Month: December 2016

Life with an artist is never simple. This morning, when I came downstairs for breakfast, Maria looked at me with a kind of predatory gaze that has become familiar, and no, it’s not what you might be thinking. She was looking at my pants.

At some points in my life, this might have had particular implications, living with Maria, I recognized the look.

Usually, it means she has had a dream, is making a quilt or hanging piece, and wants something I am wearing. I have lost countless shirts, pants, even underwear, articles of clothing that have made their way into her fiberworks and out into the country.

You do not want to get in the way of one of Maria’s creative visions, believe me, there is only one path to take.

If you have a quilt of Maria’s,  you are probably hanging some of my clothing on your wall. Once I was taking a nap, and Maria approached with some scissors, she said she was just checking out an old sweater. She had a funny look in her eye, sort of like the wives in those old Dracula movies.

I have no doubt she would have cut it right off of my body if I hadn’t given it to her. Immediately.

Why are you looking at my pants?, I inquired, wary.

“I was wondering if you need them,” she said.

“They are my pants,” I said, “of course I need them”

But I knew. “You want them, don’t you? You want my pants.”

She professed shock and some indignation, suggesting she would never take my pants unless I was completely done with them.

But I am wearing them, I said.

I’d like them now, she said.

“No,”I shouted puffing myself up. I have some pride. “You can’t have them while I was wearing them.”

Maria has a slightly different account of this exchange and you can read it here. She denies threatening me with scissors.

It was an uneasy day, Maria kept looking at my pants, she asked if she could photograph them. She was trying to spook me, and she was succeeding.You don’t want someone staring at your pants with a scissors.

She said she had a spot in a new quilt that needed some worn light blue denim, my pants would fit perfectly. Besides, she said, I had a half-dozen pants. Weren’t these getting old and worn? Wasn’t I tired of them? No, I sputtered, I am wearing them. I made a note not to take a nap today, I couldn’t sleep knowing she was out there with an unfinished quilt and some scissors, it was like a horror movie dream.  When she is making a quilt, she is capable of anything.

She routinely confiscates my things and claims they are hers – undershirts, nightshirts, shirts and pants, even scarves. You don’t wear them or need them, she says, you don’t care about them.

I said goodbye to my pants this afternoon, for dignity’s sake I am pretending to consider this, but I know this story very well. Tomorrow my pants will be in pieces, she will probably get up early to rush to her studio and shop them up and put them or parts of them into her quilt.

I will never get to see my pants again after tonight, and they have been good pants.

They will end up on somebody’s bed or living room wall.

Life with an artist is not like life with other people. At least she didn’t wait until I took a nap.

It was a bitterly cold morning yesterday, -5 degrees, but Chloe and Maria exchanged a cold kiss that warmed the air and melted the ice.

For me, the great question that hovers over me and my politics, the one we seem to deal with mainly by indifference or avoidance, is: what are people for? For me, this transcends the murky and mostly bankrupt dialogue of the left and the right, and the machinations of lobbyists, billionaires and politicians. Is our greatest dignity in poor jobs, struggle and the growing costs of maintaining our health?

In the conversations I have had with my neighbors and friends after the election – it would have been more productive for me to have had them before the election, but hindsight is free and easy, true wisdom is harder to come by – I have been mostly hearing talk about work.

What have they done to work? Why don’t I hear any politician anywhere ask what people are for?. And how we can be true to them.

Jobs that disappeared, jobs that are demeaning, insecure and do not pay enough for a man or woman to live in freedom and security. Jobs that move away. People who are thrown away.  People who are left behind. What are people for?, I ask myself each time I listen. You cannot break promises to people again and again and expect them to acquiesce in their own diminishment and betrayal.

The farm to city migration – one of the most dramatic in the country’s history – has boosted the corporate economy. So many people working for little money or safety. It has devastated the people’s economy. The middle class is on the run, everywhere, gone from the country, priced out of the cities. Is there anywhere for them to go?

The vanishing farmers and workers have been replaced by machinery, foreign workers, petroleum, chemicals, computers, robots, apps, credit and the other expensive services from the agribusiness and tech economy, sometimes confused with what was once called good work or farming.

The departure of so many people and their children has devastated rural communities and economies all over the country. In the cities, the poor serve the rich.  There are no longer enough people to care for our farms or our land. The cities swell with the rich and the poor, there is no longer any middle. The founding fathers never imagined a world with the permanently unemployable. Our very idea of work has become opaque and confused.

The police of the bureaucrats and economists is clear: we now put an absolute premium on profit, not  the quality of work, the dignity of work, the security of work.

I think of the forgotten land, empty and abandoned and waiting with open arms.

There is a lot of work to be done here, so much need.

There is the work of restoring our cities, families,  farms, forests, rivers, rural towns and communities.  Of bringing back jobs and workers. The work of restoring the meaning and value of work itself. The work of re- building the contracts that once connected employers and employees, but now pits them against one another

Over the next years, I am focusing my own values and ideals on the simpler question: what are people for? It is not an easy question to answer. My politics are shaped by where I live, and I think it is the time for the rural world to rise again.

To me, people are for living in community. For having dignity. For living in peace, not perpetual fear. There is good work for everyone to do, including the work of returning to nature, helping to restore the shattered communities of the heartland, working to restore the earth.

Today, the week of darkness and cold eased, the solstice is passed, the light and color has returned to us. The beautiful old trees keep whispering to me: What are people for?

 

Any fruit tree that survives a century in a pasture on a farm is a survivor, a heroic symbol of a species. God knows how many storms, cows sheep, droughts, winters,  donkeys and horses this tree has survived, we have placed miles of chicken wire across the bottom to try and protect it from animals, who chew on the bark, reach up to pull the leaves and apples and trees.

The tree bounces back, every spring. A survivor and an inspiration. In the winter, it gracefully holds the morning snow on it’s branches, offering itself to any kind of art. The tree has courage, it means to live.

The other night, driving by the highway that leads to our farm, we passed house after house lit up in one way or another with candles in the windows, lights around the bushes, trees wrapped in blinking bulbs.

Our farm was dark, if we didn’t know it was there, we would have easily sailed right past it. It looked dark and bleak to us. It felt cold and disconnected.

We went to the hardware store and brought some 300-Led-bulb strings and this morning, Maria hung them up. We are not conventionally religious, we mark Christmas rather than worship it, our faith is creativity and to some extent, spirituality. We are very serious about creativity, that is our shared value, among others.

I can’t speak for Maria, but something in me wanted to say we belong, we care, we are here, we matter. I wanted people to drive by our old farmhouse and smile at the lights and color.

We love the lights, we love the way the house speaks up for itself, stands out, embraces the season, offers some color and light to the dark days and long nights of the new winter.

The great philosophers all said that the first things human beings need is food and shelter, but after that and before we can live meaningful lives, we must feel safety, belonging and mattering. We must find our community.

In part, I think I moved to the country in search of community, and Maria and I both feel we have finally found the community we have sought,  here in Cambridge, a small town along the Vermont border. I doubt I will leave this town alive, it feels like home to me, the place the rolling stone rolls until it can roll no  farther.

The big mountains of Vermont are just a few hundred yards away.

Before, living in a dozen different cities as a journalist, I felt the loss of community, perhaps because I fought it, perhaps because I moved so much, perhaps because it was disintegrating in the great migration to the cities, where we were all strangers, and we asked and expected governments to care for us if we were in trouble.

In those other places, the towns were all rich, they had the money to take care of people, from rabid  raccoons to drifting snow to plows. We don’t have much money up here, the towns are lucky if they can plow the snow off of the roads. We have to take care of one another.

I feel safe here.

What is safety? It is living in an environment where we can experiment and stretch and change and grow.

It is said people cannot be creative, they cannot innovate without these three essential elements – safety, belonging, and mattering. We cannot move forward with our lives. These elements are essential to a productive brain and our ability to work and attach ourselves to other people. The safer we feel, the more likely we are to change and take risks.

This is the driving idea behind the fellowship of community, a feeling of connection with others, the feeling that despite our differences, we belong together. The feeling that we personally matter and are contributing to a larger good. I read the works of one famous psychologist who said we humans are continuously either reinforcing or begging for safety, belonging and mattering.

In a small town in rural America, the world that was left behind, I find community is strong and enduring. I feel safe. I feel that I belong, as different as I am from so many others. I feel I matter. I can take risks and be creative.

This has nothing to do with politics, or even lifestyle. We do not all love one another.

It is because we know one another and see one another, and perhaps, because we have been left behind, we need one another. That is why we got the lights, I think. Because we are safe. Because we belong. Because we matter.

The farmhouse says we are connected.