Another interesting weekend in Vermont

It is snowing today. I love it!
We had a gorgeous weekend, and interesting too. I thought you might like to hear about it. This kind of stuff seems normal to me, but I know that we live a unique kind of life in the green mountains of Vermont. Here's a little glimpse into the lives of the Berkfields for all of you urbanites...

Friday night
My housemate Abi and her son Levi went with Birch and I down to Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (about an hour away)for a panel discussion by the Prison Birth Project. The Prison Birth Project provides doula services to women who are incarcerated and they also provide other services like prenatal and postnatal women's groups and mothering from prison women's groups. They do amazing work - check out their website. http://theprisonbirthproject.org/
We went because there was childcare provided. So our babies hung out with a bunch of older kids while we listened to four women talk. Two of the women were formerly incarcerated and told their stories of being pregnant in prison, and of mothering their children from prison. Their reasons for being incarcerated were ridiculous and caused so much trauma in their families. We need to seriously rethink our current prison system, which does not help people rehabilitate, but actually causes further societal damage. It is so great that an org like the Prison Birth Project is working to support women in prison and their children. Abi and I are trying to think how we can support a project like this. We might drive children to visit their parents in prison. I'll keep you updated. I know there are also good projects like this in California.

Saturday
We had an all day retreat at our farm for the organization that we work with - Post Oil Solutions. We spent time imagining what we want the organization to be like in 5 years and we all agreed that we wanted everyone in the area to be a part of the organization, even if they don't realize it. We want people to be working as a community to solve all kinds of issues that will come up in a post oil society... growing food, sharing resources, sharing skills, working together.

And then we spent a few hours doing an Anti-Class assessment. This was a follow-up to an Anti-Racist Assessment that we did a year ago. We are an org mostly made up of people who are white and middle class. We were working on recognizing the assumptions and values that we bring into our work. And then working on how to be more effective in working across classes. We feel that our movement towards a post oil society must be a cross class effort. And if we are working to make our world a better place we envision a world without classes, where there is equality, instead of people with money using their power over people who don't have money. We are setting our goals high. The woman who facilitated was from an organization called Class Action. Check it out http://www.classism.org/

While we were in the retreat Birch was in the greenhouse with our roommates - we planted onions, leeks, kale, chard and spinach this weekend!


Sunday
It is hard to believe, but it is the time to cut and split wood for next wintera. Our housemate Dan is a logger and he cut down about 6 trees on the property and on Sunday we split the wood. Here are a few photos of our work. It was a gorgeous day and it felt great to be working together and committing to next winter.