When you live in the city sometimes it feels essential to escape. Being a girl who has roamed far and wide I often find the Midwest a little disheartening. There isn't the beauty of mountains and valleys, canyons and riverbeds, the quaintness of New England or the proximity of my beloved family and friends. But there are large swaths of open land dotted with beautiful tumble down barns, there are rolling hills planted with endless acres of crops, a fruit basket of grapes and apples and berries so beautiful in its abundance. There are unglaciated regions like the southwest of Wisconsin with its caves and springs and undulating land. Outside the city and away from the coasts of our country the pace of time slows, the life choices and values shift and community seems to strengthen. Much of this community, in what I've seen of the Midwest, is religious and conservative in a way that I am not, in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable and a bit reactive. But there are pockets that are not and those are the pockets I search for, while also, sometimes, stepping outside of my own comfort zone and reaching across the differences I am resistant to, to find a space of common ground.
Last year as winter lifted her shroud I took my girls on a day long adventure to a magical place that also happened to be an innovative puppet theater and small organic farm about 2 hours from home. On our journey out to the farm my girls gazed out the window and my older daughter began musing about what she would do if she lived amidst such beauty and open space, what it would be liked to be unleashed, to be free, to wander without reservation, without restraint. And so, although we are city folk for now, and likely evermore, I try to give them a taste of this wandering life every chance I get. We are lucky to have connections to several farms in our region and hold dear the chances to spend time at these oases, to feel connected to the land that feeds and nourishes us on every level.
To that end we have an ever expanding garden in our backyard so that when we are hungry during the growing season we can go harvest a meal of peas, zuchinni, beets, onions, tomatoes, green beans, various leafy greens, raspberries, apples ( a few), cherries (some), asparagus, rhubarb, herbs and other miscellaneous nourishment. Throughout the season of bounty we do our best to put up food for the winter. We jam, we pickle, we can, we freeze and now with snow on the ground we are digging into the stores. Before the snow fell we made a harvest pilgrimage to an organic apple orchard where we gathered bushels of apples that were later sauced, buttered and massaged with butter, cinnamon and raisins and baked. To have this opportunity to connect with our food system is a privilige and honor. This abundance and quality is rare in the world where our food production and consumption is increasingly industrialized and processed denaturing the very thing that gives us life.
It seems that the more we develop as a world, build walls around ourselves and hide in the sanctuary of technology, the more we loose ourselves. We immerse our very being in a world of action and happening of constant change and possibility, of having and wanting and needing. And as we stick our head in this proverbial sand, we loose sight of what is most important: the air, the land, the eco-systems that support us, maintain the very possibility of our existence on this planet at all. We are all subject to this immersion in the world we have created. It is hard to stop and step outside the now to look at the bigger picture and think about how we can act in this world, as individuals, to create positive change for all. It is also easy to be consumed and paralyzed by the devastation we have reaped upon our planet, think carbon footprints, extreme weather events, climate change that may well put humanity's existence to sleep. So then, how do we agree to make large scale change to preserve ourselves as a race? Can we step outside of our individual everyday and the whir of information innundating us to connect with the notion that we may well develop ourselves into extinction, destroying our food system, our environment because we are to busy to deal with the consequences of our actions. Is there a common ground where the climate change deniers and believers meet? Where hard science is understood and concrete agreements made and abided by, convenience and capitalism exchanged for a worldly good, investing in the potential for future generations to thrive. I don't know if this is possible. I'd like to think that the CEO's of companies extracting fossil fuels from the earth might want to believe in a future where enough natural resources, like water, still exist for us to be able to feed future generations, but I'm not sure their current bottom line cares to see beyond this year's earnings.
During an Autumn visit to Tryon Farm, a sustainable collective farm community in Indiana, my six year old daughter and her best friend were talking about their American Girl dolls (a brand that had its heart in the right place when it began, but now just seems to promote needless consumption to little girls) and homemade computers and cellphones. Yes, homemade, out of cardboard with detailed hand drawings of screens and keyboards, a longing for access to technology that has inundated and permeated every ounce of our culture. And their conversation was killing me, listening to this prattle about stuff, longing to have more junk to clutter up their lives, craving computers and phones because this is what they see around them. They see other kids with mountains of toys, they see adults always on computers or people picking up their phones constantly to communicate or check on this or that. They want to be a part of the action too. Even though they are not kids with an excessive glut of belongings, even though they deeply value and cultivate intimate relationships with dolls they have spun identities and adventures for, even though they were innovative enough to make their own versions of what adults have and pretend to use said things, I needed the conversation to shift deeply and so we had to stop, to inhale into our surroundings, to be quiet, to listen and then sink deeply into our experience of the there and then, without straying back into our world beyond that moment. I needed all of us to have the chance to be present where we were at that very moment because it is such a unique and rare opportunity when you live in the rhythm of the urban globalized world to connect to nature. And so I enforced a rule, just for those two hours while we walked, that they had to open their eyes to where they were, that they were not allowed to talk about any brand or thing that they wanted, that they were not allowed to talk about phones or computers, but instead see what was around them, explore their immediate surroundings, gather leaves, find something to collect, ignite a little of the magic that is in the dirt at our feet. The rest of the walk, was, well, pretty darn fabulous. There was silence and wonder and curiosity and collecting of acorns and little berries and discussions of building things and awe at nests we saw, and a deep listening to the sounds of animal rustles and tumult in the thicket. It was magic that planted a seed of reminder, planted a memory to come back to, a space of understanding that this is the land we come from and man oh man do we want it to be here for us, to feed us when we are hungry.
Three weeks after this walk my older daughter turned to me and said, "Oh Mama, I loved that walk..." and proceeded to list off the vivid memories of things she touched and saw that day, the deep sense of being held in the arms of the forrest and the prairie. So I'm wondering if we might all find a crazy earth mama to yell at us, to force quit and reboot, just long enough so that we might salvage what is most important and essential to our existence, an understanding that the earth matters not just because we want to wander barefoot in the woods or pick apples and make sauce, but so that sea levels don't rise and sweep away our coasts, draught doesn't leave us thirsty withered and without food, epic weather events don't destroy our homes and otherwise make them uninhabitable and antibiotic resistant disease doesn't wipe out large segments of our population.
I'm not exactly sure what any of this looks like, this crazy earth mama yelling at the world, but I'm hoping we'll listen to her just long enough for all of us driving the train of environmental destruction to pause and invest in radically decreasing our carbon emissions. Is it still possible for humanity to find the voice of childhood whispering in it's ear? Can we force ourselves to stop what we are chattering about, take a deep breath and change direction. It will make all of us in the developed world uncomfortable, I'm sure. There are things we will have to give up, I don't know what they are, but in so doing we will gain the possibility of life and a future beyond ourselves. We might even gain common ground.