Hope and Food Production

I have a problem of perspective. The house on the hill is too small for Thumbelina, but the titmouse under its eaves calls it the Taj Mahal. I took a year away from the Internet. To the titmouse, it was a monumental, life-changing experience. To the wayfarer on the road, nothing much has changed. I don't know which tale to tell.

First, I’ve been asked a few times if I’m working. I’m not. Secondly, I’ve been asked how the kids are doing. They’re fine. They’re better than fine. They’re amazing. I haven’t taken pictures in months. Here I will be a good playwright, and put the plot exposition into the opening scene: pictures stored on computers, computers stolen, pictures lost, ensuing sadness/freedom, awareness that I can admire that gorgeous life spark emanating from my kids at any time, even without the aid of technology…total lack of inspiration to take more pictures. But because I was thinking of you, dear Internet, I dusted off the camera. Results attached: uneven but heartfelt.

And how is Nick? Ask him yourself! You can friend him on Facebook. After close to two years of stalwart resistance, he finally became a Facebook convert about eight months into my experiment, when the upstairs neighbor got unsecured wireless and I took a trip to Nicaragua. I didn’t mind, really. I gave him my password and asked him to count my friend requests.

And me? What have I been doing with myself? Not much. In fact, I have been doing as little as possible. I did too much in my twenties. I’m thinking I might take this decade off.

In truth I have made a practice of stillness. It feels good. And, even if it didn’t feel good, I'm due for it. I have a lion's share of listening and learning left to do. So far my studies are inexhaustible and inexhaustibly rewarding. I tell my pen pals that I am going to Do It Yourself grad school. I’m a candidate for a DIY degree.

Don’t ask me, though, what field I’m in. Some days I'd like to reclaim the M.R.S. degree, transforming that mean joke into an open door to all the sons and daughters of our mothers. To so many of our mothers the kitchen was a fox trap, because their dreams were hung outside the home. But a generation later, as we seek ways to reclaim humanity and human connection, and resist the ubiquity of commercial enterprise, an advanced degree in home and family sounds like a lifeline.

Of course I can't take the gender out of the MRS. Gender is a real thing, and it does exist, and it is used as a tool in hands we know and hands we don't know. If I could tidy up that knot in a single line of exposition, you must believe that I would. But I can't. Instead I set it aside, still breathing, still tangled, and trace one single thread: how I as a feminist chose to reclaim my own kitchen.

In the very first days of my experiment, I was hyperaware of one activity: eating. As I broke the addiction – and yes, I do think it was an addiction – I found myself turning constantly to food – for entertainment, consolation, and as the centerpiece of social behavior. I had nothing else to do. I began to cook. Having ordered out or eaten from the grocery store deli for most of my adult life, I was just learning how. First I learned to make dinner from scratch. Then I learned to make a vegan dinner from scratch. Then I learned how to make a vegan dinner from local ingredients. In August, sitting down at a coyantura in Nicaragua, hearing an historian ask the assembled travelers on which topics we most wished for her to speak, I was surprised to hear myself saying, “agriculture and economics.” Not art, not feminism, not that sexy poet assassin who killed the first of the Somoza dictators. (And doesn’t that sound like a great story?) No, I wanted to hear about food: who grows it, who eats it, and who gets paid.

Now some of you will remember my mother. She wrote a book about this sort of thing. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. I am paying attention now.

To some degree, following in my mother’s footsteps in this way is only an aspect of the largest accomplishment of my year without Internet. This is a slight but measurable increase in personal integrity. I left the Internet in search of authenticity. And I most certainly found it. What I found is that genuine lifestyle change is grueling and incremental. I did make changes. But other things have not changed. I did read some of the books that I have always thought I ought to read. But others I found boring and put back on the shelf. I have awakened and healed some of my broken or abandoned relationships. But others are still lost.

But the year has given me a tremendous burst in hope. Back on the Internet for one week, I see that the anger has not subsided. There is the fear. The desire to convert. The voices that are speaking but not being heard. It wears on me. I realize that beginning to take a square look at global food production – which is not a pretty picture – depends on my ability to retreat from the more fruitless aspects of ideological conflict. I have to be able to rest. I have to be able to find silence. Otherwise I will not be able to hear. I cannot constantly be on the attack. Nor can I lie back against the rope and allow myself to be pummeled. At least occasionally, I have to step out of the ring.

And in the resting, with silence, that heals and also transforms, there is this unexpected burst of hope. Change is possible. Positive change is possible. Start now. Start anywhere.

From Hafiz, "The Friend comes into my body looking for the center, unable to find it, draws a blade, strikes anywhere."

Return of the Jedi

Well, that was disappointing.

I had planned to reenter cyberspace somewhat gracefully. This didn’t seem like too much to ask. After all, we're talking about the new, improved Esther: Year Without Internet Esther. I was going to come right to my blog and impress you all with my hard-earned wisdom and composure. I was going to be calm, and serene – I was going to float back onto Facebook.

And float I did. I floated right out of my head: -- reaching for this and grabbing for that, having two conversations at once while also deleting masses of junk email and ticking off the mental list of pages I had to check just in case something had happened that I would just DIE if I didn’t know.

Nick came into the room and said, “I wouldn’t want to be that keyboard.”

I closed my mouth.

What the hell happened? Was it all a dream? That chrysalis to butterfly transformation that I described to my penpals: did I imagine it? The calmness that allowed me just that morning to spend thirty minutes with a guitar in my lap, practicing the transition from a G to a D, over and over again; the open space in my brain that fairly yearned for crazy hard reading, from global economics to the history of US immigration policy: is it gone? Is it over? Am I an Internet junkie all over again?

For a couple of hours it sure looked like it. At one point I literally pushed now-3-year-old Milo off of my lap, saying things like “Just…just…just a second. Go play with your trucks. I’m almost done.” I was almost done for three hours.

Only minutes before I made my not-so-triumphant return to the Internet, I had been on the phone with Liz Darlington, whose daughter, Eleanor, is the same age as Stella. We were talking about our lives, the cities that we live in – now at opposite ends of the country - and about the Internet. Is the Internet a road by which we travel to certain destinations? Or is the Internet a city – the destination itself?

If the Internet is a city, yesterday, for me, it was Las Vegas. It was a Las Vegas of skin and lights, Las Vegas as it is understood by Bill McKibben in his book, Deep Economy: “an attempt to figure out what More might mean when you’ve already had too much.”

Eventually, though, it all stopped spinning. I sped up, or the Internet slowed down. Both, actually, because I made it through those backlogged emails, and the number of people I haven’t talked to in an entire year is a finite number. I don’t have that many friends.

And once I got stopped on the street corner, at the intersection of Friendship and Purchasing, and was able to watch a couple dozen cars go by, I understood that this experience only supports my thesis. It DOES matter whether or not I go on the Internet. It does matter what I think, and how I think it, and at what pace. I am so adaptable. I am so wonderfully capable of change. I can do as the Romans, and keep up with Joneses and squish myself into whatever outfit I imagine ought to fit.

This is an odd thing coming out of the mouth of a person who still likes to take the very biggest piece of carrot cake, but I’m not terribly interested in resurrecting the Internet Binge. I might even move this blog to a page with a more appropriate title -- someday, when I get around to being on the Internet that long. I do want to tell you about my experience of the previous year. And I want to do that at a measured pace. I got free, and I liked it, and I think we would all be disappointed if I couldn’t now display some of this restraint that I keep claiming that I've found.

Promising that there is more to come, at some point, let me close this with the most important announcement I can make. I did it. I accomplished what I set out to do. I went 365 days without accessing the Internet on any device: not my computer, not a phone, not somebody else’s computer. I didn’t do email. I didn’t do Facebook. I didn’t Tweet or blog or use Google. There is fuzziness at the edges of the experiment, as it felt like there had to be, to keep the center intact. Sometimes I used an ATM card. A lot of the time I didn’t. Sometimes I mailed letters to Amy to post on the blog. A lot of the time I didn’t. I taped a piece of paper over my caller ID and refused to use electronic kiosks. But I made exceptions to the kiosk rule – notably the airport parking garage – and the piece of paper eventually fell off.

It seems like now is as good as any time to admit, too, that I failed on the first attempt. In a bizarre series of events that felt totally out of my control (but obviously were not), on the very first morning of my experiment, I found myself on a library computer, using Google. I was shocked, but mostly shocked into greater resolve. At 12 noon, I started again, and the second time it took.

Am I glad I did it? I can't tell you how glad. There were some rough spots. There were some times when the whole thing just felt absurd and stupid. But there were also times when I thought, I might have gone my whole life without knowing this, without knowing how it feels to be this free.