On Charleston

I’d like to say nothing. I’d like to turn off the news, close my computer, and enjoy my coffee in this Texas sun that I’ve missed so much. I’d like to join the people in this café in their idle conversations, so that I can ignore the pain that’s etched into our nation. But I can’t.

Nine people died in South Carolina last night. And because they can’t talk, we must. These are their stories. 

Those who know me well know that shootings are a subject all too close to home. And, for far too many people in this country, massacre is something we’re much too familiar with. Terrorism is in our backyard. We read about these shootings in movie theaters, in colleges, in elementary schools, in churches. We read about them so much that we see another story in the news, and we say it’s just another story in the news. It’s tragic how meaningless the word tragic is these days.

Just because it’s happened before – too many times – doesn’t mean we have license to close our emotional floodgates this time. We don’t get to change the station and salve our consciences through distraction.

Because it’s not simple. It’s an ugly manifestation of the unchecked casual racism that runs rampant in this country. It’s a natural product of America’s entrenched systemic white supremacy, white privilege, whatever you want to call the fact that there is not equality in this land of the free for some. This attack is a result of gun lobbies having the same power over congress that guns have over hostages. Countless social, cultural, and political problems contributed to this violence and to the shamefully high number of incidents like this. The complexity of the problems doesn’t give us a free pass.

You don’t get to ignore this story if you don’t live in Charleston. You don’t get to ignore this story if you aren’t religious. You don’t get to ignore this story if you aren’t black. You don’t get to ignore this story.

We’re not going to make progress by wishing things like this wouldn’t happen. Or by wishing our friends would stop posting about them on Facebook. We have to talk about it. We have to have tough conversations and take any steps we can to end the hate that has consumed us. I don’t have any solutions. But I have eyes to see this tragedy. I have ears to hear your pain and your ideas. And I have a mouth to speak up.

Do not be silent.

Raise Your Voice

I have traditionally been apolitical.

I knew very little about politics; I know very little about politics. I find the whole world of politics terrifying, boring, and depressing. And so I avoided it growing up. And even as I got older, and I learned the basics of how our government works, how our citizens don’t vote, and why we should, I shrank away from every conversation, every article, every mention of politics. I felt utterly out of my element, unsure what to say. My parents were Republicans, and I attended a conservative Christian school through the eighth grade. And then I went to a private high school in Texas, a school which was originally a white flight school. And I began to notice that I didn’t always agree with my mom, and I didn’t always agree with my classmates. And then I went to Yale, a small liberal-arts college, and I remember my grandmother telling me to make sure I didn’t let all those liberals get to me. But I began to notice my inclinations to agree with my liberal friends. But I wasn’t a democrat. I almost didn’t vote in the 2012 Presidential election. I didn’t know what I believed. I felt like I needed to understand the whole system, study all its facets, before I declared what I believed. What I was. But I didn’t want to do all that, because I had this underlying intuition that none of it worked anyway. That government in its massive predilection for gridlock was ineffectual and meaningless.

But I’m beginning to think that even if I don’t know what I believe, I can recognize when I feel that something is wrong.

And I'm beginning to understand that I have the privilege to not need to know what I believe. But there are millions of people who will die because of the politics I have chosen to ignore. That the racist, sexist, economically and environmentally corrupt power structures that govern our lives depend on bystanders' silence. 

And I watched a TED talk on climate change the other day that more eloquently expresses the idea that I don’t need to know the entire body of scientific literature on tigers to know that I don’t want one mauling my throat. And I’m trying to find the courage to speak about what I feel through the mist of what I think I know, and what I don’t know for certain. Because I’m outraged about Ferguson, and I’m outraged about Eric Garner, and I’m outraged about Tamir Rice. I’m outraged about the cultural censorship, ignorance, and whitewashing of history that led me to believe that I was born in an era in America where racism didn’t exist. I’m outraged about CAFOs, and I’m outraged about Monsanto, and I’m outraged about monolithic multinational conglomerates who aren’t held ethically or morally responsible because they’re the biggest kid on the playground. I’m outraged about student debt and the industrial prison complex; I’m outraged about the violent misunderstandings of feminism and the cultural oppression of LGBTQIA+ communities. And I’m trying to educate myself about all of these things, but I’m also trying to figure out my responsibilities as a privileged, white, straight male, as a healthy, energetic young debt-free-but-poor person, as a human being.

I work in the theater. I call myself an artist. I spend my time teaching young people about performance and storytelling. And I tell myself that my work is important, and I believe that art is necessary. I teach young people that we tell stories as a way of understanding each other as humans. I say to them, “I have a story. I have something to say. Will you listen?” I say to them, “What do you have to say? What do you want to tell me? I will listen.” I teach them that the theater is about creating something that no one of us could make on our own – something that no one of us could dream of alone, something that doesn’t exist without each and every one of us. That the individual is important to the whole, and the whole is connected to every individual. I teach them that we must listen, and we must be vulnerable; we must allow ourselves to be changed by those around us. I tell myself that art is important because empathy is how we see each other as humans, and that empathy is what we need to heal.

And I worry that I’m not maximizing my utility. That, because the children I teach are predominantly the children of affluent white families, I’m perpetuating a system of privilege and exclusion. And I try to break the exclusivity of the programs I oversee. But I could try harder. And I have to believe that if I try to help young people be better people, if I try to make myself a better person, that together we, and they, and you can effect change that’s bigger than any one of us.

Because I’m beginning to think that culture precedes politics, or perhaps that policy is meaningless without cultural support. And we can’t destroy our racist institutions if we don’t listen to the people who are destroyed by our racist institutions, without ego. We must listen. We must be vulnerable. We, white America, we must say, “What is your story? I will listen. I will believe. I will be willing to change.” We, male America, must open our hearts to the women who tell us what they face, what they endure, what they feel, and we must be moved to action. We, straight America, must see ourselves in the queer community and stop asking why they’re different and start asking why we’re different and start understanding that different is human and that human is meant to be loved. And that Black Lives Matter and Yes All Women experience discrimination and oppression, and that it's not about us, white straight males. Most of all, we must stop thinking we know what’s best for people who aren’t us. We don’t. I don’t.

But then, I think, “This is not enough.” It’s not fast enough. It puts too much faith in people. It won’t matter worth a damn if we don’t listen to the earth, which is crying out against us, begging us to listen, begging us to see the atrocities we’ve thrust upon our natural world, begging us to change before we destroy ourselves and the world with it. If the seas rise, and the farm land disappears, and the positive feedback systems of natural pollution release are activated, and the world descends into a starving, thirsty, ravished wasteland, it won’t matter if we haven’t found the time or the ability to listen to our hurting, huddling masses.

And so I think, “We need revolution.” This system isn’t working. This infrastructure of industrialized monocultural megafarming will feed the world today, poison us tomorrow, and salt the earth next week. This corporate socialism, which protects megacompanies too big to fail, megacompanies which protect the ten white men at the top, this business world will never give us fair wages, will never close the gap, will never break the glass ceiling, will never do anything but put us in debt and spend millions on marketing to subconsciously subdue us into subjugation. This farce of a thing we call government isn’t listening, won’t listen, can’t listen, and will never work for its people, no, only the corporations it calls people. The system isn’t worth trying to fix; the system won’t ever work. Let us break the system so badly it will never rear up again. Let us band together; let us march into the streets; let us seize the internet; let us do something. Anything. Before Michael Brown becomes just another hashtag.

I’m not an expert on race relations, or environmental science, or the economy, or queer activism, or feminism, or political science, or revolution. I’m in the arts. I tell stories. And I want to raise my voice. I want to raise your voice. Tell me your story. I want to hear what you have to say. Let’s change the world. Before we lose it.

Sitka in the Fall

Three months pass.

We gather around the dining table every Sunday, sharing food and cheer, washing dishes (it is the only time of the week when the drainer is fully empty, and the kitchen is really clean), and we play games and discuss chores. There are 12 of us here, and perhaps one ghost, though only Sally’s seen her. In the shower. At least it’s a hygienic ghost. I wake up and I look out through a windowshade-less window – I keep forgetting to put it back up – and across a lawn often resplendent with golden retrievers and modern day atlatls, and across a public tennis court and playground, across a Crescent Harbor full of thin-masted boats, across a Sitka Sound lavender in sunsets, I see a daisy chain of mountains, capped in snow, wreathed in clouds, and protecting us from a world we’ve left behind.

The frost in the morning here is hairier, hoarier, than any I’ve ever seen. A blade of grass is transformed into a crystal Christmas tree, and if you walk through the woods before the sun rises to its mid-morning apex, you may mistake the frost for a mist. The alder trees are grayed and shimmery in the sidelight, the ever present sidelight of wintery Alaska.

The pictures you see of Sitka paint a misleading idyllic picture. Most days the ceiling is low, especially outdoors, and I imagine that, from the way the street blends into the mountainside blends into the clouds, the world is folding in on itself, and that I live in the shoebox project of a cosmic kindergartener. The puddles on the sidewalk rarely fully disappear, though now they are beginning to ice over. The people’s favorite footwear here are XtraTuf boots, good for fishing, hiking, and generally being outside in Sitka. I didn’t expect to move to a temperate rainforest when I moved to Alaska, but when my brother texts me about single digit temperatures in Wisconsin, and my mother talks about a freezing cold snap in Texas, I am none too upset by the irony. But the snow this morning reminded me I do miss the snow. I think I miss the snow even when I don’t think about it.

But when the sun does shine in Sitka, the edenic setting comes alive, and your friends start disappearing up mountains, if you haven’t beat them to it.

Three months pass, and it’s almost hard to recall the night kayaks that started my first week here. The one where the oars brought bioluminescent phytoplankton to light the night with their swirls of white-blue trailing your silent skimming. We forage wild huckleberries and blueberries, and our neighbors give us salmon and rockfish, the campus garden gifts us sorrel and celery, kale and chard. We meet other young wanderers: Americorp, Jesuit Volunteers, transplants from as far away as Australia. We walk in parades, play trivia at the pub, and dance contras. Our basement, their living room, their dining room, the pub, the street, the stage, we dance and we dance and we dance.

Three months pass, and our jobs normalize, and though we still have two thirds of our fellowships ahead of us, we look to what’s next. We’re always looking at what’s next; when do you become old enough to look at what’s here?

I direct a play, and some of these kids are precisely where I was six years ago, and six years ago feels so meaningless. And at nights, in my house, we discuss the problems of the world, the capitalism, the patriarchy, the system, the environment, the treating people like people, the what do I really know anyway, the how can I what can I why can I not do anything. And I feel young, and I feel hopeful, and I feel like the planet will reject us in a hundred years, and I feel angry, and I feel irresponsible, and I can’t sleep. I have a hard time sleeping in Sitka, and my mind wanders backwards. But I direct a play, and I do my job, and I love it, and I think, “How can I do this all the time?” And then I meet a woman who raised the turkey we eat for Thanksgiving, and I think about the turkeys we raised last year, and I think, “How can I get back to a farm?” And I talk to my friends, and I think, “How can I get back to New York? How can I get to Chicago? How can I get to Germany?” And Charlie writes a song, and she sings, we can’t be everywhere. Oh no, we can’t be everywhere.

Three months pass, and a text wakes me a little after midnight, and it tells me the northern lights arise. I leave the house and I walk onto, out into the ocean, and I search the sky. I wander along the shore, and the dim lights from the street, and the branches from the trees are still overpowering, and I am searching for them, looking to the stars. I hide behind the gym, and the tall walls occlude all the lights and I look up and the sky pulses. It is not magnificent; it does not change my life. But I can feel the sky racing, little sheets of white charging out above me, and the cold drives me back to my bed, but not before the same questions flutter past my eyelids.

September 2013 September 2014

A year passes.

Triteness and cliché hover nearby despite a hearty swath of experiences. Perhaps cliché descends because of the uniting themes of humanity. The overwrought gives comfort in its familiarity. I am you are we are.

The eight months preceding we talk and we do. Hello, holy shit, we're here after all. Thank God for all that. I'm really not being flippant.

Two months rigging scenery and mounting $60,000 projectors with no livestock as far as the subway goes. Unless you count sewer rats and plump pigeons. Broken feet and uneaten canteloupe. A dying Prudence and a vanished house. Pack pack pack and perhaps Macchu Picchu rises up and falls away in the rearview mirror. We grill on concrete and blaspheme stairs. Trains and chairs and buses, and I care so much, I care so much I cry surprised. New Jersey, who knew. Baked brie, popcorn, maple syrup, we measure our moments in sustenance. Physically and emotionally satiated. Sustainability is really about ourselves, because we are always we. A rock. A book. A pickle and a beer. A cafe in Connecticut. The check engine light. Pack pack throw away pack. Mattresses and Spanish and Fly By Night cry. I'm an idiot who's going to Alaska. Manhattan's gravity gives way to the gravel of Costa Rica.

Two months in three bedrooms and a lighterless stove save sparks. The cloud rolls in around 2:30 in the afternoon. The wifi barely pierces the thinly built building across the street. Coffee chocolate cinnamon rolls cilantro - I told you we memorize our lives in food. A sidewalk snakes along the vista. The milk goes bad too quickly. Talk and talk and talk. How do you marshal intention and how are people people? The question of what it's all worth obscures like the rain blinds me when I wear my glasses. How does the ballerina tiptoe so beautifully? Lights burn through mist, and tamales sell out. Butterflies like owls and cheese. Superman's a child, and fires burn even in a cloud forest. Meeting silence meeting bridges meeting on rooftops over San Jose's fireflies. Texas, a daytrip, New York for the $1 pizza. Not now, not then, not not why not. I'll leave before the ham smell does. A $0.46 taxi to Alaska. Goodbye. Fuck. I don't say that.

On Violence and Living

Note: Portions of this post contain graphic descriptions related to birth and death.

My boss is a self-described violent communicator. He speaks loudly and passionately about everything from the importance of the global sustainable food movement to the proper usage of hoses (which, as anyone who’s ever tried to use a hose in a greenhouse will know, is actually not a crazy thing to go crazy about – hoses can be really dangerous to a burgeoning garden bed). In the fall, he attended a workshop on “somatic nonviolent communication” and shared with the group that his interest in violence is what led him to the workshop in the first place. His apparent violence stems, I think, from an underlying ardor for living an examined life. He points to the violence in the natural world.

Birth, Freud’s original trauma, is an almost universally violent event. I don’t think I need to go into the details of mammalian birth (which is good, because my most direct knowledge of it is from the movie Milo and Otis, which has a birth scene probably too graphic for 5 year-old cat and dog enthusiasts, or you know, most 5 year-olds). Though it has been on my mind lately. In early February, we had two cows give birth, far earlier than anticipated. The first birth, took place while I was away from the farm and involved heroic efforts to bring the calf and its mother in from the field, the single digit temperatures, and the blowing wind. The calf made it to the barn, the mother spooked and bolted, and the calf died from exposure an hour and a half later. For days, the mother, in the pasture across the street, lowed plaintively to the barn, a bovine lacrimosa. The second calf was found dead, frozen to the ground, a few days later. I carried it away in a child’s sled over the snow, and going down a hill, the still form overtook me and slid away, a macabre moment of excitement come too late.

We stored the frozen bodies with plans to skin them, to salvage something beautiful from something tragic. And a few weeks later when it came time to skin, one hide was unusable, chewed through by rats. The other animal was hung from a hook in the way of a slaughterhouse, legs fully extended and head facing the ground. I was uninvolved in the actual skinning, but the denuded, skinned carcass intrigued me after the fact. Fully exposed, stretched out, rib bones riveting the breast muscles, this calf was almost human. Its head, free from the trappings of its usual calf fur, transfixed me. Some brief spark of universality passed through my mind – the anatomical, phylogenetic connection laid plain. We are animals, after all.

I think back to the turkeys we slaughtered in November. An ice pick pierced through the roof of their mouth, straight into their brains, rendered them immediately dead. Brain dead, at the very least. The simple nervous systems of birds, such as turkeys and chickens, are decentralized, unlike in humans. The body continues to function without the brain – wings flap, legs sprint, the neck will crane the head up, and you feel like Thomas the doubter as you see their eyes gazing at you. I am dead. You have killed me. I am here, still.

Some friends, some visitors often respond with great sympathy, horror, perhaps some mix, when I tell them about these darker sides of farming. Mary, the veal calf I fed milk to daily since its birth, went off to the big house some weeks ago, and she’s been the recipient of many postpartum condolences. Some people will decline to eat our meat after seeing the farm – “how can I eat the same pig I met?” We blindly wish for our food to be anonymous. We don’t want to understand that our food was once living. But one of the great sadnesses, or perhaps wonders, of life is that it cannot propagate without death. In order to live, you must kill, at least indirectly. Cut meat out of your diet, and you still devour acres of once living plants to nourish your own life. Violence is inherent to existence. Is violence bad?

The honeybee survives on honey, a nutritious, energy-dense food transformed from the nectar of flowers. In the process of collecting this nectar, bees unwittingly collect and spread pollen, allowing for widespread germination of plant life. Bees do not kill. Bees do not even harm the flowers they harvest nectar from. Their industrious endeavors benefit all organisms they interact with, and the fruit of their labor is delicious, nutritious, and irreproducible. Look to the honeybee.

The mosquito species survives because of blood. Though they normally feed on nectar (without spreading pollen), the females need the protein blood provides in order to lay eggs. Bloodsuckers, parasites, they carry disease and give nothing back to the environment. They themselves are not a significant part of any other organism’s diet. A recent article in Nature cites that over 247 million people are infected by Malaria yearly. The article argued that the eradication of mosquitoes from the food chain would have no ill effects. Look to the mosquito.

What hubris, though, to play God, and declare “The world has no need for this creature! We will destroy it completely!”

Dom is no religious zealot, but in our kitchen he has fixed a biblical quote, in large print, to the bulletin board: Genesis 3:19, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Spend enough time trying to grow food and you realize the glory of the carbon cycle. The divinity of nature. To say everything is connected is not abstraction. What is alive will die, and what is dead will give life, and to call that violent, with all its iniquitous connotations seems to me the greater violence.

Observations, Part II

5 1/2 months now, I have worked here, and I still feel a daily push and pull - stay longer, leave now.

Animals make the loudest noises when in distress. Calling out for help, attention, seems innate to all species.

Schedules are hard to keep, especially when driven by no externalities.

Roosters don't crow until after the sun has risen.

Ham hocks take longer to cook than beans. Simple soup is better soup. Bacon fat keeps the cornbread from sticking to the skillet. Milk doesn't curdle if heated slowly and stirred constantly. Honey and nut butter is hard to beat. Take stale bread, quickly shower it with water, and toast it in high heat - it'll soften. Pigs will eat stale bread any which way.

I don't know anyone who enjoys snow shoveling. But seeing small, clear paths through vast expanses of snow sure is satisfying.

Don't leave your car window open if there's precipitation in the forecast.

Ice melts to mud.

Brining pork bellies, hanging them to dry, smoking them, and then cutting them up and packaging does NOTHING to diminish the constant desire to eat the 100 lbs of bacon in front of me. Damn it all, I don't care if it isn't cooked.

Bacon shrinks a lot when it's cooked.

Curing meat is actually considered a method of cooking.

Trussing meat looks really cool.

Wet wood doesn't burn. Wet wood smokes and slowly disappears.

Skating on ponds is WAY more everything than skating in a rink.

Snow muffles sounds and insulates heat. Igloos make so much sense.

I don't move very much when I sleep.

I don't sleep very much when I move.

People. Watch your poop. You never know when you might find a worm. TMI? Too Many Insects. But actually, here are some fun semi-facts that I'm half remembering right now, rather than look up again. Most of the world's populations deal with intestinal parasites with some frequency. The sterilization of the industrial west and the development of modern medicine have reduced the occurence of parasites to the point that they've become highly rare and stigmatizing. Most intestinal parasites have no symptoms, and can live in conjunction with the host for many years with no critical effects. Some people even believe that the presence of parasites is helpful. Eh. The doctor will also prescribe you with an antidote that'll kill 'em all.

You know that check engine light? Don't ignore it. You might end up spreading your engine oil over the entire state of Pennsylvania and have to dump oil into your engine in the middle of the street in Chinatown. But the automechanics of smalltown Pennsylvania and Queens will do you right.

How do you sharpen knives well?

Libraries everywhere are havens of comfort.

America needs to work on public restroom availability, just, you know, in general.

Ice crunching is much better than snow squeaking.

Try listening more.

To everything.

Snow

When I was 5, I saw snow for the first time. I woke up and the neighbor’s roof was white, and I was startled. The realization soon sunk in, and my memory is full of that day. Even Texas snow builds massive snowmen when you’re 5 and seeing snow for the first time.

I wake up a few days ago and the same white dusts the landscape, sheeting our barn with an unfamiliar lack of color. I’m giddy with excitement.

Halfway through chores, hands cold chafed through thick gloves, I wonder if this will be the winter that breaks my love for snow. The crunch of snow compacting beneath my feet still satisfies. I enjoy smashing the ice in the animals’ water troughs. The cold on my cheek makes my blood quick. Life beats harder to fend off the cold; I think this is why I revel in the crisp, cold air.

The farm is quiet these days. Our pigs are at the slaughterhouse, our turkeys are in the freezer, the duck, I said, is gone. The hens prefer to stay in the coop rather than brave the frozen soil. The cattle lumber. The sun sets before the afternoon begins, and I milk with darkness just beyond the barn door. The last of the kale has wilted. Our vegetable garden is laid waste.

I’m tired. And I’ve been tired before. But I wake up and my body feels heavy on the hardwood floor. My steps feel plodding, my legs, leaden. Solitude and loneliness tango. The snowy forest captivates me. The stars are rapturous. I think how life is, roughly speaking, a series of decisions of whether to stay or go. I drift off to sleep like an abandoned raft into a whirlpool.

And people ask, why are you here? Why are you farming? What are you getting out of this?

I have my stock answers. I feel. I find singularity of focus here. I’m growing more present. I enjoy working with my hands. Farming is an inherently creative task. I’m not stressed. I don’t think about money. I like having responsibility. I think the work we do here is important. It’s gratifying to see the physical results of my labor. I’m learning. The pig tail baked bean veggie roast I made shows that. The quince jelly I made shows that. The sheep I’ve herded show that. The amount of time spent milking shows that. The massive number of things checked off the To Do lists show that. But there’s always more To Do, and three months into being the only person working here makes me question again. Why am I here?

We eat well. If I can say nothing else, I cannot deny that every meal is a barrage of flavor. Our nourishment gives us the strength to continue.

My friend Alexis once exclaimed over dinner with friends: “Guys! This… this is food!” And we knew what she meant. Not tautology, this is food. We need this; we grow from this; we share this; you are, they say, what you eat. And tasting the subtle difference in the flavor of milk as our cow transitions from grass to winter hay, I see more clearly how what you eat, you indeed are.

I go back and forth. This decision, to stay or to go. And the concomitant questions: how long would I stay? Where would I go? And I am sad both ways and happy both ways. I tell my friends that choice is good. But these days, it seems like choosing to do something smacks mightily of choosing not to do so many other things. And I think on how maybe that’s what being an adult is.

It is the time of year for making wreaths. For pulling out vines and weaving them into wreaths. Yesterday, we disentangled an ancient vine from our hoary hazelnut thicket. The long whips, still green like summer, wound themselves uncomplaining into a giant wreath. A prayer for the return of light.

Two weeks ago, I was in New York City for a grand total of 20 minutes in Grand Central. Snow wavered down, spotlighted in between the buildings. It snows here, as I write this. A forecast of 4 to 8 inches. Crystalline marvels. Here and there are not so different. Because I carry myself with me wherever I go. And I don’t ever want to lose the wonder I feel in a hushed snowfall.