First quarter reflections

We've been here three whole months!  That's enough for even me to start feeling confident about where the ground is and how to walk around on it.  I now know not to eat from the cheese wheel that appears in the community fridge on Sundays - it's for Monday's pizza dinner.  (Oops!)  Prunes are very expensive; they are to be baked into cakes, and not for snacks.  Yogurt is dessert.  I can sing along with a handful of the regular songs we sing at the 9:30am prayers.  I remember to take my egg cartons with me to the refrigerator in the laundry room, so I can restock on local, organic, free-range, scrap-fed, zero VOC eggs when I throw in or pick up a laundry load.  I know just how to thump open the washing machine when the Tür button doesn't work - that's "door" in German.  Apparently they make higher quality machinery across France's eastern border, as long as you don't need to get your freshly cleaned clothes back out.  I know the weekly communal meal cooking schedule and on whose delicious food I will prefer an extra pinch of salt.  And I can wield a sharp knife with my bare hands.

Heika (a visitor) and Christiane prepare leeks for market.

That's right folks, classic "millennial" situation here: my fingers can type as fast as my thoughts, but I have a pretty serious gap in my pre-digital-age hard-skills-muscle-memory.  I have always needed a cutting board to slice and dice, until age 30!  My school is garden work on Wednesdays, helping prep veggies for Thursday's market.  Everyone sits in a circle chatting, and in mid-air, they brandish their freshly-honed carbon steel knives to trim leeks, spruce up Brussels sprouts, and prune old dead leaves from turnips, rutabegas, and beets.  I watched their techniques from the corner of my eye the first couple weeks as I fumbled around with these tasks, and now I'm proud to say that I can hover over the table to peel, core, and slice up apples for Moisés' and Yanni's snack!  It's all in a knuckle pivot, really.  And I haven't even cut myself... yet! :)

One of our first surprises here blew in mid-December.  Out of nowhere, the day turned from glorious (as had been just about every day since we had arrived) to slightly unnerving.  The sky darkened with solid clouds and gusts of wind blasted around. I could hear segments of the metal roof testing the anchor screws and trees creaking back and forth.

That evening, I had planned to check my email and do a handful of internet tasks.  The office trailer shook in the wind and at one point, the wind smacked the barn next to me so hard that I held my breath... it was caving in?  No, no, just dancing.

Elisabeth popped in to ask that I would turn off the power strip when I finished so no damage would incur if the power lines went down.  A little later, Elisabeth's daughter Katell, the equivalent of a high school senior, appeared at the door to complete a 10 minute internet task for school, and I asked if all this howling outdoors was to be feared.  She communicated in French, basically, that it was no big deal, this is just what all of winter is like (AKA, the entire next three months).  Her response was helpful in the sense that she was not worried, albeit disheartening that we'd have to adapt to such an unpredictable and hair-raising environment.  As Katell opened the door to leave, she stopped and said the French for, "Well, sometimes a tree..."  She made a crashing sound and moved her forearm and hand from vertical to horizontal.  Uh huh, yep, that's what I laid in bed that night and thought about with wide eyes at 2am, while the wind shrieked across the farm and banged around.

A post card you can find in Brittany's gift shops and
book stores. It reads: Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring.
Image found in online search.

To be sure, after 24 hours of blustering the wind died down and we haven't really seen anything like that first night that announced winter.  Some days can be pretty windy, but not such that it's unnerving.  Mostly, we've just had an incredibly long stretch of clouds and rain... as in Christmas until now, mid-February, warranting jokes in the community about the sun as a UFO.  The locals say that winter is usually the rainiest season, but this constant precipitation is more than they've ever seen.

So far, I've hardly ventured out to shop in Pont l'Abbé, population 8,000, where there's a store for just about everything.  The community car usually stops at Plonéour-Lanvern, a small town much closer than Pont l'Abbé, with a population of only 5,500.  In addition to a tiny food market, Plonéour-Lanvern has three boulangerie/pâtisseries (bread and pastry shops) and three coiffeurs (hairdressers), but only one option for all other purchasing needs: Casino (cah-zeen-OH).  The chain store is basically a glorified Dollar General, but instead of only a measly handful of options of Barefoot Wine, Casino boasts floor to ceiling shelving of red wine, white wine, rosé wine, sparkling wine, and hard cider, where there are literally hundreds of options.  When we were still very new here, Yanni and I joined a shopping trip into Plonéour-Lanvern with Christiane and David.  I listed the handful of items I needed to buy and asked if they recommended I go to any particular store for each item.  Glancing at each other and heartily laughing at my request, they said almost in unision, "Let's see, should it be Casino... Casino... or perhaps Casino?"  There's literally nothing else.

On the other hand, right at the first round-a-bout at Pont l'Abbé, there's a E.Leclerc... pronounced without the first "E", luh-clairh.  I'm not sure if this gigantic, multi-story emporium is more like Costco or Walmart.

Image found in online search.

E.Leclerc sells electronics, which Casino does not.  Both my watch and our wind-up alarm clock were running slow, which I learned after several instances where I set both devices five minutes ahead and found myself 20 minutes late for morning prayers.  After we tried to fix the wind-up clock and made it worse, I decided that I needed to force myself out of my shell and make some purchases.

The mere idea of a shopping trip in France is a little bit stressful for me, because I want to purchase quality items while keeping to a pretty tight budget.  I assumed I wouldn't recognize a single brand and I probably wouldn't be able to read all of the promises made in the marketing.  Thankfully, I was with Christiane, my English-speaking German friend, who helped me navigate through the vastness and bustle of E.Leclerc to the electronics, and within the electronics, to the time-keeping devices.  I picked out a watch and alarm clock with only a few groans each, and after finding a couple things on her list, Christiane led us to the checkout.

Even in the US I don't do a lot of shopping, and when I have to, I don't usually find myself in a Costco or Walmart. On the occasions where I've needed to enter one of these one-stop-shoppers, I usually find it pretty overwhelming.  I can't stop my thoughts from wondering who made the clothes on the hangers, who filled the jars and put labels on them, who pieced the electronics together, who picked the tomatoes?  Are my fingerprints touching theirs?  Where are those people now?  Do they have a good life?  Can they support their families with the money they make?

I had assumed that just about everything was made by machines in the 21st century, until watching a particularly breathtaking film several years ago that gently and artistically opened my mind to some of the realities of the world.  The videographer traveled to 25 different countries to find images to wordlessly juxtapose wealth and poverty.  There aren't many movies I'd recommend, but Samsara is worth a peek (Thanks for bringing it to Peace House, Alex!).

Back in the aisles, if I can regain my thoughts and prayers for all the people represented around me as household products, I then get lost in wonder about all those generic brands.  There is a lot of coordination going on behind-the-scenes of any single aisle.  How do these big box stores have connections to make men's marino wool hiking socks and Himalayan pink salt and hair regrowth treatment?  And stock it at hundreds (Costco) or thousands (Walmart) of locations, with their cookie-cut buildings strewn all over the US and world?

The economy is truely global for the first time in history.  Around the clock, resources are pulled from one corner of the earth and labor from another, then the final product is sold somewhere else.  Because this process has been developed out of public view over several generations, and is obscured by bright, exciting marketing, it generally goes unnoticed and unquestioned.  But as any homeowner would know, it is the unseen places that threaten to decay.  We can't see how coltan is mined, or in what conditions clothing is sewn together, or if chocolate and coffee are truely being equally exchanged for monetary compensation. The opportunity for moral decay in these systems is huge and injustices are very difficult to catch or eradicate.

In addition, many of the products we consume don't actually require the distances they travel.  Why can I buy lettuce from California, furniture from Sweeden, and honey from Malaysia, in Virginia, where we grow lettuce, build furniture, and keep bees?  Lanza del Vasto, founder and visionary of this faithful community of the Ark, has penned around 60 books and other written works.  Eary on, in Nouvelles de l'Arche, he encouraged, "Find the shortest, simplest way between the earth, the hands, and the mouth."  The statement specifically refers to food, but the idea can be applied to any of the objects we use daily.  To me, his exhortation means making life "fathomable" to any average person.  As an average person myself, I cannot fathom the systems that brought me the sweater I'm wearing, much less the drywall or the electricity powering the water heater in my house in Harrisonburg.  (Not to mention all the systems that make a blog possible...!)

I can't help but speculate that an average peasant living several hundred years ago could at least imagine how to produce each of their their household items, if not have many of the skills to create the items as well.  Can an average person today even fathom 25% of their household items?  We would have to be experts in the industrial processes that allow us to transform petroleum into insect repellent and candles and artificial food dyes and many varieties of fabric and aspirin and house paint and lipstick and fertilizer and linoleum and soap and nail polish and vitamin capsules and car and bike tires and transparent tape and shoe polish and antihistamines and most plastics and...

The Ark advocates for an economic philosophy called subsidiarité (subsidiarity), based on the principle that the most just and viable economic system is found in the smallest scale possible.  Though it seems that general interest in small, local systems is growing, it is often very difficult to find or recreate local systems providing our basic needs and finer desires.  A myth of complete self-sufficiency has arisen as a reaction to the hidden decay of the global economy, which has driven scores of idealistic youth to burn out, trying to provide all their own needs and desires.  A single person cannot be a village!  Would I be too bold to claim that this type of self-sufficiency has never existed?  Picture it: between myself and a husband, equally committed to a life that would be possible in the Kingdom of God, thus seeking freedom from systems of oppression, we cannot cover the vast trades of clothing, food, shelter, medicine, transportation, and entertainment from beginning to end.  That is an unfathomable life!

Image found in online search.

So in considering subsidiarity, a single person or solitary family providing everything for themselves is the smallest scale, but is not possible.  The current global system has certainly proved itself possible, but it's certainly not small.  Somewhere between these two, we find a section of the spectrum where simple meets possible, where we find our finer needs and basic desires met easily.  At this point we have to say finer needs and basic desires, instead of the other way around, because some of our finer desires in the 21st century are likely impossible without the global economy.

The community here at the Ark is quite small.  Four families left the mother community together around 11 years ago to begin a new location with Lanza del Vasto's vision.  Two of the four families decided to withdraw early on.  The remaining four adults, with five children under the age of 10 between them, eventually found this land, Guenvez, and began building up the infrastructure in the shell of old chicken houses and ramshackle barns, for housing, bread baking, a chapel, and a market garden.  In the mother community, the families had grown accustomed to hand-washing their clothes (and cloth diapers!), plowing their fields with horses, and heating their own bath and dish water as needed, among many other low-technology or fossil-fuel-free ways of life.  This was easily possible with built-in systems and the support of so many other people.  Because they were basically beginning from scratch here, with only a small pool of human energy to draw from, they have made some temporary compromises on their prefered way of life.

Although they have had to implement some higher technologies than they would like here at Guenvez, they are always careful to consider the smallest scale possible for any given activity in order to live into their ideal economic vision.  For example, to fell and split firewood by hand from the woods surrounding us is the smallest system, but not practical at this stage of the community, with so few people.  They have a chainsaw as a compromise, which is a smaller system than either buying all their firewood or heating their homes with gas or electricity, and allows them to continue to practice living in a way that makes for a smoother transition back to harvesting wood with human energy.

In another compromise, the community owns a small tractor.  Benoit could easily let the scale of the market garden grow to what is capable with a tractor, but with strong intention of eventually using horses again, and all the necessary implements stored in one of the long barns, Benoit plans the market garden in a scale possible with horses.  Robert uses the tractor to plow the grain fields in the same manner.  He sees that buying all his grain to avoid using a tractor himself, would not stop the use of a tractor, since any farmer he bought from would use one.  And as with harvesting wood and the market garden, this gives Robert a chance to continue practicing all the systems and yearly rhythms having to do with growing grain while the community is not yet stable enough to support horses.  The community lives with great hope and anticipation to transition out of the technologies they have accepted as a compromise, back to ways they practiced living together for over a decade in southern France.

For seven billion people to obtain a lifestyle with all the 21st century's finer desires, using the earth's resources and producing waste like Americans, we would need the resources of 4.1 earths to sustain us.  Peering through a biblical lens, the American standard of living is inherently more akin to taking the place of honor at the banquet (Mark 12:38-40) than becoming the servant of all (Mark 9:35).  It's a standard of living that isn't attainable for everyone and requires whole classes of servants to maintain.

Jesus said that the poor will always be among us (John 12:8), but is it ok for us to benefit from the systems that create and maintain an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor?  Yet every issue of injustice is so convoluted that any attempt to "fast" from even a single injustice (Isaiah 58:6) has to be equally nuanced and requires much creativity.  Moral decay generally goes unseen and the village-sized systems of support have all but disappeared.  In addition, pre-industrial-era living knowhow is slipping away or completely lost.  Forget making our own clothing fabrics or building materials, now we're so far removed that some people can't use a plain ol' knife until age 30!

But I want to live in a way that doesn't cause suffering!  That doesn't require pollution!  How can my daily choices and actions live into the Kingdom of God - that is, righteousness/justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17)?  The Kingdom of God is near... it's among us!  I can see what I want but I don't know how to get there.  Instead of answers, I just have a lot of thoughts dredged up when I walk through aisles taller than my house in Walmart and Costco.  And now, E.Leclerc.

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I hope this post gives a window into why Nico and I are making certain lifestyle choices.  Please hear that my goal in letting these thoughts flow out of my mind and into written word is not to change your life, but to share why we're changing ours.  And we're not changing ours to point our fingers at people who aren't making the same choices.  We are so grateful for all our family and friends, whether you make the same choices or not!  We deeply appreciate you and need your support!  :)