School's Out and Summer is Hot
Happiness as Resistance, and becoming a miniaturist outside your door as one way to de-stress
The New York school year is much longer than any midwestern one I know of, so we just ended school only a little bit ago. (For those that don’t know, I was teaching at the Center for Discovery’s Farm school, where I worked as a T.A. for this last year.) The boys and I all finished the same day and the three of us are now on summer break for the months of July and August–this summer I am working one day a week on a woman’s farm, milking her cow and weeding her garden, but other than that, I am aiming to focus on this newsletter and trying to give the boys a fun summer where I basically try to get them to do anything that gets them off their computers. (Activities include: chores, going out more to the farm, taking care of six chickens, making ice cream, going to hidden wild blueberry patches and swimming holes it took me a year to find).
Life is strange. Here, my life is not what I was really hoping for; we still have a very small yard that gets little sun, making gardening hard, but I do have a few thrifted terra cotta pots on the deck and a small raised bed that Alex and the boys built (which doesn’t get much sun!). I realize, though, without any kind of real garden space, I cannot do the things I really want to do (I can’t make a salve from the four calendula flowers I have out there). Aside from that, though technically Alex is supposed to get vacation time, vacation doesn’t really exist when you are understaffed at the farm that produces food for a sizeable CSA, a cafe that serves a big staff, as well as live-in residents and a number of the school’s students. Instead of any real time off to go somewhere, it means being tethered here for the time being, work always looming in the background. To make up for these things, I am trying to really focus on the small things, the tiny things, the backyard things; spotting a rosy maple moth, the smallest of the silk moths, on a maple tree; watching ants spread seeds by carrying them back to their colonies, eating an attachment to the seed called the elaiosome, and then discarding the unneeded seed to later be germinated in the ground. These are the small things I am researching that give me hope for everything else.
I am in talks to possibly be the Farm and Garden teacher at my son’s school (where I would be focusing on outdoor and garden education, along with herbal studies). As many of you know, herbal, farm and outdoor education was always my main passion at our farm, so it is basically a dream job to be able to teach it at a school. I am starting to map out a curriculum, and doing so, remembering how incredible the world of the miniscule truly is, and why I love permaculture so much. Currently, I am brushing up on how to teach the miracle of the nitrogen-fixing abilities of the pea/legume family. Almost 90% of the plants in this family form symbiotic relations with soil bacteria called rhizobia. This bacteria is found on tiny pearl-like nodules on the roots. In return for these microscopic bacteria magical wizards supplying the plant with usable nitrogen, the plant uses photosynthesis to give them shelter and nutrients; a true, health-building partnership. It is why I became drawn to permaculture in my early twenties; spiritually speaking, I feel that God gave us a blueprint when creating nature’s scientific systems for how us humans should live. Things work in cycles, with symmetry and symbiosis, in fractals, in patterns. “Nothing is wasted in nature” is one of permaculture’s many mantras. Everything works together; an earthworm does not do things to only help its earthworm self; it works in a glittering and speckled food web. Nature showcases how ecology works like puzzle pieces sliding next to each other, helping everything work correctly. Unfortunately, humanity is rooted in self-absorption that takes effort to realize and fight against; it is hard for humans to work with each other and not only do things that benefit the individual self.
Cooking for and nourishing yourself and others is also a tangible way to do something small–much like a foraging worker ant finding a seed with food attached, carrying it on his back, and making the long trek to deliver it to its colony. Nourishing your community can make you feel grounded in this insane, often sad world.
Ways I have been attempting to be a joyous miniaturist is to do little (free) things, like making our family eat outside almost every day we can (we have a covered back deck, so we can do so even in the rain). Not farming has made it so I am not spending more time outside than inside anymore, and even though I worked at the Center’s farm school last year, the classes I was helping teach were not outside as much as I wished they were. That, then, left a lot of time indoors.
Humans evolved to live outside, which is one reason I believe our mood can increase when we are outdoors. Eating outside is a way we can be “living” outside more (an outdoor kitchen is next on my list, perhaps when we actually own a home one day!). Back when we were living in the RV bus and I would spend late nights scrolling Zillow (never again, too depressing), I realized there was a common, almost cut-and-paste phrase that I read over and over; something to the extent of “drink coffee every morning outside on your front porch!” or “drink your coffee outside looking at your beautiful back/front yard/lovely view”! It took me reading this over and over to realize that I never even thought to drink coffee outside in the morning, and I lived in a freakin RV–I was camping for two whole years, and somehow, it was just too chilly in the mornings, our outdoor space was too dewy to sit, or the barely lit early hours were too buggy. Maybe I knew we were to be outside most of the day working on various farms, or hiking in the afternoons, to bother having my cup of coffee anywhere but my extremely small table inside our tight bus, wrapped in a blanket. The thought did not appeal to me, and selling this idea as the American dream of home ownership seemed strange. That said, there is something deep in us that maybe we are drawn to spending more time just outside our door; thus in the evenings, we never missed the chance to eat dinner outside, diligently carrying our plates to a picnic blanket or small folding table or already-there wooden picnic table, depending on where we were. (We also just didn’t really have room inside with that tiny table for all of us).
Now we live in an actual house, and we still do not miss a day to eat outside, and sometimes take an after-dinner walk down the road, and it really does elevate my mood every time, even if it is just a little. It is something so small, but perhaps small is sometimes what we can handle, or the most accessible or least overwhelming. Perhaps the small is something we should be modeling our life from; like what is taught in permaculture, the small miracles can be the map of what we are to follow. If you are needing a pick-me-up, I recommend starting small; take your dinner plate out your door, sit at a table or a stoop or a blanket or chair, and be enchanted by the grass or trees or birds. After your dinner, a bonus idea would be to lie in some grass somewhere, and watch an ant’s seed dispersal; with a little patience, you can see them perform their act of nourishment for their fellow ants while also helping to spread important seeds. Maybe you can take it as inspiration–maybe we all should.
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This newsletter was on hold from being released because I suddenly somehow came down with covid, and I do not mix well with covid. I am finally feeling better, but I still cannot smell anything (a nightmare for the family cook and an herbalist constantly trying to identify plants by leaf arrangements and scents!) and it has not been real fun to eat anything. I finally have energy to cook tonight (it’s Mediterranean night with beet salad, chickpeas, baba ganoush and our fermented pickled cucumbers). Hopefully I can taste something besides just salt!
Paid memberships have been on pause for a while now, and when I was teaching during the school year, I felt for many reasons I wouldn’t be able to do it justice. I am planning on starting them up again and unpausing membership at the end of summer, giving me enough time to plan and work on it, so that it can be as educational and information-packed as possible. It will be less on recipes and more on kitchen witchery (how to stock a healthy and medicinal food pantry, how-to tutorials, meal planning, etc.). Likely I will be teaching somewhere in the fall, like I mentioned, but I will just carve out the time for it all!
Loved learning about the altruistic ant activity. And your advice to find joy in the small things is welcome and wise.