by Amy Minato
I’d been found out.
Lost in a maze of possibilities, for years I couldn’t commit to any one person, place, or lifestyle. Now it seems less and less like a game or a freedom to have so many choices, and more and more like a carnival ride that won’t let you off.
Rain
Rain has many sounds. A low hum as it strums the landscape. Loud plips where it collects on the corners of the eaves and falls, and where the ceiling drip meets the pot. Then the crescendos of windy rain, the chatter of it on the roof. A stormy opera.
I walk down Siesta Lane and the rain flows over and down my body, hurrying into the least crevice in my clothes. What else can I do but weep with the current? Sorrows I don’t remember drivel out of me, course down my face with the rain until I am washed clean, inside and out.
Rain taps the roof, pads the path, knocks on the branch. I am not alone in rain. It drums my head, strokes my face, beckons, cajoles. It is what in nature reaches out and touches. It is the voice of the sky. I can cower and shield myself, dodging into shelters, or I can surrender, and send my soul to greet it.
The natural elements beckon and bless what we hide, wanting to know all of us. We can be carried in their stream. Bird. Cloud. Wind. Rain.
Or we can run to the city where scenes buzz with action, where distractions whittle away at our emotions.
But here feelings grow wide, roam the meadow, wisp into the woods; drawn out by the quiet horizon, they can stretch to the sky’s end. Sorrow spreads and mellows. We steep in it, the ache in the marrow, tears in the rain. Joy flies in the quiver of leaves on an oak, bounds as a squirrel to a branch, catapults from the white mouth of a cloud spewing sun.
To live here means having the courage to be aware of your heartbeat, terrified at your mortality, each sense and emotion tuned and strummed.
No wonder some turn to drugs, television, shopping. How impossible to sit in all awareness in our delicate skin, pelted by the incessant rain.
Sustainability
Sara comes home from a talk by Helen Caldicott about the ecological crisis and is ready to change her life.
“We can never use plastic again.”
“Okay,” I say. This is right up my alley.
Now, I’ve heard of an eco-guru who had everyone in his intentional community scared to use toilet paper. He told them that they should be able to wipe themselves sufficiently with one square of TP. Guilt compelled them to do it, and to use only one corner of a towel to dry themselves off, and to not eat anything that needed refrigeration. This was one guilt power trip, but it worked on some people, because we have this hidden wound over how we’ve impacted the earth. For some of us the wound is less hidden, for some it’s buried deeper than a kudzu root. Sara and I were interested in realistic changes, simplifying one’s life as a challenge not as a burden. A gift that ends up, in a crazy way, being for yourself.
Together we eco-evaluate our home. First, we elaborate on our recycling efforts, setting up more specific receptacles: clear glass / colored glass / plastic recyclables / non-recyclable plastic / metals / glass containers with deposit / metal containers with deposit / containers to reuse / low-grade paper / high-grade paper / newspaper / milk cartons / real garbage.
Then, we make sure all our food waste gets composted. (Only Raul, who claims it as part of his heritage, eats much meat.) We sew small bags using fabric that has bright colorful fruits and vegetables on it for buying bulk foods, and bigger, heavier ones for carrying groceries home. (Our TV-free home is conducive to fun craft projects.) Risking pneumonia, and having few visitors, we keep our cabins cool to save wood. Finally, we beseech the others to carpool.
But that is where our eco-community unravels. In our household, five of the eight of us commute twenty miles per day to work or school, each in separate cars. Sara and I plead, we set up schedules, suggest specific carpools, but everyone’s needs are different, there is no city bus to Rainbow Valley, and even veteran bicyclists would have trouble with the steep hill riding home. Sara and I feel deflated and implicated.
It seems that we, as a society, have grown accustomed to convenience. In fact, we consider convenience an inalienable right. And we’ve made our lives crowded enough so that we can’t meet our responsibilities without it. Also, we love to move. “Always on the go.”
All this adds up to a dependence on one of the most addictive and dangerous, albeit wondrous, inventions of our century: the personal car. We are wearing a straitjacket, which, as we twist and turn to get out of it, wraps us tighter.
Living a simple, ecological lifestyle requires minimal use of a car. My next home, if I’m savvy and lucky enough, will be within walking or biking distance of most of my needs.
But for this brief, blest respite from soul-crushing capitulations, I stay home when possible, and listen to the land.
Limits
Ten hangers will hold four dresses and six blouses. Pants must fit in one drawer, shirts in another, sweaters in the wicker basket, books on the shelf.
Rather than expanding my storage space to hold my stuff, I’ve put a harness on my possessions. Everything I own needs to fit in the confines of my cabin. No more hangers, no more drawers.
In a country where the average person acquires about fifty-two clothing items per year, this is a radical activity, oppressive at times. But the result is sanity, clarity, peace. For each item discarded, a sign reading “Liberty” swings gaily in the wind.
Any books I am unlikely to open get donated to the library. When I buy a new piece of clothing, another is given away. Changing possessions keeps my creativity alive. Getting rid of as many as I acquire sharpens my will, and my practice of nonattachment. I now have a Zen wardrobe.
Sometimes I’ll miss a favorite shirt or dress, and wish I’d kept it. A portion of my attire is infused with meaning—because of whom or where they’re from, where they’ve been and with whom. My multi-patched jeans from high-school wilderness trips, the red Guatemalan shirt I wore attending a birth, the indigo vest into which I knit all my passion for an unavailable blue-eyed man—desire stitched into its soft weave. The ones made by hand or from distant lands. These I try to keep. To mend and mull over. When I don such clothes I am wearing memories, reminding myself who I am and have been.
And so I forge a tentative harmony with possessions, floating together like debris in a swift current. All of us flowing downstream. Scattered to the ocean in the end.
Sharing
Inevitably it will happen. You’ll be making dinner and need another egg for your cake or a teaspoon more of lemon juice for a sauce. Your guests are coming over in five minutes. No one’s home to ask, so you borrow the egg, the lemon. You reach onto a shelf marked with someone else’s name. You’ll square with them later.
We learn a lot about each other when this happens. Whom you can never borrow from, whom you can always borrow from, from whom you can only borrow certain things that are impossible to discern until after you borrow the wrong thing and get scolded. Who needs you to replace stuff now.
We learn who would freeze through dinner before borrowing a sweater, who would rather borrow than use their own things, who borrows without mentioning it, who can’t remember what’s theirs, any way. Who’s not careful with stuff. Who is.
A salad spinner gets borrowed and broken and all hell breaks loose. The owner is steamed and everyone has opinions. The tension around dinner prompts a discussion of property values and we draw on our childhoods for explanation of our differences.
“We were punished if we broke anything.”
“Everything was common property in our family.”
“My sister and I fought over possessions.”
“It was okay to borrow something but if you wrecked it you were screwed.”
“All our stuff was junky so it didn’t matter.”
“It was honorable to share.”
“It was rude to borrow.”
The hard feelings around our different styles begin to soften. We learn abo
ut each other.
Sara will put away her treasured items.
Be careful with whatever you borrow from Luke.
Amy wishes that most things were shared.
Replace soon what you borrow from Paul and Natalie. They have plans for it.
Raul doesn’t believe in private property.
Never borrow from Jack and Rita.
So rather than a set policy we juggle our differences. Tough to keep straight but a way to respect the individual within the community, and our varying degrees of need for self-sufficiency.
Meanwhile the natural world waits to be included in the exchange—bees pollinate our vegetables, mosquitoes draw our blood, and wolves recede from our roads. No requests, no explanations. But wait. Was that the squirrel calling for a house meeting?
Food
Because we are a group of fair-weather farmers, not all the vegetables we eat leap onto our plates from our garden. Also, our garden water is somewhat saline which inhibits quite a few of our crops. But that’s an excuse. Mostly we Siestans are half-hearted gardeners, leaving the serious row-hoeing to experts.
In Oregon and other states you can become a member of a farm. Community Supported Agriculture is a system where a group of families and individuals buy shares of a farm’s yearly crop. You pay up front for a season’s worth of fresh, organic, locally grown food.
From May through November you pick up your delectable variety of fruits and vegetables from a designated spot in your neighborhood (usually another member’s porch or garage). You trust luck about what and how much you’ll get each week. Exotic new vegetables, exciting recipes, and sometimes phone numbers are passed around. Everyone’s invited to visit or help out at the farm and to come to the few festive gatherings each season.
One day I visit the couple that runs Full Circle Farm. Jude, with a seven-month-pregnant belly carries equally rotund pumpkins under each arm, stacking them onto an old truck. “Usually, we deliver by bike trailer,” she says, “but not with pumpkins!” Her cheeks flush, her eyes shine. Martin greets me, grinning through his mop of hair and thick beard, wiping cracked hands on worn overalls.
I join them in a potato dig. Jude shovels up the soil and we scramble for spuds, brushing clumped mud off them with our gloves, filling box after box.
Large, dark clouds bunch and bustle above our small crew in an autumn field. Within the flat expanse of land and sky, our three hunched figures seem inconsequential, whispering and gleaning slowly along the rows. The rain starts and we head to a shelter for lunch.
Jude has cooked stir-fry on a propane burner. They lease the land so there’s no house here. Volunteers have helped rig up this rustic shelter.
After lunch we sort potatoes beneath it, pitching them into piles by size. Martin separates the purple ones for seed stock. Jude fills the bags. We laugh and swap stories. The rain ends. The day passes too fast.
They send me home on my bike with pockets full of garlic and kale, good conversation, and deep respect for their work. Independent, organic farming is a rich and difficult life. Sharing it for just one day has given me a new measure for my own.
Happily, the dirt in my palm creases takes days to fade.
November The western screech owl’s call is more a stutter than a hoot, a repeating monotone “who-who-ho-ho-o-o” that picks up speed but loses volume, like a bouncing ball. It punctuates the quiet night, coming from the soft dark of the trees. I feel compelled to respond, to answer this tiny feathered creature’s haunting insistence, but have yet to discern its offering, to begin to comprehend it.
Snails
Each morning snail trails decorate the entrance to the main house, curling around the welcome mat. The sun lights these silver hieroglyphics, messages from their nocturnal wanderings.
Why do the snails come here, I wonder? Do they want in? Are they trying to tell us something? Or does the cement stoop provide the perfect dancing pad for courtship? Snails are hermaphrodites, so whoever shows up is fair game.
I like to imagine that they mate all night outside our door. And with snails, it may take all night—upright with their gooey fronts sliming together. For whatever reason they come, I look forward to their secret scribbles brightening our doorstep.
Snails are honored in Buddhism, as they climbed onto the Buddha’s head while he meditated to protect it from the sun.
Buddha statues show snails arrayed like curls, spiraling around his crown. There they lay with their hard shells and soft insides. What better emissaries of stillness? Creatures that take their time have my recent admiration. Enamored, as I am these days, of slowing down.
During several dynasties in ancient China, you could tell the wealthy because they wore long beads around their waist. This kept them in dignified motion. If the beads clanked together, they were walking too fast. Being rich, of course, meant you didn’t have to hurry.
How opposite it is in our country today. Being successful means you can answer your phone fast—it’s on your hip! You can move across the world faster than birds, you can send e-mails instead of waiting for the postal service.
In the city park I watch a determined mom run along a circular path bouncing a baby in a jogging stroller. The wide-eyed child looks as scared as my cat does when I have to drive him somewhere. Quixote’s tongue hangs out and he leaps from window to window before burying himself under a seat. He knows we mammals aren’t designed to move so fast, except for maybe a few of his cousins, like the cheetah.
When cars were first invented, people scoffed. Why would anyone need to go anywhere as fast as fifteen miles per hour? “The faster we go, the less time we have,” a character bemoans in The Magnificent Ambersons, a classic Orson Welles movie. And there is evidence that those of us who regularly use computers grow impatient with the rest of life happening in real time.
A few years ago in Mexico a friend and I walked down to her village to buy the day’s food. We strolled through cobbled streets, stopping at the coffee vendor, the fruit stand, the post office, and finally the tortilla shop. In each place Alejandra knew the owner, and would visit several lively minutes with them, catching up on family, friends, and local politics before moving on.
In this way the townspeople “polished each other’s hearts,” I was told. People of all ages and aspects charmed and flirted with each other, keeping their community healthy, their members feeling valued and looked after.
Robert Pinsky argues that “America is the idea of motion.” We hit the ground running back at Plymouth Rock and haven’t slowed down since. We’re a restless tribe, looking for Eden across the next hill, destroying the land where we are because we’re on our way somewhere else, anyway.
I once rode in a speedboat on its new run into China from Hong Kong. The dignified figures in wide brimmed hats beside their water buffalo may as well have been from another century. They looked up and stood completely still, up to their knees in mud, as we raced past their rice paddies. Most likely their family had been growing rice on that spot for centuries in the same careful manner. Our boat spewed oil into the river as we stared back, with the incomprehensible luxury of tourists, feeling, in my case at least, more than a little silly. “Death will catch up with you anyway,” I imagined them saying. Who did we think we were fooling?
At Siesta Lane today the rain is a lullaby. Catkins hang and sway like gold lanterns on the hazelnut tree’s filigree of branches. Rivulets circulate the meadow as my breath livens the blood in each capillary.
These meandering loops of water, blood, slime, the graceful trails I follow.
Cravings
“Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”
“Chocolate cake.”
“Yep.”
“Brownies. Fudge sundaes. Cinnamon rolls.”
“What’s in the pantry?”
“Rice cakes. Stale graham crackers.”
“Oh.”
“Any cocoa?”
Pretty soon Sara and I have created “Graham Éclairs.” Graham crack
ers with chocolate sauce sprinkled on top and peanuts. This temporarily assuages our sweet teeth. Our craving for sugar makes sense evolutionarily. It kept our ancestors from eating unripe fruit and dispersing immature seeds. Today, it fuels our economy.
Being out of town forces us to let the wave of our small addictions and indulgences pass over our heads like a swarm of gnats, or to improvise.
You get through one day then the next without TV, electric heat, ice cream, or whatever you’re craving, and eventually you hardly think about it.
I invite a good friend to visit me one weekend and add, “Can you believe I haven’t had chocolate for a month?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t come,” my friend replies soberly. I wonder if it is the lack of chocolate, or the thought of me being without chocolate that makes her uneasy. Finally, deducing my veiled SOS, she brightens. “You want milk or bittersweet?”
Although I consider my cravings fairly harmless, it’s nice to tie them up in the stable when necessity requires, and a joyride to let them out after.
Survival
Oregon has the ninth-highest number of endangered species in our country. A few of these plants: Bradshaw’s lomatium, Willamette daisy, and Kincaid’s lupine live in the few remaining wetlands, one of which lies just over nearby Gimpel Hill, an area that the Nature Conservancy has recently burned in an attempt to help reestablish native plants. Use of fire was a common practice of the early native people of the area, the Kalapuya Indians. In this way they would keep back some of the trees encroaching on their, and the deer’s, food plants. The Nature Conservancy mimics this technique to assist its conservation efforts.
This month, the prescribed fire kills several ash trees that need removal. The Siesta coalition plans to help open the land by cutting down a few of the dead ash trees for firewood. Mick, our lanky live-in botanist; Luke, the printmaker from Los Angeles; a rented chainsaw looking like a large piranha on the truck seat; and me, whose closest experience with heavy machinery was driving a Zamboni ten years ago. We make a fearful foursome.
