Worms and other weird things

First off, let's get the context.

I am a writer and project manager/consultant-type for a communications firm. I serve clients. I plan and develop communications strategies, write/edit/architect websites, analyze website usage data, write and advise on Facebook posts, and everything in between. I dress up for work, and I work in a beautiful downtown office. With other people who are consultant-types and creative-types, who also dress up every day and do a lot of brain work.

I'm also a hippie. I believe (fervently!) in living a life connected to the natural world--from food to weather to seasons, to human duty to act responsibly with our resources. It is this philosophy that underlies all my value decisions. I live in a small house, I camp out most weekends in Northport, dreaming (and occasionally making progress) about reclaiming an old farmstead.

And that differential—between business-day Amelia and farmer Amy—is what this post is about. For my friend and colleague Will, whose sharp mind, curiosity, humor and enthusiasm are eternally valuable, here is a catalog of things I do, that you will think are endlessly weird.

1 - Worms

I think this is what started the whole conversation. Worms, that eat your organic garbage, turn it into compost, and live happily in your house with you. They're efficient little fellas, and they live in a condo like this one. You fill each tray with moistened bedding made out of cardboard or newspaper, sawdust, chopped leaves, or other biodegradable goodness. You put in lots of worms in the bottom tray, and as you generate biodegradable waste aka kitchen scraps, you bury it in the bedding in the upper trays. The worms migrate up toward their food, and leave behind their castings, which are awesome for your garden.

You use red wigglers, and lots of them. I looked it up, it's more than 10. More than 50. Probably more than 1,000. It depends on how much compost you have to process. You buy them from a worm farm, by the pound.

Since I know you are DYING to know more, here's a better explanation: http://cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html#wormcompost

2 - Homemade dairy products

Yup, this one too. I make yogurt from organic milk (raw if I can find it) and a starter yogurt culture. It involves heating the milk, cooling it a bit, adding starter, and letting it sit at warm temperatures overnight. I eat it plain, straight out of a mason jar.

If you want Greek yogurt, you do just drain off the extra liquid from regular yogurt. Cheesecloth and a colander over a bowl in your fridge for a few hours does the trick.

I also make creme fraiche, by mixing buttermilk and heavy cream, and letting it stand on the counter overnight. My least-weird dairy recipe is ice cream.

I want to learn to make cheese. Real cheese of the smelly variety. Like the kind that ages in caves. I also want to have a miscellaneous assortment of milk-producing pasture pals, someday. A cow, a couple goats, a few sheep.

3 - Homemade beer

We brew our own. We drink primarily Michigan beer when we're out, but at home, we pretty much keep ourselves in our own beer, cider and mead.

We spend a few days a year, steeping grain in hot water to convert the starches, boiling the wort, adding hops, adding yeast, and waiting while it ferments away in a corner in the kitchen, five gallons at a time. In a bucket or a giant glass bottle.

I do still buy wine, but only because I haven't had time to figure out winemaking yet. Oh, and it comes in boxes now, which are quite tasty, and better for my recycling bin.

4 - Preserves

I put up vegetables every year, either from the market or from our own garden. This you will not find gross, but perhaps just a little strange. Pickled asparagus, cucumbers, beans, beets and garlic tops. The occasional pickled garlic and pickled eggs (ok, maybe you think that is gross. but it's really delicious). Roasted peppers and roasted tomatoes get popped in the freezer. Frozen beans, peas and fruit. We're nearly out of everything from last year--spring and early summer, before the first harvests, are known as the "hunger gap."

Someday, one summer soon, I want to try to grow all our vegetables. I realize I don't actually have time to be a farmer, so I'll have to keep buying meat and eggs from friends and the market. But, one day, we'll see if I can't more or less feed us out of our garden plot. Between that and a fishing license.... who knows?

5 - Diesel and grease

I drive a diesel Volkswagen Golf with almost 200,000 miles on it. My truck (an early 90s F-250 with about 150K on it) is also a diesel, and is parked behind the grape vines out back right now, because I'm trying to figure out how much to spend fixing it, and when. I fully intend to convert both vehicles to run on grease.

I am sure there are other, and perhaps stranger, things that I do, or want to learn to do. I may not even know they are strange. I like being quirky, dreaming up new ways or reclaiming old ways. I know its nonsensical, when you juxtapose back-to-the-earth-Amy with head-down-working Amy. I might be better off if I were in better balance.

And that, my friend, is the thing that has me scratching my head. How do we create an economy that has room for knowledge work and manual labors of love like growing and cooking food? How do we create space for people to be connected on the internet, and connected to their food source? What does a truly integrated life look like?

I'll be working on that daydream, from my desk, and from my garden.

Elusive contentment

Life is imperfect, stunning, complicated. The way we live it is up to us, and I believe we have choices to make about what "normal" means. Contrast this against the daily pressures of deadlines, billable hours and my own insecurity. Against the reality of an economy that requires income and functions on commerce.

I suspect that I want to change the rules that define life in our time.

I envision a connected life, based in personal relationships to people, food, land. Work that is tangible and meaningful—related to my survival and well being. The time to be thoughtful. The practice to be prepared. A heady dose of creativity and intellectual stimulation. I imagine a world that I want to live in. I know it is attainable, but I don't know how to get from here to there.

I want to reduce my frustration with the life I have.

And that frustration stems from a few things, some easier to control than others. Some of them require others to change their behavior (hard). This is about changing my own behavior (still hard, but easier.) And here is a problematic behavior of mine: I don't enjoy the trappings of the life I have, because I want to change them. As a result, I am ill-prepared to fully live this life. I don't have the right tools for the tasks at hand.

So here is my experiment: attention to gratitude, contentment and presence.

Living the life I have, with as much integrity as I can

• Gratitude: I am thankful for the life I was born into. My family worked hard, and my sister and I had opportunities that gave us the foundation for success. Education, travel, parents and grandparents, enough independence to learn something on our own.
• Contentment: The life I live now is hard in many ways, but it's a pretty great life. I'm not hungry. I have enough to share. I work for and with people whom I love and respect. I live near water, and I have room for a garden. I have our farm up north. I'm in love.
• Presence: This is the life I have. I can shift it toward the life I want, and I should. But I also need to allow myself to live this one. Create the routine. Find the boundaries. Stick to them. From clothing, to exercise, to cooking, cleaning, reading and writing (those are as much hobbies as they are chores, don't laugh), I need to do more than survive. I need to be present in all aspects of my life: creative, emotional, intellectual, practical, and professional.

I think being present is the hardest one.

For a long time, the professional part of my life has had all the attention, mostly because it felt the most required for survival. I've been successful, but I've been aware of the cost. Perhaps I am only beginning to understand what it means. This is the hardest one, because it means wrestling my job into balance—time and attention. This is the hardest one, because it means learning the difference between service (paying wholehearted attention to the needs of others) and presence (not sure how to articulate that one yet, but I know it's different).

Wish me luck. If you have good advice, let me know.

Whatever you're meant for

I have been thinking a lot about what my next step in life will be. I work too much, laugh too little, and spend far more time managing projects than I spend living my life. This is not what I'm meant for.

But what am I meant for? If I could do anything, what would it be?

1 - I'd farm. I'd grow food for myself and my family, and I'd cook it into beautiful celebratory meals.
2 - I'd write. I'd capture the small moments, the insignificant ones that seem like they are mundane, but are really perfect little miracles.
3 - I'd listen. I'd read, wonder, research, and see where it all took me. I'd be just fine with open questions.
4 - I'd practice. Music, meditation, languages, all of it.
5 - I'd share. I'd have dinner, wine, coffee with friends. I'd make new friends. I'd cherish old friends.

Simple desires, seemingly so little to ask of life. Where do I go from here?

What I learned today

I love the people I work with. We operate like a family, and for the most part, we're a pretty functional one. I'm grateful for what I learn every day. Today was a zinger. Here's what I learned:

I define collaboration as co-creation. Sitting side by side, working fluidly, letting go of ownership and boundaries, to make something that couldn't be made with any of us alone. I think it's a better result. It's certainly a better experience.


Feedback and subsequent iteration is not enough (for me). This mode of "meet, then go away and create, then come back and get feedback, then go away and create" is inefficient, and feels rife with opportunities for misunderstanding. And, it makes it hard to get the right feedback at the right moment. To have a removed reviewer, the designer has to explore something to great depth, to realize a concept almost fully.

Unfinished work feels bumpy and uncertain. It can easily inspire fear and doubt in a removed reviewer, and defensiveness or frustration in the creator.

Not everybody wants to, or knows how to, be a co-creator. It takes invitation, shared expectations, and full commitment of trust in each other. We have to give up our attachments, and be open to the unknown discovery, the unpredicted innovation. There's a lot of uncertainty there.

What I haven't learned is how to work with the in-between. How do I figure out where and when to engage the various people who need to have input—because they have a significant stake in the outcome—when their definitions of collaboration fall in so many places along the continuum of co-create to review-and-iterate?

How do you do it? Where do you find your community of practice?

***
It's hardly poetry. But it's what was on my mind as I close my day and turn to the business of the rest of my living.