do say so myself. And I do), a cup of coffee, and then, by 6:30, the house reverberating with the heavy thunder of all the infantile music Penny cannot tolerate (goodness, but I’d almost forgotten about Dio!) and me with hammer in hand, framing the sidewalls of the new woodshed. A decade-and-a-half we’ve been here, the whole time stacking firewood under sheets of old roofing tin, weighted by old tires and other random objects of significant mass. But this year, a woodshed: That, my friends, is what passes for upward mobility in these parts.

On both days I treated myself to an hour or so of mushrooming, with the result being well short of last year’s haul – it’s been terrible dry – but plentiful enough that my primary meals of the weekend featured steaks cooked just past the point of biting back and a sweet mess of pan fried morels. I scarfed them sitting on the front stoop, then picked a salad out of the greenhouse, and scarfed that, too. Then back to framing, then chores, then leftover steak, a glass of cream (because life’s way too short to drink milk), and another salad.

Sitting there last night, gnawing cold steak from last year’s steer, drinking cream skimmed from the mornings milking, eating early salad out of the greenhouse, and picking at the crusted remnants of morels in the fry pan while Metallica’s Ride the Lightning (I know, I know: I really need to grow up a bit)  rattled the windows, I couldn’t help but feel like ’bout the luckiest fool ever to walk this good, green earth.

And I thought of how, just a couple days before, Penny and I had been discussing our finances, which are not actually all that bad at the moment. Then again, they’re not actually all that great, either, particularly if the current proposal my agent’s shopping around doesn’t find a home. Ah, to have my family’s financial fate resting in the hands of a bunch of NYC publishers I’ve never met. “Comforting” is not the word that comes to mind.

Yet there I sat, every last morsel of food in my belly a product of the very piece of land on which my family has made our home, onto which my sons were born, and onto which, if my luck holds, my own flesh and blood will decompose. There I sat, full and satisfied and tired in that sweet, bone-deep way that can only come of physical labor.

And then do you know what was best of all? It started to rain.

Tippy

Foster gets a snack

 

Milk and cookies. Minus the cookies.

The highlight of yesterday was most decidedly Apple’s decision to calve in the full light of day. There would be no midnight intervention-by-headlamp required, which, for those of you who have somehow failed to experience the pleasure of rescuing an eel-slippery newborn calf from underneath its mother’s frantic cavorting, with the feeble beam from your light darting to and fro and those dangblamed cloven feet – each bearing at least a quarter of the ol’ girls’ 1500 or so pounds – landing repeatedly atop your own fragile trotters… well, lemme tell ya: Daylight is a blessing I’m almost scared to give voice to, lest whatever Gods prevail over such things decide to revoke the privilege and leave us in the dark again next year.

With that drama behind us, and a healthy little bull calf on the ground (this is the other thing about Apple: She’d big on bulls. Out of the 7 calves she’s given us, 6 have been male. And the only heifer we got came from sexed semen), another story. Why not? I think I’ve ranted enough over the past few weeks to justify some story telling. By the by, the following is lifted almost – but not quite – verbatim from SAVED. Which comes out June 11. You should read it. Penny says it’s pretty good.

So we moved onto this property in ’97, having spent pretty much every last nickel we owned on the bare land. As I think I mentioned in a post some while ago, we managed to convince a friend to loan us ten grand, with which we constructed a small cabin, set atop concrete piers (aka “sonotubes”). Owing to the slant of the land, the downhill piers stuck out of the ground more than four feet which, if memory serves me right, was better than double manufacturer recommendations. The result was that on windy nights, the whole place swayed. It was sort of like being in a cradle. Or in a cabin that’s about to tip over.

In any event, in 2001 we jacked up the cabin and poured a full basement underneath it, along with a foundation for an addition. I remember well the day the jacking began, for I was on the whipping end of a writing deadline and could not afford to miss a day of work just because my house (and therefore, my office, which consisted of a desk wedged into the corner of a loft that was accessed via an aluminum ladder) was about to get a few feet closer to the sun.

“Do you think it’d be alright if I stay in the house while yer liftin’ it,” I asked Gary, assuming the regional dialect (not so hard, since I was born and raised in the region) in hopes of connecting with the fellow on a Vermonter-to-Vermonter basis, and thus earning his approval to remain on task. Gary was the contractor we’d hired to lift the house, which demanded both exceptional delicacy and brute force, a pairing of qualities that seem dichotomous but which in rural Vermont is actually quite common. And even essential.

I’d come to like Gary quite a bit. But I liked him even more when he rubbed his stubbled chin thoughtfully and cast a glance at the cabin, which was to be raised a total of 4 feet. Already, not yet having been moved a single inch, the cabin looked disturbingly vulnerable with its foundation piers removed and replaced by a latticework of cribbing, as if the damn thing was sitting on a bed of pick-up sticks. Gary looked at me, then back to the cabin, as if making a mental calculation regarding my tolerance for risk and his responsibility not to kill me. Finally, he broke into a grin: “Can’t see how it could hurt.”

My desk was situated at a window that looked out the northern gable end of our little home, and it was there I sat, typing away, as the house slowly rose beneath me. It felt as if I was levitating, and it is not a sensation I will ever forget. Every so often, the cabin would sway from side to side, like a cradle.

Or maybe like a cabin that’s about to tip over.

Shop the Animal

Fin and Rye milking Apple, circa 2007

So I’m in the mood for a little story-telling, and since I’m sorta on the subject anyway, here’s the tale of how we ended up with a baby-killing cow (another night in the barn and still no calf. But tarnation did I sleep wicked good!).

We got Apple in late summer/early fall of 2004. She was the month-old calf of a sweet little Jersey named Lily, and we brought them home approximately two weeks before Rye was born, and approximately two weeks after I’d broken a couple ribs when I decided to see what might happen if I threw myself over the handlebars of my bicycle and hugged a boulder.

So I was hobbled, Penny was hobbling, and we possessed only the most rudimentary shelter and fencing for our new hooved friends. A more logical family would have ciphered that this was not a particularly good time to bring home a couple of cows, but as I’ve mentioned before, I think much magic is squandered when we act on logic alone, and so it was that we came to own cows – one of which needed to be milked twice daily – only two weeks before our second child came calling.

Anyhow. Lily was an amazing animal, with none of the mothering issues Apple has somehow come to embody, and we got a couple more calves out of her before she broke through the door to where we had the grain stored (this was back when we thought cows needed grain, and if you think cows need grain, you’re either milking for money or you have the wrong cows), ate somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-pounds of the stuff, and basically made herself so drunk on the fermenting grain in her belly that it destroyed her liver. For four days Penny and I nursed her along, and Melvin came up twice daily to help me administer glucose IVs and try and get her on her feet, but it was futile and on the fifth day, I shot her. It was, and remains, the singularly most emotionally difficult thing I’ve done on this land, because the truth is, I flat-out loved that cow.

So then. Apple remains, for all the reasons I mentioned yesterday, but also because she represents a turning point in our lives. We have kept cows ever since, and will for as long as we are able, which I sure as heck hope is a long, long time. We currently have the nicest little herd we’ve ever had; in addition to Apple, there is Minnie, who just freshened with her first calf, and whom we are currently milking. There is Cinco, a two year old steer who is destined for the freezer this fall. There is Pip, the heifer we got out of Apple last year, a docile little Jersey/Devon/Shorthorn cross that we will probably breed next spring. And there is Snook, a yearling steer that will also find a place in our freezer come 2014. Soon, we’ll have a calf out of Apple, for a total of seven, which is just about the right carrying capacity for our pasture.

Other than our soft spot for Apple, we are fairly strategic about which cows stick around, and which don’t. We have culled a few over the years, one because it had chronic mastitis, and a couple others because they just didn’t hold condition on grass alone. We like cows that breed back easily, stay fat and sassy through the winter, and are even tempered. We are not loyal to a particular breed (that said, we do avoid breeds that don’t tend to embody the above qualities, such as modern Holsteins). More than once I have witnessed people choosing animals based on breed, rather than temperament, and then being mighty regretful when they’re chasing the fancy, pedigreed beasts through the pucker brush two towns over, or being kicked in the face every time they milk.

I suppose that’s my advice for the day, if’n any of you happen to be in the market for a bovine to call your own: Shop the animal, not the breed. Oh yeah: And if you got grain, lock it up real good.

I Was Wrong

Last night I slept in the barn, curled into a sleeping bag spread across the remnants of the sheep’s winter bedding. I did this because one of our cows was due to freshen (aka calve) and she has… how shall I put this?… mothering issues. Which is to say, if one of us does not extricate her newborn calf from beneath her marauding hooves within, oh, a half-dozen seconds of it being born, she’ll stomp the poor bugger to death. This is to be our 7th calf out of her, so we’ve pretty much got the drill down.

We put up with all this because she is, in all other regards, the bovine embodiment of grace and good will (admittedly, the whole infanticide thing she’s got going on is pretty glaring defect, and were we not sentimental folk, she would’ve gone on the burger truck long ago). She allows the boys to ride on her back. She holds her condition throughout the winter, even on substandard first cut hay and not a lick of grain. She produces milk that is almost absurdly rich; once, just for kicks, I upended an open jar of cream we’d skimmed for butter, and the darn stuff was so thick it didn’t even begin to roll down the glass. Even vigorous shaking couldn’t spill the stuff.

It occurred to me the other day, in the midst of all my recent posts on kids and education and whatnot, that I rarely  write about the labors that comprise the vast majority if our waking days. Nor do I write much about the tangible products on the other end of these labors, which of course is food. I think this is in part because it’s no longer a novelty to us to devote most of our waking hours to working the land, and in part because for me at least, the nourishment we glean off our little farm is a byproduct of what I really value, which is the process. In short, yeah, I like to eat good food and it’s important to me. But in many ways, the actual labor and art of creating that food is equally, if not more important.

Which brings me back to my night in the barn, one step in the process of procuring a year’s worth of milk and butter. It was cold, but not terribly so, and I slept as I always sleep: Like someone bopped me on the head with a 12-pound sledge. I had no fear of not being woken up if Apple were to begin freshening, because part of her act is to bellow (or in local parlance, “beller”) like a runaway freight train.

At about 4:00 a.m., I awoke to pee and to wrap myself a little tighter in the bag, and for awhile after, before drifting back to sleep for another hour, I just lay there. I could hear Apple breathing a dozen or so feet away. On the other side of the barn wall, where the boys’ goats make their winter home, I could hear the soft movements of their day beginning. There was a bird calling, and I wished I knew what it was. My nose was cold.

Once, I thought it was way too much work to keep a cow that demanded such intervention. Now I see that I was wrong, and I am struck by how life’s unplanned inconveniences so often carry their own rewards.

Too Short For Anything Less

Yesterday was nasty and raw, full of little spitting flakes and an incessant, indecisive wind that wanted to switch direction every half-dozen seconds or so. Both wood stoves were pressed into action, and although I was not particularly pleased to be dipping into next year’s firewood stash, I was grateful that at least I had next years firewood stash to dip into. Without it, we’d probably have been a couple coffee tables short by this morning. Or maybe the damnable piano, already relegated to the back shed where every so often we hear the tinkle of keys as one of the cats strolls across it. Yeah, I bet that sucker’d burn real good.

Mondays are when Rye’s mentor friend Erik comes for his weekly visit. As such, by 9-ish Rye and Erik were deep in the woods, and so too Penny and Fin, who also struck out into the wild. Or what passes for wild in Cabot, Vermont. And where was I while my family was off galavanting across the land? Why, I was right here, shivering dutifully in my office, waiting for the stove heat to wend its way to my small, tucked-away corner of the house. Yes, it’s true: My devotion to my family is nothing short of inspiring.

A couple hours later, both parties returned, arms laden with treasures and heads full of stories. For their part, Penny and Fin had found ramps, fiddleheads, and mint. They’d also found a stream bank of solid clay, from which we will one day construct an outdoor bread oven. Oh, and a grouse nest, containing a clutch of eggs. Erik and Rye brought home a motley assortment of goodies, including pheasant back mushrooms, wild nettles, and a few logs of skunk poop, full of iridescent green insect bits. Two of the three were cooked on a rocket stove they built into the ground, before being consumed with gusto; the other was poked at with sticks in an attempt to ascertain what other goodies might be embedded within.

I know that like most people, I often fail to acknowledge and in some cases even recognize the many things for which I should be grateful. But one of the things that rarely escapes my attention is the simple fact that my sons are able to spend so much of their time in this manner, absorbing the particular knowledge of their surroundings. Such opportunities are increasingly rare in an era of standardized, homogenized education that has no particular allegiance to place.

I also know that not everyone – probably not even everyone who reads this – shares the same beliefs regarding how their children should be spending their days, and what they should be learning. That is ok. In many ways, it is probably good: The world needs lots of different people, sharing lots of different knowledge.

My belief is not that every child should be educated in the exact manner of my boys, but rather that we should all be  afforded the freedom to find a path for our children that fills us with that sense of gratitude. Because let’s face it: Life’s way too short for anything less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can’t Be Bought

The question that arises in my mind after reading “Hypothetical” is your proposed idealization would mean exactly what for your boys in relation to the rest of the world?  If all our children were raised as you expressed it, Ben, and who wouldn’t want to be raised so, what would it mean for them if the rest of the world excels in the arts of technology and science, all in the competitive framework we now exist in?  How would they cope if the world overtakes them and thus “controls” them, if you will, because it controls the way’s of the world, it’s economic day to day reality?  The perfect life I’ve found has the seed of sadness within it, because, it is my belief, we cannot sustain it here in this world.  The deeper we experience happiness, the deeper we sense the fragility of life, its impermanence, its imperfection (Tim O’Brien’s song “Brother Wind” expresses it perfectly for me). How we prepare our children for the world they will inherit is a profound question because it exposes our deepest beliefs to our own self and our responsibility to them. 

The great thing about the comments of late is that ya’ll are basically writing this blog for me, as well as providing plentiful fodder for book #4. So thanks for that. The check’s in the mail, as they say.

I don’t really disagree with anything Tim writes above. I think there is a degree of risk in having chosen to raise our children so far off the well-travelled path of the modern American experience. Is it possible that Fin and Rye will forever struggle to find their place in a world that barely acknowledges the very existence of so much of what they have come to revere? What if the rest of the world excels in technology and science, while they excel in… what, exactly? Bow making? Trapping? Foraging? Hide tanning? Goat milking? Romping through the forest? Hog butchering? One imagines them living together in a deep woods cabin, wearing woolen long johns year ‘round, and subsisting on smoked beaver and woods sorrel. (Although really, what would be so wrong with that?)

There are two points I would like to make, not so much in defense of my sons’ unique educational path, but rather in explanation of my views pertaining to how our children might best be prepared for the world they will inherit.

First: I cannot in good conscience raise my children in any manner but which offers them the best possible opportunity to develop the connections and relationships I touched on briefly in Hypothetical. To do otherwise would be to live in direct opposition what I believe is possible for them and for the world at large. And that is no way to live.

Second: Is it possible that by allowing them to learn in a self-directed manner, outside the context of the institutionalized education system, we are actually providing our boys with the tools they will need to learn what they need to know, when they need to know it?  School does a fine job of relaying information to our children, but I believe it does a lesser job of actually teaching the process of learning. And no wonder: This process is highly individualized, and if there’s one thing our resource-strapped educational institutions can hardly accommodate, it’s individualism.

Three (yeah, I said I had two points; consider this one a freebie): At what point do we, as a society, begin the process of making truly substantive change? I’m not talking about feel-good changes – the compact fluorescent light bulbs, the hybrid cars, the recycling, the so-called organic food, blah, blah, and blah – that still fit quite neatly within the paradigm of the exploitative growth economy. I’m talking about change that can’t be bought,  that requires entirely transformed expectations and assumptions about what defines an “economy,” about human exceptionalism, and about our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

I can’t promise that my children will be part of that change. But I’m pretty sure that if all I do is cynically encourage them to follow the well-trod path (of which a mainstream education is only one facet) toward presumed success in the context of corrupt, diseased, and exploitative arrangements, they will not.

Hypothetical

Plumber in Training

 

A sneak peak from my current project:

What if the primary goal of a child’s education were to acknowledge and understand the connection between human wellbeing and the health of the natural world? What if our children were taught to identify every tree species in their community before they were taught their multiplication tables? What if their “standardized testing” included fire starting, songbird identification, and bread baking? What if, as part of their daily study, they were expected to spend a full hour outdoors, freed from toys, tools, and agenda? What if we placed as much value on feelings and relationships, as we do on information and knowledge? 

What if the point of an education were not to teach our children to assume control, but instead to surrender it? What if the point simply cannot be found or measured in the context of performance-based assessments, or projected lifetime income? What if the point of an education were to imbue our children with a sense of their connectivity, not merely to other humans, but to the trees and animals and soil and moon and sky? What if the point of life is to feel these connections, and all the emotions they give rise to? 

What then?