Daniel Bowman Jr. : Clearing, Stones

Clearing

By Daniel Bowman Jr.

Today I’m clearing limbs
from last night’s storm.
The morning sun is so calm
it’s as if it never happened.
The buffalo have relaxed.
The pigs look happy.
A small goat has freed himself
and will need to be retrieved.

The ride
from the ranch to the farm
is hot and dusty.
When we cross the creek,
the dog knows what to do.

It’s just us out here
for many miles.
Sap has hardened
on my hands, neck, jaw,
and in the bend of my arm.

Stones

By Daniel Bowman Jr.

Behind the farm there’s a new field.
I spend the afternoon combing it for stones,
filling the wagon.
Later I’ll use them
to build up the banks of the creek.

Daniel Bowman Jr. has published or will be published in The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, The Bitter Oleander, The Midwest Quarterly, Redactions, Rock & Sling, and Seneca Review. An excerpt from his novel Beggars in Heaven is forthcoming in Stonework, Issue 6 (Spring 2008). He lives in upstate New York with his wife and daughter and teaches part-time at Roberts Wesleyan College.

Comments

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Miche Fambro
June 24, 2008 at 8:07 pm · Edit

Funny how words can relax and calm you.
Just simple words. “Hey I could have written that”, but I didn’t, I would have continued to overlook a simplicity that makes me who I am.

My wife was brought up on a farm and I can still recall my father-in-law retrieving sap from a tree wearing a sign around his neck saying “sap”.

I’m not a literary person but the words took me to a place that brought me a simple joy.

Thanks.
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Nick Lykling
June 27, 2008 at 9:21 am · Edit

The images in poems such as these speak to the spirit of this publication (I’m so glad you included these) and bring us to places we need to be for the healing of ourselves and the earth. In my mind’ s eye, I see Wendell Berry as the speaker in the poems. These moments mean so much to us, and as I read Miche’s comments following the poems, I heard more poetry speaking to poetry,

“My wife was brought up on a farm and I can still recall my father-in-law retrieving sap from a tree
wearing a sign around his neck saying “sap”.”

There is no better feeling for those of us who are not “literary” to behold the beauty in poetry and let it take us to the poetry that lives within us.

Thank you editors, Daniel, and Miche for creating this dialogue and beauty…

Mil Norman-Risch: Downingsville Road, Vermont

Downingsville Road, Vermont

By Mil Norman-Risch

Me alone, fields on each side,
walking wrong, somehow,
on a road at night.

Silence, except shoeshuffle on gravel;
I have to make things out by contrast as I go:
Fence, field, barn, gate. What’s whitest here is road.

A far off porchlamp layers light as waves,
The hayfield’s stalktips crest and angle,
Swelling, then dimming, into nowhere.

I pass a house, where the sight of sudden color
–yellow panes of light–makes me form these words:
“like sorrows laid out one by one in squares.”

I think of the trappers and farmers who walked this road
years ago, alone in a darkness, listening, waiting
not for sentences, but for foxes, for rain.

Mil Norman-Risch was the winner of American Poetry Journal’s 2007 American Poet’s Prize. She has published poetry in Willow Springs, White Pelican Review, Sojourners, and Amelia. Avatar Review and Freshwater accepted poems for forthcoming editions. A poem of hers is featured in Agha Shahid Ali’s anthology, Ravishing DisUnities, (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Norman-Risch teaches and writes in Richmond, Virginia.

Dorothy Day: On Distributism

On Distributism: An Answer to John Cort

By Dorothy Day

[From The Catholic Worker, December 1948, 1,3.]

[Editor's Note: John Cort, who died at age 92 in 2006, was a Catholic poverty/labor activist, editor at Commonweal and author of Christian Socialism: An Informal History and Dreadful Conversions: The Making of a Catholic Socialist. "Distributism" is most simply defined as a Catholic form of agrarianism that argues, in the name of social justice, for economic property to be widely distributed rather than to be controlled by a few capitalists or governments.]

First as to our disregarding the Popes. Our pages in the Catholic Worker are filled with excerpts from little-heeded addresses of the Holy Father. Here is one:

“Life on the Land is a matter deserving special concern and consideration, though too often our sociologists and politicians tend to turn their minds instead to the problems raised by the concentration of large-scale industry. These latter problems have indeed an urgency and acuteness which we are far from questioning, but haec oportuit facere et illa non omittere, it was right to heed the one wrong not to heed the other. — Matt. 23: 23.” Pius XII.

Here is another good one:

“The Church wants some limit set to the dwarfing of man himself in these days through the emergence and dominance of the machine and the continued expansion of large scale industry. Among small craftsmen, personal work, till now at least, has kept its full value. The craftsman transforms his raw material and carries through the whole of a work; to that work he is closely linked, and in it there is an ample field for his intellectual skill, his artistic capabilities, his good taste, his deftness and delicacy of touch in making things that, from his point of view, are greatly superior to impersonal and standardized mass-produced things. And therefore small craftsmen as a class are, one may say, a picked militia defending the dignity and personality of the workmen.”

And most familiar is that paragraph of Pius XI: ‘Bodily labor, which was decreed by Providence for the good of man’s body and soul, even after original sin, has everywhere been changed into an instrument of strange perversion: for dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, where men are corrupted and degraded.”

Also Pope Pius XI, in 1931: “We must reassert it the more strongly now, his (Leo XIII) salutary injunctions have been too often consigned to oblivion, either through deliberate suppression or in the belief that they were impractical–a false belief, for they can and must be applied today . . . for modern machinery and industrialism rapidly flooding great tracts of territory–alike in the new world and in the ancient civilizations of the Far East–have enormously increased the numbers of dispossessed proletarians, those whose groanings go up from earth to God.”

And here is our mandate:

Pope Pius XII on Sept. 1, 1944, “made explicit and formal Catholic social teaching what had hitherto been an inference from reason, repudiable by anyone sufficiently dishonest or sufficiently interested,” (writes Harold Robbins).

“Small and medium holdings in agriculture, in the arts and trades, in commerce and industry, should be guaranteed and promoted . . .

“And it should not be said that technical progress is opposed to such a scheme, and that in its irresistible currents it carries all activities forward towards gigantic businesses and organizations before which a social system founded on the private property of individuals must inevitably collapse.

“No. Technical progress does not determine economic life as a destined and necessary factor. It has, indeed, too often yielded timidly to the demands of the rapacious, selfish plans calculated to accumulate capital indefinitely.

“Why should it not, then, yield also to the necessity of maintaining and ensuring private property for all–that cornerstone of social order? Even technical progress as a social factor should not prevail over the general good, but it should rather be directed and subordinated to it”

And in April, 1939, Pope Pius XII had said:

“In this age of mechanization the human person becomes merely a more perfect tool in industrial production and–how sad it is to say it–a perfected tool for mechanized warfare.”

And as for the system as a whole: “The wounds and bruises of individualistic and materialistic mankind cannot be healed by a system which is materialistic in its own principles and mechanistic in the application of them.”

It is sad to point out that these quotations are not the ones which John Cort, or even Fr. Smith or Fr. Cantwell seem to be familiar with.

Let me quote from a letter from a “worker priest in France.”

“My life in the factory has begun to be a slow and increasing revolt against the capitalist world. This began with the inhuman attitude of the employer who inspects the workers like a room of machines. It continued with the question of the wages, of efficiency, of the conditions of women’s work, the fighting for union rights, with all this atmosphere of factories, while the worker for a century has felt that he has been oppressed and exploited. Outside my own experience I had in the same line the reactions of our mechanic who is weighted down with forty years of work; he appears to me as a beautiful example of a specialist worker, who is conscientious, a type of man whom I love as much as a scientist or a statesman. His conversations which are rare are almost always echoes of this revolt slowly growing in the heart of the working class. Either it be that the worker has no right to eat his bread between seven and noon, or it be that his time is checked and his efficiency scheduled. The wage earner is not a free man, he is sold out. He is not a man who works with an engineer or an employer, but a factor of production which has been hired and will be exploited to the maximum, not even directed by a human feeling of efficiency but rather solely by the profit of money. Capitalism distills today more than ever, in the consciences of the workers the feeling of being pawns and the urge to revolt.” And the priest goes on to link up the indifference of the Masses to religion with their resentment towards the Church which they feel has exploited them and lined up with the capitalist.

The above papal quotations were sent me by my son-in-law, David Hennessy, of Stotler’s Crossroads, West Virginia. He adds, “for side reading in the debate in the Commonweal, reread Eric Gill in ‘The Factory System and Christianity,’ page 21, in It All Goes Together. Fr. McNabb in his Old Principles and the New Order, Action Stations, page 111, and follow this up with reading ‘Sertum Laetitiae’, Pius XII’s address to the American Bishops, in 1939. Remember he had a good look at America in his visit here. The N.C.W.C. edition, page ten, carries a list of the vices of the day here in America, in the midst of which he placed, the ‘flight from the land.’ You will note that this evil is not mentioned for discussion in the study club section and is not even listed in the index as the twenty other odd vices are!”

Speaking of David Hennessy reminds me of another crack of John Cort’s, and that is that most of the agrarians are firmly entrenched in New York City. Irene, Mary Naughton and I have been gathering names of those families, friends of ours, who have toeholds on the land, and we have reached well over sixty. They are pretty busy people so they don’t have much time to enter into controversies.

But there are plenty of the priests and the people who are on our side, but perhaps they are not in high places, not so articulate nor so readily heard. I presume John means me and Bob Ludlow being firmly entrenched in the city. If he knew how many times I escape to my daughter’s to garden, to can, to take care of the children; and then there is the farm at Newburgh which provided a bread line of 350 with pork (six pigs) apple sauce, potatoes and tomatoes on Thanksgiving day.

As a practical man, as a father, and as a tenant who is about to be evicted, I should think John would see our point, but he never has, in all the years we have known and been fond of one another. He is a willful and a wayward son!

This is an ‘old controversy that is being carried on. Blackfriars in England opened up its columns to it thirteen years ago or thereabouts. In the columns of The Catholic Worker, 1939, there was a controversy between Fr. Paul Hanley Furfey and Fr. John J. Hugo on “romantic agrarians.” All the while John Cort was with us on Molt street it went on. He well knows our stand through all the years (I wish he would go over the back issues sometime) and that we begged people not to confuse immediate issues and a long range program, every time we were engaged in any industrial dispute. One of the reasons why he talks of our changing our position is because we were indeed active in ‘36 for instance, both in the seamen’s strike and during the early organizing of the CIO, which we upheld in spite of all opposition then from press and pulpit. There was never a strike, whether it was the Ohrbach strike, the National Biscuit Company strike, a brewery strike, a stock yards organizing campaign, steel and auto strikes, or the sitdown strikes in which we were not accused of being either Communist or Communist sympathizers.

It is true we have been inactive in that field since the outbreak of the war. We could only look with dismay on the prospect of bettering the conditions of workers in industries which were helping out and working along with the war effort. As for the General Strike, advocated not only by Robert Ludlow but also by me since the beginning of the war (see the early issues of The Catholic Worker), we advise people to think of it a bit more seriously, and not just as an anarchistic and nihilistic dream. Jack London, whose works on socialism and the class struggle are still best sellers in Russia, wrote a pamphlet once on the General Strike in the form of a story. The self-discipline, the thoughtful care of the sick, the weak, the children shown in this little study, are worthy of study in the days of violence, when the use of force has come to be the only weapon accepted by Communist and Christian alike.

Yes, we are quite willing to think in terms of immediate needs, the immediate struggle and I think we show that willingness to deal with the actual and the concrete in every issue of our paper which reach, we remind you, 65,000 people every month. That is the number of papers which go out. As to how many people see them, that is another matter. Oftentimes statisticians think in terms of so many readers to each paper, so that circulation figures are not too certain.

We deal with conditions of work, with wages, with housing, and the existence of our Houses of Hospitality in New York, for men and for women, in Rochester, in Harrisburg, in Pittsburgh (there it has been taken over by the diocese, but we started it), in Cleveland and Detroit testify to that. Our breadlines become longer. In New York, where jobs are scarce in spite of full employment in the rest of the country, we serve 800 meals a day at least. We have our feet in the gutters. Louis Murphy, of the Detroit house, says that we are the gutter sweepers of the diocese.

Just the same, I’d like to call our farm at Newburgh, The Ivory Tower. It is a title of the Blessed Mother, you will recall.

But we plead with our readers to keep a long view, a long range program of action. Hilaire Belloc, in his Restoration of Property, gives a good blueprint for action. He talks about large-scale machinery, what must come under common ownership (and he endorses communal as against state ownership) and what can be broken up into smaller units. His book is short, is factual, is practical, and it is just republished by Sheed and Ward, for two dollars in this country, and there is a seventy-five cent paper covered edition published in England.

One of the saddest things about this whole controversy is that our opponents look upon agrarianism as visionary. Here is what Chesterton said about such a criticism:

“They say it (the peasant society) is Utopian, and they are right. They say it is idealistic, and they are right. They say it is quixotic, and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out of the world; every name that measure how remote from them and their sort is the standard of honorable living; every name that will emphasize and repeat the fact that property and liberty are sundered from them and theirs, by an abyss between heaven and hell.”

This sounds pretty harsh from the gentle Chesterton, but we, who witness the thousands of refugees from our ruthless industrialism, year after year, the homeless, the hungry, the crippled, the maimed, and see the lack of sympathy and understanding, the lack of Christian charity accorded them (to most they represent the loafers and the bums, and our critics shrink in horror to hear them compared to Christ, as our Lord Himself compared them) to us, I say, who daily suffer the ugly reality of industrial capitalism and its fruits–these words of Chesterton ring strong

As to the industry councils which John Cort and his friends advocate, here is what the bishops said in their 1948 statement. “Such a program of social order (industry councils) seems to us to be the answer to the questionings of high minded leaders of industry, and to the explicit proposals of the sound and responsible leaders of organized labor. We bespeak for it in these critical times dispassionate consideration and calm, open discussion in an atmosphere of good will, and in a disposition to seek solutions by agreement rather than by force, whether political or economic.”

These industry councils, made up of “representatives of management and labor, under the supervision, and not the control of government” if they ever do get together, could well study the problem of decentralization, and the contol proposals of such men as Hilaire Belloc. (I wish to emphasize how practical a blue print this book is.)

But meanwhile, Ed Willock, looking upon things as they are, points out in the Christmas issue of Integrity, in a far clearer way than I can, the issues involved in this controversy, pointing out that controversy is good, but not misunderstanding.

So let us keep up the controversy for the clarification of thought, and it will be with good will, because we have that basic unity of those of one faith.

Dorothy Day was a journalist in New York City who converted to Catholicism and founded The Catholic Worker.

[For more information on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, see the Dorothy Day Library on the Web at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/.]

Philip Bogdonoff: A Nonviolent Alternative to War

Civilian-Based Defense: A Short History of a Nonviolent Alternative to War

By Philip Bogdonoff

[First published in 1982, and used now with permission of the author.]

This article briefly documents the history of an alternative, nonviolent defense system which has been under development for several decades. Its purpose is to provide a perspective, not only on the history and work that is behind this idea, but on the growth of a movement for the abolition of war. Those who are interested in pursuing the history in greater depth are encouraged to delve into the articles and books mentioned here.

Roots of the theory of nonviolent resistance can be traced back to the writings of Thoreau and Tolstoy and even earlier. The germination of the idea of a nonviolent alternative to war begins, perhaps, with William James’ essay in 1910, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James felt that the virtues instilled by the military, like honor, courage, discipline, and efficiency, must be maintained and proposed a national peacetime service requirement. More directly, Bertrand Russell, in “War and Nonresistance” (Atlantic Monthly, August 1915), proposed that concerted nonviolent resistance be used against a possible German invasion of England. After World War I, Walter Lippmann replied to James with “The Political Equivalent of War” and argued that “It is not sufficient to propose an equivalent for the military virtues. It is even more important to work out an equivalent for the military methods and objectives.” What is needed for “the abolition of war” are “other ways of deciding those issues which have hitherto been decided by war….”

Gandhi began writing about the possibilities of national defense by nonviolent resistance in 1931. He recommended a nonviolent defense policy to Switzerland in 1931, to Abyssinia in 1935, to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and to Britain in 1940. The Congress Party in India rejected his proposal for a nonviolent defense in 1939, and again in 1940. One of Gandhi’s principal contributions was perhaps his insistence that nonviolent resistance was not a passive, acquiescing technique — it required courage and discipline and strength.

Richard Gregg suggested nonviolent resistance as a “substitute for war” in his 1934 classic, The Power of Nonviolence, and made direct comparison between military strategy and nonviolent strategy. A “plan of campaign against all war and all preparation for war” was given by Barthelemy de Ligt in his 1935 book, The Conquest of Violence. In 1937, Kenneth Boulding, in a short pamphlet, Paths of Glory: A New Way with War, published by the Friends Book Centre, London, developed the general need for a substitute and offered “non-violent resistance” as an alternative. He also addressed briefly some of the problems he foresaw would be associated with transarmament (possibly the first use of this word).

Jessie Wallace Hughan (If We Should Be Invaded: Facing a Fantastic Hypothesis, 1937) and Krishnalal Shridharani (War Without Violence, 1939) also published material on nonviolent responses to foreign aggression. Gandhi, too, continued to publish relevant material (e.g., “Can India Be Defended? New Weapons Against the Invader!”, Liberty, August 1940).

Most of these early treatments are characterized by moderate to extensive amounts of criticism of military defense and their proposals for civilian defense are generally limited to merely advocating the idea.

In April 1957, a “blow-up” occurred in Britain. A highly esteemed military man, fourth lineal descendant of a family of naval officers, proposed that Britain should renounce the use of nuclear weapons, strongly limit its conventional military forces, and prepare for “nonviolent resistance.” It was a startling proposal coming from such quarters and it created quite a bit of discussion. Stephen King-Hall’s book, Defense in the Nuclear Age, appeared in March of 1958. His critique of military defense and nuclear weapons had a large impact coming from an expert and authority on military strategy.

The effect of King-Hall’s proposal and the subsequent discussion represented a turning point in the development of the civilian-based defense concept; politicians and the military became involved as never before; the rationale presented for the policy tended to shift from moral reasons to strategic and military reasons; and the idea began to be considered as an alternative to the current nuclear defense theories.

More works followed. Johan Galtung, in Defense Without a Military System (1959), after another systematic critique of military defense, went on to ask what should be defended? and how? Galtung developed eleven strategic principles for civilian defense in a more scholarly approach than the previously mentioned works.

Quincy Wright, et al.’s anthology, Preventing World War III: Some Proposals (1962) included three chapters on civilian-based defense in a comprehensive volume which contains many different approaches written by many authorities in the field. The idea of a civilian-based defense began to be taken more seriously.

In 1962, an action-group in Stuttgart, W. Germany, which included Theodor Ebert, now a professor of political science in Berlin, wrote a pamphlet dealing with nonviolent struggle and outlining a “nonviolent civilian army.” The pamphlet offered the most thorough treatment yet of the preparation and organization necessary for civilian-based defense.

In the mid 60s, Gene Sharp began to discuss the need for a functional substitute for war, assuming that conflict is inevitable and plays a positive role in society. Sharp used and analyzed historical cases to back up his theories. He also criticized the idea of a combined civilian and military defense, arguing a pure civilian, nonviolent defense was more effective.

In September 1964, Gene Sharp, Adam Roberts, April Carter, Theodor Ebert, and others convened what was to become a landmark research conference at Oxford on “civilian defense.” They invited many eminent figures to present papers on a variety of subjects, including: “Forms of Military Attack” by Alun Gwynne Jones, then military correspondent of the London Times, later Lord Chalfont and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs; “The Coup d’Etat” by Lieutenant-Colonel D.J. Goodspeed, military historian; and “Aspects of Totalitarian Systems” by Professor Ernest Bramsted, a well-known researcher on totalitarianism. Some of these and other papers were later edited by Adam Roberts into a book and published in 1967 as The Strategy of Civilian Defense (and in 1968 in an American edition, Civilian Resistance as a National Defense). The book contained many historical examples and some early efforts at consideration of strategy and transarmament.

It was also during this year that efforts were made to change and define the vocabulary. The term “civilian defense” began to be deliberately employed. And “transarmament” was substituted for “disarmament” to indicate that the idea was not to leave a country defenseless, but to change from one type of defense system to another.

In September 1967 a follow-up to the Oxford conference took place in Munich, arranged by the Association of German Scientists. There were more focused contributions on the problems of transarmament, and some consideration of the possible effects of the policy in the international arena. Theodor Ebert proposed that a working party on civilian defense be established within the Association. Later, this working party was established.

The spontaneous resistance offered by the Czechs and Slovaks to the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 caused considerable fallout in this field of investigation. Many books and articles were published in response and more serious interest began to be given in official government circles to the concept of civilian resistance.

The Strategy of Civilian Defense reappeared in paperback with a new introduction dealing with the events in Czechoslovakia. The report from the Munich conference was also issued in a second edition, and a Norwegian anthology of case studies (Gleditsch, 1965) appeared in an enlarged edition in Sweden. Since 1969, Theodor Ebert has been editor of Gewaltfreie Aktion (Nonviolent Action), a quarterly publication on nonviolence and nonviolent defense. And in 1969, one of the hitherto most developed books on the subject of civilian defense was published in Sweden (Tryggve Hedtjarn et al., 1969, The Politics of Peace–Civilian Defense). The book attempts to present a thorough view of the problems of defense and the possible role of civilian defense from a perspective of radical social criticism.

More governments became interested in civilian-based defense. The Norwegian Defense Research Establishment issued a study on the possible role of civilian defense within the total security policy of Norway in Non-Military Defense and Norwegian Security Policy (Johan Jorgen Holst et al., 1967 [Holst later became Minister of Defense for Norway, 1986-1989]). In Denmark, the Minister for Disarmament and Culture asked the Institute for Peace and Conflict Research in Copenhagen to conduct a survey of the literature on civilian defense, which was published in English in 1974 as War Without Weapons, by Anders Boserup and Andrew Mack. The Swedish Ministry of Defense supported a research program at the Department for Peace and Conflict Research at the University of Uppsala.

Major academic conferences were held in Finland (Tampere, October 1970) and Sweden (Uppsala, 1972). Later conferences were organized in Belgium (Brussels, 1976), Norway (Oslo, 1978), and Omaha, Nebraska, USA (1978 and 1982).There have been many more since.

Perhaps the most significant and illuminating publication in this field has been Gene Sharp’s three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973). This work has become the reference on methods and dynamics of nonviolent action, categorizing and describing 198 distinct methods that can be used when waging a nonviolent struggle, including a civilian-based defense campaign. Sharp’s Social Power and Political Freedom (1980) also advances the theory of nonviolent resistance by providing the analysis needed to understand key issues and concepts in the use of nonviolent struggle.

The movement and theory for a nonviolent, civilian-based defense has grown considerably, and yet it is clear that much must be done before war is abolished. What is needed now is a coherent set of national and international strategies which will point the way towards the adoption of this policy by one or more (and eventually many) countries in the near future. As dismal as the outlook for world peace may seem, history is being written yet and we have a great opportunity to influence its course.

Philip Bogdonoff has over 25 years of experience supporting and promoting nonviolence, sustainable development, and the use of computer-based tools to facilitate improved planning and decision-making by nations and communities. He began in the 1980s building computer models to calculate the effect of tropical deforestation on the release of carbon dioxide. He helped launch the first academic research program on nonviolent sanctions in conflict and defense at Harvard, and later helped adapt the research for field use while at Nonviolence International. He contributed to the World Bank’s early efforts to measure the environmental status of nations. At the Millennium Institute he used computer models to expand the capacity of countries to assess their development options. More recently he has committed significant time and attention to local and regional sustainability initiatives, including: being a founding board member of the Sustainable Washington Alliance; educating youth about aquatic ecosystems and watersheds; and promoting partnerships for creating solutions to community development challenges. He serves as a trustee of Friends Community School, a Quaker elementary school in College Park, Maryland, that has just moved into one of the larger strawbale structures in the U.S. He is currently working to raise awareness of the value of Nature’s services and to redirect economic resources toward the restoration, preservation, and management of ecosystems so that such services can be sustained.

[Editor's Note: For more information on alternatives to war, see the following links provided by the author.]

Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution,
www.aeinstein.org/

Harvard’s Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival,
www.wcfia.harvard.edu/ponsacs/

Mubarak Awad and Nonviolence International,
www.nonviolenceinternational.net/

Peter Ackerman and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict,
www.nonviolent-conflict.org/

Nonviolent Peaceforce, www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/

John Leax: The Woods, The Garden

John Leax: Two Poems

The Woods

The woods is not itself, independent, free
of history. It is a wildness in the heart
of culture, a wildness shaped by human
hand, by insect, water, wind, and time.
A ragged square bound by road, pasture, field
and sprawl of houses crawling up the hill
from town, it lives because we chose to give
a name to it before we knew its nature.

We called it Remnant Acres and brought
to life a place apart from habitation
where hemlock, ash, and maple could stand
free of market value. An old fence line

marks the northern boundary, keeping horses
from the apples fallen where once an orchard
thrived. It yields now to time, a scattering
of twisted trees loved by deer who browse a line
of clarity when winter settles in.
I’ve cut a few to ease my coldest woes
and warmed our room with fire and cider.
These small assertions by deer and human
make to the woods no never-mind. It takes
them as they come, unbidden and unnoticed.

Beyond the orchard, a seep-damp slope
tempts me always to build a pond, to turn
raspberry-popple thicket into sun
reflected water and make a landscape
fitted to my eye. Our active naming
prevents me, holds me to my word, my choice
to see my willfulness disciplined
by what is real before me, to find my heart’s
desire outside myself. Here, even
in summer, I walk wet footed, pushing
through brambles, stepping over logs turning
slowly–within their solid shapes–to soil.
All that is is becoming something else,
just as I am changing within my body
by word and deed into a part of all
I cannot know except by walking here.

The seep gathers into a flow and runs down
into a little brook. So grounded, water
begins its journey back to rain. I walk
the summer-dry bank plunged deep in memory
of skunk cabbage pungent with spring.
Hemlocks loosed by undercutting floods lie
in my way. How quietly the maker
of this place chooses to be beside me,
invites me from the bank into the stream
of shaping water. In him my walk becomes
a leaping dance from stone to tumbling stone,
a formal yielding within the wildness
we have chosen to keep ourselves alive.
Each time I give myself to find its grace,
it leads me back to where my walk begins–

to you and to our common hold on earth.

The Garden

By John Leax

We dug our garden first on neighbor’s
land, keeping the back lawn a safe expanse
for our toddler daughter and her friends.
We planted predictably: lettuce, beans,
tomatoes, a little corn, broccoli,
and beets. We satisfied our hunger, gave more
than we could eat away and found a small
economy grown almost apart from
our intent. We liked its work and working.

Our neighbor moved. Our borrowed plot was sold.
Turned back onto ourselves, we turned our loss
into commitment; spade by spade, we broke
a corner of the playground yard to make
a garden we could keep. Digging, we found
old bottles, shards of earthenware, broken,
rusted tools–screwdrivers, knives, and wrenches–
remnants of lives lived here before our own.

We joined our work to theirs. Planting apple
trees, a row of blueberries, asparagus,
we chose to live in hope of things we could
not see by season’s end. We bound ourselves
to steward one small place as in our vows
we bound ourselves to body forth our love.

As children grew the garden grew, spreading
to enclose the place of play within our
place of labor. I warred with groundhogs,
hurled bullet words at rabbits, and despaired
at slugs rasping the sweet new leaves of beans
with their violent tongues. Some days it seemed
that we would lose it all, but autumn brought
us always to our knees with more than we
could use. Some we froze for winter. Much more
we gave away, and what was left we heaped
into the compost bin to work till spring.

One April, holding in her memory
the wild abundance of fall, my wife spoke,
“Flowers might be nice.” The noise I made meant
neither yes nor no. It meant I did not hear,
but her word woke in me as if I had.
That summer I turned fifty. Our daughter
married, and leaving, left us changed.

Where she had played I made a crescent bed
between the house and built-up plot that grows
our vegetables. In it I dug a pond
for fish and lilies. I lined its edge with
stone hauled from the woodlot creek and planted
shrubs, flowers, herbs: barberry, spirea,
hydrangea, coreoposis, mint, thyme, phlox,
and inviting wildness in, red bee balm
for hummingbirds and butterflies.

At the limit of our deed, I planted
a hedge enclosing our domestic
habitation. In time finches claimed it
for their own making our limit open
to more than we can know. Within that hedge
I built a place for words, a cabin, small
and tight, like a poem crafted from years
of silence. I go there mornings and keep
my peace. In summer birds fill the window,
skitter on the roof. In winter, when wind
stirs the lilac branches, the scraping
on the hemlock wall becomes music. One song
Creation sings in cold. Another song
I make, scratching these words across my page.
By grace and good intention the songs are
one, a contrapuntal fugue of measured
lines, the garden beds, and patterns wildly
scored by bird flight on the sky. Enclosed
by vow and years of labor, broken soil mounds
in fertile beds, its depth our blessed end.

John Leax is poet-in-residence at Houghton College and has lived and gardened at the edge of a small town in the Genesee Valley, NY, his chosen place, for 40 years. (The woodlot is five miles upstream.) Leax’s books include Standing Ground, Grace is Where I Live, and, most recently, a collection of poems– Tabloid News.

David Walbert’s Backyard: May 2008

David Walbert’s Backyard

When I was young my parents tended a small garden: Peas, tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, zucchini, beets. All this in the small backyard of a small house in a medium-sized northern town, sheltered from a major highway by a cinder-block laundromat. My mother pickled beets, canned apple butter and pear preserve, baked wheat bread twice a week. A cry of rebellion against the confines of urban life, I might say, but my parents are not the cry-of-rebellion type. When I was seven we moved to the country, to a bigger house with a vast backyard in one of the most fertile patches of land on the planet. That first summer they planted a big garden, maybe too big. I grew a dozen ears of corn. Zucchini swelled. Groundhogs descended. The following year they never got around to the tilling, and they never gardened again.

For years afterward my mother bemoaned the impossibility of obtaining beet greens. When she thinned the beets from her own garden she cooked the baby beets with their greens, sweet and tender, served them with butter and salt. My father and I missed them, too. But no supermarket sells them. Beet greens are the byproduct of small gardens, of the gardener’s refusal to waste the precious space between the swelling roots. A farmer growing beets for wholesale could never afford to overplant and thin by hand. Hardly anyone eats beets anyway, I suppose; there’s barely a market. Even the farm stands dotting those Pennsylvania roads, big ones with seasonal staff and rickety card tables with honor-system cash boxes, stuck with tomatoes, zucchini, snow peas, peppers. Every spring we inspected the offerings: Nothing. We went without. Yet there we stood on an acre of the richest soil imaginable, the self-styled Garden Spot of America. You want beet greens? All you have to do is plant some! Instead beet greens became, in family lore, the wasted heritage of lost generations, our exemplar of things they don’t make like they used to.

Life intervened, as they say. My mother had two growing kids and then three to tend; my father’s job grew more demanding. When I was young so were they, and it was the seventies, when the flotsam and jetsam of agrarian life drifted unmoored through the culture and washed up in odd places. Then it was the eighties and they were older. Something about finding yourself in your mid-thirties with small children saps your desire to be different. Easy enough in your twenties to experiment with alternative lifestyles — and let’s face it, serious gardening is an alternative lifestyle in most of America — but children have a way of dragging you back into the mainstream. Simply being different takes time and work and energy, and so do children. Something has to give.

And yet: When children are young is the most important time to garden — or to do anything else we find meaningful and important — because what their families do when chlldren are young is what they will grow up thinking is normal. That example will be what they follow without thinking or fall back on when they don’t know what else to do. They can always rebel against it later, but either way, it will define them. The child who grows up vowing to do the opposite of everything his parents did is no less the product of his upbringing than the one who unthinking follows in their footsteps. Plenty of us find our values through rebellion, but individual rebellion is an iffy path to a better world. If we want our values to become mainstream, our children will have to grow up thinking they’re normal. If we value reading, they ought to see us read; if we value art, they ought to see us creating; and if we value nature, they ought to see us working in it. We can’t control what they learn from it, but at least we can set the example.

What did I learn from beet greens? Not what was expected or intended, if any lesson was. When I was just old enough to recognize it as normal, we had a garden and fresh greens. Then we didn’t, and we missed them, but nobody did anything about it. What I learned was that you can accomplish a lot for yourself when you quit pining for the good old days and do what you can, now, today.

Now I, too, have a young child and work that has grown more demanding than I meant it to. This year, for the first time since my daughter was a baby, we found time — made time — for a serious garden. At the moment it overflows with greens. Until last month I had never seen my daughter more than nibble at a piece of lettuce, but now if I ask her what she wants for dinner, she suggests salad from the garden. And she eats with relish a mix of kale and mustard and turnip greens that I at her age surely would have sniffed at.

We did not, however, grow beets. I brought some beet greens home from the market a few weeks ago and, predictably, my daughter hated them. She loves beets, loves greens, loves Swiss chard which is botanically identical to beet greens; she hates beet greens. But then, we didn’t grow them ourselves. Whatever lessons she learns from all this will be her own, and nothing I could predict.

Baby beets steamed with their greens

For this recipe, the beets should be no bigger around than a penny and the greens young, tender, and bright green. If you grow beets yourself, just thin them when the greens are a foot or so high. If you’re lucky enough to find them at a farmers’ market, they should come as whole plants, pulled from the ground, bunched for sale.

1. Thoroughly wash the beets and greens. Trim the long roots and cut the beets from the stems, discarding the tough part where stem meets root. If necessary, cut the beets into small pieces (no larger than 1/4 inch). Chop the stems and set aside with the beets. Chop the greens and set aside in a second pile.
2. Place the chopped beets and stems in a pot and barely cover with water. Add a half teaspoon of salt per bunch. Bring to a boil and cook until tender (about five minutes). Then add the greens, return to a boil, and cook another two to three minutes until they too are tender. (It may take longer to cook the greens, but if it takes longer than five minutes, they were probably too old.)
3. Most of the water should have boiled off, but if some remains, drain the beets and greens. Add a tablespoon of butter and a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice per bunch. Taste for salt and serve hot.

Columnist David Walbert lives outside Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and daughter and too many animals. He is the author of Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America. You may find his website at The New Agrarian: http://www.newagrarian.com/

1 Comment

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Wayne
May 27, 2008 at 8:01 pm · Edit

We’re getting a vegetable garden in, a little late this year: planting happens Sunday if all goes well. My daughter is six and has never helped plant or tend one. I think my wife and I always told ourselves that a garden was for when we bought our next house, the one that has a bigger and more amenable yard. But that’s taking too long to happen, so we’re starting right here, Willy Loman style.

My father planted a vegetable garden and I remember juicy tomatoes, some squash and some cucumbers, green beans too, I think. But he didn’t include us in any of the gardening chores, and I feel like I witnessed the garden from a distance rather than participated in its cultivation. Perhaps his weekend gardening was a way to get away from his children.

In any event, this is a timely essay for me, since my wife and I plan to have the children involved every step of the way.

Jim Goodman: Nature’s Way

Jim Goodman

Nature’s Way

Last month I had a pretty good idea how the cows would react to their first days on pasture, but I never get tired of seeing them acting like calves again– running, gorging on fresh grass and stretching out flat and dreaming of an endless summer. Cows love the spring and they love change; they would like a new pasture every day, every hour if we could arrange it. Cows have the attention span of a kindergärtner. Nature tells them to move, cover the ground fast and eat the grass when it’s fresh, then come back in a few weeks and start the cycle over again, just as grazing animals have done for centuries.

As the seasons change, our work schedules change as well. With the animals outside feeding themselves again, we can turn our attention from hauling feed to and manure away from the cows to spring tillage, planting and fence building. The calender tells us that spring comes around March 20 or 21. For farmers, spring really arrives the day we begin turning the remnants of last years crop under in preparation for a new season. The soil has a certain smell when it is ready; anyone who has ever worked the land knows it.

This year spring is late and wet. So, we wait until the ground is dry enough to spread the winter’s manure and plow, disk and seed a new crop. At times we farm between the showers one day at a time, hoping for enough dry weather to work the ground and plant, yet knowing seed needs moisture to germinate. We always hope for the perfect combination: moist soil, no tractor-swallowing “wet spots”, plenty of sun and no breakdowns.

Cloudy, wet days mean cutting firewood for next winter and repairing the fences that snow and fallen trees have flattened. Fixing fence means lots of walking, getting soaked from the rain showers and for me even those short breaks in the clouds can bring on a good sunburn. Splicing broken wires ensures that by day’s end you will have some new rips in your jeans and most likely in your hands as well. You do get a chance to watch the robins, larks, bluebirds and orioles flitting about making their nests and, if you are lucky and keen of eye, perhaps you might find those morel mushrooms that came up overnight. All in all, not a bad way to spend a day.

These days we always seem to lag behind the rest of the neighbors; they are busy planting and spraying their corn while we plow and prepare a smooth seedbed for this year’s crop of oats and barley and the grass and clover that will be next year’s hay and pasture. Our standard crop rotation of corn, oats, hay and pasture is considered old-fashioned by many.

By using genetically modified (GM) seed, farmers can plant without tillage and, in theory, kill everything but the GM crop with chemicals while insects are killed by a bacterial poison engineered into the corn. Rather than wasting time working up a smooth seedbed for oats or wheat, the “progressive” farmer plants corn and soy– lots of acres in a yearly exchange of GM monocultures.

But, one must remember, if it sounds too good to be true . . . it’s not easy to fool mother nature. The GM promise of one spray to kill weeds failed to happen; in a few years weeds became resistant and now several applications of even more chemicals are needed. Insecticidal corn, well, it worked to a point, but new bugs moved in so new insecticides and control measures are needed. Fuel savings, well, some university researchers now advise some minimal tillage may be needed to aerate the soil and break up compaction. Between those extra trips and more spraying and/or cultivation to kill resistant weeds, the no-till GM system may use as much fuel as the old crop rotation some farmers still rely on.

Most advocates of no-till farming would strongly disagree with me, as studies in Kansas ( http://kec.kansas.gov/reports/WaterOfficeReport2006.pdf ) show no-till reduces fuel usage by about 2 gallons per acre over other systems. Yet there are few completely no-till systems left as most farmers do some tillage, whether it is deep subsoiling, planting a winter cover-crop or minimum cultivation for weed control. When you consider the tremendous amounts of fuel used in transportation of crops, chemicals and fertilizers and the fuel used in the manufacture of fertilizers and chemicals for the global food system, smaller local and regional farming systems have a better potential for fuel savings and environmental protection. Long-term studies done by the Rodale Institute and Cornell University confirm that chemically intensive commodity crop production does not save fuel or reduce carbon dioxide production or significantly increase yields over sustainable and organic farming methods:
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/NFfield_trials/1003/carbonwhitepaper.shtml

I may be old-fashioned, but research is backing up what common sense has told farmers and gardeners for years: systems that mimic or work closely with nature work better for everyone in the long term. Nature eventually figures out a way to beat the best-laid plans of chemists and corporate profiteers. With good farming practices, managed grazing and a real crop rotation, soil over time tends to build its organic matter (and carbon) content, while commodity cropping with alternate crops of corn and soy tends to do just the opposite.

Traditional farming systems, those that rely on an integrated system of grains, hay and pasture in long term rotations, appear to survive the test of time. Livestock incorporated into these systems can efficiently utilize grass for feed and add fertility back into the system through their manure. Furthermore, growing and marketing food locally can greatly reduce the amount of fossil fuel used in transportation and promotes local economies.

By supporting these natural systems, farmers can earn a fair wage, informed citizens have access to fresher more nutritious food and while we feed ourselves we also allow the rest of the world to feed themselves locally and regionally. The wisdom of indigenous farmers around the world tells us that we cannot own nature; we can only hope to be a dependent yet beneficial part of it.

If a more holistic approach to farming were widely adopted, only the financial interests of the international grain traders, oil companies, fertilizer and chemical manufacturers would be harmed. To that, my cows and I say– “So”?

Columnist Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer in Wonewoc, WI. He has published essays in the Madison Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is a fellow of the Food and Society Fellows Program.

Allan Carlson: Excerpts of “Green Rising” Chapter from Third Ways

By Allan C. Carlson

[Editor's Note: This chapter deals with European agrarian history. It is taken from Allan Carlson's latest book, Third Ways, and is used with the kind permission of the publisher, ISI Books.]

Agrarian politics had its roots in romantic views of the organic society. The peasant campaign reaped the harvest of various nineteenth-century movements: romanticism; folklorism; the rehabilitation of vernacular languages; the “new literature” of long-suppressed peasant nations; the Russian narodniki celebration of rural life and customs; and various Slavophile inventions. For the peasant, land was a “sacred thing” bound to the history and future of a family. The peasantry formed the “soul” and foundation of all emerging East European nations. As the Romanian theorist Constantin Stere, writing in 1907, put it: “The peasantry, as the undifferentiated base of society, constitutes a separate social category, upon whose back are raised all other social classes, not excepting even the industrial proletariat.” The Croatian peasant leader Ante Radic saw the global “social pyramid” resting on “the innumerable peasant masses of Europe, Asia, Africa and America.” This position gave the peasantry a special mission. As the Polish Agrarian party explained in one of its platforms: “Because of their numbers, their physical and moral strength which derives from their association with the land and their value to nation and state, the rural population are justified in regarding themselves as the natural masters of Poland.”

Sustaining such claims was a vast intellectual renaissance, with particular strength among the young. From the 1870s through the 1930s, successive waves of university youth returned to the villages “to refresh themselves spiritually by contact with the simple peasants of the earth,” to become new men “closely bound to soil and nature.” Called “village explorers”, they put aside older concerns. In interwar Transylvania, for example, minority Hungarian and majority Romanian youth– communities long seething with hostility toward one another–consciously joined together for their rural pilgrimages. In Poland, the League of Peasant Intelligentsia took form.

Attracting them was a new creed, one which threatened the ambitions and programs of both the Right and the Left. Agrarianism’s attachment to family-held property was stronger than that of any conservative party. It shared liberalism’s full embrace of democracy and opposition to state intervention into the lives of persons and groups. And the movement’s social ideals, together with parts of its economic project, were similar to socialism. In each case, however, there was a vital difference, a novelty that underscored a fresh and exciting campaign with universal ambitions. As Czech agrarian leader Milan Hodza explained in 1925: “We know that Agrarian democracy . . . is the strong bond which will create of the peoples an international unity, a formal, organic and psychological unity against which all attacks, whether directed by imperialist right or bolshevist left will be shattered.” . . .

[T]he agrarian program of the peasant parties was a highly original and remarkably progressive agenda focused on winning social justice. It was forthright, courageous, and consistent in theory. Its key components included the following: [For brevity's sake, I have not included all 18 elements, nor have I provided the chapter's Notes.--Ed.]

1. Agrarianism is a Third Way social economy, neither capitalistic nor socialist. According to Bulgarian theorist George Dimitrov, agrarianism “upholds the idea of private and cooperative ownership and opposes every form of speculative accumulation of wealth, be it private-capitalistic or state-socialistic.” The agrarian author Branko Peself argued that “socialists and laissez faire liberals . . . share certain views on the solution of socio-economic problems . . . . both regard large-scale production as the highest form of productivity.” In contrast, the peasant parties sought–in economist David Mitrany’s words– “a cooperative society, equally distinct from liberal capitalist society as from the collective society of socialism.” The Croatian theorist Ante Radic emphasized how agrarianism formed a “middle way” that repudiated both “capitalistic exploitation” and “socialist collectivization.” . . .

5. All families should hold property and strive for self-sufficiency. For the agrarians, property ownership by all was a political imperative if the goal was true liberty. “If the individual does not possess property of his own . . . , he is not free,” Dimitrov intoned. Looking beyond the bucolic, a peasant’s farm, an artisan’s shop and tools, and an intellectual’s books were all different forms of “labor property” deserving protection. And while the agrarians treasured property, they denied that there is a right to unlimited property accumulation . . . As they refined their view of industry, the agrarians also advocated that workers in necessarily large enterprises should participate in ownership of the companies.

6. The agrarian state welcomes rational and moderate industrialization. Many commentators, a century ago as today, blamed the rural poverty of Eastern Europe on overpopulation. The agrarians replied that decades of economic and social deprivation and political neglect are the real causes. They were fully aware that land reform, by itself, cannot solve all rural woes. They acknowledged the need for a “rational and moderate industrialization,” done in a way “for bettering the peasant way of life.” According to one Peasant Manifesto, this meant “industries, so far as possible, [organized] on a cooperative basis” that were “mainly devoted to the processing of local agricultural and forest products.” The agrarians rejected the industrial policies common to the prewar Balkan states.The massive factories upon which these policies were centered “could have no hope of thriving on external markets,” they “impoverished” the very people they were meant to help, and they created “a hopeless, vicious cycle, always dependent on the State and all the time corrupting it.” . . .

16. Agrarianism seeks peace and disarmament. Peasant leaders understood that the cannon fodder in any war would be their sons. As one Bessarabian peasant put it, “whoever wins the next war, the peasant will lose it.” The result was a commitment to authentic pacifism . . . After the Great War, in both “winning” and “losing” nations, agrarians walked the pacifist path. In Yugoslavia, Stephan Radic put new stress on the pacifist plank of his Croatian Peasant Party platform. In Bulgaria, [Alexander] Stamboliski welcomed the clause of the Treaty of Neuilly which required Bulgarian disarmament. He cheerfully moved resources away from the military into economic development and school construction.

17. Agrarians love their faith, monitor their clergy. In a peasant society, religion “proves a bulwark rather than a competitor of the family system” . . . In Croatia, the Radic brothers combined reverence for God with a marked anticlericalism, seeking to break the control of rural clergy over the minds of peasants. In Bulgaria, Stamboliski faced an Orthodox clergy which tended to back “usurers and petty politicians” and a church that maintained large monastic estates . . . This practical approach to religion carried over to relations with the Jewish population in Eastern Europe. While some early agrarian outbursts– notably Romania’s Peasant Revolt of 1907–were colored by anti-Semitism, Agrarian parties in postwar Hungary and Romania “openly stood up against the virulent anti-Semitism” encouraged by other groups.

18. Agrarians seek transnational union. Of all the political parties found in interwar Eastern Europe, the Agrarians were the least affected by nationalism. As early as 1900, Stamboliski hoped the emerging estatist organizations would cross national borders. When, five years later, the International Institute of Agriculture took form in Rome, he yearned for it to become a catalyst for a “Green International.” In 1923, he cofounded the International Agrarian Bureau, an authentic global “Green” movement. As prime minister, he worked tirelessly to heal differences with his Balkan neighbors and to build a real federation of states. As Dimitrov remarked, Stamboliski “preached of the United States of Europe long before Aristides Briand.” All interwar agrarians “gave stalwart support to the League of Nations.” Indeed, the dream of a federated, peaceful, and cultured world stands as “one of the grandest objectives of Agrarianism.”

Distinguished scholar Allan C. Carlson is president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois and international secretary of the World Congress of Families. His other books include The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America and The ‘American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity.

Barbara Wuest: The Dairy Farm

By Barbara Wuest

The barn air reeks of manure.
But how sweet the silage, corn,
barley and wheat ground into

feed for the bare-eyed milk cows.
They stare dumbly; I stare back.
They know nothing, know too much.

A row of brown-furred bodies,
they serve the people like troops.
Old soldiers with udders hanging

full of thick, yellowish juice.
Louie, the farmer, chews grain,
testing for firmness, texture.

He makes certain it’s just right
for his cows, his life-blood, love.
He smells of manure and milk.

Louie refines the process.
His cows live, produce and die
and he can’t get the smell off.

Barbara Wuest lives in Milwaukee and works at Cardinal Stritch University. She has published poems in several journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Wisconsin Academy Review, Cape Rock, The Paris Review, Dogwood, CrossCurrents, Friendly, Writers’ Journal, and others.

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