Bones of the Building
Posted: August 21, 2026 Filed under: Permaculture & Home Renovation, Portfolio - Elena's work, What is an Art Farm 1 Comment
We bought this old house at foreclosure, a distressed sale at a very low price plus 20 years of hard labor. I was able to find an angel to buy it while I renovated and then refinanced it conventionally through a bank. We made it work.
My wife was in her third trimester with our second child so time was of the essence; I hired a crew and we descended upon the main house, opening all of the walls, building double stud walls and super insulating, redoing the electric, heat and new kitchen plumbing, removing the dust and debris in 76 days. We tore down the original barn. 10 days later my son was born and came home.
Five years later, a gift from a deceased Uncle, allowed me to rebuild the barn, making the house large enough for us to stay here. The Ell – the summer kitchen as it was originally called – we never touched; we had neither the money nor the time. It has now come time to begin that work.
The carpenter’s adage holds that the two most important things in a house are the foundation and the roof. Everything else is framing and finish – livable space – but the foundation is the cornerstone while the roof sheds water, locks the walls in place, adds rigidity to endure strong winds.
The foundation of our Ell is crumbling. Thirty years before the Civil War, at the time of the Indian Removal Act, a carpenter with initials C.D.W. and a crew of thirteen set to work on this plot of land. They hand dug a trench down to the frost line, then foraged the fields for boulders, using oxen or draft horses to haul and drop the rocks into the trench.
The rubble is “loose fill” – no mortar – but jagged edges of rock do lock in place over time. 200 years is plenty of time. When the rubble foundation reached just above ground level, they mixed a lime mortar and set bricks upon which the farmhouse was built.
Lime mortar allows moisture to evaporate and is softer than the 19th century bricks, meaning the mortar will decay before the bricks. Lime mortar does not age well.
Carpenters speak about the bones of the building, of which the foundation is key, and the timing of rebuilding our home’s foundation while I recover from a total hip replacement is symbolism of striking proportions. After 65 years the cartilage of my left hip decayed, has gone, leaving bone-on-bone. “It will not get better, it will only get worse,” said the Doctor. After 200 years the lime mortar of our foundation has decayed, leaving loose bricks, entire sections missing. It will not get better, it will only get worse.
For the foundation work, I hired a journeyman mason. For the hip replacement, I hired a surgeon. Each was the appropriate choice. Neither seemed a do-it-yourself proposition.
The mason began laying bricks at the age of 15. Fast and strong, he could make far more per hour than his peers working retail or in an office. At college he majored in structural engineering and business, then hung out his shingle and has never looked back. He specializes in old houses.
Our Ell has settled about 1 inch over 27 feet. Not bad, all things considered. When we built the addition we did jack up the Ell as possible, but then we locked it, using heavy duty lag screws, into the foundation of the new addition. The slight unevenness will remain, an eccentricity of age.
In September 2024, I toiled in the Ell crawlspace bracing the floor system. I set ten concrete pads, upon each of which a post was hammered into place with a gusset to lock the posts and prevent movement. I brought everything up to code, with 36” to 16” of working space. Each concrete pad was difficult, while several were incredibly challenging. I had two choices: either mix concrete in the crawlspace and then bucket it into location or pull a pre-cast block, weighing 130 pounds, into a pre-dug hole. Given “pick your poison,” I chose the latter, the pre-cast.
The crawlspace is macabre and surreal. Spider webs and carcasses hung everywhere overhead, covered in a white mold/fungus on the exoskeleton. Rats have lived in that crawlspace and in the dirt lay remnants of former lives in this house: shards of broken china with pastoral scenes, an oyster shell, shoe leather, a glass bottle of “Medicated Worm Syrup” made by Hobensack’s in Philadelphia circa 1845, and two lego pieces. I wrote then, “Let me be clear: never would I do this as paid work-for-hire. But for my wife and children I will and I have crawled on my back and my belly, with minimal leverage, to move concrete pads into place, hammering posts, affixing gussets to make stable the floor system.”
My work done, the mason is focused on the present, creating a bridge between 19th century loose-fill and 21st century masonry. The carpenters arrive first. Before they remove the bricks, cribbing is needed under the sill plate, to support the Ell during the masonry work.
Inside the crawlspace they find more china and old dried bones, from a large rodent, one of the residents over the centuries. Bones as metaphor and as literal dry and dismembered brought to mind scripture, “The Valley of Dry Bones” from the Book of Ezekiel ”…and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.”
This passage inspired “Dem Bones,” the classic African-American spiritual with the easily memorable lines:
Toe bone connected to the foot bone
Foot bone connected to the heel bone
Heel bone connected to the ankle bone
Ankle bone connected to the leg bone
Leg bone connected to the knee bone
Knee bone connected to the thigh bone
Thigh bone connected to the hip bone…
This truth is literal. The Ell’s rafters are notched at the eave end to rest upon the top plate, which rests upon the studs, which transfer the load vertically down to the sill plate. 5” wide x 6” thick x 14 feet long, fashioned of hemlock, locally felled and hewed by hand, C.D.W. laid these plates long ago. The sill plate rests upon the bricks, which rest upon the rubble. To remove the bricks without cribbing would be like cutting a man down at the knees.
Cribbing in place and the bricks removed, the mason will next apply a thick layer of N-type mortar and set cinder blocks to lock the new into the old. Considerably larger than bricks, fewer blocks will be needed speeding the process. N-type mortar uses both lime and Portland-cement for strength and durability. Our concern is stability rather than historic accuracy.
Portland Cement is from the Isle of Portland off the coast of England, not the city across the bay. Invented in 1824, it had not made it to Maine when this house was built. The “discovery” of Portland cement was but a footnote to building history as it was the Romans who perfected concrete over 2,200 years ago. No one has come close to matching the strength and durability, nor even understanding what the Romans did. The formula remains a mystery. Like Pompeii.
We don’t need 2000 year concrete; we need the right material and Portland Cement and lime will do the job. The mason will push his crew and the work should move quickly. During the entire process I will recline on my bed, icing and elevating my leg. The analogy between their process and my healing bears striking parallels.
My new titanium hip is uncemented into the femur bone. The implant has a porous, textured surface into which the bone cells migrate creating a structural lock, a biological fixation.
The masons’ N-type mortar combines cement, hydrated lime, sand, gravel and water. As the slurry hydrates and hardens it flows around every piece of stone and block, creating a rigid monolithic mass, locked into place.
Both the new hip and the new foundation each satisfy the needs of load distribution, structural integration and mechanical interlocking. But the body, magnificently, goes one step further.
Concrete is static, once cured it is rigid and fixed. Entropy begins.
Bone is dynamic, living tissue that continually adapts to mechanical stress.
Wolff’s Law states that healthy living bone adapts to the mechanical stress and load placed upon it. The bone density changes according to the stress: “Stress it, and it strengthens; ignore it, and it weakens.”
Applied science is happening at the art farm. While I lie in bed, allowing bone to grow and attach to the titanium, the mason and crew hustle to rebuild the foundation.
My children observe it all, lessons in science, history, and place: 1830 C.D.W. and crew set out to build this farm. 2012 we began the renovation. 2017 we rebuilt the barn. 2024 I toiled in the crawlspace to stabilize the floor joists. 2026 the mason and crew rebuild C.D.W.’s work. From the 19th to the 21st century, building, decay, repair, and renewal unfold around them.
Entropy happens.
Preservation takes work – intervention, ingenuity, judgment, and skilled hands.
A house survives because people decide it is worth the effort, and then figure out how to save it. A body is much the same.
This is our homeschool lesson: on planet Earth, things do not just keep working at the push of a button. People come together to make them work. We study what came before, diagnose what is failing, gather the needed tools and the right people, make a plan and go the distance, whether that is a work crew slinging mortar, or the achingly long nights of bedrest.
The only way out is through.
And, if we are lucky, we pass it all on to the next generation.
Human, Flourishing
Posted: June 5, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm 1 Comment
What to the Romans was named Terra, to the Greeks Gaia, astronomically is classified as Sol III – the third planet from the Sun being an ocean world that harbors life with liquid surface water. Given a mass of (5.97217±0.00028)×1024 kg rotating at a breakneck speed of 1,037 miles per hour at its equator, here at 43° 38′ 29″ N / 70° 14′ 27″ W a real person coming of age learns about the materiality of life.
With the Mother Tree, he studies soil, more precisely “applied biogeochemistry,” starting with applied chemistry through field work and kitchen-based experiments. For the past eleven weeks he has examined soil, taken samples from multiple sites. He is learning that specificity is an essential attribute of knowledge.
Our backyard, for example, for centuries was the dumping ground for the real persons who have lived in this “Big House-Little House-Back House-Barn,” the classic New England farmhouse from the 1800s. Long before municipal waste collection, the people would toss their detritus “out back.” Their attention was focused on their vegetable fields growing in front of the house, so the back yard was left untended, a waste heap. We endlessly dig up broken glass, as well as a perfectly intact coffee mug, empty bottles of elixir, and other assorted sundry items.
My son has been digging holes out back, to study the soil, which is not “dirt” but something wonderfully complex, biotically rich, far more specific and particular. Of the Hollis Fine Sandy Loam variety, the soil here is classified by the Natural Resources Conservation Service as prime farmland. This 200-year old farmhouse was not built with heavy equipment pushing fill, and then landscaped with commercial sod grown on some industrial farm a few states away; original to this site, our soil is a biological archive of hundreds or thousands of years.
As guided by the Mother Tree, my son has used transects to mark a section of the back yard and drawn a map. He dug holes 6” deep and, having taken soil samples from five sites, studied their percolation rates, to understand compaction and composition. This hole is not like that hole; this hole percolates 1” per 3 minutes while that hole percolates 1/16” per 3 minutes. “Why is that?” we asked.
He made a quadrat – a standardized sampling frame, a window into place – then threw it randomly within the marked off section, to isolate specific areas, to systematically count, identify and measure the abundance, or lack, of plants and bio-mass. “What is that?” we asked.
On the space-time continuum, my son, a real person, during this academic year has been constructing a mental framework – structure and method, applied – to learn about place, one specific place, this yard, where he is becoming an adult real person. The Mother Tree has helped him to “think well,” not by locked logic but creatively.
Cynefin is a word among the Welsh people, with no direct translation into English. Literally it can mean “habitat” or “familiar place” but at a deeper level it describes an integral sense of belonging, the deeply intertwined factors of being, heritage, stories and traditions shared within family and community. In my teaching, emotional connection lies at the core of cynefin. This treasure trove among real persons, AI’s Ziggurat of the cloud lacks, entirely. The young real person growing here, on the Hollis Fine Sandy Loam of this art farm, accrues daily, slowly, a specific knowledge, grounded in emotional intelligence, that will become his identity.
Our quest to define “what is a person?” expanded this week to include “what is place?” which lead us to have a chat with his Cousin, the Professor of Law. I had expected to discuss the legal fiction of corpus fictum but the Cousin took the conversation in an entirely different, magnificent, direction.
Me: So, let’s begin with the definitions of a person: do you remember Plato’s?
My son: Uhhh…the chicken…with no feathers?
Me: correct. And Aristotle…?
My son: (silence)
Me: The animal…the political animal?
My son: Right.
Me: We also had the Sanskrit and the buddhist…with materiality shared among all of the definitions. Materiality seems basic to personhood. Our bodies.
Cousin: But is that a distinction of kind or form? I have a colleague here who studies bio-ethics, which is ethics at the edge of humanity. For example, genetically engineered monkeys replacing their genes with human genes to give birth to humans. Or pigs used to grow human organs.
My son: What do they feed it?
Cousin: Great question. Would a monkey with human ovaries and a womb need human food? To define humans as material is not precise. A person with a mechanical heart – a pacemaker – is still a person. This is a logical puzzle. A pig with a human organ is not human, but a human with a mechanical heart is still a human. So the distinction is not only material but form defines a human. Form = ends. Do you know the Greek word telos? It means what is something pointed towards? What is its ultimate aim? So, what is the end purpose in Aristotle’s definition?
My son: (pause, leans back in his chair) As simple as politics?
Cousin: Politics, yes, but what does he mean? (Pause) A “polity” = a political society.
Me: I should say, the words are derived from the Greek “polis” which means “city.” Metropolis is a city area. Metropolitan Transit is the bus line serving the city. The political animals live in cities, some organization, which is political.
Cousin: Aristotle’s definition of a political society is “a free people coming together to debate how ought we to order our lives together?” So what makes us distinctively human? What is the key word there?
My son: “Free” ?
Cousin: What about “free” makes us different from other animals?
My son: Well…humans are more developed, we have more opportunities.
Cousin: Is there a difference between human and animal? Is the difference of degree or kind? A categorical difference? Think back to “free”. Is there a kind of opportunity that we have that is different from animals?
My son: Humans have…I think about this some times, “why are humans the most developed? Why don’t guinea pigs drive cars?” We have more opportunities because we are more developed. We have choices.
Cousin: “Choosing”…that is huge.
My son: (leans back in his chair) Our dog has choices in…maybe this is too broad…she can decide to eat or not, she can go in the yard BUT we can choose other foods but she cannot. Maisie gets only one kind of food. She cannot communicate – she can bark but not talk. So it is harder for her to communicate. We make decisions for her. An animal in the wild has more choices. Domesticated animals…we make more choices for them. We make the major decisions.
Cousin: So you tie freedom with communication. Aristotle used the word “debate” in his definition. Let’s push further. What is the one word that we confront here, that is the key in his definition: “a free people coming together to debate how ought we to order our lives together?”
My son: (pause)
Me: We know we are talking about people… we have discussed “free” the adjective. And “debate” the verb. The key term is not going to be the pronouns “we” or “our” so…
My son: It is not going to be “together” because animals live in a pack. (Pause). “Ought?”
Cousin: What do we mean by “ought?”
My son: You “should”
Cousin: What kind of judgment is that? If I say “you ought to give a dollar” or “you ought not hit someone” ?
My son: You are proposing an idea?
Cousin: The “ought” has a meaning that begins with the letter M…
My son: Is “ought”…(pause)…a “mandate”?
Cousin: A dog could have a mandate. It needs to eat. What kind of a judgment…what is the basis for saying that?
My son: (pause)
Cousin: The word is “moral”
My son: Ohhhh!!!
Cousin: It is distinct to humans about morality. A dog might make a mess but that is not immoral. Humans as moral is the through line. Morality gives weight to the decisions that we make. It is ordering our lives together – so do packs of animals but the human form of animal is different due to the moral element. We are not only biological but a human flourishing. We are moral agents. How does that sound to you?
My son: (pause) I think I understand the topic better.
Cousin: Do animals have morality?
My son: I think animals – well, I don’t know how they process thoughts – but in the wild animals do not think of a moral question. They need to survive. I have heard that dog squeaky toys = the sound of an animal suffering. Dogs like that sound. But humans…do all humans have a moral capacity? Yes, but some are more aware than others. Not all vegans but many see that as a moral issue. Some vegans eat that way for health, but some as morally wrong. Others have no concern. All humans have some amount of morality, but it is stronger for some people.
Me: Do you remember last year we discussed Plato and the virtues: the good, the true and the beautiful; the ultimate divine reality. We are touching on that here. I have been thinking about compassion and here we talk about morality. How are those different? Morality can imply a guilt and remorse.
Cousin: Once we have the idea of morality as a defining characteristic then “what do we mean by morality?” There are three basic types:
- Utilitarianism: our goal is to maximize pleasure for the greatest number of persons
- Ontological reality: we live by a set of rules (as an architecture of the mind, we perceive the unknowable by imposing innate rules and categories)
- Virtue ethics: our purpose is to cultivate virtues (not by rules or consequences but by character, itself). Compassion is a virtue.
Me: So utilitarianism would be “homo economicus” – real persons as narrowly selfish agents driven entirely to maximize utility and personal gain.
Cousin: Correct. Ontological would be Immanuel Kant. He established rules for how we think. For the “Virtue Ethics” Aquinas said there are 7 cardinal virtues.
Me: “Cardinal” here means “primary”
My son: Like the cardinal directions…
Me: …north, east, south and west. Correct.
Cousin: Aquinas said there are three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity plus Aristotle’s four virtues: fortitude, temperance, prudence, justice. Justice means that everyone should get their due. Fortitude means courage. Temperance means self-restraint. What is compassion? A blend of charity and justice. Compassion is a virtue ethic, a morally flourishing person cultivating virtues. Any virtue like compassion is a secondary…the cardinal virtues are like the palette used to blend the other virtues.
* * * *
As our year draws to a close, we plan a summative project that will include art-making; the “cardinal virtues like the palette” is perfect. The act of making is particular, manifest and specific; the artist must choose, which mirrors precisely the action of moral agency.
Our definition of a person expands to become “a thought bearing biped mammal, not only biological but a human flourishing as moral agent, with consciousness of purpose, meaning, intuition and connection.” We go deeper into our understanding of persons and place, the specificity of being, further from the delusion of Ziggurats in the AI cloud.
Copernican Moment
Posted: April 3, 2026 Filed under: consciousness, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: artificial-intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality 1 Comment
“The earth is flat” held firm for tens of thousands of years, until Aristotle, during a lunar eclipse, noticed circular shadows and thought differently: the Earth must be round. But still, all thought, the Earth must be at the center of the universe: “geocentrism” was a given.
And then, in 1543, a Renaissance polymath spoke truth to power, publishing De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), the defining and pioneering moment in the Scientific Revolution. Nicolaus Copernicus changed the world.
Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and musical theorist, followed suit, between 1608 and 1621, with the three laws of planetary motion, a much needed defense of Copernicanism. Rene Descartes, in 1641, sealed the deal with his Meditations on First Philosophy; “Cogito, ergo sum” and Cartesian coordinates became the law of the rational mind.
From Copernicus to Descartes, in 98 years, the modern world was conceived, a conceptual shift so profound that life on planet Earth irrevocably changed. Rational science is so central to our age that it is hard to fathom how bold and pioneering were these men who challenged the Pope, Emperors and Kings, the entrenched orthodoxy, and the learned guardians of Medieval culture.
Martin Luther, no wallflower, reportedly said, “This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth.” Calvin wrote, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”
Descartes, in fact, replaced the God-centered with the human-centered universe, and then separated the mind from the physical body and world, a duality that reigns still. But now, we are at a “Copernican moment of redefinition” of what it means to be human, argues Michael Pollan, the widely read author, journalist and professor, in his new book “A World Appears.”
The science of consciousness emerged in the 1960s as a niche fringe among eccentrics, then became mainstream by the 1990s, as Nobel-laureates Francis Crick (the DNA double-helix) and Gerald Edelman (unlocking antibody structures) published papers on neuroscience and consciousness. With the advent of AI, consciousness has become a high priority scientific field. Science empirically proves the physical world has stunning and myriad examples of intelligence, consciousness even, so the question pertains: what if the world is not the cartesian 2 or 3-dimensions, but multi-dimensional, not either-or but both-and?
Darwin, Pollan writes, “suggested that we think of the plant as a kind of upside down animal, with its main sensory organs and ‘brain’ on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top, aboveground.” Man was the measure of all things, but in 2012, at Cambridge University, esteemed scientists gathered to issue the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
Pollan describes Mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that can be taught to ignore a stressor, and remember what it has learned for more than twenty-eight days. “Plants can send and receive signals from other plants and alter their behavior in response to those signals. They can distinguish kin from competitors and both from their own selves.”
Intelligence is basically “the ability to solve problems,” so Stefano Mancuso, a plant scientist at the University of Florence, developed an experiment in which the root of a corn plant navigates its way through a maze, to locate and feast upon a quantity of ammonium nitrate – a cheese equivalent – which is to say, a great reward to a plant. The experiment has been repeated many times, with the exact same results.
Pollan continues, “In addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, root tips can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, microbes, various toxins, and chemical signals from neighboring plants and fungi. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it.”
The intelligence of plants leads to the work of Suzanne Simard, the forest ecologist, whose work on the Mother Trees is empirically proven: fungi and roots facilitate communication and interaction between trees and plants, by exchanging carbon, water, nutrients and defense signals. Rather than competition, nature is cooperative. Which changes forever the Darwinian model of rational self interest.
In the “year of our lord 2026” artificial intelligence is being used to decode the communication among whales, crows, dolphins, elephants, primates and rodents. And so it might be that not “we the people” but all life “is created equal,” which means this “Copernican moment” brings the realization that intelligence – perhaps consciousness – is empirically found to be widespread, neither narrow nor limited to humankind.
So let’s revisit Descartes’ duality, the mind body split, in a world where men, since the advent of agriculture, have held the dominant role. Antonio Damasio, a Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute, believes that male scientists long considered feeling too “feminine” to seriously study. “It is one of the paradoxes of computer science,” he writes, “that the ‘higher’ capabilities we once thought of as uniquely human—reason, language, intelligence—have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions.”
Pundits would have us believe the scepter of AI hangs overhead, but prudence urges that we remember AI has been modeled by and upon the narrow confines of logic, algorithms and statistical probability, not the elemental array of emotions that make up the extraordinary depth and breadth of life, among all species. I am not downplaying the serious risks of AI but pointing to emotional vitality as a largely under explored and resilient domain. AI is a tool, and every tradesperson knows we need be smarter than our tools. Once we accept that intelligence is pervasive far beyond mere humans, even gender fluidity seems but one small step for humankind. It is a wild time in which my children come of age.
Rumors of social decay are not exaggerated, but they may be an early indicator of a more fundamental flowering that begs to emerge. Multi-dimensional consciousness may be to the mono-rational what monotheism is to panentheism; an expanded consciousness neither makes science moot, nor does it push God aside, but expands dynamically the potential for understanding and embracing all of life, which could bring new solutions to today’s ever increasing problems.
Annaka Harris, author of “Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind,” explains why consciousness is foundational and ubiquitous:
We’ve done all our science with the assumption that consciousness emerges at a certain level of information processing. But what if we started from the opposite assumption — that consciousness is fundamental and everywhere? Instead of treating conscious experience as a byproduct, we’d treat it as the foundation. That might help us understand phenomena we’ve struggled with.
There’s something exciting about realizing that something you felt 99% sure about wasn’t quite right — or was entirely wrong. It paves the way for new questions and better understanding. If we’re willing to admit we have made incorrect assumptions and apply our tools more creatively, we might finally get somewhere. We might start seeing the Universe for what it is — maybe even as conscious.
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
an Art Farm 