Karma
Posted: May 1, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness 2 Comments
Spring Break 2026 was, for me, no vacation but a grueling gauntlet, repairing wrongs, like a cat on a hot tin roof. The Quaker school where I work has its ongoing lawsuit, and the roofer – whom I shall call the Industrialist – had offered to provide an in-kind repair, at no cost. The quid pro quo was a release from all future claims. The lawyers worked hard on that language of release, and once done the work was allowed to proceed.
We agreed to make the repair when the school was on break, no children around. I hired carpenters to handle the non-roof repairs, plus a structural engineer to opine on the condition of the framing lumber, and a Forensics Expert to advise overall. My role is to oversee everything, and give final approval; redundancy was built into the plan.
The school was built to passivhaus standards – the highest voluntary standard of energy efficiency – and was the first passivhaus commercial building in the State of Maine, and the third passivhaus school in the nation. Built in 2015, the school was a model of hope for the future, but now the roof leaks; “The Audacity of Hope” once was a bestseller but today the “Art of the Deal” reigns, and when it rains water pours into the building.
The roof is covered in metal, beneath which is 6” of foam insulation. The roof should be dry, but 80% moisture content has saturated the foam insulation. Passivhaus construction is air tight, so once water gets in, it has no means to dry out; in other words, the building slowly rots from within, which will lead to black mold.
For the spring break, the Goddess and our daughter had gone to New Orleans, leaving my son and me at home, alone. On Monday morning, while my son slept, I was at work early when the Industrialist and his crew showed up.
Our agreement was to open four panels of the metal roofing – about 6 feet wide – and replace all wet insulation. But that section was so thoroughly saturated that when the foam was removed the wood sheathing was slick with water. It glistened in the sunlight. In stunned silence, we stood.
The Industrialist curtly told his crew to remove the entire roof. On the ground below, the carpenters waited at their trucks, nothing to do until their turn to remove the wet sheathing and see what lay beneath. And there was I, leading the charge, alone on behalf of the school. Neither a Quaker nor an employee, I am a part-time independent contractor and could have quit long ago. This task so far exceeds the basic maintenance I was hired to do, but when work and life are viewed not as transactional but relational, I chose to stay the course. Such is my karma.
I speak of karma not in the yoga-centric sense where present actions cause future results but from the Sanskrit root “kr” which means a movement (r) within space (k). “Kr” ‘does’ ‘works’ and is ‘action’ itself. Thus, karma ‘makes.’ Karma ‘creates.’ I came into the job as a carpenter, which is one who moves, while making, creating the built space.
This root definition of karma was entirely new to me, shared by my soul brother, after he saw photos from the work. His “Kr” lead me back to the Bhagavad Gita, which, over 5,000 years old, is an epic work of moral science, ethical duty and balance. Ghandi said, “Gita is not only my Bible or my Koran, it is mother…my ETERNAL MOTHER.”
Gita verse 3.19 states, तस्मादसक्तः सततं कार्यं कर्म समाचर।असक्तो ह्याचरन्कर्म परमाप्नोति पूरुषः।। १९ ।। which translates as, “Therefore, without being attached to fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for working without attachment, one attains the Supreme.”
That private school has been a source of tremendous experience, powerful relationships. Early in my tenure I arranged a donation of Peter the Polar Bear to the Pre-K class. I had helped build Peter, one of seven sea monsters from a Public Art exhibit. When the exhibit ended, the maker sought new homes for the sea monsters. The Quaker school welcomed Peter, gathered in circle for an assembly, after which the Pre-K cherubs lead Peter out of the Meeting Room, down the hall to his new forever home. I lead that march.
Another time I sat in circle among the 7-8 grade students with an elder, who, in 1965 for the Committee for Non-Violent Action, helped coordinate the Selma to Montgomery Marches. The elder gave voice, in the first person, to Martin Luther King’s presence and the enduring role of civility and non-violent civil disobedience.
And later, when those 7-8 grade students studied the Holocaust, I sat in circle again to share the story of my son’s Great-Grandfather and Great-Great-Grandmother, Jewish in Austria 1939; he, the Great-Grandfather, was persecuted but escaped on the last flight out, while she, the Great-Great-Grandmother, was exterminated. The official letter from the Ministry of Social Welfare, Repatriation Department – Tracing Section states she was deported “to Terezin (Theresienstadt) on June 20th, 1942, and from there to: Auschwitz (Poland) on December 15th, 1943.” The number of her transport was Dr – 1490, the official correspondence signed “For the Minister” with a counter signature vouching “For the Correctness.” Age 74 at the time of her transport, below the signatures, the certificate states, “Notice: Persons more than 50 years of age did not return.”
Dark is the cauldron of hate; our duty is to bear the light, without attachment. Having borne witness, my relation with the school grew profoundly deep, and so I stayed to fight on their behalf, to do battle over a roof and its design, even on Spring Break, when everyone else was on vacation.
The work last week was grueling. By Friday it was clear to a man, that all of us wanted to be anywhere else but there. One of the carpenters looked me in the eye and said, “The next time you need to remove plywood, don’t call me.” Forearmed, I replied swiftly, “You know I was thinking I never want to see you again!” Laughter broke the tension. We got back to work.
Ours is a testosterone-driven age of dominance, where the transactional drives pursuit of rational self-interest. The relational is different, a compassionate path which is the core both of the Homeschool Academy and my karma, which is how I teach my son.
__________________________________________
Meanwhile, Gaia pushes up and starts go down, into the ground. We weed the beds. The growing season begins.
The Path Not Taken
Posted: April 24, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness | Tags: John Dewey 2 Comments
The local school that my son does not attend is $8.4 Million in debt, needs to cut 70 positions (including 30 teachers), plans to close and possibly to sell one of the Elementary schools, all just to hold the property tax increase to 6%. Two years ago, the School Department opened a new state-of-the-art $70 Million Middle School.
Going from state-of-the-art to layoffs in two years is a frightening whiplash, and you might wonder if the local public school is a nurturing work or learning environment these days. No longer in that school system, my son’s path not taken, it is edifying to compare our curriculum to the public school system; what are the “pros” and what are the “cons?”
One hallmark of the public school system is the “No Child Left Behind” Act, signed into law in 2001 by the Second Patrician of Kennebunkport, Maine. “We’re gonna spend more money, more resources, but they’ll be directed at methods that work,” he growled, “Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work.” Throwing money at the problem proved a futile waste.
The No Child Act was reviled and despised by teachers and parents for its emphasis upon standardized tests. “Teaching to the test” brought draconian penalties for schools that fell behind. The focus on math and reading left less time for science, history, music and the arts. Recess was cut back. To avoid sanctions, some states lowered their definition of “proficiency.” The Act drove the expansion of charter schools, further draining money from public schools, especially those carrying a debt load for buildings and infrastructure.
“The skinny kid with a funny name” President changed the law in 2015 – the Every Student Succeeds Act – that reduced testing time and gave the States more control over accountability. But regardless of the metric, math and reading levels continue to drop; as of 2024 “The Nation’s Report Card” shows only 22% of high school seniors demonstrate “proficiency” in math and 35% in reading. The system seems flailing.
Homeschooling once seemed out of the question, but when COVID struck during my son’s 1st grade, we were forced to homeschool. He returned to the public school for years 3 and 4, but then abruptly began Middle School in the 5th grade. Nationwide, COVID brought increased rates of inattention, anxiety, depression, and behavioral changes such as opposition and aggression. For my son, the classroom situation became unbearable by the 6th grade and so – at his request – we launched this holy experiment.
Our great unknown is “compared to what?” Am I preparing my son to succeed in life? And “What is success? What is our standard of proficiency?” Here at an art farm we value emotional intelligence more than sheer mental horsepower. Too many are the stories of brilliant minds – MENSA even – who struggle with mental health issues, left unaddressed. The IV league is not for us. I value honesty more than politeness; I prefer to live close to the ground. I believe, in fact, the purpose of life is healing, not the acquisition of assets, honors, or accolades. I may be in the minority, but not silent.
We are required to submit an annual assessment, which is handled by Our Aristotle, a State of Maine Certified Teacher, who works in the public school system, while pursuing a double Masters in Education and Social Work. A remarkably perceptive young man, he was the student teacher for my son’s 5th grade class. They have worked together in a classroom, as well as via the internet. His insights are invaluable. He speaks clearly with my son. One of his gifts is that he is ADHD.
His students are of the “Anxious Generation” and the data are chilling: 20% of US adults ages 18 – 25 report high levels of anxiety; for the period 2010 through 2022 Emergency Room visits for nonfatal self-harm among teens ages 10 – 14 spiked 311% for girls and 171% for boys, while suicide rates for the same age group increased 117.4% for girls and 66.5% for boys. The system is failing, horrifically.
Our Aristotle, who works on the front lines of the Public School System, explained to me, “Relationships are key. The system gets in the way of relationships because it is focused on output, on tests, on metrics. That does not mean you cannot get a good education in the System, but anxiety makes it harder to learn in the System; to thrive there you need to ignore the influence of the negative teachers. Individual teachers do care about education but the system values output.”
The relational approach is based upon the attachment theory of how infants and children form relationships. Developed in the 1960s, the idea is that infants need a strong and secure relationship with at least one caregiver to provide the security and protection for normal emotional development. Absent a secure nurturing environment, children develop as Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant or Fearful-Avoidant. Our Aristotle explains, “Attachment is the blueprint for how you relate to others. It can change over time but change is hard fought. Public school becomes a matter of survival if there is a strong attachment to the parents.” The antithesis of the Tiger Mom; attachment bolsters the sense of self to provide deep rooted courage and self-reliance to push back against social norms, opening to the vulnerability of a different path.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), our Aristotle argues, is about output, training for high income jobs producing more output in pursuit of the ever expanding Gross Domestic Product. The Second Patriarch of Kennebunkport admitted as much, shortly after the trauma of September 11, telling the country, “Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
“The goal of education,” Our Aristotle continues, “is for kids to transcend us, not to focus on output. They need to learn what good and bad is; the purpose of education is to create a society in which ‘we the people’ can think critically to fight back against oppression. Public education is for all, not for the royals.”
The key to this goal is reading and writing. STEM topics are helpful, but, to Our Aristotle, are meaningless without a solid grounding in words, an understanding of language and how the mind frames thoughts, in order to comprehend what is virtue. The ability to think critically is, he says, the key to the fulfilling life.
John Dewey, a foundational American philosopher known as the “father of progressive education,” advocated against the rigid rote memorization of the Gilded Age in favor of child-centered experiential learning. He viewed schools as vital democratic communities preparing children to live well and gain skills to contribute to the greater good.
In My Pedagogic Creed, written in 1897, Dewey notes that “to prepare [students] for the future life means to give him (sic) command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities….education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Our Aristotle explains, “School should be about helping people to become critical thinkers who can create their own knowledge of the world. Because we are all inherently good, if we are able to direct our own learning, we’ll naturally come to see the world through a pro-social way. I think that kids go down the “wrong” path because they feel totally disengaged with their learning, and they feel disengaged from their learning because school is mainly about compliance.”
In The Child and the Curriculum, published in 1902, Dewey advocated for the child’s relationship to the subject matter because the relational allows the student to link the information to prior experiences, deepening the connection with new knowledge. Dewey opposed a curriculum focused on data and facts with the student as passive recipient, where “the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened.”
Our Aristotle challenges the authoritative model where educators are the experts, “An educator should be a coach for the students’ own journey in teaching themselves… connecting current learning to previous learning makes it relevant rather than [some] nebulous piece of information that they need to learn because we said so…. many times in school I was forced to learn something in order to perform well on an exam, but I didn’t retain any of it because it seemed like “school” stuff…[the goal is] to meaningfully engage in my world which, in adulthood, becomes bridged with the broader social world.”
Ever deeper we go, our meditation on the purpose and process of education.
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence
The Page, part 2
Posted: April 17, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent 1 Comment
Bitter is our national divide and debate over rights; like sharp toothed dogs we gnaw on our prey, the Amendments 1st, 2nd, and 14th to name the more frequently challenged three among the twenty seven. Discussion of civic responsibility, meanwhile, seems held in an empty auditorium where few if any attend; that yoke not willingly assumed in this age when might makes right and dominance has become a defining trait.
On the day, however, my Daughter was Page on the floor of the State of Maine Senate, debate was vigorous between rights and responsibility. The topic was LD 1822, the Maine Online Data Privacy Act, which fundamentally addressed the 4th Amendment, defining “reasonable expectations of privacy.” The choice was between the responsibility of individual privacy versus the rights of business using digital data to target market to consumers, and minors, in Maine.
LD 1822 has been the most heavily lobbied bill this year. The Chamber of Commerce aggressively challenged it, which mirrored a trend nationally. More than $1.1 Billion has been spent since the 2024 election by Big Tech, including Meta, Amazon, and Google parent Alphabet, as reported by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
There is no single comprehensive federal policy for digital privacy. A few disparate regulations – for health care (HIPPA), finance (GLBA) and Children’s Online Privacy (COPPA) – have been made law, but those were written almost 30-years ago. The US Government Accountability Office reports, “The collection or use of personal information by the federal government is governed primarily by two laws…But there is no overarching federal privacy law that governs the collection and sale of personal information among private-sector companies. There is also no federal statute that gives consumers the right to learn what information is held about them for marketing purposes and who holds it.” Upon the states falls the responsibility to protect consumers.
Our day on the Senate floor saw LD 1822’s final vote take place. The law was written to exceed the requirements of other states, by imposing stricter data minimization (to collect less) and stronger limitations on data sharing (to share less). The “accept all cookies” question gives companies unrestricted permission to track, store, and sell user data for targeted advertising. Debate was vigorous.
Anne Carney, a strong proponent, and the Senator who invited my Daughter to serve as Page, opened up the debate. She commented the bill has been 6-years in development, the financial impact fell substantially to large corporations, much less to family owned businesses, and that Massachusetts is considering a similar law.
An Honorable Senator stood to counter, “Massachusetts is never smart to follow. A bad idea gets bad results.” He acknowledged he neither understood nor used “the Facebook thing,” but, as the owner of a vegetable stand in the Penobscot region, assured the floor that his Son-in-Law had said the law would be bad for their family business.
Carney regained the floor: “The law protects children from predators. Who benefits?” rhetorically, she asked, “not the small Maine businesses. The data brokers are unrestrained.” She quoted a Reuters special report from November 2025, “Meta internally projected…10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from advertising for scams and banned goods…fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.” She concluded, “This is an abject failure of the Feds.”
The Penobscot farmer, armed with opinions but no facts, regained the floor to argue this law was “a 1st Amendment issue, the language is vague, this is an additional cost to Maine business that will empower out-of-state businesses.” Another Senator gained the floor to read from the very long list of major corporations in the State – LL Bean, included – who strongly opposed the bill. He implored a no vote. Opposition was vocal and strong.
Rick Bennett, the only Independent on the Floor, stood to speak, seeking a compromise, “The bill contains an exemption for not-for-profits, which are a huge employer. The ACLU supports this bill, and they advocate in politics, meaning the bill is imposed on others but not upon themselves.” Bennett called for a vote on a “Movement to Recede to Prepare an Amendment.” Carney stood to challenge, “This is 6-years work! No amendment will help now.” Bennett replied, “The Senator had proposed the not-for-profit amendment, why not another now?” Vote on the Movement to Recede failed 14 in favor and 19 opposed.
A meeting was held in private with the President of the Senate, and when Bennett returned, he called a vote to “Table Until Later.” Vote to Table failed 14 in favor and 19 opposed.
Still another meeting with the President, after which a vote for “Indefinite Postponement” was called but that vote also failed 14 in favor and 19 opposed.
On the day my Daughter was an Honorary Page, civic responsibility rather than corporate rights was affirmed as LD 1822 passed the Maine Senate. That evening Senator Carney wrote to me, “I have been involved in this data privacy work in the Judiciary Committee for the past six years, and this iteration is a great bill that is well-equipped to comprehensively protect users online — particularly minors.”
A poet once wrote, “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.” Indeed, that is what we experienced on our day and the following 9 days.
The House of Representatives two days later rejected the Senate version because of its exemption for political groups: 70 in favor and 78 opposed.
Four days later, the Senate again voted to approve the bill, 18 in favor and 14 opposed, thus sending the Bill back to the lower chamber.
Three days later, on 9 April, a motion in the House to Recede and Concur with the Senate failed by a vote of 70 in favor and 79 opposed.
Businesses en masse lobbied to oppose the law, arguing undue hardship by limiting their advertising to targeted consumers based on search history, location and other personal data. Most states have passed an industry-favored version, allowing companies to collect data as long as consumers agree to it. But Maine has nothing in place. Corporate interest is unrestricted.
Rep. Rachel Henderson, who originally had proposed a less strict version lamented, “The sad reality is that…when the bill dies tonight, we still walk out of here without a privacy policy.”
Might makes right, until we choose change.
Building Models to a T
Posted: March 13, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent 4 Comments
The son of a carpenter, he had an 8th grade education. Then he took night school classes for business and stenography, until at age 17, began work as stenographer for the Pocachontas Fuel Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. He described his boss as “the dean among smokeless coal producers and the local distributors never took decisive action without first consulting him.”
With the Dean’s approval, he moved to the Queen City Coal Company as stenographer and part-time salesman, riding the electric rail lines to make his sales calls. On his first day, he boarded the 6:00 am train and, at the Mers Coal Yard, sold a carload of New River Mine coal on his very first call.
In 1914, at age 19, he paid $675 to buy his first car, a Ford Model T. Ohio had license plates then but no drivers licenses until 1918. His sales territory expanded to southern Indiana towns along the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, and as far east as Columbus, Ohio. Roads were occasionally paved with bricks, but the vast majority of intercity roads were made of gravel, crushed stone or dirt. With a cruising speed of 20 miles per hour, sales calls were an all day odyssey beyond the reach of any telephones.
In June 1914, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated and the “War to end all wars” began. Our 19-year old hero drove 140 miles – which took more than 7 hours – to Camp Sherman to enlist in the US Army. While at Camp Sherman, Edwin Forbes Glenn, Chief of Staff of the Department of the East, asked, “Can anyone write shorthand?” Our hero, named John, rose his hand and was put to work. Upon completing the task, General Glenn dictated a letter to Newton D. Baker, Secretary of the War in Washington DC whereby he appointed John as his personal secretary with the title of “Army Field Clerk.”
Edwin Forbes Glenn was soon promoted to rank of Brigadier General, and subsequently a two-star Major General as commander of the 83rd Infantry Division. John was stationed in Le Mans, France and became Chief Clerk for the American Military Training Center with duties of entertainment and shipment of troops to the Western front line. During the War, the 83rd Infantry Division supplied over 195,000 officers and enlisted men as replacements in France without seeing action as a complete formation.
John is my son’s Great Grandfather, and this week’s homeschool history topic is coal, automobiles and Detroit. LEGO released, last week, a 1,060 piece kit for a Ford Model T measuring 7.5” high by 11” long by 5” wide, with a fold back fabric roof, split windshield, spoked rim wheels with white rubber tires. The rear trunk opens, the driver’s cab has working steering, the hood panels open to reveal the engine, while the front crank spins the fan. My son pined for that model, which he easily earned laying the tiles. This history lesson became part of the deal.
World War 1 ended with the Armistice of 11 November 1918. John returned from the war and was offered a job with the Atlas Coal Company, his territory Ohio and Indiana. The company’s “Red Comet” coal was mined in Harlan, Kentucky, a center of labor strife between coal mine owners and union workers, especially during the Harlan County War of the 1930s. Harlan County would become the poorest county in the USA.
491 miles north, in Detroit, Henry Ford – also with only an 8th grade education – had been busy during the “War to End All Wars.” The River Rouge Complex was built in 1917 and became the world’s largest vertically integrated factory. During the war it produced 42 Eagle-class antisubmarine patrol boats, more than 38,000 Model T cars, ambulances, and one-ton trucks, 7,000 Fordson tractors, two types of armored tanks, and 4,000 Liberty airplane engines for the Allies.
Henry Ford did not need John’s coal – Henry sourced his own – but John knew that Detroit would need vast amounts of Kentucky coal to boil the water to create the steam, to spin the turbine to activate the generator, to create electromagnetism to drive the industrial machine. John would become known as “The King of Coal” in the Ohio River Valley region. By the late 1940s he was buying the entire output of mines, shipping trainloads of coal north to fire the turbines of Detroit Edison. When held “as goes GM, so goes the US economy,” the King of Coal of the Ohio River Valley was among legions of salesmen shipping upwards of 3.2 Million metric tons per year to Detroit.
Both the King of Coal and Henry Ford had only an 8th grade education. That is pretty much where my son is now. Henry Ford famously “learned by doing” which increasingly seems the direction of our homeschooling. When my son learned small engine repair, the Professor taught electromagnetism. Welding as chemistry has been one facet of our teaching, while even Language Arts teaches that grammar is a construction of thought, a process of assembling words, phrases, sentences to map form to meaning. While “hands on” is a key here, this week’s lesson taught that history has sharp edges.
Cadiz, Ohio, in far eastern Harrison County, is the Appalachian town where Clark Gable was born. For our lesson about coal, Harrison County was a top producing county in Ohio, driven heavily by massive strip mining operations, with total production reaching 55 million tons per year by 1970. Cravat Coal was founded in Cadiz in 1951 by a Yugoslavian immigrant, whom John helped launch, co-signing a $100,000 note to underwrite the business. Over the years John sold their coal, and the company passed to his sons, pistol-packing union-busting coal operators.
John was old school, born in 1895, and always did business on a handshake. But the Puskarich boys used contracts, aggressive tactics, and were less than forthright. By the 1970s they were moving to push John out, and they tricked him to sign away his rights.
My now-deceased Cousin told the story, “I called grandpa in either 1975/76 and asked if I could go with him [to Cadiz]. He said he didn’t think it was such a good idea (probably because he was in the process of being let go, as I understand, they didn’t want to pay him anymore).… We stayed at a little motel. “Big” Mike Puskarich, the President, was larger than life…De Niro in Casino…8 of us sat down for dinner and he ordered “steaks for the table”…let’s just say he wasn’t Opa’s cup of tea…actually more like Rodney Dangerfield…the bill came and Mike pulled out a hundred or two and said “keep the change.” Next morning we went to the coalfields. After lunch Gramps hired the receptionist to check in on me while I watched TV. I remember Gramps coming home rather despondent. We were supposed to stay another day, but late that afternoon we checked out and returned to Cincinnati in his Grand Prix.”
In June of 1980 John wrote to Big Mike and his brothers: “Your $600,000.00 profit on this order alone was five (5) times my total salary for the 10 years I was Vice President, Sales. Your greed in taking $9,000.00 from my salary in 1977 and 1978 and rewarding me with a pension of $4.00 per day was incredible, ungrateful and dishonest. May I remind you it was I who co-signed your $100,000.00 note starting you on the road from rags to riches, and my dedicated services to a net worth of $7,000,000.00 as of December 31, 1976. Shame on you!”
John had been cut out. Five days after sending the letter, he suffered a stroke, from which he never recovered.
This week’s history lesson has many aspects, but at its most basic teaches how complex history can be. Henry Ford was an iconic industrialist, as well as committed to racist and anti-semitic views, including supporting the Ku Klux Klan.
The surface mining in Harrison County, and throughout Appalachia, has caused profound degradation, with barren un-reclaimed land and severe air and water contamination leading to higher risks of lung, respiratory, digestive, and kidney cancers due to exposure to toxins. Harrison County has higher mortality rates compared to both the Ohio state average and the United States national average.
The coal industry was dominant in the Ohio River Valley and Appalachian region from the late 19th century through the 1980s, which is exactly John’s life. At its peak, in 1923, 863,000 were employed in the mines, so more than four generations found steady employment, but at great cost. It is no surprise that an enterprising 8th grade drop out could leverage shorthand into a significant career selling coal. But to his great grandson, of the Zoomer generation, that way of life seems incredibly outdated and dangerous.
Cravat Coal, in fact, has gone out of business. John’s searing experience there brings to mind the proverb “gentle as a dove and wise as a serpent.” Both are needed.
Perhaps the ultimate lesson is that life is not a black and white story, but grey; not simple like the old western cowboy movies, where the good guy, in the white hat, rides into town and wins. Coal powered a war time industrial machine that battled and defeated fascism. America was dominant. That legacy now fades, and the Zoomers come of age in an increasingly complex, deeply interconnected, possibly anti-democratic future.
Red Cabbage Ph
Posted: March 6, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm | Tags: Social ecologies 1 Comment
Nettlesting is a Mother Tree, whom I met, almost 30-years ago, in the Fulton Market District on Chicago’s near west-side. When that city was the “Hog Butcher to the World” that neighborhood was home to its meatpacking warehouses, but circa 1998, gentrification spread, and we each occasioned to be there for a Childrens’ art exhibit. She walked up, we started talking.
In 2000, our paths crossed again, in Chicago’s Financial District canyons, on LaSalle Street, outside the once venerable Harris Bank, which now has been merged into the global behemoth BMO. I was preparing to depart for the Philippines – a land of smoke and mirrors – on my oxymoronic quest for “Humanitarian Finance” while she was preparing to WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in the full sunlight of Southern Australia.
Being a Mother Tree, she is a steward of Gaia who thrives at the vanguard of soil and soul. Like a zen koan, she is not an artist, but one might say she is an eARTheart-ist.
In 2004, she planted six kernels of “Golden Bantam” organic heirloom 1902 sweet corn in a shopping cart and then proceeded to push it around Chicago’s dense urban core. People were confronted by food growing, rather than food as a commodity purchased in a store. “Know your food, know your farmer” came alive on street corners. [Search You Tube for “Field Trip. A cart full of Corn Hit’s the Road.”]
In 2006, Sandor Katz, the NY Times best selling author, profiled her guerrilla gardening in his book “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.” By 2012 she was named as one of Utne Reader’s “Twelve Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” That now ancient history was prologue, however, to the work she has gone on to pursue.
In 2020 she travelled in the Ecuadorian Amazon basin and worked with Indigenous peoples as well as local growers, developing classes on soil and remediation. The BBC reported this, quoting her, “The ultimate goal is to create an ecosystem of native plants and crops that can be farmed sustainably while also cleaning up the oil. I’m trying to have people re-engage with certain subtle complexities of nature…”. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200316-cleaning-up-the-oil-spills-of-the-amazon-rainforest.
Her “Soil Keepers” program grew out of this effort, and has now been taught to more than 250 students around the United States, as well as in Qatar, Finland, Poland, and Ecuador. https://socialecologies.net/
Over the years we have kept in touch and she recently came east to soak in the rocky coast of Maine. Our oceanic expanse served as counterbalance to the Great Lakes’ prairie. She and my son M got along quite comfortably and an idea was hatched.
Science is not my strong suit. In high school Chemistry, the concept of a mole as “a unit of measurement to quantify the amount of a substance, representing exactly 6.022 × 10²³ elementary entities (atoms, molecules, ions, or particles)” was bewildering. I dropped out post haste to study ceramics. I never looked back.
Necessity, though, is the mother of homeschool innovation. Between M’s needs and my lack of science training, when the Mother Tree offered to teach him soil science I accepted post haste; what I call soil science is, more precisely, applied biogeochemistry, starting with applied chemistry through field work and kitchen-based experiments. It is amazing what red cabbage can teach about Ph.
This week we rolled up our sleeves. Following the Soil Keeper’s lesson plan, we finely chopped 5.4 pounds of red cabbage and then boiled it in one gallon of neutral Ph water. M selected 20 household items, then put 15ml of each into a small jar with 50ml of the deep purple cabbage water. The materials included lime and lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, pickle juice and hot sauce; clean snow, dirty snow, calcium chloride salt, and a salt/sand blend; wood ash and sawdust, an organic 4-3-3 fertilizer, mortar and grout (from the tiling); bleach, baking soda and table salt.
With the certainty that is science, before our very eyes the cabbage water changed color depending upon the acidity or alkalinity of the materials. The acids turned pink, while the alkaline moved to green or even yellow.
By day three, we made notes about the experiment; more precisely, my son wrote out sentences. As we began, he commented, “I remember Science class in 5th or 6th grade always taking notes. I find it hard to take notes.”
He began with simple sentences, but as his excitement grew, they became compound and complex: “Lime was the most acidic. The most alkaline was bleach. The “Midnight Black” grout went from black to light green, and slowly became a darker green in the layers; the grout mix fell to the bottom because it was heavier. The 4-3-3 mix was next to the mortar….”
We talked and drilled deeper. While tiling, the Professor had mentioned that Lime was an ingredient in mortar. M researched and discovered (a) mortar contains lime from dolomitic limestone, (b) lime comes from rocks that contain 80% or more of calcium or magnesium carbonate, (c) Espoma Bio-Tone 4-3-3 contains calcium (at 5%) and magnesium (at 1%), and (d) he concluded, “Therefore, it makes sense that 4-3-3 mix and mortar are next to each other on my Ph scale because they both contain the main ingredients in lime.”
Excitedly, he reasoned, “What lime is doing to the soil is technically the same thing as calcium supplements do to humans.” He paused, then said, “Wait, it is not the same thing…” and so he corrected his sentence to [emphasis added], “What lime is doing to the soil is related to what calcium supplements do to humans. Calcium, to humans, supplements human bones. Calcium, in soil, supplements the cell walls.”
He then asked, “what is dirt made of?” Soil, he learned, contains minerals 45%, air 25%, water 25% and organic matter is 5%, while its texture is the ratio of sand, silt and clay particles.
He exclaimed, “I have never been so invested in a science lesson! This is fun…this is genuinely fun!!!”
About the circle of life, he discovered, “nutrient transfer: plants take up essential elements from the soil and convert them to organic matter consumed by humans.” Did someone say, “know your food, know your farmer” ?
Having only just begun, he pondered why pickle juice and sawdust were beside each other on his Ph scale. His research lead to this conclusion: “The reason pickle juice and sawdust were next to each other was because pine and spruce are softwoods, and more acidic than hardwoods. We got the sawdust from the table saw, and have been cutting pine and spruce for the tiling work. That makes sense.”
“Just two more questions?” he pleaded. He chased down that softwoods are more acidic than hardwoods due to acidic resins, while oak is a hardwood that can be more acidic. Pickle juice is highly acidic, typically 2.5 to 3.9. In contrast, sawdust from pine, spruce, fir is neutral to slightly acidic; pine = 4.1 to 5.3, spruce = 4.7 to 5.8, fir = 5.2 to 5.9. “So, pine is more acidic while fir is more neutral,” he concluded.
“What if we try this again in the summer? We can test the soil when the plants are growing!”
And so our Red Cabbage Ph experiment came to an end. His bristling excitement a testimony to what happens when a student sits beside a Mother Tree, pondering soil and soul.
_______________________
NB: The astute reader may have noticed that here at an Art Farm we use no proper nouns. That is intentional, to underscore the mythopoetic, more than the rational. For example, whatever Ultimate Truth may be, it has more than 1,000 names, which is to say proper nouns, none of which capture the grandeur or sublimity of that whole, many of which lead only to wars.
Humans give names to bring order and cognitive structure to a complex world; naming divides subject from object, while “being” remains intransitive, a verb which takes no object. “Divide and conquer” is a tool of would-be authoritarians and Emperors which leads us to fight to the bottom. In these challenging times, then, let us be together, undivided, to rise to new heights and an expansion of consciousness. And to that end, my pronoun is “We.”
__________________________
Number Rules the Universe
Posted: February 13, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent 1 Comment
“Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent,” said the Greek sage. So fundamental is this truth that every middle school includes geometry in its curricula.
Coming of age, children, enter into the exquisite beauty of geometric truth. Regardless of language spoken, color of your skin, which church, temple or forest you worship in, the eternal truths – πr2 (area of a circle) or 2πr (circumference of a circle) or πr(r+l) = πr[r+√(h2+r2)] (total surface of a cone), et cetera – pertain. Greek letters are used to label these eternal truths.
At our Art Farm Homeschool Academy we study surface area in the conventional way, using worksheets and word problems. But, on hands and knees, we examine the floor closely, teaching math as tactile, not just conceptual. Last week we discussed electric currents and Ohms. This week we turn to tiling, which is a form of applied geometry and chemistry, using hand tools to spread mortar and setting tiles to create one continuous surface.
We began with Pythagorus. To establish the layout, we needed to determine the exact right angle to the exterior wall, so the warhorse a2 + b2 = c2 was used. After marking the right angle, the center line was snapped and the layout became clear. We used tiles 12” x 24” (2 square feet each) and my son quickly calculated the bathroom surface area was 136 square feet.
Tiling is about surface, not volume; each tile must be flush at all four corners. My son learned how to spread mortar, which again is about geometry. A notched trowel is the tool, and depending on the size of the notch – 1/8” or 1/4” or 1/2” – the amount of mortar spread will vary greatly. More importantly, the angle of the trowel impacts the thickness of the mortar, which is to say the volume. The Professor used a sawtooth trowel and he taught that the proper angle was just below 45 degrees.
To spread mortar is “to butter the tile.” We “double buttered,” applying mortar both to the floor, as well as to the back of the tile, in order to create a stronger bond. The tile is then set in place and gently pushed back and forth, to eliminate any gaps from the sawtooth troweled mortar, and to set the tile firmly and evenly in place.
Tiling a bathroom floor is immensely disruptive. We had to pull the toilet and bathtub, there was no laundry for more than a week, showers were intermittent. When an object fell down the drain line we had to vacuum it out. For anyone with obsessive tendencies, the process is like chasing, or being chased by, the dragon. It was a long hard week.
On the final day we set the grout, but the instructions wildly under stated the area covered by one bag. Mid-way through we had to mix a second bag – which meant cleaning the tools and the bucket, getting fresh water, mixing more – but the working time was a factor for the grout already set. If the grout cures before it is all set then you have a major problem. We were racing the clock. What we thought would be smooth teamwork became a gauntlet. Like a farm boy, my son hustled, taking orders in real time.
The marathon was grueling. Our teamwork was successful, the timing worked out, the end result wonderful, the washer and dryer in place and operating again. The radiant heat is working, programmed to 74 degrees at 5:30am, cooler to 62 during the day, and then reheat for the evening, back to 60 for the night hours. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, our blessings abound!
Through this gauntlet of fire my son is learning what the Greek sage said, so long ago, “Number rules the universe.”
Ohm, not om
Posted: February 6, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Portfolio - David's work 3 Comments
The Professor makes house calls.
His full title is the “Pema Professor,” to honor Pema Chödrön, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist. The Professor came to our house and held class in the bathroom, not about Om – the sacred syllable – but about Ohms, the measurement of electrical resistance in circuits or conductors.
We are doing the finish work, finally, in the bathroom we added onto our house back in 2017. For nine years that room has had the basic plumbing but no heat, and a subfloor painted grey. Immense is our blessing to be able to do this finish work now, when masked jackels rampage our community, when our brown skinned neighbors stay indoors afraid to leave their house, more than 200 people having been arrested and absconded during “Operation Catch of the Day,” while so many homeless still live on street corners begging for coins; that we are able to afford such luxury now is a privilege not lost upon us. But still, our addition needs to be finished.
We are laying electric radiant heat on the bathroom floor, and then tiling. The Cadillac approach. The process begins by laying a waterproof uncoupling membrane which prevents tiles from cracking if the wooden subfloor moves. Into the membrane’s grid, we snapped in place 84 square feet of heating cable. That wire connects to a 15 amp Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter circuit breaker. Before laying tile, we needed to test both the Ohm resistance in the cable and its ground fault continuity, to ensure the integrity of the cable and circuit.
An Ohm is the measure of resistance, an object’s opposition to a flow of electric current. That resistance to flow creates friction, which friction creates heat, which is what we desire in the floor of the bathroom. We need to test this before laying tile.
Ohm’s formula is R = V/I, where V is voltage – the push driving the flow of electric charge – and I is current – the electric charge that flows past a specific point in a complete electric circuit. The formula for resistance was discovered by George Ohm, a high school teacher in Cologne, Germany, who published his theory and formula in 1827. The academics rejected his idea, but in 1841 Ohm was recognized and received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. The unit of electrical resistance, the Ohm, is named in his honor.
In Language Arts my son has been learning the Greek alphabet. By happy coincidence, the Greek letter omega (Ω) is the symbol for ohms, chosen because its sound is similar to Ohm’s last name. Everything seems concordant here at the art farm.
To install the radiant floor heating cable, we made multiple tests of “conductor resistance” to ensure the circuit was functional. We used the Professor’s megohmmeter to take an ohms reading between the two power leads. At the factory the cable tested 14.8 ohms, but our test before installation was 14.1, after cable installation was 14.2, and after tile installation was 13.4. The manufacturer allows a 10% variance, so we remain within that range. Our test was positive and we proceed.
Of note, if the tester uses his fingers to press the megohmmeter leads against the copper lines, then the resistance reading shows the resistance through his body; he has become a part of the circuit. As a homeschool experiential, my son tested the resistance that way and got a reading of 4.3 ohms. The Professor did same and had a 4.7 ohm reading. The lower the ohms the easier electricity flows through a circuit. The circuit breaker was off so he was not at risk. Salt and magnesium in my son’s body can account for the difference because they are conductive electrolytes which increase the flow of electricity. My son does take a magnesium supplement so there is a line of reasoning here.
And so life goes here at an art farm. Ohms not om, our homeschool tutorial was one step the toward tiling the new bathroom. Updates to follow, as this journey continues.
Oneness
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: anagarika govinda, consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality, Thomas berry 2 Comments
Having built a whale, we decided to make a movie on the topic “all life is one.”
Having finished the short film, I sought funds from the Maine Arts Commission.
Having to substantiate my body of work as an artist, I referenced “An Art Farm.”
Whereupon, I realized our art farm had been mostly inactive since 2015 and so on 31 March 2024 I wrote “Crossing the Rubicon” about delivering the Whale north to the Wabanaki nation. I did not win the grant, but I did continue to write, and for 94 continuous weeks now I have posted short essays.
In a sense these are weekly postcards to my Mother, a chance to share thoughts that otherwise would not come up in our occasional phone conversations. More importantly, they allow me to mine thoughts that arise at 2am, to chase down loose threads and weave them, as if into tapestries, at best like those of the Renaissance rich in detail and color, telling stories of this strange and troubling moment in time.
An overarching theme seems to be Spiritual Ecology, a field of inquiry of which I only recently became aware. Rudolf Steiner is considered a visionary, having described a “co-evolution of spirituality and nature.” I learned of Steiner back in my Chicago days from a Gaia-centric friend at the vanguard. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, also considered a founder, almost one century ago, wrote of a ”consciousness of the divinity within every particle of life, even the most dense material.” In “The Phenomenon of Man” he foresaw that “Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”
My Mother actively discussed de Chardin in her college days, and within the social circle of her childhood in Clifton of the Queen City, Cincinnati, Ohio, as well as at our dinner table. Father Sullivan, elder of Holy Cross Parish, once described my Mother as a “pantheist;” I suspect he meant that as a criticism but which she rightly took as a compliment! Perhaps, what the Father actually meant was panentheist (God in all things) not pantheist (God is all things), but regardless, since my childhood the tenets of Spiritual Ecology have been laid down as plain common sense.
On a family road trip west to the Grand Tetons, my Mother handed me a copy of John Muir’s biography. I was enthralled, in the backseat, while crossing the endless great plains. Decades ago I read Thomas Berry, also considered at the vanguard, who emphasized “returning to a sense of wonder and reverence for the natural world.” More than my share of Thoreau and Wendell Berry have I read, as well as David Abrams’ “The Spell of the Sensuous.” Joanna Macy has been celebrated among the Wise Women here at the art farm, while Emergence magazine is on my subscription list, the product of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi trained multi-media maven on topics of a collective evolutionary expansion toward oneness.
But what would be this consciousness of oneness? The Renaissance is an historic example of a shift in consciousness, the “awakening” or “rebirth” of Europe, away from the Church-dominated Medieval era to embrace humanism, scientific inquiry, individualism, a flourishing of arts and culture. Rene Descartes, living at the end of the Renaissance, is considered foundational to modernity, his “cogito, ergo sum” defining the thinking rational self. But “cogito” is only one part of the whole self, and it can easily fall into the binary, mono-dimensional thinking of either-or, rather than both-and.
Newton’s Laws of Physics state an object is either at rest or in motion, but quantum mechanics allows an object to inhabit two states at once. Our logic has lead to AI which is a massive accomplishment, but it might either destroy us or bring far-reaching benefits. The “us versus them” is endlessly argued by politicians, the strongman’s lever using fear to divide and conquer. A spiritual ecology pursued only through the rational seems destined to failure. An expansive and inclusive approach is needed to embrace the breadth, depth and interconnectedness of both the natural world and ourselves.
“Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness,” by Lama Anagarika Govinda, is insightful toward this life-affirming goal. He describes the “one-dimensional logic which…cuts the world apart with the knife of its ‘Either-Or,’” and then introduces “…a new way of thinking, an extended multi-dimensional logic which is as different from the classical Aristotelian logic as Euclidian geometry is from Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He presents this using the coordinates of an x-y axis. “If we regard the horizontal as the direction of our time-space development (unfolding), then the vertical is the direction of our going within, toward the universal center of our being and thus the realization of the timeless presence of all potentialities of existence in the organic structure of the whole of the living universe. This is what the poets call the ‘eternity of the moment’ which can be experienced in the state of complete inwardness…such as happens during meditation and creative inspiration.”
It is no small undertaking, a 21st century renaissance awakening to multi-dimensional consciousness not among the few, but ultimately we, the people, of the planet. Small-minded politicians and capitalists will pursue their goals of domination, and so this seems a necessary path out of the madness, deeper within. It is beyond the scope of one short essay to speak to such fullness, but this seems a direction for our art farm to pursue in the new year.
…and here is a link to the short film on the topic that we are part of the ecosystem, that all life is one, which set this ship – which is an art farm – to sail on this oceanic odyssey:
https://www.picdrop.com/claytonsimoncic/C39UK57ncx
The short film was produced with Anna Dibble. Clayton Simoncic was the photographer and editor.
_________________________________
Since it is written “the last shall be first,” I shall end this post and honor the Benham Family tradition, that good things come to those who begin a new month, on the first day with the first words: “Rabbit, Rabbit.”
May good things come to all people in the new year.
Mr. Sneed and His Eggs
Posted: November 21, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Money & Banking, Portfolio - Elena's work, What is an Art Farm 2 Comments
The soundtrack of my childhood is best captured in the screech of sneakers on a parquet floor, the sharp, clear trill of a referee’s whistle, its echo down an empty gymnasium. On saturday mornings my father would drive my older brother and me to the Walden School for intramural basketball games. My brother is a gifted natural athlete who thrived there, while I found the game incredibly dull, the challenge of throwing a ball through a hoop entirely lost on me.
From my parent’s perspective it was a brilliant set-up; the house emptied for an entire morning, my Mother had quiet, my Father had no distractions and we returned home exhausted, which ensured a peaceful afternoon. My enduring intramural memory is that Mr. Sneed, who ran the program and was its referee, made his living trading eggs on the floor of the former Chicago Butter & Egg Board.
Eggs, to Mr. Sneed, were a fungible commodity, bought and sold in bulk. Eggs, in our house, were a thing scrambled, served with bacon, raspberry jam and English Muffins, for Sunday Brunch in our Dining Room after the 10:30am guitar mass at Holy Cross Church.
My Father’s day job was food merchandising. Known as the “Grocery Guru,” he wrote and lectured on three continents on how to market food at the retail grocery level. He was a stock and bond man so Mr. Sneed’s world of commodity futures contracts seemed an abstraction; foreign, opaque and mysterious. But there must have been some spark. I followed that path.
During college, I met people who worked in the markets and I visited the floor, experiencing the open outcry pits in action. Sheer bedlam, it was capitalism at its most raw and rapacious: I win, you lose, a buyer for every seller. Eventually I got a job at the Chicago Board of Trade’s Financial Futures floor, where more than $350 Billion in US Treasury bond future contracts change hands daily. It was the pits, an awful place to work, but fascinating all the same.
Eventually I became the “squawker,” reporting the 30-year Treasury bond pit action to a trading desk in Lower Manhattan, giving them an edge on market timing. The Broker for whom I worked had a superstition and would allow me to use black ink only, never red ink, which marks a loss in accounting, which he could not allow under his stead.
Following the pits I ended up managing the food service in a residence for women artists. From my office desk I traded stock options on the S&P 500. While working at a wholesale flower market I traded corn futures. Eventually I ended up trading the 30-year Treasury bond futures not on the floor but from an office. I never did well enough to quit the day job, but I never washed up, either. It was an odd fascination.
And so I came to meet the Wizard, a CPA active in off shore banking who was born in the 1920s in Nemaha County, Kansas. He had been named in honor of the traveling banker who visited the town, “an old Kansas man, born and bred in the heart of the Western Wilderness.” Close to the 100th meridian, it is hard to fathom how remote Nemaha County would have been in that age before electricity, running water and phones. It was Dorothy’s Kansas.
By conventional terms he was the Father of a college classmate, but in truth he was the Wizard of Oz trading the futures markets. He was curious about my experience and we began talking. Eventually he told me about the sanctus sanctorum, the Golden Fleece, the goose that lays the golden egg, which was the “cash forward discounting of 108% bank debentures.” And so into the land of smoke and mirrors I went.
He introduced me to a financier who had helped launch McDonalds and whose Uncle had financed the Hollywood mavens: Marcus Lowe, Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille. I found myself managing discussions with Sheik Mohammed Had, an Emissary and Confidante to the Royal House of Saud. I flew to Manila to meet with a mild-mannered man named Jun, possessor of 100 Metric Tons of Gold Bullion stored in the underground vaults at Kloten, Switzerland. Whether or not he was the illegitimate son of Ferdinand Marcos, the Dictator of the Philippines, was an open question, which is about the way things go in the land of smoke and mirrors. I worked with Abraham, a Christian from the South of India, who possessed a 1 kilogram rough cut emerald, the largest in the world. He was trying to leverage the asset to fund development programs for his community but when the planes struck the Twin Towers, it became all but impossible to work with rare and unusual assets.
I spent hours reading at Northwestern University’s Law Library and stumbled upon Public Law 104-62. Known as the Philanthropy Protection Act of 1995, this exempts certain charitable organizations from federal securities laws. Signed into law by the 2nd Patrician of Kennebunkport, 104-62 is a loophole large enough to drive a Brink’s truck through. I contacted McDermott Will and Emery, the world’s largest tax law firm, but was declined as a client because, “Having checked our entire roster of Associates, no one has ever heard of this law and we feel it would be unethical to learn on your dime.” Although arcane, humanitarian finance is an official law. In the land of smoke and mirrors I found the path less travelled, which proved to be almost impossibly difficult to follow.
While in London, I worked with a CPA from Toronto who had helped Kuwait finance reconstruction after the 1st Patrician’s Iraq-Kuwait War. Following the liberation, the Central Bank of Kuwait revived the Dinar at an exchange rate of USD 3.47 to 1 new Kuwaiti Dinar, making it the strongest currency in the world. That the power to organize, finance and fund can change an entire country has always struck me as fascinating.
At this season of life, these experiences are long in my past. On a recent trip back to Chicago, I took my children to the Board of Trade, but the open outcry markets are gone, replaced by electronic trading. Since 9-11 the Board allows no visitors into the Exchange. This chapter has entirely vanished.
The eggs I buy to feed my family now come unwashed at room temperature, from a local school teacher. Buying as close to the source is as far as imaginable from the fungible commodities of the Chicago markets.
That the power of capitalism can be used at scale to fund the common good remains a compelling idea, which runs counter to rational self-interest. And so I keep one line in the water still, just waiting for when the Great White Whale swims into the Casco Bay.
credit where credit is due: photos by Elena
The Serpent of Caesar
Posted: November 7, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: George Fox, Leviathan 1 Comment
I am the “Serpent of Caesar” acting for and on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends local school. I chose this role willingly, in my position as the Facility Director of the physical plant and property. The roof leaks. Even after its repair. And so I lead the Quakers into battle.
Prior to January the terms “construction litigation” and “Forensic Engineer” were not in my vocabulary but now they dominate my thought and action. Some hoped to approach this problem amicably, asking for the help of the Architect and Builders. I turned to the Agreements signed in 2014 when the School’s building project began. Contracts are, by their nature, adversarial; they define the course to cure problems when things go wrong. And a repeatedly leaking roof, clearly, is something gone wrong.
Only an Expert can opine in construction litigation; it takes one licensed Architect to argue against another licensed Architect. As a mere carpenter my opinion is moot. Within the trades, the Plumbers and Electricians are “Masters,” because they are licensed and trained to have and to hold special knowledge. Carpenters, at best, become Journeymen, but none of us dare come to a job site claiming the mantle of “Expert.”
The first Expert retained was indeed a licensed Architect, who showed up on the job site wearing the wrong shoes. He was a cowboy, “all hat, no cattle” and “all sizzle, no steak.” He gladly criticized another Architect’s work, but when asked to design the solution he deferred, saying, “I will have to think about that. My liability insurance might not cover that.” Off into the sunset he rode. I did not look back.
The second Expert retained was a licensed Architect and member of an engineering firm founded by three MIT professors. He, and they, are the Brahmins of Boston. Meticulous and thorough, at an exorbitantly high cost, on one hot day in July they opened up the roof and did find 80% moisture content, 3” down into the insulation. By the nature of the design, to replace any of the insulation you must remove all of the roof.
And so knives were sharpened, a lawsuit was filed. When the investigations were ended, I wrote the Demand Packet to establish the damages sought. The opposing counsel’s counter arguments were brutal, a challenge not to take personally the barbs thrown my way. But they are only doing their job. This fight is about money, and they are its sentries.
The pace of a lawsuit, and its forensic investigation, is slow and ponderous, and this week all of the parties finally gathered in mediation. Dressed in business casual, all parties came bearing sword, saber or pocket stiletto. The opposing counsel – all men – were abrasive in their prevarications and circular reasoning, doing everything possible to point the other way, to avoid the central fact that the roof has failed. It was trench warfare, fought to a draw in the opening round of the long battle ahead.
The origin of our story lies centuries ago in England during the Civil War, also known as “The Great Rebellion.” The Royalists fought the Parliamentarians in a winner take all battle. Life for the Nobles was grand and sumptuous while the tenant farmers struggled, long before electricity or indoor plumbing, working from 6am until 6pm, children beginning to work as young as age 7.
In 1651 “Leviathan” was published with the infamous sentence that “Life is nasty, brutish and short.” This work is foundational for political realism, defining the authority of the State over the individual to avoid the “war of all against all” that results from the pursuit of rational self-interest amidst the absurdity of death.
Also in 1651, a Dissenting Preacher was imprisoned for challenging the orthodoxy of the King’s Church, and his sentence then doubled for refusing to take up arms in Cromwell’s army fighting against the Royalists. That preacher’s core tenet was that the “inward Light” belongs to every man, woman and child; no intermediary is needed to receive divine guidance because the sovereign is not the King but God, itself. And so George Fox formed the Religious Society of Friends.
In 1681 William Penn, one of Fox’s adherents, was granted by King Charles II 45,000 square miles along the North Atlantic Coast of North America. Such then did the Quakers settle on virgin soil, acreage which today constitutes Pennsylvania and Delaware, and a different form of political realism was practiced, which became foundational to the American experience. Colin Woodard, a local historian and author who lives in Freeport, Maine, described Penn’s social experiment:
“Penn envisioned a country where people of different creeds and ethnic backgrounds could live together in harmony. Since his faith led him to believe in inherent goodness of humans, his colony would have no armed forces and would exist in peace with local Indians, paying them for their land and respecting their interests. While all the other American colonies severely restricted the political power of ordinary people, Pennsylvania would extend the vote to almost everyone. The Quaker religion would have no special status within the colony’s government, the Friends wishing to inspire by example, not by coercion.”
Penn’s “Holy Experiment” became the sine qua non as Philadelphia emerged as the largest and most influential city in the Thirteen Colonies. Thomas Jefferson wrote there, in a rented home at 700 Market Street, the most radical progressive sentence in the history of politics: “We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Friends Schools have been central to this “social contract” and “holy experiment,” in the belief that spiritual, social, and intellectual growth are intertwined. Since 1656, when Quakers first arrived in Maryland, the schools have always taught both boys and girls.
And so 368 years later I arrived at the Quaker school bearing a Transcendentalist message from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Your goodness must have an edge, else it is none.” Kindness alone is not enough.
Circa 30 AD the street preacher taught in Aramaic: “ܗܐ ܐܢܐ ܡܫܕܪ ܐܢܐ ܠܟܘܢ ܐܝܟ ܐܡܪ̈ܐ ܒܝܬ ܕܐܒܐ؛ ܗܘܘ ܗܟܝ” which circa 120 AD was translated into the Koine Greek – the lingua franca – as “…γίνεσθε οὖν φρόνιμοι ὡς οἱ ὄφεις καὶ ἀκέραιοι ὡς αἱ περιστεραί,” but when the Italians settled the Holy See where Nero’s Circus had been, circa 382 AD, the Latin Vulgate was translated, “Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbae” until 1611 when all the King’s scholars and all the King’s scribes wrote the masterpiece which is the King James Bible: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
For two millennia this wisdom’s fulcrum, its hinge, is the humble conjunction and: “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Life’s complexity does not reduce to either/or but more often is both/and, which is especially challenging when waging war over a leaking roof.
an Art Farm 