Twelve by Twelve (13 page)

The summer was coming to an end, and a new semester awaited me back at Santa Fe Indian School. I harvested the first of my squash, zucchinis, and blue corn and packed my little Nissan hatchback with them, driving it into the school parking lot and giving produce to the other teachers. They
oohed
and
aahed
, joking that they knew what
I’d done with my summer. Teaching during the week, I continued to work at Stan’s on the weekends. I found that the experience with Stan and the anticivilization Dixon crew blended easily into my teaching. I was no longer the Ivy League expert here to impart knowledge; I was student to these young Native Americans. One day they told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment are still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

I played Super Bowl commercials in the classroom, and together my Native American students and I “deconstructed” them. This was, in part, an idea encouraged by the state of New Mexico. The Green Party, powered by thousands of off-the-gridders like those I’d befriended in Dixon — who lived in pockets throughout the state — had increased their power in the state legislature and had worked with citizens’ groups to pass mandatory “media literacy” for all New Mexico schools. I went through the in-service training and then explored, with my twelve-year-olds from the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo reservations, the ways marketers manipulate us by linking their brands to emotions like love, belonging, freedom, sexuality, and fear.

I showed a commercial with an SUV conquering a mountain, and an Apache student, Monique, correctly labeled the lie: “Freedom!” she cried out.

“Love and belonging,” another student suggested, noting that the male driver was accompanied by a beautiful woman and rosy-cheeked children.

A Hopi student raised his hand. Frowning, he grew angrier as he spoke. His point, eloquently delivered, was that “crossing our sacred
grounds with that noisy thing” did not mean love or belonging. He said that, to be more truthful, the gas-guzzler should be driving past the retreating glacier that its greenhouse gasses were melting.

I found these media literacy sessions as deliciously subversive as the chatter in Stan’s fields. Thanks to citizen pressure, the very nation that produced more global warming gasses than any other was arming a million New Mexico students with the intellectual tools to
reject
consumerism.

AUTUMN ARRIVED.
On one of my last days at Stan’s (before the tractor was oiled and tools stored for the winter), a half dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rose Mary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the gentle wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt whole and alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate, the lively smell.

Stan seemed elsewhere, “Kind of Blue” on the breeze, perhaps already in his next novel.
Clip-clip
went his shears. How many basil sprigs had he chopped in his thirty years of farming?
Clip
. The breeze picked up and I couldn’t hear the brook, just the swaying trees above, and the smell of chemise and sage mixed with the basil. Stan stood up to his full, lanky height and ran earth-covered long fingers through his beard, looking out into the direction of the wind as if for a sign. Then he sighed, almost imperceptibly and went back to clipping.

In Stan’s fields an idea germinated in me that would much later coalesce into a kind of general principle: be in Empire, but not of it. As the years went on, even as a Yankee pragmatism kept me cinched to Empire, I’d try to follow this, walking up to the edge of radicalism. I wouldn’t jump over, but the heat of the flaming edge, in Dixon, in Chiapas, Mexico, in Bolivia, in Liberia, and especially on the banks
of No Name Creek, kept alive the embers of noncooperation, a healthy maladjustment to ecocide.

The long workday ended. Stan went to the till to fish out my wages. Wages that I could certainly use with my low teacher salary and high Santa Fe rent. But wages I couldn’t accept for the community of this fall day. “Stan, I won’t take your money for this work,” I said, in twenty-four-year-old earnestness. “There’s nothing I would have rather been doing today.”

Stan looked at me from his heights, his blue eyes suddenly animated, and he patted me on the shoulder and invited me to a late lunch of foods from his farm. I’d later realize that this, more than anything else, is what Stanley Crawford cultivated at El Bosque: an awakened, generous human spirit and, therefore, a new earth.

MALADJUSTED TO EMPIRE

AS THE DAYS AT JACKIE’S PASSED,
and the cold earth softened, buds and tendrils began finding their shape, and I increasingly thought about heroes. My heroes are mostly people you never hear about. They quietly go about creating a durable vision of what it means to be an American and a global citizen. These are the people whose spirits nourished me as I hoed the rows at Jackie’s place, people like Stan Crawford, Bradley, and Jackie herself. As the world flattens, they give hope. They are what I call
wildcrafters
, people shaping their inner and outer worlds to the flow of nature, rather than trying to mold the natural world into a shape that is usable in the industrial world. Wildcrafters leave a small ecological footprint. They don’t conform to any outward program, manifesto, or organized group, but conform only to what Gandhi called the “still, small voice” within. I consider much of the dispersed “antiglobalization,” pro-sustainability movement to be connected to wildcrafting. Wildcrafters inhabit the rebel territory beyond the Flat.

But one morning at the 12 × 12, as a particularly strong stench of the chicken factory blew in, I asked myself how people like Stan,
Jackie, and Bradley find the inner strength to resist ecocide. As if in answer to this question, I discovered a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography on Jackie’s bookshelf and began reading it each night in her great-grandmother’s rocker. I knew Gandhi’s famous quote — “Be the change you want to see in the world” — but the question still remained:
How?
In his autobiography he talked about how he was convinced that absolutely anyone can achieve what he did; he was simply an average person who decided to transform himself.

This transformation happened gradually when, as a young lawyer in South Africa, he decided there shouldn’t be a gap between his convictions and his actions. Each time he identified something in his outer life that contradicted his inner beliefs, he decided to make a change. For example, believing it wasn’t correct to eat meat, he immediately cut meat out of his diet. When he realized that buying British clothing supported the colonial system that oppressed his people, he began wearing a dhoti, spinning the cloth himself. And so he continued, one quick relinquishment after the next, until his outward actions gradually came into harmony with his beliefs. This not only built his character but inspired the confidence of others, turning him into the great, humble leader who would free hundreds of millions from the colonial yoke. In his own words, Gandhi was incredibly clear: changing yourself is the key; no external achievements, however noble, can replace that.

From the rocking chair, I regarded the 12 × 12’s floor, a white slab of bare cement. So stark. An unadorned slab of rock surrounded by two full acres of breathing earth. Jackie later told me that she had mirrored Gandhi’s transformation, relinquishing one hypocrisy at a time, a gradual, deliberate evolution. She didn’t want to support war taxes, so she reduced her salary to eleven thousand dollars. She wished to have the carbon footprint of a Bangladeshi, so she went off the grid.

Bradley, using his skills and interests, was doing something
similar. He didn’t like the suburban sprawl he saw rolling into Adams County, so he began buying up large tracts of land and turning them into environmental eco-housing. Seeing that our educational system was perpetuating ecocide, he established innovative sustainable agriculture programs at the local community college. It was remarkable to feel the ripple effect of the courses he taught there, from horticulture to eco-design, from beekeeping to turning native plants into tinctures, medicines, and foods. Bradley shaped Jackie’s skill set, and she in turn inspired Bradley with her ideas. And they are part of a larger constellation of wildcrafters. My direct neighbor, José, made traditional Mexican furniture by hand. The Thompsons had left the city to produce organic chicken and pork. Lisa, up the road, was a social worker who’d bought ten acres and was slowly transforming herself into a small farmer. And a fascinating father-son team, Paul Sr. and Jr. — whom I was eager to meet — had purchased thirty acres outside a nearby town and had followed Jackie’s lead and built several 12 × 12s.

Like Gandhi, these wildcrafters made one small change after another in their lives and watched their inner and outer lives slide into harmony. They were beginning to inhabit a place I’d later come to see as the creative edge.

This idea first came to me in the 12 × 12, but only after leaving Jackie’s did I fully grasp the extent to which these folks are shaping their inner lives first, then moving on to shape their outer environment through living beyond paradigms — including paradigms of environmentalism. Wildcrafters, those who work with nature’s flow rather than against it, do this in a place that is, in the end, simultaneously internal and external: the creative edge, a dynamic geography.

Wildcrafters on the creative edge have social and political impacts beyond their numbers. For example, the several hundred wildcrafters in Stan Crawford’s Dixon were only a few of the tens of thousands in New Mexico creating healthy, near-carbon-neutral
communities. They voted on and passed innovative policies like the mandatory “media literacy” courses in schools, and they have grown the state’s Green Party into a force in state politics. Nationally, the Green Party has around two hundred elected officials, including members of city councils in Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Madison, and New Haven, and numerous mayorships. In Europe, Green Party inroads are stronger still; in Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, the Greens have controlled the powerful foreign minister position and other cabinet posts.

This growing political and economic resistance, sadly, comes not from our elected and corporate leaders, but rather from
gusanos
(worms) that gradually eat away at the apple from within; when it collapses, it decomposes and becomes soil so something new can grow. I have several friends, for instance, who are
gusanos
within the California system, working on the creative edge of health care, education, business, and conservation, laboring to turn their state into something approximating their vision of America, in the hope that it will inspire the rest of the country as a model.

What is particularly fascinating about the
gusanos
in North Carolina, my 12 × 12 neighbors, is that they did not choose to wildcraft in progressive Europe or in funky California, Vermont, or New Mexico. They’re in the conservative rural South. The late Jesse Helms used to have a lock on this area of North Carolina. The Thompsons, when they escaped to experiment on their new ten acres, were in a sense in rehab. The trailer park, the weapons and crack, neighbors in prison, the constant drone of commercial TV — all of this gone, cold turkey. They now opened their front door to a profusion of birds, a pond, a dark stretch of forest — to No Name Creek.

While musing over all of this, one morning I noticed a cocoon attached to the deer fence. Was it from last year, or from a caterpillar that had already gorged itself on spring leaves and gone into an early cocoon? Around the 12 × 12, dozens of different-sized, -shaped,
and -colored caterpillars and inchworms dangled from silk strings and attached to budding leaves. I came to marvel over the miracle of that cocoon and the transformation of one organism into a completely different one.

Really, we’ve got the story wrong. We imagine that the caterpillar, knowing that it is time, goes to sleep in its womblike cocoon and wakes up a smiley, happy butterfly. That’s not what happens. As biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains, the caterpillar devotes its life to hyper-consumption, greedily eating up nature’s bounty. Then it attaches itself to a twig, like the one on the deer fence, and encases itself in chrysalis. Once inside, crisis strikes: its body partially liquefies into broth.

Yet, perhaps guided by an inner wisdom, what Sahtouris calls “organizer cells” go around rounding up their fellow cells to form “imaginal buds.” These multicellular buds begin to bloom into an entirely new organism but not without resistance. The caterpillar’s immune system still functions and thinks that the imaginal buds are a virus and attacks them.