The secret of my un-success, or great advice I won't be following

I caught this inspiring passage in The Greenhorns' New Farmer's Almanac last night:

In whatever you engage, pursue it with a steadiness of purpose, as though you were determined to succeed. A vacillating mind never accomplished anything worth naming. There is nothing like a fixed, steady aim. It dignifies your nature, and insures your success.

This sounds about right, and it is a variant of great advice I've heard--but not heeded--my entire life. If wisdom comes with age, and wisdom has anything to do with accepting that which we cannot change, then I am wising up to my nature. I can't take advice that is at odds with who I am fundamentally.

This is not to say that while I garden, or play piano or guitar, or write poetry, or take an online class on complexity, or make home movies on my iMac--or any of a great number of other things I do with a sometimes moderate level of proficiency--that I won't be attentive and present and pursue excellence in that moment. But I am a generalist, and I don't want to change that. My attentions drift and dart and as long as I keep moving, I'll pick up some things.

The line I take issue with from The New Farmer's Almanac, then, is "A vacillating mind never accomplished anything worth naming." I've heard (and I'll buy it) that the days of true Renaissance people are gone.

There is simply too much to know in the 21st century, too much information, too much specialization is possible, for any [normal] person to be an expert in more than a few pursuits. Excellence takes practice. It takes time. It takes exclusive devotion. So much for expertise in my own life.

I guess my response now has to be, oh well. Leonardo da Vinci was the quintessential Renaissance man, and I've always been amused by this lamenting biographical note of Giorgio Vasari's:

He might have been a scientist if he had not been so versatile. But the instability of his character caused him to take up and abandon many things.

Oh well! Here's to instability of character. Besides, I've got loads to do today.

April's Farming Publications Set Me Straight

"Of course this year will be better than last! Every farmer knows that. Every year."
                                                         --My grandmother, two weeks ago

I have a sheet of paper on my fridge that's meant to remind me why I'm here, on rural Indiana farmland, without my job teaching creative writing--why I left everything I know for a life I knew next to nothing about. Like most manifestos written in a moment of clarity, it now blends into the environment and I rarely notice it. Item one: I want this to be a place where the work keeps my head clear and I can sleep well at night after a day of honest, self-guided work, knowing that what I did that day fits with my values (among which are sustainable living, soil health, and less consumption for consumption's sake).

I could rattle off a list of reasons this list has started to feel like a remote wish. They would sound like excuses, and technically they are. In my defense, some of my excuses are good ones, but I'll skip them all for now.

The first year I lived here, I did nothing but read about what Depression-era organic pioneers Helen and Scott Nearing called "The Good Life"--a life of virtuous hard work that eschewed consumerism. I read almost exclusively about this and had nothing if not a sense of purpose. Because ... (I have my reasons) that sense of purpose was lost.

But this was a banner week for fresh farming publications. The inaugural issue of Modern Farmer came out and it is as delicious as I imagined.

The photography and layout are just as beautiful as their web pages, and of course their philosophy is perfect. Here's Ann Marie Gardner in the letter from the editor:

There is a global cultural movement taking place. Organic has gone mainstream. There is a growing curiosity, even concern, about the source of our food--how it is produced and distributed, the ethics of big ag and the sustainability of small ag. Even as farming becomes cool, and beehives and rooftop gardens spring up across urban landscapes, rural farmers in the United States and abroad still toil against very real problems: droughts, lack of access to land, regressive policies. A global economy means that our food supply chains are all connected--we can't ignore the international implications of our personal choices.

On top of that, The New Farmer's Almanac (2013) from The Greenhorns came this week after a long delay (their first almanac).

The introduction by Severine Von Tscharner Fleming gave a fantastic overview of back-to-the-land movements and our tendency to glorify by-gone days of farming, dating back to Virgil's 29 BCE lamenting the loss of a golden time in agriculture. Besides the great historical perspective, I was reminded of what brought me here:

Under the sky, under the stars, we have time (what a privilege) to consider our lives and what we can do with them. It is possible to quiet the mind, especially with so much time screwing and unscrewing hoses, moving fence, watering seedlings with regular swoops of the sprinkling wand. In this way, stillness and reflection coexist with routines and chores, observation brings in new themes of inquiry, every day is a catalog of small, useful insights, which we can attach to visual cues alongside the inventories of grain, hose, bits and valve, and brainpower to design our own personal theories of change.

Our first chickens come in two weeks. We have no idea what we're getting into, but I'll be next door in my Dad's barn helping him construct the chicken ark (or chicken tractor). My back and arms are sore from pulling up an erosion fence two days ago--a job that took a sledgehammer, cinder blocks, chain, and a giant lever. When that was done, I spent several hours with a shovel and a garden rake preparing the ground for the spring vegetables (late start this year due to the cold).

I'd write more, but I need to bundle up (it's 40 degrees and rainy) and head over to Dad's barn. If what I've said here hasn't amounted to anything profound, I'm hoping the work I do with my hands today does.

***

Here it is so far:

Under an Anonymous Sky

The following poem was a finalist for the Iowa Award in Poetry in 2004. It has been submitted a few times since, and was rejected by The Sycamore Review today. In honor of National Poetry Month, I'm giving it away!

Under an Anonymous Sky

The evening becomes evening.

but I am leaving the shore

in my skin boat

the earth opened and a dwarf popped out.

He is afraid of the stares of men, which are too quick and piercing for him, and he retreats into the sky like a string of colors.

His toes are made of crystal, so he can hide them, and the boys could not find them.

It should be explained that they were taking the head to show to the others.

So it thought, and it said, “I will turn into the moon.”

It called, “Open the doors, I want to get my things.”

The head cried.  It called out, “At least give me

my two balls of twine.”

The men shouted, “You going to the sky, head?”

It didn’t answer.

After that a marvelous thing.

snow snow

rain rain

never mind

I hope to God it rains and snows

I greet you, white morning,

take me, take me with you, take me

***

Selected from W. S. Merwin’s translations, 1948-1968. Excerpts taken in the following order from Song for the Dead: Roumanian Anonymous folk Poem; Into my Head Rose: Anonymous Eskimo; Ichi the Dwarf: Anonymous Quechuan Peru; The Rainbow: Anonymous Quechuan Peru (nonadjacent fragments assembled together); The Creation of the Moon: Anonymous Caxinua Amazon (nonadjacent fragments assembled together); The Glory of Taliesin: Anonymous, Welsh circa 6^th century; Swallow: Greek, Anonymous; Maido: Anonymous, Greek, modern ballad collection; The Song of Cellach: Anonymous, Irish, 12th century; Song of Exile: Anonymous, Greek, modern ballad collection.

Today's Small Contribution: Water Conservation

Installed a dual flush toilet with a simple $40 adapter kit. We depend on our well for water, and after two summers of drought, I'd like to conserve this precious resource wherever possible.

Speaking of water: We plan to set up a rain barrel system along the south side of the barn this spring to get water to the gardens--preferably drip irrigation. We moved here from the desert, and it looks like some of the best practices there might become necessary here.

Life on the Farm: The Sequel

It is now just over two years since we moved to our Indiana homestead next door to my parents. With the sale of six acres to our neighbors on the other side comes an official re-appraisal of our home and time to take stock.  

We are extraordinarily lucky to be here: our buying 21 acres, a house and barn was financially unlikely. Acquiring this place came together through an uncanny confluence of events. 

And we took immediate steps to make our home more sustainable. We insulated every inch, with emphasis on attic and crawl space. We put on a metal roof, which will last longer (no asphalt shingles in the landfill every time it hails) and reflect heat in the summer. Our new carpet was made from recycled bottles, our new wood floor was sustainably-harvested bamboo. 

The triumph of 2012 was installing a geothermal heating and cooling system. This meant goodbye to propane altogether, and ahead of schedule!

The problem with making such progress so quickly is that you eventually slow down. The beginning runner knows improvement like the experienced runner will never see again ("I cut my time in half!"). Now we are running out of money and what we have won't go toward solar or wind energy, like I dream about, but to necessary maintenance on the house. Fixing the old and rotting windows and the damaged gutters--these are also investments, but more about preservation than cosmic improvements. I always raced like that in cross-country--no sense of pacing, I shot out in front of everyone for the first mile, then watched everyone pass me and dragged myself to the finish line.

But we are lucky. My dad (here he is, above, in plaid in 1979, teaching me to rake leaves) had a stroke that grounded him from flying a year ago. He was a test pilot who dreamed his whole life of farming. He recovered marvelously, is in great health and now has time to grow more food, help me with projects, play guitar and even write songs! My mom sews--clothes, curtains, pillows, purses, lampshades, cloth napkins--and we reap the benefits. The "family-share model" I envisioned works well. There is far less commuting (fewer fossil fuel emissions!) when one family can pick up groceries at the store for the other. And of course there is sharing the fruits and vegetables of our labor.

So this year, lacking sufficient funds for ambitious plans, we will nevertheless continue to put hard work into the place. There will be plenty of greenhouse, gardening, and landscaping projects. We will get those chickens we meant to get two years ago. Yes, chickens--who inhabit more and more urban backyards--will finally have a place on this homestead. It's back-to-basics, and that was always part of the plan.

Another thing: One watches the weather differently from a rural county road. When I first described the move here, we were experiencing a once-in-a-generation winter, punctuated by a treacherous but breathtaking ice storm. Since then, in the summer of 2012, we have seen a drought that rivals the 1930s, with more days over 90 degrees and less rainfall than 1936. 

Drought-ravaged corn along County Road 200 West, July 2012. 





It's hard to know for sure how the native grass and wildflower field of 7 acres, planted summer 2011, fared in the 2012 dry spell. The grasses are drought-tolerant, but they take several years to establish themselves above ground. I have my fingers crossed that they were busy building deep root systems this past summer. I suppose that's exactly where I stand: with the grasses. It's hard for me to tell whether I'm going to thrive here or not, and I'm just hoping that I've been building an impressive root system. As an Air Force Brat, I was never practiced at putting down deep roots. I came here with an admittedly romantic notion of the hyper-local: that I would take a small piece of land, care for it, leave it better than I found it, and through my actions feel a deep sense of connection to it. For the grasses, we hope for summer rain. For me, it's less clear. I wrote before that the move here was sudden and yet it had been building for years. I'd like to trust those seemingly contradictory circumstances that brought us here, so that finally, being here will be like the end of a good poem as my mentor Tom Andrews defined it: both surprising and inevitable. 

A Model for the Destruction of Hard Things

A woman studying the fracture properties

of coconuts may insist that nature

breaks its own structures reluctantly, along fault lines

of hard resin on fibrous interiors. 

She might apply that principle to apples,

animal horns and wood,

profile a pineapple so that she might

learn something about destruction.

You stand alone at the edge of ice, push

a half-submerged tree branch deeper into a hole.

Your branch a lever, the entire frozen pond reacts:

you recognize, (with iterations!) Mandelbrot sets

forming across its surface.  It crackles

loudly beneath you, obeying symmetry,

brokenness: illusions begin

to thaw as water seeps into lines from below.

Coconuts have nothing to do with ice.  Levers

do not determine fault lines.  The sound of wood

splitting has nothing to do with the smell

of a forest in January.  Wait.  Apples just might

have everything to do with a pond in winter.  I’m suggesting:

a woman in a lab, chiseling antlers to celebrate

breaking, has everything to do with you

standing in the cold wood, holding a tree branch.

--First published in Fourth River, Autumn 2011

Song for the Troubled Mathematician Who Confronted Remote Infinities

Cantor was depressive, too. Paranoid,

he believed he heard God’s voice reciting

theorems—divine mathematical whispers.

Here, birds eat, drink, and mate on the wing. Such

aerial existence has a certain

disadvantage: come what may, we all end up

on the ground. But the air has substance.

The spaces between stars are filled with dust

and gas. Large African antelope can survive

indefinitely without drinking. Saw off layers of

antlers to find the atheism of dry things. Still,

—and this explains a few things—

stars coalesce from dust and gas; God’s word

is flexible. Cantor had proof. 

---

[1] Georg Cantor (1845-1918), whose work implied “an infinity of infinities.”

--First published in Fourth River, Autumn 2011