WORK SONG, part 2: A Vision
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If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisaical dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

– WENDELL BERRY –

For me, this poem resides in the heart of my experience of Brook’s Bend Farm.  Since going there in the latter part of June, I think back to its brooks winding through swathes of thigh-high ferns, and the small-town charm of a place that has not lost touch with its agricultural roots.  Remembering Brook’s Bend inspires me to act confidently in my pursuit of an ecologically regenerative livelihood.  For upon traveling to the middle of Massachusetts, I made my landing on a farm that actively develops its carrying capacity for people living wholesome lives on the land.  One manner by which they accomplish this feat is by offering courses like the one I attended there in June, on advanced permaculture design.

During a permaculture design workshop, any manner of things might happen.  Fortunately for myself and the other participants, our course came straight from the playbooks of Dave Jacke and Jono Nieger, two of the northeast’s foremost professionals in the realm of permaculture design.  Both of these gentlemen give vast amounts of energy and attention to the continual development of Brook’s Bend, building up an impressive bounty of information for ambitious designers to draw from.  Each course and planning session builds on the last in this way.  The resulting complexity built into the challenges facing the design teams creates a sensational learning experience.  Not surprisingly, these exceptional teachers hold that the design process itself becomes the student’s greatest guiding force.  The teacher’s main function tends increasingly towards giving tools, demonstrating how to use them, and making sure the play goes well.

I found this to ring true as my design team was turned loose on 50 + acres to do an assessment of the property and to create a design for an integrated forest use and management plan in 3 days.  The potential for exploration and the resources at our disposal set off a design frenzy that kept us up into the wee hours, night after night.   Our design team congealed into a veritable force of nature as the data poured in and the deadline drew near.  Of course, in most any professional design scenario, the design team would have much more time than three days to work at such a task.  We had no such luxury.

Allow me to digress for a moment on some of the luxuries we did have…

1) The food was extraordinary.  Chief Cook Mira Nussbaum nourished us to our core twice a day with local, organic foods prepared in an unusual little kitchen on wheels which was built around a “cadillac” cook stove (see photos below).

2) We were able to journey out on some field trips to full-on forest gardens nearby.   I found myself struck with awe upon finally seeing skirret, gooseberries, currants, and 10 year old trees copious with paw paws, after reading about these mysterious plants for years without knowing they really existed.  We visited Jono Neiger’s backyard paradise, and there was a trip to one of his client’s homesteads as well (which I missed, unfortunately).  To top it all off, some of us were fortunate enough to visit Eric Toensmeier’s urban forest garden site in downtown Holyoke.  This place was incredibly dense with productive perennial plants, and the soil was pulsing with fertility, in testament to the power of carefully designed ecosystem dynamics.  Eric kindly assured us all of how easily accomplished just such a garden can be.

3)  Every participant contributed substantial greatness to the group.  The opportunity to collaborate with such an incredible assortment of folks just doesn’t come along all that often.  Just sharing company with that caliber of people does something to you.  I felt like I added several IQ points just from the osmosis factor in the room!

If it wasn’t for all the hard work going on during those nine days, it might have felt like a vacation.  Let me assure you, it takes a specific sort of individual to enjoy themselves under the expectations that come along with the work load we were under during this intensive.  And although I proudly consider myself one of the cheerfully obsessive minority, I must recognize that working toward such ambitious goals can benefit dramatically from a larger appropriation of temporal resources.

The time crunch had an interesting effect on the nature of our designs.  There were great flourishes of whimsy, such as ovoidal tree house pods for the interns and taco shacks for campesinos in need of a break, which may or may not have much practical merit.  Most of us were aware that the more well thought-out and financially responsible plans were more likely to see the light of day, and generating fully-realized, landscape-level designs with human-scale social structures, appropriate technologies, and impeccably crafted business plans was the shared intention going into the assignment.  Yet, however lofty our ambitions, and flashy our drawings and diagrams, I felt as though simply engaging in the design process from beginning to… “end” had much more to teach us than we could ever hope to impart upon our audience with our rushed-out design presentations.  That is the beauty of cleverly-crafted experiential exercises after all, especially where design is concerned.

I will say, at the risk of endangering my tone of modesty, the presentations were awesome!

So were the festivities around the campfire that ensued.

Breaking away to leave Brook’s Bend was truly a struggle.  The farm exists as just the sort of place that Wendell Berry conjures up in the poem opening this blog.  The forest floor felt spongier than anywhere I’ve set foot.  Health and wisdom seemed to be on an exponential growth curve.  The traditions of the past were connecting with the solutions of the present day in a timely, organic fashion.  The people coming together at Brook’s Bend Farm can take pride in the lives that their lives are preparing.  Certainly, the awareness of what that feels like gave us something to share upon returning home.

 

credit: Jorge Espinosa for photographs 2,3,8,& 9