I believe in worms

I wrote this for the Traveling School, in accordance with an assignment that the girls had...

I believe in worms.

Pink and striated, fattened on dirt and rain – a healthy diet of mud. Sometimes plump, round, and sated. Other times, stretching long and thin as though to exercise - to roll and squirm contentedly in the earth which cradles them.

I believe in worms.

One basic function, one instinct deep ingrained. To eat, process, poop. To leave what is richer than it was before. Thankless task – pooping. Rarely noticed (perhaps better that way?) unless the rain comes and the thousands of worms swim along our impermeable pavement.

I believe that worms do, every day, what we struggle to technologize, invent, create: some way to take the detritus of our society and do something other than pitch it. They are the crank that turns the wheel, transforms the disgust into the very stuff of life. From the poop of worms grows the seed that grows the food that feeds the babies that grow to be the adults that change the world.

Worms don´t have very much to say. Eat, process, poop. Eat, process, poop. Yes, the kids are fine. Eat, process, poop. Jimmy had diarrhea yesterday. Eat, process, poop. Sally´s appetite´s been a little low lately. Eat, process, poop.

In contrast, I do a lot of talking. I try to get my mind around the problems of the world. I philosophize. Sometimes I cry in desperation. Sometimes I read about revolution. And most days, I just don´t know where to start. My life is not big enough, it seems, to swallow a global food crisis and war and rising gas prices and climate change. My big brain ties me in the knots that the worm never finds itself in, despite the obvious difference in body type.

Therefore, I believe in worms. To recycle before someone coined the term. To compost simply because the material was there. To engage in the politics of simplicity, and stand in the revolution of renewal. Eat, process, poop.

We cannot wait for our stomach to grow big enough to swallow the entire climate crisis, or our intestines to swell to war capacity. A worm just takes what is in front of it, and does what it can. When it has eaten, processed, and pooped that section of mud, it moves on to the next, and then the next. And soon enough, apple cores become dirt, and cow dung becomes fertilizer. Egg shells, paper, tea bags, leaves. Waste reduced to its most nutritive parts, spread judiciously to give life to some next generation.

I believe that if we try to swallow it all, we´ll never digest any of it. I believe that maybe we´ve been thinking too hard. I believe in the politics of my own backyard.

I believe in worms.

self-indulgent beginnings

I started a blog when I began traveling with the Traveling School. Something about the novelty of experience, the constant stimulation, the thoughts and feelings bobbling around lends itself to smooth words. I came home with a desire for the same novelty of experience in Maine - where I grew up, and subsequently spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to leave.

It's hard to be home. I knew it would be - but the search for finding what is profound and deep in our own space requires so much more digging than briefly flirting with the lives of people and cultures and places around the world. I've decided to write The Radical Backyard in an undeniably self-indulgent attempt to sort out my own thoughts and feelings on seeking out how to live a sustainable, radical, peaceful, and just existence in a way that actively acknowledges rather than denies or guilts the society and culture that I come from.

I'm trying an experiment. I'm trying to radicalize my own life: and by that I mean that I am trying to live where I live, be around the people that I love, and figure out how to create an existence that is whole, fulfilling, and peaceful. I don't want to go anywhere else or work for anyone else, because if I have to do that than how can we demonstrate that it is possible for each individual in their own life? Hence the idea of a Radical Backyard. All around me are the elements of a new way of thinking, a new economic model, a new example of community. Or, in actuality, they are very very old, their time is simply coming around again. I want to capture those, reign them in, and hold them here as I try to wade through them all.

I work on a farm that's lost its identity. Its so strikingly symbolic to me - that there are 626 acres of land here, resources available, buildings around: the opportunity to literally do anything. And somehow it seems so hard to create even one thing. That's an interesting thought that I'll have to delve into further later.

But I do work on a farm, and there are animals, and gardens and forests. So the Radical Backyard will also collect the madness that ensues here: the little vignettes of every day existence as the blind lead the blind stumbling through the re-learning of skills that humans have cultivated for more than 10,000 years. I can only hope that this blindness will allow us to experience the land in a new way - that we'll have to sense it in ways other than the obvious. Perhaps that will allow us to start fresh.