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.
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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.”
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Misery
Posted: February 27, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm 1 Comment
Misery loves company, which is why we did the tiling work as a team, laying 259 square feet of tiles on hands and knees. The work is finished now and indeed, “teamwork makes the dream work,” which saying the end result has proved.
To make a distraction from tiling, we played the “Greek Syllabification” game. In fact, this was a lesson in logical thinking and, even though the local schools were on February Break, our Art Farm Academy remained open for business.
My son’s Language Arts teacher, known as “The Magister,” created the game as, “…an excellent, brief object lesson in logical thinking…a fitting complement to his thinking about and then articulating how an English sentence can be composed one way or another to suit the purpose of the statement. …it’s time to slyly ratchet up his ability to think and express himself more critically–and at the same time build his pride and confidence, which the strangeness of the Greek can occasion.”
I dared not tell my son this was an assignment, but instead spoke of the “game,” with four basic rules:
- Every word is made up of syllables and consonants.
- Every syllable makes one sound.
- The sound of a syllable is made by a vowel, or by a consonant with a vowel.
- To syllabify means to divide a word into its syllables.
Seven letters are vowels in Greek: α, ε, η, ι, ο, ω, υ. The combinations of αι and οι make up one vowel, which combination is called a diphthong. A Greek word has as many syllables as it has vowels or diphthongs.
While the Professor and I worked on our hands and knees, my son set up a table and chair, and we began. The contrast in postures was as comical as playing the game was wildly impractical. But we pushed on enough to lay both the game’s ground rules as well as more tiles.
Another assignment during last week was to calculate the degrees of the triangle formed from our first day’s tiling work. My son knows that every triangle contains 180 degrees, and our day’s work was a right triangle, meaning a 90 degree angle at the base. Using a tape measure, we found the hypotenuse was 115″ but the sides were not equal – one was 71” while the other was 90” – and if not equal then the angles could not both be 45 degrees. We needed trigonometry, not geometry, to solve the ratio of the sides of a right-triangle to find a specific angle.
My daughter, who excels in high school, was amazed that we would tackle trigonometry but such was the task at hand. Conventional schooling regards trigonometry as a subject for Junior or Senior year of high school, but anyone in the trades learns that you use the tool when needed. My son has already studied ratios so this was a chance to apply that knowledge.
Our problem, it turns out, has been discussed as far back as the Babylonians and Egyptians; was refined by the Greek astronomers, but Aryabhata, an Indian mathematician, discovered the terms used today: sine and cosine.
The word “sine” is derived from the Latin “sinus” which means “fold in a garment,” but that was a mistranslation of the Sanskrit word “jya-ardha” which meant “half a bowstring;” the Sanskrit derived from Persian, which, in turn, came from the Greek “χορδή” which meant “a bow string made of gut.”
The Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek astronomers were trying to understand arcs in a circle, which is the shape of the cosmos. Trigonometry became their language to divide a circle in order to map the heavens, and thereby understand the movement of celestial bodies. Rich history lay behind the very tangible question of the triangle we laid on day one of our mudroom tiling.
“Sine” is simply the ratio between the right triangle’s hypotenuse and its opposite side; the 71″ Opposite divided by the 115″ Hypotenuse equals 0.617. Converting that ratio into an angle requires the inverse function known as the arcsin; given the known sides we want to know the angle they form, the space between. Because the math to calculate the arcsin is complex, we used a calculator, but the concept became clear: our tiling had angles of 90, 38, and 52 degrees (which add up to 180). Not surprisingly, the Greek letter theta θ is used to represent the unknown angle. The strangeness that Greek can occasion!
Our Art Farm, then, teaches a practical truth that life is about problem solving, not meeting the metrics of a school curriculum. And in the “there are no coincidences” department, the Goddess happened to read to us a passage written by Melody Beattie about solving problems:
When we spend more time reacting to a problem than we do solving it, we miss the point. We miss the lesson; we miss the gift. Problems are a part of life. So are solutions.
A problem doesn’t mean life is negative or horrible. Having a problem doesn’t mean a person is deficient. All people have problems.
Recovery does not mean immunity to or exemption from problems; recovery means learning to face and solve problems, knowing they will appear regularly. We can trust our ability to find solutions and know we’re not doing it alone. Having problems does not mean life is picking on us. Some problems are part of life; others are ours to solve, and we’ll grow in necessary ways in the process.
Face and solve today’s problems. Don’t worry needlessly about tomorrow’s. When they appear, we’ll have the resources necessary to solve them.
Indeed, our core curriculum increasingly is the very practical lesson of stepping up to life to solve problems. And about that game of Greek Syllabification? By Sunday my son had finished the task. Greek is the least of the lesson. The point is to play by the rules and gain confidence in approaching and working through the unknown. Some serious mental gymnastics ensued, as he worked this through, including pronouncing the words after breaking them into the syllables.
1) ανεω (silently) 3 syllables: α νε ω
2) ερος (love) 2 syllables: ε ρος
3) θεωρος (spectator) 3 syllables: θε ω ρος
4) παμφαινω (to shine) 3 syllables: παμ φαι νω
5) ανθρωπος (man) 3 syllables: αν θρω πος
6) λιλαιομαι (to desire) 4 syllables: λι λαι ο μαι
7) νομοθετης (lawgiver) 4 syllables: νο μο θε της
8) ανοικτιρμων (merciless) 4 syllables: αν οικ τιρ μων
9) συγκαθιστημι (to bring together) 5 syllables: συγ κα θισ τη μι
10) χρυσεοπηνητος (woven with gold) 6 syllables: χρυ σε ο πη νη τος
The log splitter
Posted: January 30, 2026 Filed under: Portfolio - Elena's work, What is an Art Farm 1 Comment
Growing up in Illinois, a “log splitter” was not a tool but a moniker for the young man downstate who later became the “Great Emancipator.” Honest Abe, known by many names, did in fact work as a young boy clearing fields and splitting logs by hand.
Here in Maine almost half of the homes are heated by wood stoves so log splitters are a tool – not a nickname – used everywhere. My son has learned how to swing an axe, and in homeschooling he has been learning the hydraulics of a log splitter.
The Professor built his log splitter with a hydraulic ram able to push 30 tons, enough to move a semi-trailer. That power proved too strong for a weld on the chassis and so, when splitting a black elder log, the weld cracked before the log split. Black Elder is a hardwood indeed!
The Professor invited my son to disassemble the log splitter; a “shade tree science class” on small engines and fluid mechanics. The math of fluid dynamics gets very complex quickly, so we focused on the basic principles and how hydraulics work.
The motor is a 4-stroke internal combustion engine, which means the piston completes four rotations while turning the crankshaft. The four strokes are (1) intake, (2) compression, (3) combustion, (4) exhaust. The 4-stroke offers higher fuel efficiency, lower emissions and better durability.
To explain how the hydraulics work my son drew a diagram then described the hydraulics like this: “It is like a big rectangle. When you turn the motor on, the hydraulic fluid moves through the lines…around the edge of the rectangle, and then it goes into the piston chamber with a diameter about 5”. As you open the lever, the fluid fills the chamber, where the piston is centered, and the piston begins to move forward, in the path of least resistance. When you toggle the switch back, the piston retreats. It is something like that.”
The process was for my son to reverse engineer the log splitter, taking it apart and carefully numbering every part in the process. The Professor taught my son how to measure the size of a nut by using your finger. My son’s finger is about 1/2”. My finger is about 3/4”. When looking for a socket, you can use your finger as a rough gauge. My son mastered this quickly.
After the chassis was stripped bare, the Professor welded a new metal frame beneath the old chassis. He doubled the strength. He then reassembled the machine following my son’s carefully numbered plan.
In early January we drove to his house, and beneath the shade tree split wood using the log splitter. We had come full circle. And the Professor has split wood to heat his home during this bitter cold winter.
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Credit where credit is due: Lead photo, “Black bird, White snow” by Elena.
the Why Cheap Art? manifesto
Posted: January 23, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, What is an Art Farm | Tags: bread & puppet theatre Leave a comment
McSweeney’s Manifesto contains 25 manifestos, two of which were penned in the hamlet of Glover, Vermont. Statistically that is a “non-zero probability” meaning that is incredibly unlikely to occur. And yet Glover, Vermont ranks among the titans of 20th century Manifestos!
Clare Dolan set down “The First Manifesto of the Museum of Everyday Life” which is (a) a theoretical museum, (b) celebrating “…mundanity, and the mysterious delight embedded in the banal but beloved objects we touch every day…the secret, ordinary objects that make up the vocabulary of common lives!” (c) heralds “its mission of glorious obscurity!” while (d) located in Glover, of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
The Bread & Puppet Theatre was founded in 1963 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side kingdom of overcrowded tenements, that housed the dense wave of immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th century. The puppeteers embraced sculpture, music, dance and language as well as baking sourdough bread to share with (to break bread with) their audience. In 1974 the company moved to a 140-year old hay barn in Glover. In 1984 the founder, Peter Schumann wrote the “Why Cheap Art?” manifesto.
Shortly after moving to Maine, I was given a copy of the manifesto, which hangs prominently in our kitchen. For this week, I present the manifesto in its full graphic glory.
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.
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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.
Well dressed, on the Porch
Posted: November 28, 2025 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness, What is an Art Farm 1 Comment
In early September, during our Language Arts class, two young Christian women came to the door, dressed in their “Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.” To avoid disruption, I hopped up to answer the door.
They politely asked, “We are doing volunteer work and wonder if you would like to hear some good news from the Bible?” I replied, “That is worthy but I am not interested now. I am homeschooling my son. But I ask you this question: what is the true understanding, the meaning of John 14:12?” They thoughtfully began to open their Bibles and I stopped them, saying “Do not answer this now but consider this as you go.”
Two months passed and recently one of the women returned with her father (younger than me), again dressed in their best clothes. The daughter wore the fashionable full length “Little House on the Prairie” style dress with burgundy flats. The father wore a tad-too-bright blue suit, crisply starched white shirt and a natty woven – not silk – tie. They were radiant in their wholesome goodness.
Standing on the front porch, we discussed grammar of the Bible passage: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.”
I explained that “…because I go unto my Father…” is a subordinate clause. They did not see it that way. But grammatically it simply is subordinate to the independent clause, “…the works that I do he shall do also; and greater works than these shall he do…”. I focused on the verb “do” which they exhaustively counseled meant “to preach.” I countered that it referred to actions such as “raise the dead, walk on water, multiply loaves and fishes.” Flabbergasted, he laughed. Who ever heard of such a thing?!!
He opened his tablet and read from the prepared script that missionaries having gone to the ends of the earth – traveling farther than that street preacher ever could – and having reached countless millions of people means the “preaching” is “greater than.” I respectfully averred that the inverted sentence structure is complex; the object “greater works than these” comes first while the subject “he” comes last. But both the demonstrative pronoun “these” and its antecedent “works” are plural so more than just preaching is going on here.
I discussed Isaac Newton – paragon of the rational scientific mind – who also was an alchemist. He (the father) had never heard of alchemy. His daughter remained silent. We were heading into uncharted territory but my point was the deeper insight is needed, not the narrow rational. In fact, alchemy arguably is a symbolic language of higher consciousness, “base metals” turned into gold a perfect metaphor during the time when alchemy was considered heresy, punishable by death. Higher consciousness clearly does threaten the orthodox, and the street preacher – who was an avatar of consciousness – is revered not because he preached but because of what he did, which includes – as the story is told – raising the dead, walking on water, feeding the masses. Later that evening I asked my Daughter her thoughts and she readily said “works means accomplishments.” Preaching may be one of the accomplishments but “greater than” clearly speaks to something far more substantial.
We spoke about translations – from the Aramaic, to the Greek into Latin and now English; multiple languages over millennia – but he said “God guides all the translations” thus “the word is sacred.” An interesting point, but which renders the grammar moot. Even if the word is sacred, our understanding is not automatic. We need to think for ourselves, with grammar the means to insight; “these” is plural.
We briefly discussed Buddhism, which is to say alternate paths to wisdom. “All roads lead to Rome” is the saying but they held firm in their belief that the “King of kings and Lord of lords” reigns supreme.
Alas, our porch chat came to an end. They asked if they could return and I said, “Of course.”
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
Monetizing Light
Posted: November 14, 2025 Filed under: Money & Banking, What is an Art Farm 3 Comments
Every milli-second of every day for the past 4.6 Billion years, at the center of our solar system nuclear fusion repeatedly has occurred, and will occur; two hydrogen nuclei collide and merge to form a single helium nucleus, thereby releasing energy which powers the sun, which creates light.
As a form of electro-magnetic radiation, the nature of light is to emanate outward from its source, in the form of tiny discrete packets of energy called “quanta” or “photons,” and travel 93 Million miles in 8 minutes and 20 seconds whereupon they warm up a solar array on the roof of the School where I work.
Since 2015 sunlight has been harvested upon that roof, with 430 panels, covering 8,000 square feet, generating approximately 135,000 kWh of electricity per year. When sunlight bathes the solar array, electrons become energized and flow between cell layers, creating an electrical current. The flow of electrons is captured by metal plates and wires; thus, electricity is generated.
Solar power generation was discovered in 1839, and the basic design of a solar collector has endured since the 1970s. It is worth noting, however, that for the past 1.3 Billion years, fungi, and for the past 700 Million years, plants, have been eating light, thereby producing oxygen while decreasing carbon dioxide. Solar power is a stellar advancement, but cumbersome in comparison to the elegant simplicity of the plant kingdom. Still though, let’s sound three cheers for human progress and our role in it!!!
The embodied energy of the solar array (energy consumed to manufacture, ship and install the panels) is approx 260,050 kWh. That amount was offset in 1.9 years and since then the roof’s array has been net positive. Over the past ten years, the school has generated 780,010 kWh which means 842,641 pounds of carbon emissions were not produced, roughly equivalent to 424,754 pounds of coal, 5 tanker trucks of gasoline or 1.1 railcar of coal. The school’s footprint is small, its impact enduring.
By a financial sleight-of-hand the school is able to make money by converting light into power. This is done by selling “Renewable Energy Credits” (REC) to the secondary market where large utilities or carbon-producing industries purchase them to meet state-mandated climate standards. If this seems abstract, then you read well; the REC is a legally defined commodity separate and distinct from the physical electricity itself.
You can spend a dollar only once, and so too, the consumption of energy. What we monetize, then, is not the energy created and consumed but the carbon offset; we monetize not what was done, but what was not done. A subtle distinction, and except for the law of the land, otherwise not possible.
RECs have value not by fact, but by fiat; they have no monetary value except to high-carbon producing utilities and only by decree. In the year 2025, in these United States of America, the shared responsibility of clean air is legislated as a State’s right. 11 states have no REC program; the carbon “red” states are politically raging red (Deep South plus Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho) while 11 states had programs that are now expired or repealed. All of New England participates, while Maine ranks among the more stringent standards, with 2019 legislation passed to increase Maine’s portion of electricity supplied by renewable energy resources to 80 percent by 2030 and a goal of 100 percent by 2050.
Whether the REC market will continue is an open question, hotly debated as the climate continues to heat up. While America looks back to its carbon rich past, China forges ahead with renewable energy. The Economist reports: “The scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. China generated 1,826 terawatt-hours of wind and solar electricity in 2024, five times more than the energy contained in all 600 of its nuclear weapons. In the context of the cold war, the distinctive measure of a ‘superpower’ was the combination of a continental span and a world-threatening nuclear arsenal. The coming-together of China’s enormous manufacturing capacity and its ravenous appetite for copious, cheap, domestically produced electricity deserves to be seen in a similar world-changing light. They have made China a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.” And very likely the AI race will be won by cheap electricity rather than chips.
All of which brings to mind Martin Luther King’s statement: “it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.” The RECs provide a vehicle toward a lower carbon future, and the school participates, every minute the sun is shining.
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.
Realpolitik vs. Real People
Posted: October 24, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: egypt, vermont 2 Comments
Recent world events have brought remarkable promise, for the hope of peace, in a region where crushing violence has been the norm for centuries. It has been achieved by actors on the great stage, using common people as pawns, in their quest for domination. The signing of the Gaza peace plan was described by one publication as “a brutal lesson in realpolitik.”
Realpolitik is the pragmatic approach, valuing practical and material factors while ignoring ethical questions or abstract ideals. The term was first used in Germany in 1853. Niccolo Machiavelli and Henry Kissinger are its standard bearers, but the world today is rife with alpha strongmen practitioners.
“The Great Man Theory” was developed in the same era as realpolitik. The Scottish man of letters, Thomas Carlyle, developed the idea, in 1840, arguing that history is the impact of highly influential individuals – men – of superior intellect, heroic courage, strong leadership even divinely inspired:
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.“
Realpolitik is, essentially then, the effect and the Great Man the cause of much of world history. And so these alpha males build monuments to themselves – arches or obelisks or pyramids or ballrooms – to reassure us by the monuments’ material presence, of the superior level of their being, of their vast accomplishments. Immense is the energy and treasury spent to remind us (or actually to reassure themselves), but history teaches that the common people, in fact, can get the last laugh.
Barre, Vermont is known as the “Granite Center of the World.” In the early 1800s vast granite deposits were found, which brought immigrants flooding into the Capital Region of the Green Mountain State. “Barre Gray” granite is sought worldwide for its grain, texture and superior weather resistance. It is estimated that one-third of all monuments in the United States are made from granite quarried in Barre.
Italian stone masons emigrated en masse to Vermont and these dark hair, dark-skinned people were among the lowest of the social register, the Venezuelans of their day. But their work was of the highest quality, and so when John D. Rockefeller – an alpha of American industry – began making plans for his family’s burial sites, his mausoleums and obelisks were crafted by the Italians of Barre. John D was buried beneath a 70’ tall obelisk, the tallest in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, from the largest single piece of granite ever quarried in America, carved by the lowly Italian stone masons.
The locals tell the story of how those craftsmen tricked the old man, using superb granite on their work-for-hire while keeping the superior stone for themselves, their night job, handcrafting their own tombstones. Hope Cemetery – called the “Uffizi of Necropolises” – in Barre is famous for the quality of its tombstones, 75% of which were designed by the occupants of the graves.
One might find comfort that when John D. Rockefeller, and those of his social strata, lay upon their death bed, mighty proud of their own accomplishments, self-certain of their immortality, it was the unnamed stone masons of Barre who saw clearly the vanity and sham of their monumentality.
The world today seems to run on realpolitik but let us hold hope that it is we the real people who hold the key to a brighter future. A fact laid bare in Barre, Vermont.
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Credit goes to Professor Nate of White River Junction, Vermont who shared the tale of Barre Italians. Thank you, Nate.
an Art Farm 