The gardens are ripe.  There's food of all sorts coming in every day, to be eaten, dehydrated, processed into sauce, frozen, stored.  Tomatoes!  Eggplants!  String beans, haricot vert, edamame, yard-long red noodle beans.  Dried beans--kidney, cannellini, black turtle, and more.  Tomatillos, husk cherries, zucchini.  Hundreds of heads of garlic are in, cleaned, and socked away in 5 lb bags.  Onions and spring potatoes are drying on racks.  The barn is full.  And there's so much more to come in!

I spent the last week away from the farm--first to Boston, to celebrate a friend's 40th birthday.  Then, to Amherst, to attend the New England Organic Farming Association (NOFA) conference.  Anne and I stopped in to visit an old friend of mine, who now lives near Amherst in a rural area, on a gorgeous bit of land that's been well cultivated and tended.  Then down to Washington DC, to meet my new niece, and to help out my sister and her husband for a few days.  And then to Philly, on my way back, to see one of my oldest friends, who's recently moved to a new home.  A bit of a whirlwind tour.  I would have loved to spend a month with them all, to get to know their children better.  Milo, who's cutting teeth and toddling about.  Elias, the builder, and Rosa, his sweet sister.  My own niece, Isabel, working to hold her head up by herself, and intent on observing everything around her.  And Eli, who's has grown so fast I can barely believe it.  So many wonderful children to love!

And parents to support.  I spent the most time with my sister, cooking for her and her family.  I was swept by a powerful urge to feed them healthy food, to nourish them, in a way that I've never felt before.  I wanted to pour all my love and hope and good energy into food, and pack it away for them, so that they could eat whenever they needed, and rest easy.  That's the kind of job I'd love, actually, to be a home cook for new mothers, preparing nutrient-rich, healthy foods for them, packing their fridge and freezer full for the week... 

And after all that cooking, now I'm back at the farm, holding all these babies and their parents in my heart.  Thinking about the harvest here, wishing I could feed all those little ones from the fruits of this garden.  It's sad that we're all so spread out.  I know that mobility and independence are highly valued in our culture, but I'm especially aware right now of what we lose when our families and friends are dispersed...

Everything we know about civilization . . . whether you date it from Eden or the Buddha or Shakespeare or however you define it, that's all 275 parts per million CO2. We're at 390 parts per million right now.

--Bill McKibben

Anne and I took a little time this week to listen to NPR's program, "Speaking of Faith," which featured a moving interview with Bill McKibben, a professor at Middlebury College who's been advocating for action to address climate change for decades.  The title of the talk was "The Moral Math of Climate Change," and you can listen to it or read the transcript here.  He has founded 350.org, which is a global movement to instigate action.

You probably don't need or want any more facts about the way our climate is changing.  You've probably heard it all.  You probably know that this has been the warmest decade on record, the warmest 12 months on record, the warmest spring on record, the warmest June and July on record.  You probably know that Russia is literally on fire, about 10% of it aflame.  That Pakistan's been flooding, and suffering landslides now, with 1500 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.  That a chunk of ice three times the size of Manhattan just broke off the Arctic ice shelf.  That the amount of phytoplankton (the marine life that is the essential, necessary base of the aquatic food chain) has been radically depleted--decining 40% since 1950.  We can put all these things together, though we may not want to think about them, and see that we're dramatically affecting the planet.  It's not a theory anymore.  We're breaking records nearly every day. 

And that those of us who insist on talking about climate change can sound like a broken record.  You might be fighting the urge to click on a different website.  But bear with me, because something Bill McKibben said in this interview is worth considering.

Although I grew up in a practicing Catholic family, and attended church and catechism classes every week until I was about 16, I often feel like I'm hearing some of the Bible readings for the first time.  So it was when Bill McKibben discussed the "Book of Job" in the interview:

Everybody knows the story. Job finds himself cursed by God. He's lying in a dung heap at the edge of town, covered with oozing sores. His flocks are dead. His family's dead. You know, he's in a world of hurt.

And his friends arrive to help him work through this, and he keeps lamenting what's going on and calling it unjust. And his friends keep saying, "Oh, no, no. You know, you sinned or one of your children sinned. This is how it works and that's why you're being punished." And Job, much to his credit, is not the patient Job of legend. He keeps demanding that God appear and explain why this thing has happened to him. And God finally does.

And I think the soliloquy that God delivers in the last three chapters of Job I think is the longest sustained speech that God gives anywhere in the Bible… Old Testament or New. And it's a remarkably interesting speech because it doesn't answer any of the questions that Job has set out.

Instead, God gives this incredibly beautiful biologically accurate, crunchy, sexy tour of the physical universe. [About] All the kind of interesting animals and, you know, and [told] in very wild terms. You know, [God] asked Job, "Do you hunt prey for the lion and her cubs? Do you help the vulture find … carrion on which to feast?" "If you're so smart, you tell me, where do I keep the wind? Can you tell the proud waves: 'Here you shall break and no further? ' Do you know where the storms are, the warehouse for the storms?"

Well, you know, after listening to this for two or three chapters, Job basically says, "Sorry I asked." And sits down....

The message seems to be, "Job, you're not the center of things."..."[Y]our questions about justice and things are kind of puny. You're a small part of something very large and beautiful and that should be enough," and for Job it appears to be enough.

So the shocking part in reading it now is realizing that for the first time in human history we're no longer in the position Job's in...Now we just spit right back at God. You know, "Can you tell the proud waves where to break?" "Hell, yes. We think we're going to raise the level of the ocean a couple of meters in the course of this century." "Do you know where the storms are kept?" "Yeah. We're pushing cyclones one after another across the Pacific. You know, we've got our thumb on the scale." In a very short order we [humans] got very, very big. Human beings have always been in Job's position — small — and our job is to figure out how to get smaller again. And I think it's essentially a theological task, at least as much as anything else.

 So I went to read some of that speech that God gives Job, and it's a doozy.  A sample:

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone
while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'?

God's got some attitude!  Listen: "Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, 'Here we are'?"

I've long thought about the moral dimension of climate change, centered on the notion that we should take care to pass on a liveable planet to future generations.  But there's another moral context here, made visible in Job, that seems worthy of further meditation:  Do we really think we're in charge?  Who are we to mess with God's creation?  We are blundering through the planet, thinking that we know what we're doing.  But we don't.  We clearly don't know how to drill at the bottom of the ocean.  We are only just beginning to glimpse how the oceans, winds, atmosphere, planetary orbit all work together, and we shouldn't be messing with the basic formula for life.  We know that all human life has existed at about 275 parts per million, that that's the magic number for humanity to flourish.  Yet we think we can just flaunt that, somehow, without consequence.  We aren't in charge here, no matter how much our brains and egos would like us to think we are.  We're just a small piece of a majestic puzzle.  A big dose of humility seems appropriate.

But instead of humility, I keep hearing more talk of "geoengineering" to address climate change--giant carbon vacuum cleaners, global domes...I love McKibbens' take on these "solutions":

I mean, I think that physically it's not possible to do that and I also think at some level there's something silly and ignoble and almost blasphemous about trying it. I think that the response we need is to figure out how to restrain ourselves, how to pull ourselves in. It strikes me that religious thinking back at least as far as the Buddha and probably farther, has centered mostly on the idea that we become most fully human when we don't put ourselves at the center of everything.

The world is changing around us, and we should stop arguing about whether or not the sands are flowing through the hourglass.  It's not only a political issue, though of course I pray that our politicians will stop being so spineless.  It's about the place of humanity within this amazing gift of a planet.  Can we curb our appetites to bring ourselves within the parameters for life?  Can we adjust our habits to get back into the flow of history?

One last snippet from Bill McKibben seems appropriate, where he discusses the recent surge of interest in farmers markets and local food:

It takes a lot less energy to move a tomato five miles than 5,000 miles. And not coincidentally, it tastes better. I mean, I traveled 2,000 miles yesterday. I know how I feel. That's also how the tomato feels.

But the real [and interesting] reason... that we like farmers' markets, I think, turns out to be they're different. Sociologists followed shoppers first through the supermarket, then through the farmers' market. Everybody's been to the supermarket. You know how it works. You walk in, you fall into a fluorescent light trance. You visit the stations of the cross around the perimeter of the supermarket. You emerge with your items. That's it. When they followed people around the farmers' market, they were having, on average, 10 times as many conversations per visit.

Cheap fossil fuel, you know, heated the planet. It made us rich. But it also, maybe most profoundly, made us the first kind of our species who've had no practical need of our neighbors for anything (italics mine). We tell ourselves, you know, what a great chic thing we've invented, the farmers' market.

In fact, that's how all human beings shopped for food until 50 years ago and 80 percent of the planet still does. No wonder it feels good. I mean, this is what we're built for.

This is, for me, the crux of the matter: what are we built for?  Are we built for relationship, for community, for neighborliness?  Are we built to appreciate beauty, to experience awe, to feel love and gratitude for life?  These seem, to me, to be the essence of being human.  Our culture's just gotten so disconnected from the basic impulse of life, and from one another, and we're in danger of not only breaking all records, but of breaking the foundational formulas, the conditions that allow life to exist on this planet.

One of the biggest surprises of the past year on the farm is how much pleasure I've gotten out of simplifying my life: getting rid of the TV, growing food, shelling peas, making my own yogurt and cheese, telling stories with friends, rising and resting with the sun.  Things that humanity has done for millenia.  Turns out that stuff feels good--like it's part of our DNA, part of our human makeup.  Maybe we would do well to remember that we're part of a long history of humanity, and that our ancestors' way of life had value.  What if we all shut off the lights when it got dark?  Would we fall in love with the stars, with the universe?  Would we rest, and fall in love with one another again?

I'm reminded of a quote by Paul Hawken:

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television."

Have you ever heard of purslane?  This little plant is a wonder, packed with key nutrients, and it's delicious.  It has a slight citrus flavor, and is a little juicy, because it's a succulent like an aloe or cactus. You can eat the stems as well as the leaves, though the roots of the plant are not edible.

It's got more iron than spinach.  Magnesium, B vitamins, folate, choline.  More Omega-3 fatty acids than any other vegetable.  More Vitamin C than cabbage.  More Vitamin A than beets.  More iron and calcium than frozen blueberries.  (More on nutrition here.)  It's used in many cuisines: French (called "pourpier"), Japanese ("grapara"), Indian ("sanhti" or "punarva") and Latin American ("verdolagas"), among others.

It grows easily, and requires no planting, as it's a self-seeding annual.  Growing along the ground, it spreads quickly, and our garden is covered with it.  Covered with it, no kidding.  It flourishes in hot, dry weather, which we've had plenty of this year.  But it doesn't seem to bother the other crops, in fact, it seems to be serving as a ground cover.

But it's commonly considered a weed.  And if we still thought of it as such, we'd be in a bit of a bother.  But once we started looking into it, and realized its tremendous health benefits and the variety of ways to prepare it, we came to see purslane in a new light.  

And I'm so glad for that!  Rather than ripping it out by the wheelbarrow-full, and dumping it in our weedpile, we can harvest it, eat it, preserve it, sell it.  We've been harvesting it like crazy for our own use, using it in salads and stir-fry, making it into pesto and pickling it, and selling 15 bags of it a week at the farmers market, at one pound a bag.  

If you've got a yard, it's quite possible there's some of this stuff growing.  Take a look.  One note of caution: there is a similar looking plant out there that's no good for you.  So if you see what looks like purslane, cut a stem, and see what color the juice inside is.  If it's clear, you're in the clear.  If it's milky, then don't eat it: it's a plant called "spurge," and it's toxic. 

Interested in trying purslane?  Here's some easy ways to prepare it:

1) as a cold salad:  chop it up, stems and all, and toss with olive oil and lemon juice.  

2) as a cold salad: chop it up, stems and all, and toss with chopped cucumbers, and a yogurt-honey-pressed garlic-chili powder dressing.

3) saute it with onions and garlic, then add some beaten eggs and tomatoes, and scramble. (You can use purslane as you would spinach, in general.)

4) stir-fry it with some garlic, and toss with soy sauce and a dash of toasted sesame oil (hot chilies too, if you like)

5) use as you would basil, and make pesto (and then freeze for later use!)

6) add to soups, at the last minute, to thicken (has a slightly mucilaginous quality)

7) add to salads, mixed in with lettuces

8) pickle it! 

Sometimes all it takes is a shift in perspective.  Weed or superfood?  It's up to you.

And what else would benefit from being considered in a different light?  One of the Sisters here just completed a three-month sabbatical, staying in a little hermitage on the property here.  In the first week of her sabbatical, she had set up her laptop, facing a big open window onto the woods, and was planning on doing email and other tasks on the computer.  But the internet connection was slow, and frustrating, and while she sat and sat, waiting for pages to load, she gazed out the window.  And began to watch the birds and other wildlife, becoming entranced.  Her frustration and thwarted connectivity turned into a new passion, as she began learning all about the birds in our little ecosystem, listening to their calls, studying their habits.  What a gift emerged from the failed wireless signal!

This is my meditation for the week: what can emerge, if I'm willing to shift my perspective?

Every month, here at the farm, we hold an event called a "Full Moon Fireside."  It's a chance for the Sisters to open their doors and invite people into their life and their work, and to create connections with folks interested in sustainability, food, and Earth.  For much of the last year, we've focused on learning more about the Transition movement, which is a decentralized, grassroots initiative in which local communities work to organize themselves to address the triple challenges of energy insecurity, economic instability, and climate change.  Efforts focus on supporting the creation of more local food production, strengthening local economies, and establishing and enhancing local energy capture and production. The idea is to "transition" away from oil dependence and long supply chains into local resilience.

This month, we talked less about the "what" and the "how" of Transition, and more about our personal experience with trying to make changes in our own lives.  Anne led us in an exercise from the Transition Handbook (an organizing manual) where we contemplated ways that we, individually, are "bound up" in systems or patterns which we'd like to move away from--whether gas consumption, fast-food and packaged food purchases, attachment to money.  After focusing on one of these, in particular, which we'd like to change, we spent some time getting creative.  And rather than focusing on the negative ("I promise never to ... "), Anne asked us to make little superheroes that embody the positive side of the change we want to see.  What kind of superhero qualities would help us realize those changes?

It's funny with these things.  My "oh-god-this-is-so-uncool" censor is always on high alert when it comes to visioning or creative exercises, and I have to actively work to make sure that I don't withdraw myself out of a good time.  And when I do let myself actually play, and not just play along, such experiences can be eye-opening and rewarding.  This time, I took a few deep breaths and decided I would not hold back.

For me, one of the things that I love the most about the farm is the sincere effort to try to eat mostly what we produce.  We buy some staples: flour, sugar, milk, and some things like soy sauce, but the vast majority of what we eat comes from the work of our hands.  That's deeply satisfying, and changes much of my relationship to food.  And gives me great relief that I'm not part of the whole packaging nightmare, with plastic coming out of my ears and flowing into the ocean... But I still have a few "holdovers"--somehow, I still crave, or feel I deserve a "treat" now and then, and that comes in the form of junk food.  Why on Earth do I think I need a treat, when I get to eat wonderful, tasty, fresh food every day...when I get to work in the Earth and pray and cook and write...when I live among funny, wise, and caring people--what on Earth do I need a "treat" for?  This is clearly some kind of old pattern that keeps me connected to an unhealthy food economy, and to unhealthy thinking.  And I'd love to be rid of it.

So this was the problem I chose to contemplate for the exercise, the problem for which I needed a superhero.  And almost immediately, when it came to the most nerve-wracking part--the spontaneous creativity party--it came to me: my superhero is "The Green Yogini" (said in the voice of "The Brown Hornet!").  I made this little apple figurine, and used some twining branches to create the impression of crossed legs, like the seated meditation pose. 

In a flash, I saw that the Green Yogini is all those things that I struggle with when it comes to food and "treats":  centered, aware, and compassionate.  She is calm in the face of temptation and bad habits.  And she makes choices based on her values, her care for food and Earth, her understanding that life itself is the most wonderful of treats...

It may seem a bit cheesy, but the exercise was actually quite moving.  Think about it: what do you want to change?  And who's your superhero?

It's been nearly a month since I last updated this blog--I knew June and July would get busy, but whoa...it's been BUSY.  And there's so much to tell!  First, the gardens have been amazing, yielding buckets of strawberries, then raspberries, pounds of luscious sweet peas, and greens of every variety, including giant bok choi, crisp cabbages, and buttery lettuces.  June was lovely: cooler, with misty mornings and green hues everywhere.  We've had delicious salads every day, "put up" or stored at least 10 head of cabbage in the form of sauerkraut, frozen 12 gallon-size bags of peas, and enjoyed many pieces of strawberry rhubarb pie.  What colors, and crunch, what a contrast to those last rutabagas in our winter rootcellar...

We'd planted about 20 beds of brassicas, including kale, collard greens, bok choi, tat soi, mizuna, and arugula, and cabbage.  Kohlrabi, cauliflower, chard, broccoli, and broccoli raab rounded out the list.  And because of the warm temperatures in May and June, all these plants flourished, growing faster than we could keep up.  We began bringing baskets of produce to the food pantry, as the crops came in quicker than we could use them, and before the farmers market had begun.

Sr. Catherine Grace at the marketIn mid-June, the local farmers market began, to our relief!  We had planned our crops to be ready for early June, and even the delay of two weeks meant that we were fighting to keep our bok choi and other crops from "going to seed," that is, from trying to reproduce.  Almost every day, we had to go around the garden and chop off any sign of emerging seed pods.  Bok choi, for example, sends out a little floret from the very center of the plant, which needs to be snipped right away, otherwise the plant grows quickly into a tower of seeds and shoots.  We've spent quite a bit of time these last 6 weeks searching for any signs of flowering, scissors in hand...

Anne holds up a new potato

And it got pretty hot as soon as the end of June rolled around.  In 90+ degree heat, we grabbled new potatoes on the 4th of July, carefully feeling around underneath the plant to find the treasures buried there. Then, in the midst of a real heat wave over the last two weeks, we harvested quart after quart of dry peas, socking them away for the winter.  And just Saturday, we harvested hundreds of bulbs of garlic, now sitting in the barn to finish drying out. We had, earlier in June, cut off the garlic "scapes" (curly shoots of the plant), which contain a seed pod.  Doing so ensures that the plant sends its energy into growing the bulb, rather than into reproducing! The scapes are delicious, and we froze and pickled the lot of them, to enjoy their garlicky flavor for months to come.  

Armfuls of seeds and flowers

This business of fighting fertility is a little unsettling.  Just as I am focusing my good thoughts and so much energy on helping this garden grow, I am also running around making sure it doesn't grow too fast, that the plants stay productive without reproducing.  I've pulled out little mountains of plants gone to seed...

And I think it touches me particularly because I'm turning 40 in just a few short months, and I'm aware that my own reproductive "season" is coming to an end.  I haven't felt a biological pull toward having a child in a long time, not since I was about 20, I think.  But I've been feeling it lately.  The drive of life to continue, to arise again in a new form, is ubiquitous, and powerful. I sense that I am part of a much larger framework of fertility, of life striving to live.  Being in the garden, seeing lifecycles up close, having my hand in the work of extending life, or not--all this has impact, and resonance.  I am pulling up plants now full of seed pods, and I feel a little for them, for their thwarted fertility.  I choose a few to keep, to collect their seed, to preserve them for the future.  I marvel at the fact that baby girls are born with all the ovum they will ever have, that the eggs I have remaining have been with me since I was formed.  I feel the life force of my ovaries, filled with eggs like little mustard seeds, with seeming infinite potential.  Life, waiting to be realized.  I'm so thankful that in the midst of all this--fighting the fertility of the garden, and feeling my own biological pull--my sister has just given birth to a baby girl, Isabel, who I'll be able to shower with love in the years to come.  Fertility and life wins, in the end...

How fitting then, that last night, I came across a wonderful poem--thanks to a great blog called "Our Local Life: What We Need Is Here."  The first few lines especially caught my attention, given that I was musing about fertility, seeds, and buds.  The poem is entitled "St Francis and the Sow," and it is written by Galway Kinnell, an American poet from Providence, RI.  I will definitely be looking for more of his work...

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

In this season, I feel called to appreciate the potency of the bud, to recognize the flowering within, and to appreciate the "thingness of things," the intrinsic essence of life in whatever form it takes.