What are the current questions + inspirations that have our attention?

Read below for the Currents from our Pilot Year 2019-2020!

MARTHA SNOW

I made granola for the first time this week, using a recipe from the Prune cookbook. I have being doing a lot of food projects in the last few days, feeling grounded in using my hands to prepare things to nourish the whole house. The granola is nutty, and crisp, and not too sweet. I also pickled beets - they are tangy, soft, and sugary, an interesting opposition/complement to the granola. 

JORDAN WILLIAMS

Y'all, if we aren't already growing our own food it's time to start! Your body will thank you and so will your ancestors <3 Not sure where to begin? Check out these divine Black womxn dropping the knowledge and wisdom that will help us get ourselves and our people fed and free here :)

LILA RIMALOVSKI

As the future for myself (and our species) is increasingly unknown, I’m looking to the land for wisdom. The soft buds of springtime are inviting me (all of us) to be brave… to step out of the intimacy and coziness of colder times and into the outward blossoming and convening that is soon to come. This is tricky in quarantine. Yet, the warm months ahead will inevitability bring us out of our homes to dance and play and work and grow under the sun. How might the cleansing and immune-boosting properties of springtime forage— white spruce, wild garlic, dandelion— strengthen our bodies for the reunions to come?

ELEANOR ALFORD

Throughout my time off of campus, since cover-19 began…I’ve noticed how strangely time moves when theres no pressure to every tik tok. I have a lot of anxiety around time, so it’s been nice to, for once in my life, not feel that anxiety…about time. Keeping myself occupied with the adrenaline rush that walking up mountains magically spreads forth, reading “We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party” by Mumia Abu-Jamal, listening to some new tunes, drawing, dancing, and look up new recipes (the bestest recipes I can find!) to make.

ALESSIA CUTUGNO

I’m thinking a lot about storytelling, the sudden suspension of stories I’ve been told and collecting about what is human and what is possible, and community agency in co-creating new stories for ourselves. In visioning what is possible to live well together and care for each other in community I've been inspired by all of the principles of the Underground Center, including these:

• "The ends do not justify the means. Society is a process. It is people interacting, working together, learning, growing, repeating rituals and traditions, etc. There is no separation between working to create a society and acting in society. Therefore, the process of creating collective infrastructure must also follow the principles we want to end up with."

• "Take responsibility for your needs collectively. Independence is an illusion made possible by a system that displaces the burden of our needs on the shoulders of others that remain out of sight. The most effective way of removing this burden from others is by working together to take direct responsibility for meeting our needs."

DAWN BREEZE

I have been thinking about the word wake. Wake is a polyseme in our lexicon that is relevant in understanding this moment.  In researching the history I discovered how the origin of wake initiated as “to keep watch” as a vigil; to be watchful with prayer. This was an action that folks did in their homes when loved ones died--they watched over their spirit as it departed. Later, the word wake evolved to mean arouse, arise from sleep, to be lively, to spring from, to be strong, and at this point, the word budded into two words with different and connected meanings. Over time the history of their connection has been lessened and when one attends a wake one expects a social gathering around the dead and when one says they are awake they mean they are not sleeping. There is also a third meaning of the word wake and it is the path or course of anything that has passed or preceded, often used to describe the wave trailing behind a boat at sea. 

Reflecting on these meanings and attempting to answer the question, “What does it mean to be awake now” I think it is embracing the trifecta of wakefulness. We are roused to pay attention, to keep watch with prayer, to see the path of destruction behind us that we have been living as unconscious consumers, to mourn the death of loved ones taken by Covid-19, and to notice the essential qualities of the life we love and that we want to live.

PAUL RIX

I like the expression “real need creates real community.” And in this difficult and scary time we find ourselves, I am thinking a lot about the good that might come from this experience. I have been heartened by so many stories, so many gestures, so much love and support for each other. This time is clearly one of real need. I wonder how many of these great creative solutions people are using to facilitate need and community might survive beyond the immediate situation. What superfluous or wasteful might fall away to leave more space for meaning and purpose?

MAYA GREENE

We are putting up the last of our homestead’s maple syrup for the season. I’m feeling saturated by the sticky sweetness, and grateful for the bounty that our sugar maples offered us this year. I’m also excited to have found a hidden stash of antique farm stuff in our garage attic! I’m looking forward to exploring these relics, and considering a simpler time.

RACHEL SCHNEIDER

I took a walk the other day. I saw a branch with new buds against a clear blue sky. A little further on, over the bridge and the clear flowing brook with a multitude of stones beneath it, I walked along the wooded path strewn with last year’s oak leaves. I saw that Life allows the letting go of last year’s leaves to sink into the mystery of earth-soil while at the very same moment, opens the buds to the mystery of air-light/warmth. 

SANDRINE HARRIS

I'm actively exploring how the experience of connection gets reshaped through the social spaciousness that is currently required — along with the intensity in our world right now —and learning how all of this lands in my body. Working with the aspects of uncertainty combined with physical distance, while still sensing into interdependence, is a new landscape for many of us right now. How can we expand into deeper wholeheartedness, connection, and adaptability right now? 

LILA RIMALOVSKI

The Moon and I are deep in conversation these days. I’m learning to honor her powers, to offer my gratitude, and to align my body with her cycles. I’m asking myself: how may listening to the pushes and pulls of the Moon align my life with Earthly rhythms and cyclical time?

JORDAN WILLIAMS

Golden, amber, and scarlet hues of fall draw me into deeper relationship with the divinity radiating around and through me. 

How do we offer radical and divine intention (love) to our fellow beings? To this land? To our ancestors? To our community(ies)? To ourselves? To Oshun?

... it seems that the only way to know is to try.

LUKE VAN HORN

As the summer fades, I am thinking about what wild plants I can harvest at this time of year. I am using Wilderness Survival Handbook by Michael Pewtherer, Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Living with the Earth by Tom Brown Jr, and Edible Wild Plants: Eastern/Central North America by Lee Allen Peterson to introduce me to plants I can eat. How can the plants support my life as well as other animals’ and their own?

MARTHA SNOW

I am thinking about the poet Nano Sakaki’s invitation in ‘Break the Mirror’: “If you want to know a place, get to know the weeds.” How can you live with and hold the contradictions of everything about a place: the most vibrant and the most grotesque? The most ostentatious and the most plain?

ELEANOR ALFORD

Welcoming the energies in my path, and learning to let my needs have a voice. I wonder what the word “love” means. How can I best serve it outwards to the things that influence me, whether it be living or nonliving. Finding deeper understanding in the earth’s clasped palms that we are held in. The trees growing a net, the soil giving it a stage, and the water rippling through with bright health. We are surrounded by so many different versions of strength, yet we spend all our lives trying to find our own strength. Or trying to figure out how to use it in ways that follow our story and morals. I am digging out the trenches that direct where my strengths will flow.

DAWN BREEZE

Currently I am reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I am captivated by the idea that our human ability to create and believe a shared fiction is what has made it possible to collaborate in large numbers across geographies. This idea posits that it is the fictional stories that are more powerful than realities of our place. I think it is time for a new story to move us forward to survive the future

MAYA GREENE

As our sow gets ready to farrow, the inspiration of new life (piglets!) is at the forefront. Additionally, the documentary film “The Biggest Little Farm” recently wowed me and my family, reminding us of the intricacies of the web we are weaving on our homestead—and beyond. 

STEFFEN SCHNEIDER

I’ve been inspired by sunflowers. We have a whole field at the farm where they bloom at the moment. I am taken and humbled by their intricate sunny and spiraling beauty, their honesty, clarity and open generosity. They encourage me to want to strive to become more like them and remind me of the amazing summer that is passing into autumn now.

MARTIN PING

I’m inspired by this line: “We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous.” ~David Whyte

MATT STINCHCOMB

My current question: How to best align my life and work around ecological repair in the Hudson Valley?

DAWN BREEZE

Last week, I reread Audre Lourde’s essay Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power! (listen here)I just picked up a copy of The Invisible Heart by Nancy Folbre about economics of care and can’t put it down. I am also reading a new book by local author and nature writer Akiko Busch called How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a TIme of Transparency, which explores the dangers of visibility as currency. Personally, I am exploring questions around leadership and related, I am researching Wampanoag Sachems. I also enjoyed when Brit Marling from the OA describes dying to change her life path.

CONNOR STEDMAN

What’s inspiring and informing me currently:

-Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black and Soul Fire Farm’s Reparations Map

-The Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, and worldwide school strike mobilizations for climate solution legislation and justice.

-Carol Sanford’s The Regenerative Business and No More Feedback, radical re-envisioning of business and work design

SANDRINE HARRIS

In working with the body, as I do in private practice, group sessions, and with my own body, i am endlessly fascinated by both our interpersonal neurobiology and our highly individual nervous systems. We are always connected and in relationship to other living beings, and we also have a unique microbiome and functioning system that is wholly our own and shaped by many different layers of experience, early development, culture, and more. And now…drumroll…enters Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory. This emerging research and work with the vagus nerve, the “wandering nerve,” is changing how we work with healing trauma, and understanding another layer of the social engagement system in the body.

MAYA GREENE

I’m currently feeling very inspired by the practice of Mindful Self Compassion—and particularly the research of Kristen Neff. I’m using the Mindful Self Compassion workbook to explore the practice in my daily life, and I’m attending a 5 day intensive workshop at the Omega Institute to learn how to integrate the practice and principles into my work.

RACHEL SCHNEIDER

The book, The Fifth Sacred Thing inspires me.

STEFFEN SCHNEIDER

What’s inspiring me currently? Well. I was very inspired by my visit to the Hilma af Klint exhibit at the Guggenheim recently. Seeing her paintings “from across the threshold” were very moving to me. One reason why I think that was, is that I am always striving to experience the “beingness” of the world. What is REALLY living in the phenomena that I see?

SOPHIA HAMPTON

I am interested in the relationship between healthy soil and healthy people!

[Editor’s Note: The More Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts I Sell, the Worse I Feel]

GOPAL HARRINGTON

I am thinking about local currency and alternative economies.