Sense of Place: Review of Ravenkeeper's Playwrights' Retreat

Greta Fields’ neighbors over the ridge are strip mining. Greta is planting wildflowers. The contrast is palpable as Greta tells me of pressure from the mining company to sell her land. Greta has other plans.

“I thought of calling this place Mine Pony Farm, to honor all the ponies who lived here and died in the mines,” she muses between pointing out and naming bunches of flowering plants in the understory. We walk in and out of woods on her land, a mountain, actually, in Appalachia. She was raised in these mountains and is clearly as rooted and natural here as the flowers and fruit trees she’s sown.

Her family has a rich love of the theater and Greta has authored several plays. Her ties to the regional and national arts communities lead to the brainstorm of turning her farm into a playwrights retreat, complete with homes for writers and actors and a stage, where playwrights can hear their works in progress performed.

She’s well on her way. Many fledgling groups struggle to find and purchase land. Greta has plenty of land, owned outright, and she’s researching putting it in land trust. Often getting the first houses on the land is an ordeal. Her farm has 4 homes and a trailer now. The single story homes range from one to three bedrooms, with complete kitchens and baths. All have been rewired. At the moment, all need some repairs. She used to maintain them herself, but she’s been away from the property attending graduate school and now she’d like to hire or trade with a handyperson or caretaker who will occupy the farm during the work.

Greta has a biocentric  (life centered) philosophy and she protects and nurtures a population of rare, large ravens on her land, hence her online moniker, Ravenkeeper.

I’m excited at the possibility of preserving Greta’s farm in land trust, protecting it from unsustainable practices and holding it instead as a platform for exploring and preserving the rich cultural and arts traditions of Appalachia. “ I used to think the idea of ‘Appalachian place’ was meaningless,” explains Greta, “Now I realize it is everything. If you lose your sense of place, you lose your soul.”

Few words could be more powerful for me, as I visit Greta directly from visiting my family farm in Bloomfield, Kentucky. Our farm as been in our family since the land grant days. It has always been a touchstone for me, a living soul I sometimes call my “second grandmother.” I wrote my screenplay, Bacca Blooms, as an exploration of my bond with our farm and the generations of my bloodline there. 

As I approach 14 years of life in the woods of Heathcote Community, I ponder how mobile our society really is. During this trip I heard an NPR report that more than half of the human race is now living in urban settings. So few of us put down roots and sit still with any piece of land for very long. What are we denying ourselves? This loss must diminish us. No wonder so many humans can’t view their purchasing and lifestyle choices through the filter of their impacts on the environment. Their choices so rarely come directly back to them. And the land doesn’t get the time to “speak” to them, as when we slow down, getting still and wordless.

Greta has many of the elements in place to make a difference on this piece of land, and to offer it as a sanctuary to artists who might then spread their “sense of place” to the world. Who can help her with the next step, which is getting her houses ready for artists? The caretaker should have carpentry, plumbing and electrical skills and be able to work independently with direction. And s/he should be prepared for rustic living, these are the mountains. There are snakes, bobcats and bears. Nature is not a Disney movie!

For pictures of my trip, visit my blog and pictures on my profile. If you’re interested in being a caretaker or getting involved with Greta’s farm in another way, contact her via her gaia.com profile:

http://ravenkeeper.gaia.com/

Re: Sense of Place: Review of Ravenkeeper's Playwrights' Retreat

I wanted  to thank Wren for the beautiful picture of the farm – she captured the sun's rays spreading out, and that is pretty amazing that she chose that photo to post because I always thought the sun shines especially bright on this farm.  It is the sunniest place I have ever been.
    I was very luck to get to meet Wren.  I believe she is actually a great poet, but her great poetry is couched within her film script, so it is almost buried there unless you get to read the script.  The script was also very entertaining to read, and it is good – but her poetry is “great”..  It is spiritual, and it so hard to express spirituality in poetry given our secular tradition in America, I think.. She has accomplished it, I have not.  I am trying to create a play style that is spiritual in expression.   However, I grew up in the era of realism, which really means half realism, since realism omits the natural or supernatural…as if it did not exist.  [Yet what is important than the soul?]
    I tried to give up the natural world to live in the city and write plays, but I could not.  I have ultimately been forced to confront my own contradictory feelings about nature, and return to it.  So after living four years ion the city again, I returned  to my farm, to try to start a playwrights retreat, a place where we too could live a sustainable lifestyle.
   It is not possible to make a sharp break between the American lifestyle and the sustainable lifestyle, however.  Even the most successful ICs still get half their food and supplies from off the grounds.  I think Scott and Margaret Nearing actually did get all their food from their own farm or from barter with local people, however, so it is possible to survive without OPEC.
   It is not possible to survive without protection though.  I am afraid to live in the woods alone because in the past, dope growers tried to break into my houses at night.  Apparently they thought I must have dope up there – why else would anybody live in the woods if they didn't want to grow dope!!!??? 
    I am interested in a dope free, drug free community where children and women are still safe when in the woods.  And animals.   Dope growers shoot birds thinking that birds eat their prewcious pot seeds.
   Excuse the rant, but I hate them.
   After Wren left, I was very busy.  I hired a neirhbor and he brought a tiny excavator to the farm to ditch the road.  I think it will bs sustainable a ditch as ever existed, and will not have to be dug again in 50 years or so.  We did turnoffs years ago, so that water drains naturally sideways into the creek, instead of down the road, and those turnoffs work.  The only reason the ditch had dirt in it was because we graded it to get a big slab of rock out that cars couldn't go over in the winter, and the grader shoved all the dirt sideways into the ditch, and I just never got it out.
    Also, we dredged silt out of a reservoir.  Then I read Cadillac Desert, a book about non-sustainable dams in America silting up.  Rivers are designed to carry salt to sea and to deposit dirt along the banks, not to hold water back.  It's like we say, we do not trust God to give us more water, so we better dam up the river\ to water our over-opulated cities.
    I felt guilty except that – I have already done what the book suggests.  I cut a slot in the dam so that the water runs.  It is not stopped up.  There is a pothole off to the side of this stream that holds water for us to drink.  The creek continues to run. 
   Actually, I did not do that.  My father cut the slot in the dam before he died.  he was an expert on water and he knew what he was doing.  I thought the dam would wash away.  Instead, a neat little creek continues to flow through the slot, and there's the hole off to the side to catch a little water for me.
    I also plantd to apple trees after Wren left, so I have been busy.  I planted one Arkansas Black apple, whatever that is, 2 days ago, and yesterday, I found a big tuft of white buck fur on it.  The buck has been watching me from the treeline as I plant trees, for over 20 years. He is a very big old buck who has outsmarted the hunters all these years!   While they shoot up on the ridges, he grazes around my yard, where he knows he is safe.  When Ieft home, I planted a cherry tree on the edge of the woods, and I found a depression where he sleeps under it now.  The first day I was home he came out and stood under the tree, which was blooming and 30 feet tall by then.  I  guess he thought I planted it for him!
   I am going to hang a set of double doors on the back of one house today.  I can actually do maintenance work myself…Wren got thing wrong, I don't need a maintenance man.  I do need people to work with for moral support, however.  Most carpenters and plumbers do not work alone because it is demoralizing…you feel like a slave who doesn't exist.  Lots of them hire people just tohave company – I do myself.  I can certainly run a mower, I can even run bush hogs and saws.  however, I hire men to come weedeat just to have people around. 
    I roofed several buildings by myself, and that is not too bad - you get to be up in the sky and the hawks come and sit by the house and watch you, when you are up in the woods.  However, I have a two-story house in town that is 3 stories on back, and I need a 40-foot latters and harnesses to do that one.  I decided to hire a man, and what do you think he'll charge?  He gave me a $5,000 estimate on one project and I just did most of it myself for $1000.  The last part will cost about $2000.  But of course – he has to pay for his $30,000 white trucks, white trucks signifying, I am getting rich off you.  Everything seems to be about money these days, not about service or helping others, or even honest work.  It's all about getting a $30,000 work truck.  That's the kind of economy and thinking that I hope to get away from, if I can make the escape back to the farm!!!!
   If  anybody is a fanatic about gardening or theatre, they can contact me and we can work out some trial visits or whatever.  However, be merciful if Ioffer to pay you to help.  I am not rich!!!
the Ravenkeeper