We recently led a seminar on Madroño Ranch as part of the annual Summer Literary Festival at Gemini Ink, a writing center in San Antonio. The theme of this year’s festival was “What Would Nature Do?” and in our seminar we read and discussed works by Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Michael Pollan, Ellen Davis, Lewis Hyde, and Mary Oliver. We also asked the participants to write a brief “geobiography” (as “A Native Hill” is described in the collection The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry), a statement of how they consider themselves rooted in a particular place. Here’s a slightly modified version of what I wrote:

I am a native of the Bay Area, a place that everyone thinks is among the most beautiful in the world. I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County, just to the north of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge; I lived amid the winding hillside lanes and towering redwood and eucalyptus trees of Mill Valley, beneath Mount Tamalpais, until I was eighteen, when I went off to college in Massachusetts. There I met the woman I would marry, a native Texan, as I recounted in an earlier post; she had a job lined up in San Antonio after graduation, I followed her there, and I never lived in California again.

Why did I so thoughtlessly, even eagerly, put California behind me when I left home? In part, I realize in retrospect, I was hoping to escape some not particularly unusual or interesting adolescent angst and family tensions, and to redefine myself as a brighter, happier person in a new setting, among strangers. (I say nothing of the futility of such an effort; I was young and foolish.) Massachusetts, and then Texas, seemed like blessed opportunities, and I clutched at them desperately.

Only… almost despite myself, I continued to count as my closest friends two men I had known almost since birth. Brad and I met in kindergarten; Hans came a few years later. The three of us went all the way through elementary and high school together, and all three of us headed east to college, Brad to Harvard and Hans to Yale. (Both, I hear, pretty good schools.)

After college, I ended up in Texas, while Brad and Hans returned to California, to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. Last year we all turned fifty, and Brad decided we should celebrate the milestone together. So, after much back-and-forthing (all three of us are married with children, with all the scheduling complications that implies), we arranged to meet in San Francisco in March and spend a day in Marin hiking along the California Coastal Trail, six miles from Tennessee Valley to Muir Beach and back again. It was a beautiful day, we had a wonderful time, and we agreed to make this little reunion an annual event. This year, again, we gathered in March and spent the day hiking in Marin, this time at Pierce Point Ranch on the northern end of Point Reyes National Seashore. Next year we may meet in L.A., in deference to Brad; the year after that, perhaps we’ll meet in Texas.

One of the wonderful gifts this time with Brad and Hans has given me is the opportunity to reconsider my relationship to California. My father was something of an outdoorsman, and when I was a child we went camping and hiking in Marin County, in the Sierras, and even up the coast to Oregon and Washington. For various reasons, I never really enjoyed these trips as much as I should have—or so I thought. But hiking to Muir Beach and at Point Reyes with Brad and Hans forced me to confront an unexpected and long-suppressed truth: I loved this land, and felt comfortable in it in a way I still don’t in Texas, even though Texas is now home. I gloried in half-remembered vistas, in the way the glittering ocean and the crepuscular redwood forests and the rolling dairy farms butted up against each other; in the cypress and eucalyptus and madrone and laurel and manzanita, and in the blooming flowers whose names I’d never learned; in the cool, salty air; in the fog banks drifting in over the Pacific.

I felt as if a long-shut door in my head had been wrenched open again, and I could look out, for the first time in years, onto the bright green hills of a place I’d forgotten, or almost forgotten—a place I knew at once, with an almost literally breathtaking shock of recognition. I now realize that, having grown up amid such gentle but dramatic beauty (the suggestive, if erroneous, local legend has it that Tamalpais means “Sleeping Lady”), I came to believe that the world is an essentially beneficent place, and that the land is an unfailing source of pleasure and comfort. (I might have reached a different set of conclusions had I grown up in, say, Orla, Texas, or Barrow, Alaska.)

Mostly, however, I realize how much I took for granted, and how unbelievably lucky I was (and am). Over the years I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy in attempting to deny or at least rewrite my past, but now I feel as though I’ve been given a second chance to connect, to learn this land—not as the place I live, perhaps, but as the place I’m from, the place that formed me.

What we’re reading
Heather: Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Martin: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch

Martin’s last post about our entertainingly (or so we hope) ill-prepared entry into the marketplace has got me thinking. (Martin says the most terrifying words in the world are “Honey, I’ve been thinking…” when they come out of my mouth. Reader, beware!)

In preparing for the seminar we’re going to lead at the Gemini Ink Summer Lit Fest in San Antonio next month, I’ve been rereading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. The description of our seminar asks all the Big Questions about our hopes and plans for Madroño Ranch. I’m not sure what prompted me to look at The Gift again, but whatever it was, it was, well, a gift; Hyde beautifully untangles many of the ideas knotted in my head about those hopes and plans.

He begins by identifying the two distinct economies in which a work of art exists: the market economy and the gift economy. While a work of art can exist without a market, it cannot exist without a gift. Harlequin Romances, for example, follow guidelines set by market research and sell very well. But are they works of art? Probably not. While writing one requires a certain level of competence, a Harlequin Romance probably doesn’t have a foot, or heaving bosom, in the gift economy.

Hyde develops a theory of the gift, which of course has multiple levels of significance. Its economy is marked by three related obligations: to give, to accept, and to reciprocate. Gift exchange is what one early theorist called a “‘total social phenomenon’—one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological.” Gift exchange is an issue in medical ethics as well, especially with reference to organ transplants: what is the status of body parts? Is it appropriate to commodify what has traditionally been regarded as a gift? What are the consequences when something moves from the gift economy to the market economy—when worth and value are confused?

Hyde cites the case of the Ford Pinto, a car that had a tendency to spill gas in low-speed collisions, a defect that killed at least 500 people. An easy fix for this defect existed, but after a cost-benefit analysis which valued a human life at $200,000, Ford decided that the costs of fixing the Pinto exceeded the benefits. While the decision may have made sense from a market perspective, it ignored the fact that most of us participate in another economy as well, one in which the gift of life cannot be assigned a dollar value.

One of the marks of a gift is that it is always in motion, transferred from one individual or community to another. It must be consumed (i.e., eaten, immolated, thrown into the sea) or given away; otherwise, it ceases to become a gift and becomes mere property. A true gift is the antithesis of personal property. Hyde says that “a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of return…. A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis; you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.” Gift economies generally operate in relatively small communities like families, brotherhoods, or tribes; market economies tend to emerge at the limits of gift economies as a means of negotiating with outsiders. While my truncated description makes gift economies sound primitive, they aren’t; Hyde cites the (ideally) unrestricted flow of ideas within the scientific community as an example. When ideas become remunerative for an individual or a portion of the community instead of free to the entire community, the gift economy dries up and the spirit of the group evaporates. The gift of ideas ceases to move.

Gift economies foment community; market economies fragment it—another iteration of the endless wrestling match between the Many and the One. One of the great benefits of a market economy—freedom from bondage—has significant limits. Where “the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to… enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community from the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition.”

So here’s what I’ve been thinking, honey: industrialized nations have converted the gift properties of nature into commodities. Any aboriginal people could have told us that disaster would ensue as a result of buying and selling what was pure gift, something not earned but given to us in abundance that the gift economy demands we pass on to our children in its original abundance.

I’ve also been rereading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, in which he quotes the journals of the early American artist, writer, and wanderer George Catlin. Riding north to the Missouri River, Catlin found a campsite “in one of the most lovely little valleys I ever saw, and even far more beautiful than could be imagined by mortal man… an enchanting little lawn of five or six acres, on the banks of a cool and rippling stream, that was alive with fish; and every now and then, a fine brood of ducks, just old enough for delicious food and too unsophisticated to avoid an easy and simple death. This little lawn was surrounded by bunches and copses of the most picturesque foliage, consisting of leafy bois d’arcs and elms, spreading their huge branches as if in offering protection to the rounded groups of cherry and plum branches that supported festoons of grapevines with the purple clusters that hung in the most tempting manner over the green carpet that was everywhere decked out with wild flowers of all tints and various sizes, from the modest sunflowers, with their thousand tall and droopy heads, to the lilies that stood, and the violets that crept beneath them…. The wild deer were repeatedly rising from their quiet lairs, and bounding out and over the graceful swells of the prairies which hemmed it in.” McKibben comments, “If this passage had a little number at the start of each sentence, it could be Genesis….”

So with Hyde and McKibben in the front of my mind, I was stunned to read of Judge Feldman’s recent injunction against President Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling, which just proves that I live in a lovely little bubble along with fairies and elves and a herd of unicorns. I do not argue against the fact of the market economy any more than I argue against the changing seasons. Nor do I argue against the gravity of depriving tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents of economic stability. But those who value the treasures of the Gulf through a market-driven cost-benefit analysis need to remember that they’re operating in a gift economy as well, and that there will be an audit.

Back to Gemini Ink and Madroño’s mission. We hope that Madroño will operate in a way that recognizes the beauty and necessity of both markets; after all, I’m out there hawking the virtues of bison meat. But I hope that in producing that meat we recognize the gift of abundance it brings us, that we honor that gift, and that we pass it on to our children and to the community in and around the ranch.

What we’re reading
Heather: Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability

To our surprise, Martin and I are going to be part of the Summer Literary Festival put on by Gemini Ink, a San Antonio writers’ center dedicated to building community through literature and related arts. Rosemary Catacalos, the executive director, is one of those forces of nature that mere mortals might consider defying, but only in daydreams or other altered states. So when she invited us to lead a seminar on Madroño Ranch as part of the summer festival, all we could say was, “Thank you, of course we will.” When we looked at each other later, all we could say was, “Gah! Are you nuts?”

I asked Leslie Plant, the director of Gemini Ink’s University Without Walls educational program, what in heaven’s name we should talk about. Since the festival theme is biomimicry, which the Biomimicry Institute defines as “the science and art of emulating Nature’s best biological ideas to solve human problems”—for example, looking at a gecko’s foot for ideas in designing nontoxic adhesives—she suggested the relationship between art and nature. Perfect. We wouldn’t have to talk about ranching, farming, business, and all the other things we know nothing about (yet). As I began to consider the topic, however, it seemed to me that virtually every field of human endeavor involves some aspect of the relationship between art and nature. So many big ideas, so many rabbit holes to fall down!

The first big idea that said “Drink me” was not particularly mind-altering: that the most important link between art and nature is that nature is the source of art. This is an idea with a long pedigree, going back at least as far as Aristotle, but because I’ve been reading Krista Tippett’s Einstein’s God, with its reflections on the nature of time, I started to wonder about origins. Are origins always rooted in the past, and do they always grow into the future as an arrow flies from a bow, in a thrust of forward motion? Or is there another way to think about them?

Tacked to the bulletin board above my desk is a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s White Queen: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Tippett’s interview of Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University, forced me to think about that quotation in a new way.

To Davies, clocks are emblematic of a kind of “intellectual straitjacket” into which we were forced relatively recently. Einstein was “obviously thinking very much about measuring time, and this is what led him to the notion that your time and my time might appear different. We might measure different time intervals between the same two events if we’re moving differently. And also your gravitational circumstances. Gravity slows time. Time runs a little faster on the roof than in the basement. We don’t notice it in daily life. When you go upstairs and come down again, you don’t notice a mismatch but you can measure it with accurate clocks.”

A little later in the interview, Davies says, “Einstein was the person to establish this notion of what is sometimes called block time—that the past, present, and future are just personal decompositions of time, and that the universe of past, present, and future in some sense has an eternal existence. And so even though individuals may come and go, their lives, which are still in the past for their descendants, nevertheless still have some existence within this block time. Nothing takes that away. You may have your three-score years and ten measured by a date after your death. You are no more. And yet within this grander sweep of the timescape, nothing is changed. Your life is still there in its entirety.” So maybe there are memories that work forwards as well as backwards, remembering what is yet to come. Maybe there’s a state in which our origins are in our futures, or in which art is, in fact, the origin of nature.

This, by the way, might be an appropriate time to begin feeling sorry for the folks who sign up for our summer seminar.

But wait! Wait! If I throw in some more huge ideas, maybe it will clear everything up! In his 1995 address upon accepting the Templeton Prize, Davies discussed the origins of the universe and the elegant mathematical and physical laws governing its development from aboriginal simplicity to extraordinary complexity. These “laws do not tie down physical systems so rigidly that they can accomplish little, nor are they a recipe for cosmic anarchy. Instead, they encourage matter and energy to develop along pathways of evolution that lead to novel variety, what Freeman Dyson has called the principle of maximum diversity: that in some sense we live in the most interesting possible universe.”

He adds, “Scientists have recently identified a regime dubbed ‘the edge of chaos,’ a description that certainly characterizes living organisms, where innovation and novelty combine with coherence and cooperation. The edge of chaos seems to imply the sort of lawful freedom I have just described.”

Here’s what I think Davies means (and since I don’t speak science, I may have it wrong): the laws structuring the universe, both in and beyond time, seem to have aesthetic consequences every bit as profound as their practical ones. In fact, aesthetics and function don’t seem to be divisible. Cruising the internet, I found all kinds of great quotations, like this one from G. H. Hardy (1877–1947): “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.”

So here’s my ambition for Madroño Ranch as a writers’ residential center, a working ranch, a source of community nourishment, and a business: that it exist at the edge of chaos and in the midst of maximum diversity, and that it be as intensely productive as it is extravagantly beautiful. We’re beginning to plan a series of vegetable, herb, and forage gardens that we hope will symbolize this intersection. We hope that the writers—and everyone else—who come to Madroño Ranch won’t be confused about the relationship between nature and art. Or, at least, not more than two of Carroll’s other characters, the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, were in their conversation with Alice in Wonderland:

“‘What is the use of repeating all that stuff,’ the Mock Turtle interrupted, ‘if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!’

“‘Yes, I think you’d better leave off,’ said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too glad to do so.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
Martin: Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn