Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  When the middle star of Orion’s knife fell apart through Jackie’s binoculars, I could practically hear the soft rain of a didgeridoo. I’m no synesthete, but coming into nature, into solitude, at the 12 × 12 broke down boundaries for me, including the boundary between the supposedly distinct five senses. They blurred together at times, forging music. Jackie is a scientist, of course, but she approaches nature with a creative eye rather than a dissecting one. Do this, and you enter a convergent world, where things fit together in fresh ways, rather than a divergent one, where an impatient eye dissects reality to intellectual minutia. I was allergic to hard science at school, but while at the 12 × 12 I opened the scientific books on her shelf — geology, hydrology, organic chemistry, astronomy, plant biology — and the landscape around the tiny house deepened exponentially like cells dividing. Underground rivers surged through channels a hundred yards under the 12 × 12; the Jack grapes out the window turned sunlight into energy and exhaled the oxygen I breathed; the compost pile chomped up old straw, tough vegetable stems, and hedge clippings and made soil; the night sky, seen so gloriously with the absence of electricity at her house, became theater. “There’s the cup,” she told me, “and that star is the constellation’s only named star: Alkes. And over there” — she pointed to a spot above No Name Creek — “is the bear driver, which Homer mentions in his Odyssey.”

  At Jackie’s, the edges of the “hard” sciences blurred together, and this is exactly where permaculture occurs. One of the books I discovered on Jackie’s shelf was Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, which has sold over a hundred thousand copies, suggesting to me how much the phenomenon is spreading. In a chapter called “Edges,” Mollison explains that the edges between ecosystems — for instance, between water and land or a hill and flatland — hold more variety than the middle. This is because they’re transition zones where unique and diverse life can flourish, such as amphibians that straddle aquatic and terrestrial areas. Home and farm become sculpture you gently shape, consciously cultivating additional edges, and therefore more richness, diversity, and surprise. Jackie, for instance, created a pond among her beds to foster more edges, resulting in frogs, insects, and aquatic plants. Likewise, I remember puzzling during my first earth mentorship with Stan Crawford in New Mexico over how to combine hydrology and biology so as to grow crops most effectively in that dry climate. The solution: I planted my blue corn in the furrows and not on the mounds, where they’d capture more of the scarce rainfall. And so on. Permaculture isn’t industrial agriculture; it’s art and music afield.

  FINALLY, I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to visit the Pauls, a fatherson team who’d left a comfortable suburban life near Philadelphia to wildcraft in Adams County. Jackie wrote to me about them: “The Pauls (Sr. and Jr.) are finishing up three 12 × 12s, much more elaborate than mine, but they have more money than I do. They have thirty-two acres about five miles from me. You might visit them. They’re just starting.”

  As I pedaled along the Pauls’ half-mile dirt drive, their small pasture and vast woods opened up to me. They were to be the first people to live on this land, at least in modern times. The silence was immense. Out toward the edge were three 12 × 12s, the only structures on this vast property. I had that African safari feeling all of a sudden, of being in the middle of the veldt, as if a large mammal — antelope, zebra, rhino, hippo — could burst forth at any moment.

  As I got closer and parked my bike, I took a closer look at the 12 × 12s; their rooftops stood taller than Jackie’s, and they had larger front and back porches. In fact, each of the porches had as much square footage as the entire house. I was dying to peek inside, and almost did, when I spotted an older man waddling out of the forest. “I’m Paul,” he said, his handshake much more vigorous than I expected. “Paul Sr., that is. Paul Jr. is dealing with a minor disaster.” He was sixty-seven, a retired American studies and religion professor from a Pennsylvania college. Paul Sr. reminded me of photos I’d seen of Robert Frost in his later years: waifish, stooped, distinguished.

  We toured the 12 × 12s. Instead of Jackie’s simple ladder, they contained actual stairways heading up to spacious lofts. Paul Sr. explained that he and his son would each live in one of them “in Benedictine monastic style,” and the third would be for guests, friends, and spiritually inclined pilgrims alike. He said that he and his son rose at three A.M. every morning for contemplative prayer. Though I might have expected a scholar and ascetic like Paul Sr. to be aloof, he came across as downright jolly.

  Paul Jr. ran up to us, panting and rubbing his shaved head. “It’s worse than we thought!” A particularly fierce storm the previous night had uprooted many of their young strawberries, beans, and other crops. Several of their newly planted fruit trees lay on their sides, toppled by the storm.

  In concerned tones, they discussed the damage as we walked from the open fields into the forest, toward their stretch of river, but as we got deeper into the woods, we all became so engrossed in the gorgeous canopy overhead, the birdlife, the blooming flora, that their stress faded away. Paul Jr. picked wild pokeweed out of the ground for the evening’s salad. It seemed that every newly sprouting leaf hadn’t been there when they’d walked through just a week before. Paul Sr. would pop every other leaf into his mouth, his big blue eyes reflecting the taste — bitter, sweet, tart. I asked him if he didn’t worry about eating something poisonous. He said, “Bradley taught us that there’s only one plant out here that will kill you, wild hemlock, and I know what that looks like.” They said they’d taken Bradley’s permaculture course at the community college and attended several of his lectures. Bradley’s contracting firm was building their 12 × 12s.

  “Look!” Paul Jr. exclaimed. A natural bridge had formed when a tree crashed down across their lovely river during last night’s storm. He scampered across it and waved at us with both arms from the other side. Then he disappeared into the forest beyond, in search of herbs for dinner. Paul Sr. muttered something about edible mushrooms and walked along the brook’s bank in the other direction.

  I could hear the sound of a hawk’s wings slicing the air above; the river’s rush, a buzzing bumblebee, and the rustle of an unseen animal in the middle distance. I walked the path the other way along the river, listening to the music around me, feeling an excitement with the Pauls similar to what I felt the very first time I experienced an earth-centered culture — in another forest, down in Guatemala.

  In 1994, I volunteered for a month in a remote Mam Mayan community. I stepped out of the bus in Cabrican, where I was met by Raul, a Mayan man and local schoolteacher who was to be my host. Through my twenty-two-year-old eyes, the lightly touched landscape seemed alive; it was Gaia, the animate earth that philosophers talked about in my undergraduate anthropology class.

  I lived with Raul and his family for a month, constructing fuelsaving ovens and lending a hand with house building and even smallscale silver mining. I noticed, amazingly, that folks only worked, on average, the equivalent of half a day. I learned a bit of Mam Mayan. But it was a small detail that impressed me, a child of suburbia, more than anything else: the footpaths.

  Like the ones through the Pauls’ property, the Mam footpaths wound through the woods with little allegiance to efficiency. They bent, looped, and curved playfully. The Maya considered the paths to be sacred, alive somehow, and imbued with greater life with the walking. Nobody had cars, and the bus I came in on only arrived about once a week. So we used our feet, onward to the outdoor market, the fields, the mine, the forest; untidy dirt paths, intersecting with other dirt paths. Often a rhythm would accompany our walk: a chanted tune, a kind of a Mayan-language mantra. We’d walk slowly, always, enjoying ourselves as much as getting anywhere.

  Later, in Africa, I heard the story of a pair of African porters who were hired by a Belgian trader to walk with him deep into the forest towns in search of one commodity or another. After two days of brisk walking, the porters sat down on the ground and refused to budge. The tr
ader first demanded they walk, then tried sweet-talking, and finally offered them an increase in salary — after all, time was money! No matter what he tried, they wouldn’t move. Finally the porters explained: they’d been walking too fast, and they now had to stop to wait for their souls to catch up.

  Along the Mayan footpaths, along No Name Creek, and along the Pauls’ trails, I felt the way those porters did. That slow, considered pace allows your soul to walk with you. At the Pauls’, I stopped on a footpath, their 12 × 12s barely visible through the foliage, to observe a cocoon on a twig. In the organic broth inside a cocoon, the organs of the new creature emerge with the pulse of a new heartbeat. Growth in nature happens not in a linear manner but rather through a series of pulsations. Growth is gentle; it reaches out tentatively into new terrain. This quote from Rumi captivates me: “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”

  AFTER OUR WALK, I sat with the Pauls in the middle of a large circular garden beside their 12 × 12s. They had inlaid their garden, a full acre in size, with a Christian cross of grass, which split the round acre into four parts, Native American—style. Paul Sr. explained the interwoven religious tapestry and talked about Teilhard de Chardin’s animistic idea that “consciousness shoots through everything” — even the rocks and river.

  “It’s not shooting through your plants anymore,” I tried to joke, a reference to the storm-affected plants all around us.

  “A disaster,” Paul Jr. lamented. “It’s the Greek god Deinos. Did you know the word itself, Deinos, is a combination of fear and love?”

  “The literal translation is ‘terrible lizard,’ ” his father noted.

  Suddenly a deer, which looked incredibly vivid against the blue sky, turned and leapt away from us in a flash of brown and white tail. The Pauls got excited. It was the first time a deer had wandered so close to their circular acre. I imagined the deer munching up the remainder of their veggies, but they called it “a fortuitous sign from Deinos.”

  I couldn’t help feeling, in that moment, that the Pauls seemed a tad naive. They had lived in urban environments for most of their lives, and their cerebral musings struck an ironic backdrop against the damaged crops in their field. They were trying, like Jackie, to build lives on the creative edge, in convergence with the earth. But if they were naive about the task they’d set for themselves, they certainly weren’t being destructive. How often, in fact, did a desire for growth lead to destruction? I thought of Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks, who — when asked why it was so important to him that the company grow so rapidly — responded that if he didn’t do it “Starbucks would be cannibalized by another chain that would wipe it out.” Relentless growth was a more powerful force for him than his coffee. In a memo, he complained that his company’s competitors were going after Starbucks customers. The startling words he used in that memo: “This must be eradicated.”

  “Eradicate” and “cannibalize” didn’t figure into the Pauls’ vocabulary, as they attempted to sculpt lives that, like the Maya’s, blended with Gaia. But it is hard to escape our internal colonization, I thought, as I noticed the increasingly anxious looks on the Pauls’ faces. They weren’t unaware of their frost-bitten disaster. But more than that there was a vast, raw land around them. They wanted to do things! Build things! Cut trails, dam part of the river for a bigger swimming area, and as Paul Sr. said, “put a hundred sheep out here.” A slightly horrific vision formed in my mind of their farm five years hence: not this perfectly raw, deer-filled, wild space, but a domesticated pastoral idyll with a summer camp feel. The Pauls would show people around and describe the present moment as those terrible days “when there was absolutely nothing here.”

  I recognized this as a symptom of that contagious, middle-class virus that causes addiction, anxiety, depression, and ennui: affluenza. The richer we get, the poorer we feel. To fill the void, we do. I know the feeling. Like the Pauls, I’m American, not indigenous Guatemalan. I am conditioned to equate my self-worth with being active, productive, useful.

  “Oh my Lord,” Paul Sr. said, a frown settling into his face. “I’ve got a hundred things on my list.”

  “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone,” I said, quoting Thoreau. At this, Paul Sr.’s face softened. Father and son both had a glint in their eyes as they reflected on this, their postures loose. Silence. The winds topping off the far trees. I got this acrid, almost gamey taste in my mouth just looking out into so much raw wilderness, and I said, “You could look at these thirty-two acres and think: ‘What can I do with it today?’ Or you could say, ‘What can I leave alone today?’”

  Paul Jr. had a growing smile on his face; Paul Sr. looked at me stoically.

  “We could get up in the morning,” Paul Jr. finally said, “and say: ‘Let’s not clear a forest for pasture today! Let’s not extend that road. Oh, and I know what else we cannot do today: not build a bridge over the river.’”

  He looked at his dad for approval but was met with a frown. Paul Jr. was undeterred: “ ‘Let’s not plant any more beds!’ The less we do, the more time to be. To hunt mushrooms, watch beavers, hike …”

  “… stargaze, compose poetry,” I said. “All of which changes nothing and keeps the landscape nourishing you.”

  “But we want to do things,” the elder Paul protested. “We get lost in our chores — could be working twelve hours and it flies by.”

  “But are we bringing our workaholism with us to the wilderness?” Paul Jr. asked of no one in particular. His dad shot him a searing look, and I sensed the tension between doing and nondoing, farming and philosophy. Whereas Jackie quite consciously farmed only perhaps 5 percent of her land — and that fed her just fine — leaving the rest of it a wild space for contemplation and animal habitat, these men were on the brink of developing a far larger swath of their land. There was work to be done, of course, but how much?

  After a pause, Paul Jr. continued, “We don’t need to go nuts out here. With our savings and my job …”

  “Your job?” his dad said, “Your job is driving a truck.”

  “For an organic farmers’ association.”

  “Ah, the benefits of a liberal arts education,” Paul Sr. said, standing up into his full stooped posture. “And now,” he said, turning to face the frost-bitten garden, “we have to get to work.”

  SIMPLIFY

  14. THE IDLE MAJORITY

  ON JANUARY 21, 1949, some two billion people woke up and got out of bed, still unaware of the terrible change that had taken place in their lives. Sip some tea, chat with a spouse or a neighbor, the sun tracing an arc into the sky; take winding paths to a farm field for a few hours of work. Lunch. Siesta. Maybe a little nooky. The day seemed the same as the one before for half the planet’s people, but it wasn’t. Whereas before they had been, well, regular people living regular lives, now they were something else, something ghastly: underdeveloped.

  The day before, President Harry S. Truman, in his inauguration speech, declared that the era of “development” had begun, thereby minting a new terminology to conceive of the world:

  We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism — exploitation for foreign profit — has no place in our plans. What we envision is a program of development.

  Suddenly two billion people who had been doing all right — like my ambling Mayan friends in Guatemala — were no longer doing all right. They were underdeveloped. And in one of the most spectacular missionary efforts in history, the rich nations henceforth strove to lead the underdeveloped of the world to a paradise of development, where they too would be domesticated and tethered to a logic of Total Work.

  Truman migh
t have more accurately called these “underdeveloped” people the planet’s Idle Majority, the billions who reject the Puritan work ethic and extol leisure. This “leisure ethic,” as I’ve come to dub it, isn’t laziness; it is an intelligent, holistic balance between doing and being. It is embodied by the Aymaran philosophy of “living well,” which includes enough (and not more) food, shelter, fresh air, and friendship.

  In international aid work, the philosophical chasm between living well and living better can lead to culture clash — as well as to serious marital problems. I know a French aid worker who married a woman from Burkina Faso. Their most difficult problem isn’t money or in-laws but idleness. His wife, he confided to me one day, “has to have five or six hours a day of doing absolutely nothing in order to be happy.” My friend is inclined to fill every available moment with work, hobbies, and travel, but his wife prefers to simply sit on the stoop watching the breeze in the trees, idly chatting and joking. If she doesn’t get this idle time, she becomes grouchy.

  On another occasion in the Gambia, a West African country, I found myself explaining to a local guy in a town called Gunjur, down the coast from Banjul, how workers in the United States and Europe waged decades of union battles to win an eight-hour workday.

  He looked at me with complete amazement, as if I had just said that Papa Smurf lived on the moon and was waving down at us. “They fought,” he finally said, grasping to comprehend, “to work eight hours a day?”

  “Exactly!” I exclaimed, a little proud to have shared a bit of Western labor history that might help him in his struggles.

  To my shock, the man burst out laughing. Amid guffaws he managed to get across that he and others in Gunjur worked three or four hours a day. It was absurd, he said, to fight all those decades to work more, especially in a rich country! It became a running joke with us. “Hey, Bill,” he’d say whenever he saw me, “I think I’ll work eight hours today,” then collapse into a belly laugh.