CHAPTER TWELVE

MY LIFE’S WORK

As part of my book I want to describe what Biodynamic farming means to me. Every Biodynamic farmer would probably bring out different aspects, but the following is what is important to me. I have tried to describe the farm ecosystem and how I attempted to create this on my last farm built. Especially hard is trying to write about the different levels of the spiritual world and how they manifest in nature without using Anthroposophical terms and assuming the reader is in the least bit familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s writings. As Biodynamic farming can be a lifelong study, and I still enjoy visiting farms and picking up new ideas I have decided to add these chapters at the end, rather than interspersing the ideas throughout the book.

The Great Artist of the Landscape

The spirituality of the earth has always been important to me. As I mentioned before, when I was nine, walking home through the bush, I experienced losing my oneness with nature. By farming my whole life, I could at least be out in nature and enjoy myself. Trying to make a living from nature has been hard but I have always had my spiritual beliefs that kept me going. When most people think of nature they think about a secluded spot or time spent in a national park. For me, nature is all around me when I farm. I like to think of a farmer as the great artist of the landscape. Every decision we make changes the look of the land. Mankind most impinges on nature where we grow our food and on the whole we have done a terrible job. Just think of the corn and bean farms of the Midwest, where people are literally not welcome. Not only are they dangerous places to visit because of known chemical hazards, but there is no place for humans. The farmer could show you his farm but it would be in a pickup truck in a cloud of dust along endless rows of corn or beans. Even worse are the chicken houses, the beef lots and huge dairy farms.
A Biodynamic farm is diversified, it is interesting and it is beautiful. It is a place that people like to visit and where they feel welcome. Not only does it grow food that nourishes, but people feel connected and safe.
I was lucky in that I could farm the land and grow good food. My late wife Joan, with the help of our two children, had the social ability to welcome people into our house and farm. Later Susan and I married and she had this same social ability. In particular, she guides people to find destiny paths….. and what better place to search than on visits to a Biodynamic farm? Thus on our farm in Wisconsin, we invited her friends to visit for the weekend, as part of our “Kindred Spirits” network. I would take them walking through the pastures and in one, I would invite them to sit in a circle as gradually the curious cows would gather around. There I would talk about the spirituality of the earth and Biodynamic farming.
As I wrote earlier, my turning point in life was when I was going through some very hard times in my marriage and the most incredible being of light and love suddenly visited me. I experienced the greatest wonder and appreciation of everything that I had done in my life and felt understood, accepted, honored and loved. Many years later, I had a similar experience of love, only not quite so intense. As background, let me explain that, for me, cows are part of the earth. The cow, in her being of loyalty to the land and the cosmos, belongs to the landscape. One late August afternoon, I was getting the cows ready for milking and they were being stubborn. It was hot and muggy and I was irritated, as I had more hay to make. As I walked past one of the cows, I happened to look into her eyes and we began a deep conversation. For my part, I said “I am sorry, please forgive my irritability, but I’ve got problems. “ In reply, she communicated back to me incredible forgiveness and love. I experienced the earth welling up through this cow. The earth, as a being of light and love, came shining through the eyes of this cow. I was startled yet deeply moved that, in my frustration; I was allowed to experience this union with the earth. Thinking about it later, I realized that it was the same love I had experienced when I was thirty-three and the Being I think of as Christ visited me. I then understood that the being of Gaia is now permeated with light and love, and that this light and love are being extended to all mankind now in an unlimited fashion.
Out of this stems my growing love of nature and the Being of the earth imbued with love. My life’s path has not been scholarly but more a life of doing. My main inspiration has always come from Anthroposophy but often there was no energy left in the evenings to study. One of the nice things about being a dairy farmer is that you are forgiven if you fall asleep at meetings. Now that I am not farming and can be more awake, I want to share how my experiences allowed me to see the spirituality of the earth and how Biodynamic farming led me to my world view.
My experience of the earth being imbued with light and love is further confirmed by meditation. When I look deep into the earth in my imagination, I move through matter, and experience the earth as hollow, surrounded at the periphery by light-filled crystal, dissolving into darkness. The hollow earth itself emanates light and love. The first time this happened I was surprised, as I expected density, weight, matter and gravity.
In my reading from Anthroposophy, mainly Sergei Prokofieff and Jesaiah Ben Aharon, these imaginations are confirmed. To me, they are most attuned to the changing earth. Also, in a course on Geomancy with Marko Pogacnik, I started to actually experience the spiritual landscape that underlies the physical.
The being of light and love that I experience is personal and present but also historical and cosmic. For me, this being is the Christ Spirit, the being of light and love, the beloved one, who has accompanied the earth and humankind from the beginning of time. This is the god that ruled from the sun realms, so all peoples have venerated this being in one form or another. For instance, the Egyptians called him the mighty sun God Ra and the Greeks called him Apollo. Slowly, during our descent onto the earth, he drew closer to the earth too and incarnated into the being of Jesus, and then united his being with mankind and with the earth. By this act, he made his new home on the earth for all time to come. This was a gift from the spiritual world, as we had lost our connection to spirit. In the past, our way of being was spirit-imbued. We still beheld and experienced spirit in matter. Now when we think about nature, we experience an abyss. ….we cannot cross the bridge between matter and spirit in our thinking. When we see a tree, we only see the physical tree. We do not see the spiritual tree, imbued with life force, or the spiritual beings that surround the tree. People with spiritual vision do see them. Now we are starting a new era, when our spiritual organs of perception are reawakening so that more and more people can again see the spirit in matter. We are starting to see the etheric world with new spiritual sense organs. At a later time, we will be able to understand this realm and then to co-create with it. Even now there are forerunners. The Findhorn community in Scotland has been creating an oasis where none could be expected to be. By taking direction from the nature spirits, they have miraculously created a lush garden out of sand dunes.
As time goes on, over the next several thousand years, people will experience and live into this realm Anthroposophist call “the etheric.” Already some people live without food by tapping into spiritual energies. The physical will less and less be able to support us. My favorite grace expresses this so well:
The bread is not our food What feeds us in the bread Is God’s eternal word Is spirit, and is life.
It is the spiritual forces in the food that sustain and nourish us. This is why Biodynamics is so important to me. By looking into the spiritual world, Rudolf Steiner has given us a way to grow food with the spiritual forces that are necessary to enrich humanity.

PART TWO
BIODYNAMIC FARMING

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A VISION QUEST IN ECUADOR
We had already made a connection to Ecuador, built our house and now we had an opportunity to live there.
I was lucky in the timing as the market for organic milk was still growing. I sold my cows for a very good price and I was able to recoup my losses. I had no plans to get back into farm ownership when we moved to Ecuador. However, by true serendipity, I was offered a twelve-hundred-acre farm that I was able to buy with the money from the sale of the cows. This land had some of the purest air, water and soil on earth and represented true wealth. We don’t live on the farm but once a week I go out and make sure everything is OK. I have a young farmer, Andreas, run it for me and we have a wonderful relationship. It’s great having a farm but not have to worry if the cows get out.
Farming is very low tech here, so I have to rethink many things I have learned. Andreas grew up on the farm with ten brothers and sisters and it was his dream to run the farm one day. However he never had the capital to buy it from his mother and support his young family. I pay him three hundred dollars a month, which is on the high side of average and was able to buy thirty beef animals and pay for some capital improvements, such as fencing and extending the watering system. What makes it financially viable here is that I can sell a full-grown bull for six hundred dollars, which is a bit less than I could get in the States. However my expenses are so much less, three hundred dollars for monthly wages instead of three thousand plus back in the States. And everything is cash. My property taxes are sixteen dollars and sixty eight cents per year. My house is a bit more, forty eight dollars per year. However, on the down side, bureaucracy is a nightmare. There is no mail delivery; we still have no mail box in Loja, the main city an hour away, so it took three trips to Loja to be able to pay my taxes. The best way to do business is to smile widely and apologize for my poor Spanish while I learn it as fast as I can. “Desculpe me, yo hablo un poco Espanol “excuse me, I only speak a little Spanish” goes a long way. People are very kind and patient and I do my best to be kind and patient in return
We have other projects that help us integrate into the community. Before coming down, a philanthropist friend of Susan’s gave her twenty thousand dollars per year for three years to give away for the highest good (FlowFunding.org). There are a few healthy conditions attached. The money cannot be used to pay oneself or one’s relatives or one’s expenses and it cannot be used for your own projects. Susan was so touched by the generosity that she decided to create one of her KINS Innovation networks pro bono, and let the members give out the money, since local people would know how it could do the most good. After six months of ferreting out collaborative people in different sectors here, she started a little network called Ayni, the Ketchua word for reciprocity. Eight of us (four Ecuadorians and four foreigners) get together about once a month and discuss how the money can best be used to help the community. For instance, in the valley below our house, there is a very poor indigenous community of the Saraguro people. The young women had asked that we pay for a dance instructor so that they could learn their traditional dances. An Ayni member decided to support this project pro bono and I help him, so every Saturday I pick up the dance instructor (herself a student at the university in Loja) and watch the women practice for two hours. If neither my colleague nor I are there, the young men disrupt the lessons. At first, the girls were very shy and self-conscious but they gradually got over it. Usually I take a book along to read and occasionally I nod off. That brings a smirk to their faces and it brings us to the same level. The women are very suppressed by their men and this dancing has given them a new belief in themselves. They came in second at the Vilcabamba carnival parade. Now that my Spanish is getting better and I can have simple conversations, I am starting to make friends with them. All together, Ayni has more than a dozen projects that are carried out by the members pro bono, with all the out-of-pocket expenses covered. They range from a “Pay It Forward” program to the free healings offered by our leading shaman to covering the cost of rebuilding materials when people have lost their houses to landslides. In all there are more than 3 dozen Ayni projects in various stages of development and total out-of-pocket costs after 3 years has been $36,000.
Vilcabamba has many interesting people and we enjoy their company but mostly I stay at home meditating, reading, writing, and working with our gardener and the cows I run on the Finca VIVA land surrounding us. Susan is the people person, so she always has lots of people to meet. She is a driving force in getting the waste disposal problem fixed through Ayni. All of Vilcabamba’s waste is going to a site just above our house where it was being burned. If the wind was going the wrong way, we would be sitting in a cloud of toxic fumes and then it would drift down to the village. This was rather upsetting, as we had travelled thousands of miles to be in a clean environment and all around us there are thousands of miles of clean Andean mountain air. Now, with the help of Ayni funds, the garbage is no longer burned and a report showed that 80% of the garbage is organic. Soon a recycling program will be started which will create lots of organic compost which will be given away to local farmers to encourage them to try organics. The non-organic garbage will be recycled or taken to a proper land fill in Loja. We must also mitigate the existing open-air dump. While estimates of the mitigation were $300,000 at first, by locals and foreigners collaborating, we are hoping we can do it for $3,000.
With the history of my back problems, about a month ago my back went out again in a more serious way. It was like old times in East Troy, where I had to lie on my back for three days, with every movement being excruciating. This surprised me as I know that my back only goes out when something is bothering me and I have been in serenity here. In fact, my worries got so bad that I developed a fever and felt nauseous. Carlitos, the shaman healer from Vilcabamba, visited and told me that I was on “a vision quest at home.” I knew this was true. For two years, I had been trying to live in the moment and still my mind. As I have mentioned, when I sit on our patio early in the morning and watch and listen to nature, I start to feel light and part of the formless all. I lose my mind identity, which is a wonderful experience. I guess my body was not agreeing with this assessment. Over the years, we put our stresses into our bodies, and for me I seem to put them in my lower back. I went through a serious crisis with this recent back pain and was determined to get to the bottom of it. By the second night of not being able to move, I was able to break through. It really is hard to not worry about the future based on past experiences. It is hard to believe that my value does not lie in what I have accomplished or will accomplish in the future.
Help did come. I was able to detach myself from my life and to go to the mountain top spiritually. I looked at myself growing up and pursuing my dreams. I saw how I lived a life full of joy and sorrow, but a wonderful life, living with what I had inherited, both good and bad. I had wrestled with the earth to make a living and in the process I was molded and taught, hard head though I always had. The earth embraced me, loving me and allowing me to fulfill my destiny.
As I write this, my back is still slowly recovering and Susan and I had to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary at home rather than hiking the Podocarpus National Park nearby as we had planned. But my bad back served its purpose because I am more firmly planted now in the present, trusting the spiritual world more deeply than I ever have before. I am fulfilling my intention to spread Biodynamic agriculture by writing this book…..and I hope you enjoy the chapters coming next on Biodynamics for non-farmers. My Spanish is getting good enough that I will soon be giving talks on organics to local farmers. I will find ways to fulfill my intention of teaching non-farmers how to steward the earth, such as by offering talks and walks here on Finca VIVA and other locations. What is important is that I have moved into a deeper level of trust in myself, in staying present and in receiving help from the spiritual world. That is enough.
We are so lucky to be on this beautiful earth. I feel lucky that I was led to farming. Despite all the hardship, the flies and manure, the kicking cows, the broken down machinery, the draughts and floods and all the hard work with little financial reward, I am excited. At night when I look at the uncountable stars glowing overhead, I experience the infinity of peace and love and wisdom of the spiritual world. Out of spirit, all this has risen. In all humility, I have been allowed to take part in the alchemy of creation and destruction through farming. All around me, I see and experience this beautiful world and know that I am blessed…..that all creation is blessed. This is my love, a farmer’s love.

CHAPTER TEN
SUSAN INTRODUCES ME TO MY KINDRED SPIRITS

When Joan died, I had just turned fifty and felt like I was being forced to start a second life. I’d lost my wife, the kids were grown up and off to college and I was starting a new business in a new town. After Celia left, I was able to face life on my own and day-to-day life seemed more manageable. However, I don’t think I was meant to lead a bachelor’s life.
Susan and I met one day in the farm yard when she was there for a board meeting of a children’s program on my farm and one of the children had accidently locked her keys in her car. I noticed her car window was opened a crack and was able to use a coat hanger to open the door. For my help, she promised me an apple pie and when she arrived with her gift, we found we had much in common. Not in our work, because I work with the land and she works with influential people in social investing and social ventures, but we were both trying to transform our world, she in social investing and I in Biodynamics. She did also have a strong connection to the land. In her previous marriage, she had been married to a Nigerian who was both chief and healer of his village. Although he had received a PhD degree from Harvard, and had been the number 2 man in Nigeria with the first democratic government, he had lost his wife and children in a tragic plane crash. At that point, he had taken up duties as the key village elder of his tribe and, after that, married Susan, his college sweetheart. . When Susan joined him, she shared his subsistence lifestyle in his farm compound and learned that it was possible to live off the land in simple surroundings. After six years, the cultural differences had been too hard to bridge and the marriage had sadly ended and, Susan returned to the States heart-broken. Soon after this we met, and our similar experiences of the grief of death and separation gave us a deep kinship.
When Susan did arrive with the apple pie, it was really good so I invited her to the Milwaukee symphony. After the concert, while waiting for the parking garage to empty, we went for some coffee. She had never studied Anthroposophy, so I offered to read Theosophy, one of Steiner’s basic books, out loud, and then we could have a discussion. She in return offered me dinner, so it was a good deal for both of us. After work, I would arrive at her house for dinner and our discussions and they grew more and more interesting. Looking back, it was strange that I offered this as I am not the type to have an intellectual discussion about a book, but I had to know if we would be compatible in our beliefs.

During the next two years, we got to know each other better and better. It was a very enjoyable courtship, as we could afford to go on some really romantic vacations. We spent three weeks in New Zealand, mainly touring the South Island in a camper van. I had remembered many of the under-developed camping sites from my youth and we would search these out and camp in our van. In the morning, we would wake up with the sun rising through the mist of a nearby river with the Southern Alps as a back drop. Not a person in sight, just a cup of coffee to warm us up. Another time, we visited England and stayed at bed and breakfasts. We had a general idea of the places we wanted to visit. Oxford for a day, London for a few days, Stonehenge, my old boarding school in Sussex and places we stopped at on the spur of the moment in-between. We didn’t have a tight schedule, so we could relax and get to know each other.

In the meantime I did have a farm to run. This was a real challenge, as I could not get the cows to make enough milk. They had a lot of health problems like bad feet, low conception rates and high somatic cell counts. I could not figure out what was wrong until one day a friend suggested I had a stray voltage problem. Cows are unbelievably sensitive to voltage differentials in their surroundings. It stresses them out and causes their immune system to kick in on a permanent basis so that they have little resistance left to fight disease. It took five years to solve the problem! A veterinarian who was also a dowser came and tested the farm. He found electrical earth currents going through my milking parlor. It was amazing to see his rods turn when he crossed a line between a low lying pond that was picking up stray voltage, the electrical control panel for my barn, a drilled well just outside the barn and then to the transformer. We solved the problem by constructing a medicine wheel from field stones off to the side of the milking parlor. Through dowsing we were able to place the medicine wheel in the right place so that the earth currents could go in a different direction and not affect the cows.
I know stray voltage doesn’t sound devastating to non-farmers, but it cut drastically into my bottom line. Every year I sold about $250,000 worth of milk but stray voltage was causing my cows to drop ten pounds of milk per day which added up to a loss of $50,000 per year. Because of the stress the cows were experiencing, I had a high culling rate (cows no longer giving milk) of over 35% so that each year I had to buy heifers that cost $1,500 each. I was cash-strapped and had to refinance several times. On top of that, I experienced a string of three drought years that made it necessary to buy a lot of feed. One year I was trucking in certified organic hay from Montana and Kansas. The hay cost $800 a semi load and the trucking came to $600, when a load would only last ten days. At times life became nasty. I would get phone calls from my suppliers saying that they would not deliver without a check. I would have to put off paying dealers who would then charge 18% interest. I would take short cuts that got me through a month or two but hurt deeply long term. It also hurt my reputation as a farmer, as I would have to put off repairs and maintenance. For example, a farmer is obliged by law to keep his thistles mowed but I couldn’t afford the right mower so I had to beg the neighbor for the use of his mower. Sometimes I would catch up on my payments but it was very stressful and I worked long hours. I thought I could be like a duck in the rain, letting the rain slide off my back without hurting inside. But I did hurt and eventually it caught up with me and my health deteriorated. My muscles became like cables, although nobody could diagnose the condition. I had to cut my hours way back or I would feel my back muscles tensing and preparing to pull my back out. I experienced that I couldn’t even let myself get angry because the adrenaline I then pumped into my body would leave me aching all over. That is a strange experience….trying to be happy when a cow shits on you in the milking parlor.
Soon after I solved the stray voltage problem, things started to improve. My calves didn’t die so I was able to raise all my own replacements and my culling rate came way down, although it took a few years for the older cows to respond. I had some cash to spare so I could replace some of my old machinery and catch up on maintenance. All through this hard time, I believed in myself. This is a spiritual lesson in itself. ….to know that you are on the right path despite all the adversity. I felt a lot of criticism from the community and felt put in a box of the failed farmer. I went through an initiation by fire.
I felt especially proud about my cows. I did several things out of the ordinary, like not using artificial insemination to get the cows pregnant. I had crossed my initial herd with Normandy bulls and in eight years, had created an all-round cow that did well under grazing management. I had decided that I would leave the calves on their mothers for four weeks rather than take them away at birth as others do. I could see that the cows craved to keep their calves, for when I started the practice, the other cows would gather around the newborn and not leave the mother and calf in peace. Some cows had sneaky ways to steal a calf from its real mother which was bad, as the calf would not get the colostrums milk it needed. After a few months of this practice, when a calf was born there would only be mild curiosity on the part of the other cows. At first, it was difficult as the mothers had lost much of their mothering instincts and it was common to lose calves out in the field. After two generations, the bonding between mother and calf returned. I felt it was important that the mothering instinct of the cows be respected and that they are allowed to fulfill this basic instinct that they craved so strongly. To see a cow and her calf together is truly moving. Even keeping the bull with the herd made a difference, as it made the whole herd less nervous and more contented.
When I first designed the farm, I had made some false assumptions. As a model to design my farm, I had used a nearby farmer who was a grazier and also used the Biodynamic preparations key to Biodynamic farming. I assumed he was trying to create the same kind of self-contained farm organism that was so important to me. In his scenario, he needed two acres per cow but he bought in all his concentrate feed. I on the other hand wanted to grow all my own feed, not only the pasture and hay but also the corn and beans so I actually needed four acres per cow. I was locked into a facility built for one hundred and twenty cows but only had two hundred and forty acres. Over the years I was able to find another two hundred and sixty acres to rent but it was a struggle to farm so many acres. Looking back it would have been better to design a set of buildings and put together a budget that was more appropriate for two hundred and twenty acres.
I still held my dream of helping people experience how a farmer can steward the earth in a caring and non-exploitive way while producing good food. Over the, years Susan had created a network of close colleagues who were interested in social issues, which often included responsible land stewardship. She invited fifty people to join a network which we called Kindred Spirits (see KindredSpiritsNetwork.com). For this we charged one thousand dollars per person, which helped our bottom line. We invited eight people at a time to come and stay at our farm for a long weekend. There were two main themes worked into the stay. Susan has a gift of matching people so that it would be comfortable for each person to talk about their lives and how they were fulfilling their destiny paths. From these discussions, they would get encouragement and support in their life decisions. My part was to take everybody for a walk through the farm and teach about how non-farmers can steward the earth. We would end up on our sacred hill where I would talk about Biodynamic farming and the spirituality of the earth. Many people have lost contact with farming and do not have a chance to experience farm life. Yet they know that their very sustenance is dependent on the earth so they appreciated this chance to see where their food comes from. In December, we would have a weekend for all fifty members but they would stay in a nearby hotel. As Susan had carefully chosen the group from her life’s work, the conversations were substantive and revolved around the idea that humanity has its ladder up the wrong wall. People think that the environment is a subset of the economy but actually the economy is a subset of the environment, because it is the earth that supports us all. Farming in particular is where we can most consciously make decisions that affect both our health and the earth. In Biodynamic farming, we have the added dimension that we work with spirit that stands behind nature. Through Kindred Spirits, Susan and I found a way to be and work together and share our lives with our friends. It was also a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project but instead of giving away vegetables in return for financial support we gave away the opportunity to learn how to steward the earth and to have destiny path conversations with a likeminded group of people. I think the fifty people did feel a deeper connection to the earth through our farm. We created a network that covered many walks of life and covered the States. Two members in particular captured the value of Kindred Spirits. On their website, master chef and authors Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg wrote, “We came to one of the smallest village we had ever visited to hear some of the largest ideas we had ever heard.”
After eight years, I decide to give up my lease. This was hard but I was ready for a change. I have always been willing to step into the void. I wanted to find a way to talk about farming and my love of the earth. Kindred Spirits had allowed me to experience this possibility but in the States I could not see this opportunity opening up. I needed time to recharge my batteries and to deepen my connection to nature. Serendipity soon gave us a path through the void.

CHAPTER NINE

MY HARDEST YEARS

Christopher and Martina moved to the States in the Seventies to help develop Anthroposophy and its sister organizations of Waldorf education and Biodynamic farming. They bought several farms in the East Troy area of South East Wisconsin and funded Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, a research and teaching institution for organic and Biodynamic farming. They were reorganizing their farms as there had been no cows on the land for the last few years and they felt that the fertility was going down. They asked me to lease their dairy and we came to an agreement that I would lease the land and they would put up a set of new buildings. I was then able to build my dream facility. We built a milking parlor, a double-sixteen swing parlor that was very efficient and could milk up to a hundred cows an hour. There was an enjoining office and space for a classroom. The cows were housed in a big loafing shed, where they could run loose on a pack of manure and clean straw. This method produces lots of compost and is very easy on the cows. The facilities were excellent and I was very appreciative. . I found a herd of certified organic cows close by and we were milking cows by April. I ran the farm business as my own so I owned the cows and machinery and had to take out loans for about one hundred and forty thousand dollars, which should have been quite doable. I was very excited to be running my own farm again and hardly had time to miss Joan, who was able to come out at the beginning of July.
Transitions were always difficult for Joan and although she was not happy, I didn’t think too much of it. She was going to start teaching first grade at the nearby Waldorf School and I reckoned she would make good new friends, as she always did. However, once she got to East Troy, she would wake up in the mornings crying and not feeling that this was her place at all. She was always brave and she carried on making the house and garden into her new home and preparing for the school year.
The day came for Dave to start college at George Washington University in DC. And I was flying to DC with Dave to get him oriented, so we had to drive two hours down to O’Hare airport. Joan had to go to her first faculty meeting so we all left about the same time, with Eve still in the farmhouse. When I got to O’Hare, they were paging me, which surprised me as I had our tickets and everything else in order. I left Dave in the check-in line and found the police office, where they informed me that Joan had just died in a car accident but had no details. I had to go back to the line and tell David that we were leaving the airport, as his mother had just died. That was a terrible, long drive, just Dave and me, not knowing anything. Eve was waiting in the house with no company, since nobody else knew, and, when we arrived back home, I had to call for help and tell people. The community really rallied around and helped as best they could. Friends and family came from great distances.. My sister flew in from New Zealand, her daughter came from Japan and my brother Johannes and his wife came from Ireland. Joan’s brother came from Long Island and her parents from Florida. It was especially hard to see her father’s grief, his only daughter gone. Old friends from Kimberton and Ithaca arrived and we were joined by many new friends from East Troy. Especially helpful was that the Christian Community priest who had accompanied Joan and me in our life, who had married us and christened Eve and Dave, now lived close by and he took care of all the funeral arrangements. I remember he took me to the funeral home that afternoon so we could arrange for Joan to be taken home rather than to stay in the funeral home. I wasn’t allowed to see her as she was too badly hurt. She had run a stop sign, not even slowing down, and been hit side on. She was hit so hard that her watch stopped and she was knocked out of her shoes. During the three days before the funeral, we were all sustained by the outpouring of love of family and friends and it was a vibrant celebration of her life. During the day, people would visit and we often had music and the evenings would be more intimate, when family or close friends would share stories of her life. After the funeral, people left and there was a depth of loneliness that at times was unbearable to me. Eve and Dave decided that it would be best to continue with college. Dave and I again went back to O’Hara and flew to DC and got him settled into college. A week later, Eve left to do her four-month study abroad in Africa. Luckily my sister stayed on for a month and helped me through some of the worst part. When my father died, a few years previously, I had been at his side and had experienced his “being” or soul leaving and expanding into the universe. This had been very special but unfortunately, with Joan there was nothing similar to give me solace. She was gone and I could not feel her presence. After a while, the emptiness would not be so constant but the grief would hit me hard at unexpected times. It would usually come at times of beauty. Seeing a flock of birds changing directions in mid-flight or the wind blowing through a field of wheat would leave me in tears and desolate. About two months after Joan died, a friend passed away and I went to the funeral. She had died of cancer, so she had a long time to prepare. She and her friends had written the funeral service and she had felt that after she died, she would be experienced in the wind, in the sunset and other aspects of life. I left the service furious and shaken to the bone because for me, there was nowhere to go to experience Joan. Working during the day was ok, as I had to keep the farm going and there were things to keep my mind and body busy. Much harder were the nights. When I closed the door to the milk house in the evening, I dreaded going into the house. I would sit on the steps and be with the cats and dogs for as long as possible before going in to make supper. Often at night, I would lie on the floor, light a candle and listen to Handle’s Messiah. This music let me experience death and then resurrection and helped my healing process more than anything else. Saturday nights were especially hard, sitting by myself watching TV. I am not the type of person who likes to sit around talking with a group of people. I prefer one on one conversation, so I would often feel very lonely, even within a group setting. I knew that Joan wouldn’t be happy watching me feel sorry for myself, so I decided to take the plunge and invite a woman out to dinner. I knew one of the of the Waldorf school teachers who was single and so I checked out with a mutual friend whether she would be open to going to dinner. Happily she was. I hadn’t dated for twenty-five years but I reckoned we could talk about teaching and she had lived in New Zealand. We did have a good conversation and became friends and later she moved in. After one of the first times that she had supper at my house and had to leave, my whole body went into a panic. The thought of her leaving left me in tears and I realized I had an irrational fear that I would never see her again. Celia helped me get through those lonely months, although I know local people were upset that I found a new partner so soon. We were together for two years helping each other getting through some hard times. She was twenty years younger than me, so I realized I didn’t need another daughter and likewise she realized she didn’t need a father figure. When the time was right, she moved to Oregon and soon found the man she was to marry.
At the time of Joan’s death, a friend had given me a moth chrysalis and mentioned that it might hatch in six months. I left it in my bedroom and didn’t think about it. One night I walked up the stairs and into my bedroom where I saw this beautiful huge moth sitting in the middle of my pillow. For me it was a gift from Joan that meant that although I could not experience her at that time, in the future we would again have a relationship that would transform into something new and beautiful. Eight years later, I was at a workshop run by Kimberly Herkert co-founder of Way of the Heart and one of the sessions was on forgiveness. Joan came into my mind and I became really upset at her for leaving me, holding the bag, when I had felt we’d had a lifelong agreement to support each other. Of course this feeling was irrational and I didn’t even know that I carried it, but I could not forgive her at that moment. At the end of the session, we went round the group, each person briefly telling of their experience. I was nearly in tears, and it was hard to speak and talk about my feelings. Kimberly looked at me and told me that I had just forgiven Joan. T hat evening I went to the beach and did indeed feel like a weight had been lifted off me. Since then, I have again felt closer and more at ease with Joan.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WASHING WINDOWS, GROWING VEGETABLES, BAKING BREAD AND BACK TO FARMING


The farm that belonged to the Waldorf School had been bought by Mr. Marin, the founder of Sunoco Oil, back in the thirties. He had hoped that it would be a model Biodynamic farm and school but it didn’t work out that way. Instead a Waldorf school was started and the farm was run conventionally for many years. A few years previous to my arrival, the management had changed and a group of young farmers had been running the farm along Biodynamic lines. The situation was perfect for us. There was a Waldorf school for the children, and in the future, Joan would be able to teach when a position became available. There was a school farm program in place and classes would come to the barn to help with chores. The farm had many beautiful places to walk so we invited the school families to visit whenever they wanted. We created some wonderful festivals. In the spring, we had a farm blessing based on Rogan’s Day. This was the day the early settlers blessed their land and asked for good crops that year. We had the children pull an old horse-drawn one bottom plough through the garden with a long rope while we all sang. We then placed a loaf of bread made from last year’s wheat in the furrow, covered it with soil and asked for a good harvest that year. We finished the day with a hay ride around the farm.
We were able to help start a Community Supported Garden (CSA) on the farm and integrated it into the farm organism by giving them cow manure and including the gardeners in some of the farm decision-making. Between the farm store, which we had just started, the CSA and the opportunity to enjoy the animals and land, for those members of the school community who wanted it, there was a real opportunity to feel connected to the land.
When we arrived, the farm was showing a financial deficit and the faculty and board were trying to find ways to eliminate the loss to the school. Already construction had been started for a farm store and a milk bottling and yogurt plant. As the farm was on Seven Stars Road, we changed the name to Seven Stars Farm and the yogurt was sold as Seven Stars Yogurt, which is now marketed successfully nationwide, certified as Biodynamic. I also put together a proposal whereby the farm business could be run and owned separately from the school as a for-profit business. The school board thought it was a wonderful proposal but the other farmer was against the whole idea of separating farm and school. A host of political shenanigans ensued and it became apparent that it would be years before any real change would happen. I would be stuck working with a difficult partner and Joan wanted to go back to Ithaca where she was offered a teaching position. After a year we headed back to Ithaca. This time it was Joan who had the job and we assumed I would find my way.
We rented a house in Ithaca while we looked for a place to buy. It was obvious that I was going to have to change my profession but I wasn’t sure what and I had no skills apart from farming. I did a bit of carpentry but that ran out. Joan’s teaching job could hardly support us and we were getting pretty low on our resources so I took a job with a cleaning company. I think it was during this time that I learned humility. Cleaning movie theatres and frat houses was the pits. However I did learn how I could make good money by cleaning windows and having my own contracts and, after six months, I started my own business. Sparkle Cleaning specialized in window cleaning. I also had a crew that cleaned a Hoyts movie complex and some office buildings. I was used to milking cows on Christmas Day but cleaning sixteen movie theatres on Christmas Day sure didn’t have the heart that the cows had.
It took us a year to find a place to buy. It was out in the country with twenty good acres all set up to grow vegetables. It even had a renovated house on it, just the right size for our family. I learned how to grow vegetables and after another year phased out my cleaning business. The trouble with growing vegetables in Upstate New York is that the winters are long and during these months there is not much income. I decided I would bake bread in the winters. I had read an article about building simple wood-fired brick ovens so I went to a weekend workshop where they were building one and also apprenticed at a bakery in Kansas where they were using one. I went home and built my oven with an eight-by-six-foot hearth where I could bake sixty loaves at a time and do seven batches before the heat ran out. I made mainly traditional European sour dough breads. The outside would have a nice crust but the inside would be soft and chewy. . My first few batches were a little on the flat side but I soon got the hang of it and soon it was considered the best bread in Ithaca. I had good markets in Ithaca and I was soon at my max baking up to nine hundred loaves a week. Fridays were my big day. I could sell a couple of hundred loaves at the Farmers Market and the rest sold at Green Star Cooperative. On bake days I would even deliver bread to the coop. right after the bread came out of the oven. The whole store would fill with the smell of fresh baked bread and it would soon be gone. My bread was successful and made a lot more money than the vegetables, so I gave up on them.

Eve and Dave were growing up and were passionate about riding horses. We couldn’t afford well-trained horses so we bought two young horses that they worked on and trained after school. We bought an old horse trailer and once a week we would load up the horses and go to riding lessons. During the summer, we would spend Sundays at horse shows. Eve and Dave were good but, as they got older, we couldn’t afford the professionally-trained horses that they were competing against. It was a nice way for me to be with my kids but by tenth grade we decided to stop and they got into team sports at school. It was nice to have a bit of extra money from the bakery, that didn’t have to go into farm improvements. One summer, we closed the bakery down for a month and vacationed in Europe. We rented a car, visited friends and camped. We started in Amsterdam and then worked our way through Germany and Austria and down to Italy and back up through France to Holland. I think Italy was our highlight. We camped outside Venice on one of the beach campsites and took the ferry into Venice where we spent two days walking around the city and taking a Gondola ride. On the beach, we encountered our first topless bathers which was especially interesting to Dave, being fourteen. Florence was wonderful with all the museums and architecture, although the camp ground was not so great. However the breakfast, fresh baguettes and coffee with the view over Florence made up for the rest. Here the kids encountered their first toilet that was a hole on a concrete pad. Another summer we went out west for a month, rafted down the Colorado River and camped and hiked at some of the national parks.
All this time I was still holding onto my dream of getting back into dairy farming. I felt that I had missed my life’s calling and secretly wished that I would die of some illness. I wasn’t depressed and I didn’t tell people but I just felt that making eight or nine hundred loaves of bread a week, even if they were the best, was not what I was meant to be doing. Joan was happy but when I told her how I felt, she accepted my needs. I do believe we create our own reality and during those years I had to struggle with finding out who I was.
Christopher and Martina Mann, leaders in Biodynamic circles, were looking for a Biodynamic farmer to lease some of their land in East Troy, Wisconsin. I visited several times and, after much heart searching, I decided to move again. We had been on our farm for seven years and Joan felt very much at home there and did not want to leave. This reminded me that, when I first got to America, I remembered going to a Biodynamic conference and meeting an old man. He was disappointed in his life and angry at his family for not letting him follow his dream when he was younger. He had owned a farm and, when they hit hard times, had to sell out. He had joined a dry cleaning business and then bought it, doing well. His dream had been to get back into farming but his family wouldn’t let him. Now he felt that his life had been wasted. I think Joan knew that I would be that person if she didn’t encourage me to take on this new challenge. Eve was already at college and Dave was going to graduate from high school that June, so this was a good time to move. I had to leave in March to get the farm ready for spring and Joan followed after Dave graduated in late June.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SEARCING THE WORLD FOR OUR PLACE

We were now a family, the year was nineteen eighty five. Dave the youngest just turning five, Eve ready for first grade and Joan and I both thirty-five. To keep my mind off the farm and Auction, I had promised us a trip around the world which would include New Zealand. Losing a farm is gut-wrenching and a bit like losing a child. I knew I would not be able to process it right away, so it was better to put my mind on something else first….like a trip. A farmer is defined by his place and work. Although our farm was still run down, people who knew about farming said we had really cleaned the place up. I had been making a cheese that I was proud off and selling it around the country. In my work, I had the daily rhythm of milking and chores and the yearly rhythm of the seasons. Always rushed in the spring, trying to get the crops in the ground, the summer was spent making hay and in the fall getting the corn in or filling the silo one last time. Even winter was busy, feeding and keeping the cows clean and comfortable. There is not much time to think about who you are. I was a farmer with a family. What else was there than that? After selling the farm, I had to confront that existential question and try to work out who I was without a farm. Farming has two sides to it. On the one hand it can be very spiritual. It’s all about birth and death; it’s about creating and destroying matter. In the sacrament of communion in the Christian church, the bread and wine are raised symbolically to the flesh and blood of the risen Christ. Farmers who spend their whole day working in the physical world are like a priest working in nature. We are constantly transforming matter into living substance that feeds mankind. On the other hand, farming is very physical and can drag you down into materialism. Running a farm is a bit like running a truck business. You have to haul feed to the cows and then take all the manure back out to the fields. It pays very very poorly and involves long hours. Maybe that’s why it ranks last on young peoples’ choices of professions.
I was somewhat lost about our future so Joan and I stored all our things in a friend’s barn and left. This time, we went looking around the world for our place, not just around the East Coast. We decided that we needed to retrace our earlier lives and see if we could fit into one of those again. After all the hard work, it was nice to relax and my sciatic leg soon got better. We were still interested in the Camphill Movement and we joined Mourn Grange, a Camphill community in Northern Ireland that was close to where Joan and I had met. I ran the small dairy farm and Joan taught the children and we learned that it wasn’t the right place for us. Although I truly admire Camphill and the intentional communities they create, I was not comfortable and wanted to be more independent. I felt that by joining Camphill I would have to immerse myself in the community and give up my individuality. Later, I felt, I would rise up again, remade and stronger but I was not ready to do that then.
After six months at Mourn Grange, we went to New Zealand, flying Singapore Airlines. Singapore Airlines gave us a special deal where we could have a three-day stay-over for practically free. A nice hotel and all kinds of tours were included. Our little family had a wonderful time being tourists. Singapore was celebrating the New Year which made it a little noisy and crowded but we went to temples, saw traditional dance shows and the usual places to buy stuff. This was very different and exciting for our country children.
We stayed in New Zealand for two wonderful months. We stayed at my sister Liesbet’s farm, with a beautiful Kiwi fruit orchard right on the river. My parents lived twenty minutes away so Eve and Dave finally got to know their grandparents and I was able to reconnect to my roots.
While we were there, my brother Johannes visited with his wife and two children. We had decided that we would rent a camper van and spend three weeks touring the South Island. The four children were new to each other and loved playing together and the wives were also good friends. It was more a question if the two brothers could survive each other in a cramped space. Everything was fine, we were taking turns driving, until I drove under a low overhead bridge and demolished the top of the camper van. Luckily we were close to a distribution point and another van was coming in, in three days. I have to admit I was a little shock up, but Johannes and I decided that we would not rent a car for the next three days as New Zealand has such a good bus service. Low and behold, ten minutes later as we were unloading the camper van, Johannes informed me that he had decided to rent a car without any further discussion. This brought up all kinds of boyhood memories, mainly of my older brother walking all over me and me tagging along as the younger brother. I had spent the last twenty years getting over this and I wasn’t about to fall into old patterns. I was coming down the camper van steps with an arm load of toilet paper as he informed me of his decision. I started yelling at him while throwing rolls of toilet paper in his direction. He drove back to our friend’s house while I caught a bus and walked. We continued our verbal fight in front of the kids and wives, me threatening that the vacation was over but the wives managing to smooth things over. My brother’s parting words were that it was my problem how I felt about our boyhood and not his fault. He was sorry that I was upset but not sorry about how things were when we grew up. Maybe he had a point that it was my problem and not his. I felt good that I had stood up for myself and did not allow our relationship to fall into old patterns. Recently he and his partner visited and in conversations about our youth he did say that he was sorry that it had been so hard for me, he hadn’t been aware of my situation. This made a huge difference to me as how we grow up as a family sets our patterns for life. Patterns that are hard to break out of. Sincere apologies can transform a situation into a positive experience. We ended up having a wonderful vacation and at night Joan and I got to sleep in the tent, rather than in the crowded camper van with all the children.
While in New Zealand, we visited several Biodynamic farms but did not feel called to stay there. At the end of two months it was time to find a place to be and I accepted a position on the farm that belonged to the Kimberton Waldorf School, where Joan had taught eight years previously.

CHAPTER SIX

CRESSET FARM

Joan wrote a book about our first nine months on Cresset farm but it was pretty sanitized. For Joan, writing allowed her to leave the hard times behind and remember the good. She put her heart and soul into the farm and loved the land but if you read between the lines, it was rough. It was primitive, it was hard work and all the money went into the farm. As she had little knowledge of farming, it was hard for her to have much input so she just followed my ideas. While we were in Camphill, we had saved twenty- eight thousand dollars, which really was not enough to buy a farm with the cows and equipment. Our borrowing institution was Farmers Home Administration, which really worked with us, giving us a hundred thousand dollar thirty-year mortgage at three percent on the farm and a forty thousand dollar seven-year loan for our cattle and machinery. The monthly payments on these loans put a lot of pressure on our budget and did not leave much margin for error.
We did have our hundred and ten acres of good soil but the barn was run down and the dwelling was a big old upstate farm house with no insulation. In the winter it could get so cold that peas soaking over night in water in the kitchen would freeze. Looking back, I could never do that to my wife and children again but it was also a wonderful time. I still feel that that was my best time, even if on some levels it failed. As a young man of twenty-eight, it was wonderful to put my heart and soul into developing the farm. After two years, we were able to buy neighboring land with one hundred and twenty acres. This made it possible to grow all our own feed which was important to me, being part of the Biodynamic model. Soon after that I took a course in homestead cheese making, and we were able to build a cheese house where we made Gouda cheese. We called the farm Cresset Farm. A cresset is a vessel that holds precious oils and we felt that the farm was like a container where special things could happen.
Although Joan was raised in the suburbs of Long Island and was used to having people around and a high standard of living, she was willing to follow me in my dream, be part of the back-to-the-earth movement and raise our family. She was not raised as a farm girl and never did learn how to do some things like driving a tractor, but she was indispensible in other ways. I remember the day our neighbor came driving into our yard and needed my tractor moved so that he could get out to the back. He just assumed that Joan could move it and a look of amazement came over his face when Joan informed him she didn’t know how to start it. Back in the eighties, most wives on family farms could take their turn sitting on the tractor doing chores like raking the hay. But Joan did much more than that. She created the feeling around the house and yard that made it nice to be around. She created community for us. She had a social skill that made people feel at home and wanted.
I have so many special memories. In the summer, after a hard day of making hay, we would all go down to Long Point State Park on Cayuga Lake. At that time it was still undeveloped and there would be few people. It was wonderful to relax, play with the children, swim in the cool water and then have a picnic dinner and talk as the sun went down. By then we had Eve and Dave, and they would sit happily on our laps as the evening became quiet and dusk changed to night.
Joan, being a born teacher, would tell endless stories to the children and knew all kinds of games that kept them busy on long winter days when it was too cold to go outside. In the summer, when there was field work to do, David would enjoy coming out with me on the tractor. After lunch, Joan would happily give me David and promise to get him soon. I knew that the tractor would lull David to sleep after ten minutes or so, but this didn’t bother Joan. He would be sitting in my lap, and after about ten minutes fall asleep. For the rest of the time I would have to hang onto him and prop his head up so it wouldn’t flop around. All the while, I would need one hand free to steer the tractor and lift and drop the implement at the end and beginning of each row. Meanwhile Joan would be enjoying her free time from motherhood and delay her promised return. After lunch, it was nap time for the children and often it was my job to make sure they didn’t play while falling asleep. I would lie on the floor and sometimes I would fall asleep before the children. They would notice and creep out only to be caught by their mother who would also scold me for failing my duty.
We would have festivals at special times and invite friends or later, after Joan started teaching again, the families from her class would visit. People love visiting farms that are still on a human scale and stanchion barns, where the cows are tied and handled on a daily bases, are cozy places to be. For children, it is especially nice when at milking time your teacher or her farmer husband can help you wash a cow’s udder and then squeeze the milk out of the teat. When we started to make cheese we had cheese festivals. One year, we had about seven hundred people visit on one day alone, with cars parked up and down the road. We had a seven-thousand-pound cheese vat and usually made about five hundred pounds of cheese every second day. For the festival, we made cheese in the afternoon so people could see the process and outside we had clowns and musicians entertaining. We kept the cows inside and everything was spick and span. We also had two teams of horses pulling hay wagons for people to ride on, going out to the back of the farm. The timing was just right. It was a beautiful fall day, with all the trees in full autumn color. Especially nice for us was watching Dave, who was four, sitting next to the driver, content as could be for the duration of the festival. For us, the festival was a financial success, as the community found out about our cheese house and we had many repeat customers over the years.
But life was also difficult. We were very cash-strapped and it was hard to sell our cheese. We had forty-five cows and had enough milk to make five hundred pounds of cheese every second day. This was in the early eighties when there was a huge surplus of milk and no milk companies would take on new customers. So we had to keep making cheese, filling our aging room, yet had no money coming in. In addition, as the value of the dollar was high, I could not compete against the imported Gouda cheeses. Imported cheese was coming in at a dollar eighty a pound and I had to sell my cheese at two twenty five or it was better to sell milk. It was just impossible then to wholesale cheese without losing money.
Worse, New York Agriculture and Markets was giving me a hard time. Farming is very regulated and everything has to be inspected and approved, including labeling. Ag and Markets was telling me I could not call my cheese “organic,” as all cheese is organic. This was very upsetting, as organic was what was setting my cheese apart from the competition. This was when organic was just coming into vogue but official standards were not yet in place. Officialdom can be very intimidating so I went to my lawyer who advised me that my farm was worth less than the cost of suing Ag and Markets but I should talk to my local assembly man Steve, who happened to be head of the assembly Ag committee. Steve knew that Ag and Markets had been asked, two years previously, to come up with organic standards but had not bothered about them. Steve kindly inquired where the standards were for organic cheese so I could understand their ruling. One week later I got a letter saying I could call my cheese organic but in future please talk directly to Ag and Markets. Yes, it always feels good to beat the system.
It was difficult to always be depending on interns to get the work done and also share our home with them. It was especially hard in winter. Our sole source of warmth was our wood stove in the living room. The bedrooms upstairs could often get below freezing so we would crowd around the stove to keep warm. A family with two young children and a couple of interns in their twenties was not always very compatible. Getting up in the mornings at four-thirty to milk the cows was especially painful. I would get up without turning the lights on so as not to wake Joan. All the clothing was set out in a special order, long johns first, with the tops still inside the shirt and sweater all ready to be pulled over the head without twisting up and then the bottoms and jeans and socks. Dressing was very quick. Downstairs the woodstove would be stocked up and coveralls put on. The insulated boot liners were always left underneath the stove so the feet were warm and dry. Once in the barn, it was warm as the cows’ bodies and breathing kept the barn above freezing.
I had so much to learn about winters in Upstate New York. In the fall when it was wet, we would make ruts in the lanes when we hauled the corn in from the fields or took out the manure. Then in the winter, the ruts would fill with water and freeze. When it is cold the cows are in the barn most of the time and the gutters behind the cows have to be cleaned on a daily bases. Cows make enough manure to fill a manure spreader every day and it has to be hauled out to compost piles before it freezes. That first year there were many a day that my tractor got stuck in the frozen ruts and I had to go out with a pick and break the ice up. A couple of years later I was able to buy a four-wheel-drive tractor that solved that problem.
With all this hard work and financial pressure, I lost my vision of why I was farming. I was working eighty or ninety hours a week just to get the work done and forgetting about the spiritual side of life. I was just slogging it out to prove that I could make it. This was not enough support for Joan. In the Christian Community wedding ceremony, the priest turns to the man and states:
Walter, shine before Joan
With the light
Which the Risen One
Let’s shine in your spirit

He then turns to the women and states
Joan, follow Walter
In the light
Which the Risen One
Let’s shine in your soul

Joan felt that I was not embodying the spirit light that she needed to be able to follow and therefore she wanted to leave. This was devastating to me and I did not know what to do. I loved Joan and the children and could not imagine life without them. The farm would have been empty without them but I only knew how to farm and could not imagine myself providing the family with what they needed without a farm. I tried to be supportive of her needs. Her parents visited and they went apartment hunting with Joan in Ithaca. Joan applied for Waldorf teaching positions on the East Coast. I remember one night in February, leaving Joan in Boston for a job interview; I was driving through snow storms with Eve and Dave in the back. We couldn’t leave Boston until six at night, as that was when the snow ploughs finally cleared the roads and I had promised my intern I would try to get back for the morning milking. It was still snowing a bit and I remember driving all night on the Massachusetts Turnpike and New York Thruway wedged between tractor trailer trucks with the snow coming at the windshield. We tried stopping for a rest but it was too cold and we could not afford a motel. Years later, Eve told me she never fell asleep and all they knew was that Mom and Dad were changing their lives. We did get home in time for me to put my children to bed and go out and milk. I struggled on while Joan tried to find the right place for her and the children. After I wrote this chapter I asked Eve if she had any memories of those times and she wrote back as a thirty year old women.
Hi Pops,

It is so nice to read your story and bring back memories from that time. Your writing is beautiful. I have lots of memories from our time at Cresset farm. One of my best memories is of Christmas on the farm. I remember going out with you and Dave to pick out and cut down a Christmas tree on Christmas eve, and then hanging popcorn strings and apples on the tree with mom, along with our other ornaments (those gold cymbals and candles). I remember how we went out to the barn and sang to the cows and I remember singing around the tree and telling stories during the holy nights. I remember Christmas quite well in that old house. I remember the fire being lit in the stove near the tree.
I also remember the festivals on the farm and how fun it was to have all those people come visit the farm. I remember times when we had babysitters, and I was always so sad and upset when you left (when I was real young). A lot of my memories are actually around traumatic experiences, like when mom got in that car accident and red paint spilt on me and scared her. I remember playing with Laurie and Jordan and Russell too (and I remember when he died). I remember the auction of the farm and that mom had a splitting headache when it was over and was lying on the couch upstairs in the addition that we added onto the house. I have a memory of seeing a ghost (or some spirit) walking thru my room one early morning and I remember our intern Daren. I could go on with lots more memories but I'll talk to you about them if you want. Anyway, loved reading your chapter..
Around this time of great sadness and uncertainty, I received a great gift that sustained me and changed my life. I had just gone to bed and Joan was still downstairs when a mighty Being entered the room. This Being radiated light and love and communicated to me that I was completely loved and accepted just the way I was. I knew that I had this unbelievable companion that would never leave or stop believing in my goodness. After a while, the Being was gone and I was left in tears of gratitude. I knew that whatever happened, and however painful it was, things would be all right. Somehow this experience changed me so that I could again be the light that Joan needed to experience shining before her. I don’t think much happened outwardly and I still had to work incredibly hard to keep the farm going. Yet I knew that all creation was perfect and loved to an extent unimaginable to us.

Since we first moved to our farm, Joan had been helping to start a Waldorf school in Ithaca, about thirty miles away. When Dave turned three, she started to teach the kindergarten class. The commute was long but she loved the teaching and meeting more people. Then the school had to change location and the commute was over an hour each way. Joan and the children had long days and would come home really tired. We were still struggling with finances on the farm and I felt we were spinning our wheels and going nowhere. With all the hard physical work, my sciatic nerve was bothering me and causing me to limp. Finally, after seven years, we decided to sell the farm. At that time, in 1985, the dairy industry was in disarray and our two neighbors were also going through bankruptcy and having auctions. The investment in our cheese house had no resale value and with the depressed value of dairy farms, Farmers Home Administration said they would buy back all our land and assets for one dollar and forgive all our loans. We were allowed to keep our car and about ten thousand dollars worth of cheese that we sold over the next few months. I was able to sell all the cheese equipment which I then had to deliver to Wisconsin. I still remember shutting the door to the U Haul truck, before driving out, thinking that I was closing the door to all my dreams. It is strange how I thought I was selling the farm for the good of the family but years later Joan said she loved it there and would have stayed.

CHAPTER FIVE

FALLING IN LOVE

My brother Johannes was living in an intentional community in Northern Ireland that was part of a Biodynamic farm and I decided to join him there. The transition from four years of isolated farms and agricultural school to a very intense community of two hundred people was difficult for me. Glencraig, as the community is called, is part of the world wide Camphill Movement that works with people with developmental disabilities. It is a magical property with a small herd of dairy cows and extensive gardens and sits right on the Belfast Loch. The work on the farm was tailored to the needs of the developmentally disabled and we tried to keep the work place simple and people friendly. At that time, we milked six to eight cows by hand and there was always lots of shovel and wheelbarrow work for those who could do it. On the other hand, we did have tractors and equipment to do the heavy work such as hay-making.
Glencraig also had a school for children with developmental disabilities and a three-year training course for the coworkers. The way that Camphill works is that everybody is a volunteer with no pay, and we all shared our lives with the disabled. All our financial needs were taken care of, including vacations, and I felt good about this arrangement
It was at Glencraig that I experienced that the care of the land is a community activity and not something that was the sole responsibility of the farmer. Every Sunday morning we had a land group meeting which many of the community members attended. The farmers would give a report of the week’s activity and future projects. As the community tried to be self-sufficient in food, the house mothers were always interested in the vegetables and other produce such as the number of gallons of milk they would receive that week sometimes the farmers would have complaints. One time the cows got out because somebody left a gate open, and consequently the veggies got trampled. Long range needs were also discussed and how these fitted into the resources of the community. Questions always arose such as whether it was really necessary to get a new tractor and, if yes, how the community could pay for it.
What spoke to me most strongly at Glencraig was the spiritual foundation of the community. Every morning after breakfast, each household would gather and read a passage from the bible. Then, on Saturday evening, the houses would hold a bible evening that was based on the last supper. We would sit in silence for twenty minutes and then a candle would be lit and we would move to the dining table and share a simple meal of bread and salt and a glass of grape juice. While eating, the conversation would revolve around special experiences that people had during the week and steer away from day-to-day troubles. Then the table would be cleared and the bible read. The person reading would lead the conversation but everybody could join in. Reading the bible every morning and then joining in communion with the other members once a week was central to the community and gave it cohesion.
The festivals were also celebrated, with artistic activities such as drama productions based on the spiritual aspect of the festival. There were also opportunities to be part of a study group, when one of Rudolf Steiner’s books would be read and often on a Sunday evening there would be a lecture by one of the community leaders. I loved the spiritual aspect of the community, but after six months of this intense living I was burned out. I was still struggling with feeling comfortable with people. I must have been shy because people would make jokes like, “Walter said three words today!” As far as I was concerned I was lying low, seeing how everything worked after having been alone on farms for so long. For one thing, there were more young women than men and I was definitely being checked out. The previous three years had been very lonely and I was a little over-whelmed by all the people and community activities. In the evenings, the young co workers were expected to lead activities with the handicapped adults and I found myself supervising sessions at the heated swimming pool with one of the women coworkers. Joan had a cute bikini and shinning dark eyes and I fell for her. She lived two houses down the drive and I noticed that every Sunday at about two she posted her letters back home. I would give her a few minutes head start and then saunter out and accidently bump into her. She was much more astute then me. Years later she told me that she knew that we would get married the first time she saw me.
Part of my troubles at Glencraig stemmed from the fact that I was exhausted. Being young and in love, Joan and I would chat and make out till twelve or one in the morning and then go to sleep. It was summer time and Northern Ireland, being so far north starts to get light soon after three. I would wake up and wait for six to roll around, so I could go milk the cows. Paul the other farmer had a wife with a baby that cried all night so he didn’t bother coming to milking on a regular basis. Milking eight cows by hand by myself before breakfast with too little sleep didn’t start the day right. After six months, I needed a change and I applied to Emerson College an Anthroposophical school, in Sussex, England where I was accepted.
Being a student was wonderful as I had little responsibility. After Glencraig, where everything was so intense, it was necessary for me to stand back and take in everything I had experienced. I missed Joan terribly but she was upset with me for leaving Glencraig and doing my own thing. She decided to go back to the States and get her Masters degree in Waldorf Education.
At Emerson, I could be as engaged with the other students as much or as little as I wanted. The school is based on the work of Rudolf Steiner and offered a foundation year of Anthroposophical studies which could lead into a second year of specialization. No credits or grades were offered so it was totally a self-enrichment program. The mornings were more intellectual, with lectures and study groups and the rest of the day would involve activities like arts and crafts and wood work. If life got too intense, I had my favorite spot in the library where I could read or I would play hooky and go for three-hour walks in the Ashdown Forest.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Joan decided that she would take a teaching position in South East Pennsylvania at Kimberton Waldorf School. This was tough for me as I didn’t have any interest in moving to the States. However, Joan’s parents offered me a job painting their house so I spent the summer on Long Island, painting. By the end of the summer we decided we would get married and we moved down to Pennsylvania. The Waldorf School had a five- hundred-acre farm attached to it but it was still being farmed conventionally with the old farm manager. However, across the river, a new Camphill community with three hundred and fifty acres of land had just been started. This land was going to be farmed Biodynamically and I moved there to help in the farming operation. All this land had been the estate of Mr. Maryn, the founder of Sunoco Oil. Mr. Maryn was a follower of Rudolf Steiner and helped found Kimberton Waldorf School and after his death the rest of the estate was gifted to Camphill.
I was twenty four when we married. The wedding service was in the old ballroom of the mansion. As the priest walked into the room I experienced a moment of confusion and the veils’ to the spiritual world fell away. The room was crowded with our friends and community members, but all around and filling the space above and around us there were spiritual beings looking on, and celebrating our sacrament of marriage. I felt that our vows were witnessed by both our friends and spiritual beings. It was a reminder that our world is not so separate from the spiritual world and that what we do is important on many levels.
Joan and I spent our next four years in Camphill, Kimberton. She taught at the Kimberton Waldorf School and commuted back and forth. She really was an excellent teacher; she put her heart and soul into it and was loved by her students. Being part of two intense communities was not easy and we realized that eventually we would leave. A Waldorf school asks for a time commitment from the teacher as she moves with her class through the grades. When fourth grade finished we started looking for our own farm. Meanwhile I had a wonderful opportunity to take over the management of the farm and start the conversion to Biodynamic farm practices. I not only learned about running a farm but also about living in an intentional community. We milked about forty cows and farmed three hundred acres. By the end, there were four coworkers and three mentally handicapped people on the farm. There were too many people for me, but that was part of the work of Camphill and community living. In addition I really wanted to find out if I could farm on my own without the support of a community.
When the school year finished, we packed up and started looking for our farm. We were both twenty-eight and ready to find out what we could do on our own.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Flight of a Hawk….and Biodynamics

My life seems to go in cycles and every seventh year, things change for me. When I was seven, I choose to go to boarding school and then again at fourteen, I made a major change. I was very close to Liesbet and at this time she married a sheep farmer. Her husband to be, Rod had a beautiful hill farm with seven thousand sheep and four hundred beef cattle, all on sixteen hundred acres. The farm looked like a park and was located at the end of a seven-mile gravel road. The land was divided into many paddocks and the greenness stretched from one hill to the next. In the hollows there were lakes and ponds and patches of native bush. Here and there would be flocks of sheep and cattle and there was a quietness pervading the whole. During my vacations, I would stay on the farm and help with the work. All the stock work was done on horseback and at lambing time we would spend six to eight hours riding around helping any ewes that were having problems and saving lost lambs. It would be springtime and on a beautiful day with a blue sky, the hawks wheeling overhead, the lambs playing and the gentle calling of the mothers, I felt that life was good. There were other days when the rain would be driving across the saddle and by lunch my hands would be so stiff and cold that I could barely undo the girth straps and take off the bridle. This too brings back memories of animals saved and good work done.
In contrast to this, school was not so fulfilling. Looking back, I realize that high school could not give me what I needed. I wanted to be part of the world and to succeed. I worked hard to be successful in school academics and sports. I had friends but by sixteen I felt disappointed in humanity and was pinning for the solitude of the farm. While I didn’t realize it at the time, school had no room for my search for spirit and I learned to hide my true being. I liked farming where I could get away from people and I really enjoyed the work and being in nature. Nature can seem hard and indifferent but it accepted the way I was. I decided that my vocation would be farming.
I graduated from High School in 1966 when the hippie movement was in full swing and we thought we could change the world. Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring confirmed my suspicion that we were fighting nature, traveling down a destructive road. The photographs of our planet from outer space were particularly moving to me, letting me experience how beautiful but fragile our earth is.
After high school, I worked on farms for two years and then went to agricultural school for two six-month periods, with a six-month farm stint between them. During those first two years on farms, I was doing correspondence courses and after all this I got my agriculture diploma. This sequence gave me a good grounding in conventional farming while searching for a way that would acknowledge the spirituality of the earth and allow me to work with these forces.
I was lucky in that my parents were sympathetic to my interests and introduced me to Biodynamic farming. Here I found a belief that the physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world, and that we could work directly with these spiritual forces. At this time I was working on a beautiful farm that was on a plateau wedged between the ocean and mountains. I spent many hours sitting on a tractor doing field work. By modern standards, these were smaller tractors with no cabs, air-conditioning or radios. You are not so cut off from nature as you are now on the modern tractors. Ploughing was especially fun. There is a real skill in keeping the rows straight and even, and as the front wheel of the tractor moves slowly down the furrow, you can look behind and watch the earth roll over in long ridges. The gulls would follow all day long, looking for grubs and worms, and it was very peaceful. I would be by myself all day and had no access to the media such as newspapers or television. I had become interested in Anthroposophy and would study in the evenings. One night I was lying in bed, meditating when I experienced myself floating in the corner of the room looking down at my body. This really freaked me out as I didn’t know how to get back in. The shock drew me back into my body but as I had nobody to talk to about this experience, I decided to stop that particular meditation. Now of course I would love to repeat the experience but my mind is too full of distraction.
While working on this farm, I had an accident and cut my wrist with a chainsaw. I cut two tendons and the hospital had to put my arm in a cast. I could not work for two months and took this opportunity to visit some Biodynamic farms. I was especially taken by one of the farmers and how he stopped our talking to look up into the sky to follow the beautiful flight of a hawk. He was getting close to retirement and I sensed that he had a deep wisdom and gratitude towards nature. If this was what Biodynamic farming did for a person, then I would follow in his footsteps. Soon after, I left New Zealand to learn about Biodynamic farming in England.

CHAPTER THREE
A BIRTH AND ALMOST DEATH

When I was a young boy, my family moved a lot. My father was raised in Indonesia, a tropical haven, part of the Netherlands East Indian empire. My grandfather, being Dutch and therefore a traveler, ran the post office in Surabiu, one of the big cities, and they enjoyed the comforts of colonial life When he retired, in the 1930s my father was fourteen and so they all moved back home to Holland. I think my father always longed to return to his boyhood home but the Second World War interfered and then Indonesia demanded its independence.
It was during the war when Germany was occupying Holland that my parents met and despite the risks, married and started a family. My sister Liesbet was born in 1944, while Europe lay in ruins, and two years later my brother Johannes arrived. My father was eager to get away from the devastation of the war and back to his boyhood roots. He joined a company that was opening a lumber camp in the jungles of Borneo. This was in 1948, when Indonesia was recovering from the Japanese occupation and had just declared independence from Holland. To get to the village, you had to take a boat trip. I have no memories of this time, but think it took about five days once leaving Jakarta, Indonesia. Now the jungle where I was born is a city of half a million people, but at that time it was a native settlement with two or three other Dutch couples to start the lumbering. My father’s job was to put the infrastructure like the roads and electricity in place. Out of the swamps and jungle, my father laid out and started a new city. I have never revisited the city but once I saw it on the news, as they were having riots there.
After arriving, my mother became pregnant with me. I don’t think I was part of the plan as my mother was trying to find her place in a small jungle settlement next to her husband and two children. It was much too risky to have a baby in the jungle with inadequate medical facilities, so my mother had to take the boat back to Jakarta where she and I could be properly cared for. Unfortunately, she felt lonely in a strange city and nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for this. Being strong-willed, she promptly sailed back to be with her husband despite the risks. I was born with the help of the two Dutch ladies who were also living there. Apparently there was a local doctor but he was sent away as more nuisance then help. However he was able to save my life a few hours later because I caught a tropical disease. I developed a high fever and there was nothing to do about it because I was going to die. I was in luck though, as the doctor finally confided to my father that he had a new wonder drug called penicillin. He only knew the dose for adults and he hoped that he and my father could think up a good quantity to give a twelve-hour-old baby. So I survived being somewhat unwanted and born into a hot humid world with inadequate sanitation and a shot of penicillin. For a long time I have had a feeling that my birth was not a happy time for me and recently I visited Jay, a hypnotherapist who helped me to reexperience my birth. As I entered the birth canal, I again felt the pain and anger of not being wanted. It was my right to have a loving mother to help me on my journey from spirit into the physical world and I did not want to be born without that. It was my sister Liesbet who made me feel welcome in her love and enthusiasm for her new baby brother. Later my mother was able to accept me and to shower me with her love and warmth and I became part of the family constellation. My birth taught me to be independent and sensitive about not being wanted. It was hard then to be trustful of people. Looking back at my life, it has been interesting to see how I have often set myself up to confirm this belief that I am not wanted.