Twelve by Twelve (26 page)

She sat in the same spot she’d been hours earlier, feeling the water with her feet. I stopped. She didn’t see me. There was no journal on the bank beside her, and she’d long since finished
My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization
. In fact, she seemed to read less and less. There is a point where we must let the feel of water on bare feet replace books and spiritual practices. They
can be very helpful as guides, as structures, as inspiration, but can also, if we hold on to them too tightly, obstruct the most important thing: an unmediated facing of the world as it is, which is to say, as we shape it.

I walked through the gleaming water up to Leah and asked: “What’s the shape of the world?”

She looked directly at the earth. Splashed water with her feet, sank her fingers into the supple moss. “It’s not flat,” she said, squinting up at me.

I looked into No Name Creek. No more suicidal dragonflies; here the water was woodcut, carefully etched with a sharp metal tool. But those neat streaks suddenly jumbled into a rutty swirl, like pasta loosening in boiling water. “The world is everything
but
flat,” she said, standing up. “Feel the smooth river rocks, the spongy banks.

” Colors tangled together in the creek: light purple, red, and orange. “The world curves,” I said.

“It spins.”

“It’s sandy.”

“There’s clay.”

“There’s jellyfish.”

“Rainforests full of animals.”

“Slithering anacondas.”

“Giant pandas.”

“Six-toed sloths.”

I’d look back on this moment as transformative: Leah and I groping for softer language concealed the flat, proclaiming the immediacy of smells, sounds, and textures. The beauty of the earth grew as we chose its beauty as the focus of our attention. The world is wet, Leah said, getting into the creek.

It’s cold!
I said, following her in.

Deep canyons.

Snowy peaks.

A million people die today.

A million are born.

The world is divine!
The world is mine.
It’s yours.
No, it’s ours.
It’s
…

Leah opened her mouth as if to say something else, but all that came out was a puff of air. Emptied of words, she collapsed onto No Name Creek’s yielding bank and pulled me down next to her. We listened. Trees shimmered; water flowed, and a hawk called out, urgently, thick in the south.

LEAH HUGGED A GOAT
and then paid the farmer for its cheese.

Durham’s farmers market, a few blocks from Leah’s house, was alive that morning. Fifty farmers had come in from the surrounding counties with meat and veggies, and a thousand of us gathered to take those organic products off their hands.

After paying, Leah and I lingered with Jim and Keisha, a farming couple in their midtwenties who had just bought thirty acres for fifty-six thousand dollars. “We love it!” Keisha told Leah while giving another customer change. “We’re now in a yurt on our land, but we’ll slowly sell enough goat cheese and vegetables to build a house. But there’s no rush.” Leah didn’t want to leave their presence. I could feel the tug, too. Both of them were so vital, full of zest and health.

We went from table to table, filling our canvas bags. Leah floated through the place with an irrepressible smile, greeting the farmers, their kids, their dogs. She pressed a fresh blueberry between my lips; we sampled all kinds of cheeses, crusty breads, fruits that gushed juice onto our cheeks. Produce smells blended together. I felt joyful.
This was a far cry from a supermarket or the Gold Kist factory. No heavy packaging, no corporate logos. Natural colors merged gracefully with the faded old pickups, the farmers’ tie-dyed Ts, the bustle of the place. It evoked a Bolivian or African market.

Farmers markets are like an emerging social contract between twenty-first-century
polis
and
dumos
; country folks produce healthy foods in an earth-friendly way and townspeople pay a little more. The number of farmers markets in the United States has more than doubled, from 1,755 in 1994 to 4,385 in 2006. They provide a lot more than food. Leah and the rest of us were there, you might say, to heal. Farmers markets, I began to realize, heal the edges of our über-industrialized economy, allowing a less chemical- and fossil fuel–intensive economy to flourish. They heal our relationships with each other as we reconfigure the buying and selling of food around fresh air and community. Most importantly, they heal our spirits, because if something pays, it stays, and those of us at the market that morning sensed we were voting with our dollars for a kind of independence: the right to farm.

“Leah!” said Jack at the next stand, his T-shirt reading, “Fix Marriage Not Gays.” “You need some pork?” As he handed her a pound of meat, freshly slaughtered the night before on his farm, he asked me about myself. I told him where I was living.

“Your neighbors are
who
? Mike and Michele Thompson?!”

“Yes.”

He silently shook his head, lips pursed. “They, how should I put this, are libertarian. Now I’m libertarian, too, and so is my partner, but we’re libertarians on the left. The Thompsons are libertarians on the
rlght
.”

I said I thought they were good people.

He laughed and said, “I wish them well with their farming. Just that I don’t know if they have it together. I hear their whole operation, what there is of it, may go on the skids. Hopefully it won’t be welfare for them again.”

Our canvas bags full, we took a spin past an iron foundry and watched sculptors create. On the walk back to her house we passed the restaurant Piedmont, an art deco place that serves only local and organic food. All of this flourished within walking distance of her little white apartment.

“This could be the new economy,” I said. “Healthy, community-centered.”

“Eerie. That’s exactly what I was just going to say.” This was another change in myself I noticed. Since coming to Jackie’s I’d become more intuitive. Several times I knew exactly what Leah was going to say a couple of seconds before she said it. While part of this was simply our getting to know each other better, I also discovered how mindfulness — being fully in the roomy present moment — enhanced a natural sixth sense. Goethe talked about this, how he became so sensitive to his surroundings that he could predict the weather with precision just by opening a window.

As we walked, Leah told me about her evolving dream. For years she’d fantasized about having a farm. Buy land, homestead, live with two chickens and goats and vegetables. Now it was economically viable to be an organic farmer. She could still be a journalist on a freelance basis, perhaps blend the two in some creative way. How empowering to discover that, if the culture around us was not working, we could join others who were creating a new culture.

That night Leah and I went to the Full Frame documentary film festival in Durham. Out of nowhere I heard, “Billy.
Billy!
” Suddenly, my mom’s warm arms were hugging me.

Billy
, she kept repeating. Childlike. Happy and present, in all her sixty-eight years of glory. She wore an earth-toned outfit and a necklace I’d gotten her as a gift while in the Ivory Coast a couple of years before. She hugged me again and took me over to introduce me to three of her friends from their activist group, The Raging Grannies, liberal-looking gals, good Americans. I asked my mom, “How about we have lunch tomorrow?”

She immediately agreed, as I knew she would. Leah came over. Introductions and hugs. Leah got a little stiff, as she always did when meeting new people, her “I’m-a-producer” mode, a professional young woman keeping a bit of distance. Mom’s three friends asked for Leah’s business card; all the while Mom’s face beamed love toward me.

Then Leah and I disappeared into the film festival. What a pleasure to be in a place where your parents live, spontaneously bumping into them, setting up a lunch. To have a friend I adore at my side. To be at a film festival, in a smallish town in America, in spring. I wondered:
Could I stop being a man without a country? Could this be home?

AT THE 12 X 12 I STARTED DREAMING
about a soft economy.

Being with Jackie, being alone in her tiny house, provoked a question: How might personal economy and the leisure ethic come together as rebellion? Jackie’s lifestyle is a twenty-first-century Boston Tea Party, but she hasn’t thrown just one product overboard; rather, she’s tossed the whole lot of planet-killing junk. Today it’s not the British Empire colonizing us, but a pervasive corporate globalism. We resist through our vote, and I don’t mean for this political candidate or that, though that’s certainly part of it. We cast powerful votes for the kind of world we want to live in whenever we fish out a twenty or click
BUY
on the Web.

After Jackie’s tea party, here’s what remains on her permaculture ship: a tiny car that she runs on biodiesel; delicious local and organic food, 90 percent of it produced by herself or her neighbors; fresh drinking water she collects herself at a local spring; solar flashlights (she doesn’t use disposable batteries for anything); a slight house, with building materials so minimal that the forests can live; and not a cent into federal war coffers.

She’s part of a larger rebellion that includes wildcrafters like Bradley, the Thompsons, and the Pauls, who are reshaping Adams County; the Slow Food and farmers market movements in the larger
Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill area; and the budding national renewable energy, natural foods, and national TV-turn-off subculture. There are intriguing trends like the Compact (groups of citizens who join together and buy nothing new for one year), national Buy Nothing Day (no purchases for a day), and Boulder Bucks (cities like Boulder, Colorado, create a parallel currency that circulates only locally, therefore encouraging the local economy). But even if no such efforts existed, each of us possesses an incredibly powerful tool of resistance: our household economy.

It’s been said that only little ideas need patents because the most transformative ideas are protected by public incredulity. Household economy as protest is one of those big ideas. Being at the 12 × 12 reminded me that I can examine with acute interest every single penny that goes out of my accounts. Is that penny helping create a vital farmers market or McWorld? The Thompsons’ free chickens or Gold Kist’s beakless chickens? A simple elegance that coexists with Bolivia’s rainforests, or a decadence that fosters comfort but destroys a far greater beauty? Ideas like warrior presence, the Idle Majority, and the creative edge, I realized, can be crystallized in my life by becoming aware of personal economy’s radical effects — and changing the direction of pennies.

LEAH AND I ATE OUR WAY
into Jackie’s soft economy. We gathered from the garden the herbs we used for baking with Mike’s chicken. Leah pulled from her hair a bright red ponytail holder and used it to bunch basil. She had me smell each herb on the farm individually with my eyes closed. We sometimes brewed dark coffee — and once Leah rooted around until she found a special chocolate spice Jackie had ground herself. She added a little bit to her coffee, and I sampled it — even richer and more luxurious! I added a bit to mine, too.

I bought the coffee at the Adams Marketplace, the community-owned natural supermarket halfway between Pine Bridge and Durham where Paul Jr. and I had talked. The coffee was organic,
shade-grown Bolivian, from the same Andean farmers cooperative I’d supported while working there. With each sip I felt a visceral connection between the work I’d been doing over the past decade in the Global South and choices I was now making in the States. For years, I gave technical assistance to cacao and coffee farmers in South America, so they might gain access to these very markets. The sense of coming full circle in that way — being able to picture Don Ernesto and Dona Celistina maintaining their local rainforests to produce coffee in an ecological fashion as I sipped that very product outside the 12 × 12 — warmed me to the core.

Leah and I would go to Adams Marketplace together. The food and other products in Leah’s home were increasingly organic and fair trade, as our consciousness deepened. At Adams Marketplace I learned about Slow Food USA, which per its website “promotes the pleasure of good food and the integrity of local cultures that grow it” and “envisions a region with local markets, restaurants, and small farms overflowing with fresh food and food choices.” The movement began in Italy at the foot of the Spanish Steps as a protest against McDonald’s and the homogenized, fast-food culture it represents. It now has eighty-five thousand members worldwide, including twelve thousand in the United States, and six chapters in North Carolina.

During my stay in the 12 x 12, both Barbara Kingsolver and Bill McKibben passed through the Research Triangle; they were on separate speaking tours, but both focused on transitioning from our industrial food economy to something more local, organic, and “durable.” Leah bumped into Kingsolver at Adams Marketplace, joining her, her daughter, and her husband for a bite of free-range egg omelet and
tertulia
, a relaxed conversation about her family’s year of eating only local foods in their native Kentucky.

DECOLONIZING OUR CONSUMPTION PATTERNS
is about more than shopping differently or shopping less. Food can be the simplest
way to vote with one’s wallet because it tastes so good. Trickier are all the ways our relationships and emotions are entangled with the corporate economy, such as how we give gifts. Consider that the average American spends $900 on Christmas gifts, not counting the shocking $120 per person for dog and cat gifts.

We were passing a large store in a mall in Chapel Hill called A Southern Season, and Leah said this was where she bought gifts for her parents, her colleagues, everyone. It was, she admitted, her addiction.

We got into the delicate issue of personal finance, and it turned out Leah lived from paycheck to paycheck. Right on the edge. Her December gift splurge alone set her back the better part of an entire paycheck. As a society, we are raised to express love with our wallets; suggesting we “spend less” can be almost like asking someone to “love less.” It’s such a sensitive topic that merely raising it can be enough to cause offense.