#51 Cleanliness

What the heck with this deck. I just finished the last essay… ummm.. The way I finished it. And now it’s cleanliness. Neat and tidy. The deck wills it, let’s do this.

Cleanliness is another card that doesn’t make it to people’s top five often. I think it’s because in a deck with Mature Love, and Family Security, cleanliness feels a little out of place. Neat and Tidy. Is that a core and central human value?

Now, fifty-one cards deep, seems like as good a time as any to mention Shalom Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz is a social psychologist and along with what I’m sure is a massive team of researchers and assistants and friends he’s the man behind the Theory of Basic Human Values, from which my Values Deck is derived. This research is no slouch-effort. Dr. Schwartz has been working on the job continuously since the late 1960’s. Now retired, the man just won’t quit.

Research has taken place across many countries and cultures over the course of decades, It’s really a pretty impressive body of work.

So what the heck is cleanliness doing in there?

Well, these values are universal. They’re cross-cultural in their very nature and they reflect people’s responses and research over those cultural lines. Cleanliness is in the deck. So be it.

When I think of cleanliness I think of a few things. First, Harold.

You will recall the brown shed between the barn and the house. Out my back door there is a path to follow; you pass the firepit, you cross a little bridge over what I would very much like to think of as a stream or a brook or perhaps even a creek, but is, in fact, a ditch.

Nevertheless it is a quaint bridge. You pass the apple tree I cut down and also the one I didn’t, and you find yourself in front of Harold. There you encounter my deep shame. The mess within.

The problem with Harold is that it’s an island–disconnected from the rest of the farm. My home, (I do not wish to brag), has both electricity and running water. Similarly, my barn is fully electrified and lit! I even have a faucet back there!

Harold, in contrast, boasts neither of these things. It’s cold and damp. In the wintertime water drips through some leaky spots in the roof. Really, Harold needs to be thoroughly addressed from top to bottom. Its posts are solid, its rafters true. But the roof could be replaced, and a simple summertime ditching project would bring the power of light.

That would still not address the bitter chill of the wet Oregon Autumn and Winter, the cold air laden with moisture working its way to your bones. I don’t want to be in Harold. I don’t want to spend time there.

As it is, it is a mess. But by God it’s mine.

Where we lived before I had a beautiful and proper shop. It wasn’t the biggest shop you’ve ever seen but it was warm and dry and clean and cleanable. It had a concrete floor; Harold’s is gravel.

My old shop had electricity everywhere. I could, and did plug in my woodworking tools anywhere it was convenient and off I’d go. Here, where we’ve lived for a little more than two years, I have yet to regain my woodworking stride. There’s just nowhere to work!

My barn is fairly full of barny things like chickens and their necessary accoutremon. My tractor is stored there. I have a welder in the corner and a space for hay storage for the cows. There’s a tack room, (this used to be a barn for horses), but we keep feed and dry storage in there, and anyway, it’s not very big. Not big enough to store tools, let alone woodwork.

I must make due with Harold, at least as storage. And it’s a mess. And it is a steady drip of stress and pressure in my life. All winter long I move things around and try to keep them from getting wet. I would like to hope I might take up any number of projects I’ve been carrying around for these adult years of mine. But not if they’re moistened. Then they’re no good for anything but to be cast away and forgotten. So I keep moving things and I keep fighting Harold.

I blame Harold and its lack of services. But it’s really my value for cleanliness that is the source of my stress.

After all, I’m exaggerating its interior wetness. It’s not really that bad. A lot of the moisture is condensation rather than open drips. And after a couple of winters I know what goes where for safety.

I love a place for everything and everything in its place! I’m just not very good at making that a reality in my life.

I also think of a broader kind of cleanliness as it pertains to our natural environment. We are so prone to extraction, so prone to taking and using-up that we hardly notice when other people’s trash and refuse and waste becomes our problem.

I reflect on my desire for a clean, pure expression of land management and stewardship. I have a few acres here. It is a little pocket in the middle of a million acres of ryegrass and hazelnuts and enough vines to romantically refer to our part of the countryside as wine country.

These are monoculture crops and to a large degree monoculture crops require intensive chemical inputs in order to maintain. And I am the owner of, (I mentioned) a stretch of ditch. I wish it was a river, a proper waterway. But it is a ditch. There are no fish. There is the occasional duck, seeking refuge from the nearby hunters hidden in blinds this time of year.

I have plans for my land! To improve it, to beautify it. To improve the soil quality like my brother’s doing on his piece of the Earth. I’m so proud of him. I’m so impressed. So inspired.

Beyond Harold is the barn, and beyond that are three pastures, about 90 feet wide each and about 500 feet long each, totaling about an acre each.

Here’s my plan: I’d like to rip the fences out between the pastures, making it a larger open pasture area of about three acres. I’d like to ring the whole thing with a five-foot-wide hedgerow constructed of species endemic to my area. I’ll plant taller trees and cut them partially down, laying them into the hedgerow and allowing new growth to take off upward from the fallen trunks. I’ll plan Red Osier Dogwoods, (Cornus sericea) and Oregon Grape, (Berberis aquifolium), and Pacific Snowberry, (Symphoricarpos albus), and other species that will grow in tightly together. This hedgerow will be a wind and visual break in the landscape and will stop invasive seeds from blowing into the main pasture.

Then, I’d like to carve some shallow swales that follow the gentle topography of the land, allowing for more water to be retained and used by some gentle copses of native trees planted on the high side. I’ll plant a mixture of forage species on the land, oats, crimson clover, vetch and initially, tillage radishes which are huge rooted brassicas that are meant to grow long, heavy taproots deep into the clay soil and then rot, aerating the soil and providing organic matter as the roots decay.

I’ll rotationally graze as many as three species on the land. Cows for a few days, then a few days of rest followed by sheep for a few days, then a few days of rest before chickens for a few days, then a good, long rest before cows again. By grazing multiple species I will exponentially increase my soil’s microbiome and the health and fertility of the soil. It will take more hooves for a longer season. I learned this from my brother.

Neat. Tidy. Somehow this speaks to cleanliness to me.

But as I said, our land is an island in a sea of monoculture. My ditch will continue to run with petrochemical runoff no matter what I do. All I can do is take responsibility for my little bit of earth. I can steward what I have. And not swim in the ditch. I can avoid swimming in the ditch.

Finally I think about my own inner cleanliness. This is where inner harmony and self discipline meet up and marinate together and sometimes create friction with my sense of self worth.

It is my own sense of inner cleanliness that calls me back to Harold. “Fix the roof” it calls to me. “Perhaps a door that closes properly”, it whispers in my ear as I pass by.

Inner cleanliness is another central theme of this whole project–a central theme of my adult life. I am reminded again of the man who married my wife and me, and his childhood farm, and the spring of clean water that fed the whole farm, its animals and people, its gardens and crops. The spring required maintenance and part of that was a thorough yearly cleaning. We must clean our springs, we must maintain our water sources for ourselves and for those we wish to care for.

In the end I do have a value for a sense of cleanliness. I want to live clean. I want to be clean of heart and intention. I want to wake up to a clean kitchen–my wife loves it and so do I.

And I want to contribute to a greater cleanliness for my children and yours.