The Edge of the Map

Posted: October 2, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Child Centered Activities, What is an Art Farm | 1 Comment

Our 8th grade year begins well, with confidence.  In late August, before we began, I mentioned to my son that the Latin language will be included, to which he concurred.  I told him there will be four days of Language Arts classes to which he replied,  “I’m good with that!”  I let him know we would focus on the language to get started, then add in science and math.  He seemed quite good, even upbeat.

The Magister had felt that Latin would appeal to my son’s orderly mind, while deepening grammatical understanding.  The Magister wasted no time in getting started, and time management has been a focus; our goal is not only to learn, but to use time well and productively.  

Early on, my son arrived 2 minutes late for class.  The Magister pressed him, emphasized he should arrive 2 minutes before class.  Pausing for emphasis, he explained, “Our culture is all about distractions.  We are fighting that tide.  I want you to know when you see me becoming a bear it is for the reason to help you master your use of time.  When we get to the end next spring, and you have finished the Latin book, you will say ‘I am somebody that I wasn’t last fall.  I can do things I could not do then.’  That is why I am a bear on punctuality.  You will be far ahead of everyone else.”

And so my son learns Latin, which communicates meaning through word endings, rich in grammatical meaning using case, number, gender, tense and person.  English follows a strict subject-verb-object order, using prepositions and auxiliary verbs to clarify relationships.  Latin has five cases (Nominative, Genitive, Accusative, Dative, Ablative) while English has three (Nominative, Accusative, Possessive).  The difference is significant, and reveals how different cultures organize reality.  

The Magister is firm, fair and demanding.  My son is required to conjugate verbs, inflect nouns, determine phrases adjectival, adverbial or prepositional; learn the English derivatives for Latin words, use Roman numerals to cite historic dates such as when did the Roman Monarchy begin, or in what year and century did the Roman Republic end? 

Pronunciation is practiced, with syllabification and correct accent on the antepenult, penult, or ultima syllables.  The “r” sound is a trilled alveolar, somewhat like a snarling dog, what ancient grammarians referred to as “the dog letter.”  Cursive handwriting is taught, both in English and Greek.  The learning is multi-sensory: sight, sound, speech, and muscle memory.  Rigorous it is – I am challenged to assist – but all proceeds well.  

My son’s translations are charmingly literal.  “Mars Rheam Silviam amat” is translated “Mars, the god of war, Rhea Silvia loves.”  “Amulius Rheam Silviam vinculis claudit” becomes “Amulius Rhea Silvia with chains locks up.”  He is literally capturing the Latin word order, rather than converting it into the subject-verb-object of English.  Those differences open worlds of perception; every culture’s understanding of the world is different, and none are superior.  In a world increasingly argumentative and combative, humility is a significant lesson.  

Chinese does not have future tense verbs, but uses helping words to establish “time when.”  In Urdu/Hindi, KAL (short a) means both yesterday and tomorrow, PARSON means both day before yesterday and day after tomorrow, TARSON is three days out while NARSON is four days away.  The past and future are simply a direction from “now.”  English forces us to say which direction (yesterday versus tomorrow) but Urdu/Hindi express that using context and verb tense.  

Some languages conceptualize time as a flow moving toward you, others that you move through time, but for Urdu/Hindi proximity to “now” matters more than which side of “now” you’re on.  

Albert Einstein once commented, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”  Grammatically speaking, his was a profound truth.

While learning his Latin, my son also works through the classical grammar of English; toggling back and forth stretches and strengthens a limber and keen mind.  Our homeschool’s approach is “both/and”, which underscores that “reality” is not fixed but fluid, not absolute but perceptual.  Intellectual humility is a trait of the wise.   

English allows a vague, unclear relationship to knowledge, while many Amazonian languages require the speaker to state precisely how something is known: did you see it, hear about it secondhand, infer it, or dream it?  One must specify “it rained (I saw it)” or “it rained (I’m told)” or “it rained (I woke up and the ground was wet, so I infer).” 

If time is an illusion, then space has myriad understandings.  Australian Aboriginal and some Balinese and Mayan languages have no words for “left” and “right” relative to the body; cardinal directions are used for everything (“move your cup a little to the north-east,” “there’s an ant on your south leg”). 

Word order in English is essential to meaning (“the dog bit the man” vs. “the man bit the dog”) but Latin opens vast and varied opportunities for emphasis, rhythm, and rhetorical impact.  The titans among Latin authors – Ovid, Horace, Virgil for poetry and Cicero and Tacitus for prose – wrote literature that influenced European authors for millennia.    

I mention none of this to my son.  

I leave him to his studies, trusting the grammar itself will open worlds.  It seems to be working.  Recently while doing his school work, his voice cried out, “I really like having the Magister as a teacher.  I really like learning what many adults do not know.  I like knowing something my classmates do not study.”

It is a paradox, but to learn a language deeply is to see the edge where the verbal “map of understanding” is one-off from life, itself, where that plays out.  Essentially, my son gains insight to the limits of language.  

Dorothy Sayers, a paragon of modern classical education and homeschooling, wrote in 1948, “…the incessant battery of words, words, words. [Students] do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”

Aldous Huxley, a towering man of letters, author of Brave New World, described the student of languages, “He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”  

We pursue the mystery.  Grammar is our means to that end.  

What Huxley described as, “…to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in” the Magister has compared to “dwelling closer to that border and hem of all languages, beyond which lies…but a purposeful illusion.”

In an essay titled, “Learning Another Language” the Magister wrote:

The language we each are raised up with is truly our world, but if we take the trouble to learn a different language, we travel to another place, remaining ourselves in our central awareness of being, but dispossessing ourselves of all the peculiar ways of seeing the world which our first language determines and restricts.  For when we name some object or event in our world (and what is language if not a collection of names), we make something what it is by saying in effect what it’s not. That’s a coffee cup next to me there, so don’t think its anything else. I’ve rationed it off, sectionalized it from the rest of experience by virtue of that word cup—and that is what we mean by a rational world: clear-cut and defined, permanent and explainable, reliable and real.

All that definition and permanency could very well be an illusion—not a delusion, but an illusion, a playing at (the original meaning of the word). 

But that is what language does and must do: set the world up as a stage, believable for a time, but thankfully not believable always. And if we can command, to some working degree at least, another language, modern or ancient, we get a ticket to go to another play and see how those actors, those nouns and verbs and all they do together, make appear real what surely—just look around—will not last. All the world’s a stage, said, of course, Shakespeare, and all the men and women merely players. There is no performance without language, and every language will perform the world differently. So another language is another conceptual costume whose colors and folds and decorative buttons give us another character to watch—or even to play ourselves—while we look day by day for the really real.

My son does his work in the computer nook that he built.  He made the measured drawings, we cut the wood, he sanded and varnished it, drilled the wire management holes, installed the brackets.  He does his studies there, quiet some time, humming and chirping loudly at others.  

I call out, “Hey, how is it going?”  He calls back, “Going well. I have one more assignment.”  He studies his declensions, learns his vocabulary, builds his sentences, dials in for his classes on his own.  The focus on time management is paying off, his study paying dividends, his pride in “learning what many adults do not know.”

A grammar of being.  

Our 8th grade is learning the Mystery.  

And the Magister keeps it grounded, “See you at 9:58:00 ET Thursday. (0 seconds). Remember that the morning before class is only for review, not study.”

Gus

Posted: September 25, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Portfolio - David's work, What is an Art Farm | 2 Comments

Framing a house rests upon its foundation.  Building a whale does not.  The whale will be too large to work in my workshop so I need to work outside.  I need a series of crates from which to hang the whale, with enough room to work, all of which will be put upon wheels but narrow enough fit through exhibition doorways. 

Industrial pipe staging seems an ideal solution but will not allow enough space for the head.  Using dimensional lumber – 2x6s for the base, 2x4s for posts – I build a custom crate and double reinforce everything for stability.  Weight is less my concern than stability during transit.  A pair of 10 foot 2x4s goes on each side, diagonals crisscrossing to prevent the crate from racking.  

Plates are installed in each corner where heavy duty casters will be attached when it comes time to move and install the piece.  My crate’s dimensions are governed by the entrance doorway of the Bigelow Laboratory of Ocean Sciences.  There is no margin of error.  

On top of the structure I set an old barn beam – rugged, stout, strong – from which the entire head will hang during construction and every road trip.  What I don’t know is that between all the installations, including time in storage, the crate will be in use for more than five years.  What I do know is that it needs to be rugged.  

As the sculpture grows, I will assemble a section of pipe staging, 5’ wide by 6’ tall by 7’ long, and spacing the staging a few feet behind the crate, will have a rectangle, about 20 feet in length, inside of which I will work.  Planks and boarding – a very simple roof – go on top, upon which I lay a blue tarp, 20 feet by 40 feet, to cover the entire workspace.  The studio is basic, watertight, and sufficient.  We begin.  

The Maven spray painted the root ball and trunk white.  It is a surprising choice that moves the materials away from tree closer to his “right frame of mind.”  The next task is finding the tipping point, from which the rootball/mind will hang.  Engineers use a complex calculus of mass, torque and equilibrium to find the center of gravity.  The Maven centers himself, goes quiet, then grabs my drill and a 1/2” boring bit and pulls the trigger.  Once the hole is bored, we attach an 11” eye bolt with lock washer to the rootball/mind.  Together we hoist it up and hang it from the scaffolding.  

Next we begin making the skull.  As a whale is not a house, so its skull is not like other mammals.  Its skull is something majestic.  A whale lives in water so gravity affects its skeleton differently than land-based mammals; buoyancy lifts the whale while gravity pulls down upon land animals.  The whale’s face and forehead bones telescope as they move backward and overlap.  The upper jaw bones taper forward into the snout.  The nasal openings move to the top, not the front, forming the blowhole.  The ear bones are detached, acoustically isolated.  That complexity belongs to the Maven.

He grabs two sheets of 1/4 inch plywood, painted white, and draws a series of non-Euclidean shapes.  I take my jigsaw and cut them out.  Using the scraps, he draws several more shapes which I cut out.  In short order we have our bones, more or less: mandible, maxilla, premaxilla, supra occipital, exooccipital, basioccipital, frontal, squamosal, nasal and tympanic bulla.  

The whale root ball/mind hangs at a comfortable working height.  During COVID people are encouraged to keep a 6 foot distance, but building inside my crate we enjoy no such luxury.  We are outside, on a perfect early July day, and have work to do.  

The bones by any name I need to assemble, creating volume in space around, but not touching, the root mind.  This is an immense puzzle.  When I was a child, a classmate in the 4th grade told me that his father was building a house from the top down.  How wild, I thought!  It always puzzled me why I remembered that but clearly, it was a premonition of this project: I am building the whale skull from the top down.  I have no foundation upon which to frame and the root balls tangle of roots allows no purchase upon which to build.  

It is July, peak of the summer, and sour cherries come ripe in our orchard.  The Maven wanders off to sit under the Montmorency pie cherry tree.  He plucks cherries and gazes off into the distance.  Inside my cube of space I am alone, on my own.  

Chuang Tzu comes to mind.  In his famous story, Cook Ding carves an ox for Lord Wenhui by following the Dao, moving through the empty spaces between the joints, “as though he were performing the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou Music.”  As a young chef, Ding saw only the mass of a whole animal. After three years of practice, he saw it as parts, not mass.  Now, his inner spirit guides rather than physical eyes.  

In a moment the solution arises: gussets.  A gusset is simply an extra piece of material, added to give more space and strength.  They are found in clothing, bags, envelopes and construction.  For the skull the gusset solves the question of rigid form.  To each of the Maven’s various shapes I attach cleats, using 3/4” stock and wood screws.  The cleats can be sculptural in shape.  What matters is they are a bracket, mass, attached to the left and right hemispheres, to which I can attach the gusset, “the extra piece of material.”  I don’t need specific dimensions.  The maven can hold the skull bones, then I can mark the gusset length, cut and sand it, then screw it into place.

During the afternoon I busily build cleat blocks which I attach, then secure using the gussets.  The skull is a triangle, narrow above the rootball/mind but wide below.  The rear is broad, the front narrow.  The maven wants curving shapes for the jowl, which is easy given the flexibility of 1/4″ plywood.  I simply cut those pieces longer, then bow them back into place.  I have given structure to form.    

It works remarkably well.  So well I name the whale “Gus.”

Once the skull is assembled, the Maven returns and explains he wants bands surrounding the assembly in space, “like gyroscopic things.”  We are using foraged materials and he has some boards, so I rip long thin pieces, 8 feet long by 1 inch wide by 1/16 inch thick.  I can bend these easily, and gluing two layers together adds considerable strength.  Nothing is structural here, and I can pin them discretely to the mandible using 1 inch #8 panhead machine screws, with washer, lock washer and acorn nut; the assembly arcs up, out, and around, creating complexity and mystery.  

The Maven explains, “I want abstract decisions, not the idea why, organic decisions by geometric solutions.  The “gyroscopic things” …what are they?  Without those Gus loses complexity, and that complexity relates to what a whale is, to what a tree is, what anything is.  I want a level of complexity that then feels alive.”  

All I know is that we are on a roll.  

Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist known for colorful kinetic constructions, using sculpture and painting, to depict hyper-detailed scenes of urban life.  The Manhattan art critic G.R. Swenson described him as one of a generation of artists who, “took the world too seriously not to be amused by it.”  An absurdist impetuous energy, rich with Marx Brothers’ puns, inform his constructions, which can fill up an entire Manhattan loft or office lobby.  His work is legendary.  He has been referred to as “a movement of one man that is open to everybody.”

In September 2017 Portland’s Artists’ Rapid Response Team staged a “Codfish Funeral” procession down Congress Street, through the Arts District during one of the First Friday Art Walks.  Combining moving projections of water and codfish with live music and dancing it was an artistic response to the dwindling populations of the Atlantic Cod.   

Among the artists was one woman, a force of nature, whose name is Anna.  She was already familiar with Red Grooms work, and saw the opportunity to combine multimedia with science to raise awareness to the warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.  She framed the problem in terms of an ecosystem rather than economics.  

She worked with science teachers to reach more than 200 students at 16 schools, elementary through college level, in Southern and Mid-Coast Maine.  Her idea was simple, which she leveraged through scale and reach.  

In 2020, just as the COVID shutdown began, the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences asked her to host an exhibit.  Nick Record, a senior research scientist at Bigelow became a key ally, “I think both scientists and artists are trying to look at the world through new lenses and show the world in ways people haven’t seen it before.  Curiosity and discovery, trial and error, and creativity are essential, whether you’re a scientist, an artist, or somewhere in between.”

The Force of Nature contacted the Maven and proposed the “Majestic Fragility” idea and asked him to build a whale’s head.  The Maven did not like her idea, and countered with something else, larger, a complete whale.  She agreed.  He made a model.  She raised the funding.  That is where I stepped in.  

Because this is COVID, all of the artists work in isolation.  Each artist has some component of the ecosystem, but no one will meet, until everyone gathers to install everything at the Bigelow Laboratory.  Each artist has one specific component and the ethos is to use foraged or recycled materials.  In the Red Grooms spirit, the energy of many colorful parts allows each artist latitude so that the whole will read as one, the individual parts subsumed into the collective.  

The idea of foraged and recycled materials relate back to the ideas of Wendell Berry, the American novelist, poet, cultural critic and farmer.  “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. My belief is that our life and the world in it are conditional gifts,” he wrote.  Life and existence as gifts, freely given not earned, and we do not “own” the earth but are mere temporary inhabitants.  From this view the fisheries are not merely an economic input but part of an integrated ecosystem, entrusted to us on the condition of responsible stewardship.  Fighting words to some, but common sense to many; the Force of Nature and her collective are using art to encourage dialogue.  

Work on the whale skull proceeds well and we prepare to build the spine.  We cut the white painted tree trunk into sections 8 inches long.  I bore through each, a not easy task, to allow a 1/2 inch threaded rod, 5 feet long, to pass through.  Between each section a smaller disc, cut from a narrower trunk, will be placed, like cartilage.  The threaded rods are bendable, the trunk vertebrae strung like garlands on a bough.   

The maven’s model rests on a table next to my cube of space workshop.  The model gives us reference, but the whale as built becomes its own sculpture.  Each vertebrae has small paddle-like pieces attached; odd shaped 1/4” plywood with a dowel attached to pin them into place.  The thoracic vertebrae near the skull need ribs forming a cage to protect the heart and lungs.  An assembly of curving 1/4” plywood pieces frame the rib cage nicely.  

The assembly gets less complex, more narrow as it tapers further down the spine. Each five foot section has a coupling nut with an eyebolt attached at its end.  We connect each 5 foot section by a lag bolt with hex nut.  Common hardware store items source our materials.  We can easily detach each 5 foot section when we move the entire whale.  

Overnight rains come.  As I lay in my bed I can hear the raindrops on the tarp, and repeatedly at 2am go outside to push the tarps up, to remove pooling water.  Gus cannot get wet.  It becomes a nightly ritual, which almost seems like a benediction; rains fall gently as Gus readies to move on.    

The tail assembly is an exceedingly complex challenge.  A whale’s head and its tail are dominant features, so the tail, which technically is a fluke, needs visually to balance out the head. I will secure the fluke to logs on the threaded rod so I first need to figure out how to stabilize it, so it does not rotate.  To the maven, I leave the question of width that scales with the head.  

Cleats screwed to multiple vertebrae, along the curving spine, will lock the fluke in place.  The maven, of course, sees the fluke not as one mass, but as three separate pieces, each at different angles and shapes.  Gussets again allow me to create volume in space.  The assembly is both not a whale fluke and a whale fluke.  

The remaining tasks proceed easily.  Using birch logs and random shaped plywood we build two pectoral flippers, the short, broad paddle shaped fins on the side.  We attach them to the skull assembly and hang it in space using 1/8” aircraft cable and ferrules.  

The final step is more of the “gyroscopic things” for another dash of complexity along the spine.  Bittersweet is an aggressive, woody invasive vine in Maine that is a bane to gardeners, but a boon to the Maven.  He has foraged long lengths of it, which we attach like garland adorning the spine.  Two pieces of bowed 1/4” plywood 4’ wide are attached from the tail to the sternum, adding more volume to the sculpture.  

By late August we are wrapping up Gus, four months of work from the aggregate yard to completion.  My commission is to build “head scratching wonder and irrational decisions.”  By unanimous consent, in collaboration we have achieved that.  

We are ready to rent a 25-foot box truck and take the show on the road.  

__________________________________

Editor’s Note: Although this story is told using present tense verbs, the whale was actually built in the summer of 2021. The “Majestic Fragility” exhibit was on display at the Bigelow Laboratory of Oceanic Sciences through summer of 2022, then was moved to the Maine Maritime Museum for the “Sea Change” exhibit from February 2023 through 2024. It was moved to Bangor, where the exhibit is expected to become a permanent installation at the Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness center.

Advanced Chain Saw

Posted: September 11, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm | 1 Comment

Recently a violent thunderstorm passed through our town, leaving wreckage along a narrow localized path.  10 minutes north nothing happened, but in the storm’s path trees were felled everywhere.  The storm arose suddenly.  The rain fell in torrents, with quarter sized hail, plus 65 mile-per-hour gusts.  

Visibility was zero, while the sound was deafening.  I laid in bed, icing my hip, and was unable to get up to close any windows.  It was about 30 minutes of mayhem, followed by stunned quiet, as the clouds passed and blue skies returned.  Our gardens and grounds were covered with ice.  

For the next several days arborists did emergency clean up day and night.  Awake at 2am I would lie in bed listening to chain saws and wood chippers just a block away.  For the most part our property seemed spared, until my son examined the back yard and found one Norway Maple had sheared at the trunk, was blown over, leaning against another tree, the branches caught in the canopy.  High up, almost 30 feet above, the trunk had snapped leaving a large section overhead, like the Sword of Damocles. 

We had a widow-maker in our back yard.  

Because of my hip I could do nothing, not even walk into the yard to take a look.  My son took photos and made a plan.  Only two weeks before, he had taken the chain saw use and safety class.  His confidence is high but this task was beyond his skills, beyond my comprehension.  What I clearly understood is that a widow maker cannot be ignored. 

I called the Everything Man.  I sent him my son’s photos and he stopped by to take a look.  He was unfazed, said “no problem, I will be in touch.”  An advanced chain saw class became a plan in my mind, but my son had other ideas.

“Dad, talk to me before you make any plans.”  I sensed his hesitation but kept my mouth quiet.  

A few days later I told him my thoughts, that the Everything Man would get the tree down and then my son would handle the brush and cut everything to length.  “Dad, talk to me before you make any plans,” he repeated.    

My son is comfortable using the chain saw but he has his own struggle with social interaction.  My two part plan directly pushed his buttons; I wanted him to help the Man get the tree down onto the ground and then take over.  The Man was available on a Friday so I put that on the calendar.  

“Dad, did I not say talk to me before you made any plans?”

“Well, I was offered Friday so I took it.  The tree cannot wait and I can do nothing.  The family needs this, so I need you to step up.  There is not much to discuss.”

“But Dad…!”

He returned to his gaming.  The task festered.  His days were long, sullen and withdrawn.  My frustration mounted, until I boiled over.  Other chores that I had asked my children’s help on went unfinished. I reached my breaking point.  In no uncertain terms I made clear that household chores need be done now, not at your convenience; life demands stepping up sometimes.  

My harangue hit the mark.  

When push came to shove, the chores got done, and I noticed a change in my son.  He was awake and dressed on Friday morning, ready when the Everything Man arrived.  Without a word he went down to the workshop to put on his personal protective gear. The Everything Man met him in the workshop. They gathered the tools and walked out into the back yard, talking quietly about small incidental things, chit-chat while preparing for their work.

The first class was about use of the chain saw. The advanced class was about rope, a 100 foot high strength nylon rope with 1800 pounds of snapping strength; an inner core of tightly wound high strength nylon threads, surrounded with an outer sheath.  The plan was not so much to cut down the tree as to pull it down.  

The “bowline” knot is one of the classic and essential knots of all time.  Nicknamed the “king of knots,” it forms a secure, non-slip loop at the end – or in the middle – of the rope, which despite holding massive tension, is famously easy to untie.  

The Man explained it simply.  

A small loop is formed, which is the “rabbit hole.”  Grabbing the end of the rope, “the rabbit comes out of the hole, runs around the tree, and goes back down the hole.”  The knot as formed. The rope can then be pulled tight, but the bowline will never become a knot that “jams,” that cannot be loosened.  

The Man tied a bowline at the end of the line, then patiently heaved the line up into the tree overhead.  It took repeated attempts – my son was given several chances – until finally he had lofted it up over the widow maker and back down the other side.  

He had lassoed the tree.  

He then ran the line from the lasso overhead, down to the root crown of another tree about 40 feet away.  He encircled the anchor tree, and made two more bowlines in his rope.  He passed the line back and forth between the two bowlines repeatedly, which now acted like pulleys, making a block and tackle.  

Silently he worked, then explained to my son, “This is how you do it by yourself, deep in the woods, when you carry all of your tools in by yourself.”

By example, not by long-winded explanation, my son learned the formula F = W / MA, where F is the effort force, W is the weight of the load, and MA is the mechanical advantage.  Each loop of the rope increases the pulling force, while adding friction.  By using four loops, the Man created a theoretical 4 times the leverage, meaning a 500 pound weight could be moved using 125 pounds of force.  

Focused on the moving rather than the math, the Man pulled the rope and the entire tree was moved away slightly from the canopy, closer to us.   He repeated this two more times, to free the tree up.  

My son watched closely.  

The Everything Man grabbed his chain saw and began to cut low on the trunk.  On the underside he made the hinge cut, which removes a wedge to mark the direction in which the tree should fall.  On the back side he began his plunge cut into the trunk.  He proceeded cautiously, making small cuts and then stopping to look around.  

The tree was held in tension, the block and tackle and the root crown forming a triangle.  From the anchor tree to the lasso was the hypotenuse.  Cutting at the root crown was removing one of the legs, the point from which the tree was expected to hinge, crashing down, pulling the widow maker with it.  

Except it didn’t.  

The canopy was still caught up in the branches above.  The Man changed his plan.  

He cut out a four foot section of trunk, allowing the entire tree to drop downward rather than hinge forward.  He let gravity, mechanical advantage, and notch cutting work to his advantage.  He did not force a dangerous, unpredictable gamble.  He repeated his cuts several times, notching the tree down, until freed of the canopy overhead, the Norway Maple came resting on the ground.  

I sat on the porch watching from afar.  

Because of my hip replacement, I was still using a cane and any sudden movement was beyond question; the task had no room for cowboys.  Once the tree was safely down, the suspense was lifted, and I left my son to his work and went inside.  

A large pile of brush was cut away, and then my son got to work, cutting 16 inch lengths for our winter firewood.  The Man and my son busily hauled the brush, stacked the logs.  Everything was cleaned up, the tools put away.  My son, on his own, cleaned out the chain saw and sharpened the blade.  

When the Man came into our house for his pay, he said, “I mostly don’t enjoy working with teenagers, but I like your son.”  

My son said nothing, but I could see satisfaction in his posture, his voice quiet but upbeat, humming a song to himself.  He had overcome two immense obstacles, the Norway Maple widow maker, and his own internal struggles with stepping up.  A man’s work, in one morning.

For the most part I said nothing.  No reason to spoil the moment.  I let him bask in his accomplishment.  

He had earned his independence.  

Bones of the Building

Posted: August 21, 2026 | Author: | 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 | Author: | 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:

  1. Utilitarianism: our goal is to maximize pleasure for the greatest number of persons
  2. 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)
  3. 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 | Author: | Filed under: consciousness, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: , , , , | 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 | Author: | Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm | Tags: | 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.”

__________________________

Misery

Posted: February 27, 2026 | Author: | 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:

  1. Every word is made up of syllables and consonants.
  2. Every syllable makes one sound.
  3. The sound of a syllable is made by a vowel, or by a consonant with a vowel.
  4. 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 | Author: | 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 | Author: | Filed under: Art & Healing, What is an Art Farm | Tags: | 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.

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