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.