Recently, I drove down to New Hampshire to celebrate the life of Barbara Bradley Rutz, the mother of one of my childhood best friends, who passed away after an unexpected medical event in December. Barbara was from Switzerland and introduced me to saunas, hot tubs, cold plunges, herbal face steams, fondue, the best chocolate, and bathtubs full of mud and rose petals in her magnificent garden.

Theirs was a mythical family—Barbara’s four children were often seen running around barefoot in the snow in their yard, their cheeks red apples. Barbara had a “tree” growing through her kitchen. Her pantry was always stocked with Stroop waffles, maple butter, and homemade dandelion wine.

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Barbara was my first boss, hiring me at 14 to sweep the floors and restock the bulk bins at Evergrain, the first natural food store in my hometown. She kept the bathrooms stocked with free organic cotton pads and tampons and created a children’s area of toys and books so that grown-ups could shop (and consult with her on herbs—and life) with unparalleled focus.

The celebration of Barbara’s life I attended (there were many) was a potluck. I arrived late, ate delicious food, heard and told stories of Barbara, and was invited to howl at the full moon in her honor along with a host of women1 who played important roles during my youth. It was overcast, the moon hidden, but I howled along, nevertheless. I relished beholding the faces, hearing the laughter and tears, and hugging the bodies of these women and their memorable beauty marks and iconic wool coats, whom I hadn’t seen in so many years.

After the potluck, I spirited away to the very tall former grange hall my dear old friends now steward, in the hills of Ossipee. Josh and I stayed up late talking about Barbara, rural organizing, and parenting.

A winter storm rolled in during the night and I wasn’t sure if I should drive the three-plus hours north in the morning (or if I was using the storm as an excuse to spend 24 hours alone in an impromptu writing retreat). In the end, I decided to drive home. Along the way, I saw a hand-painted sign in someone’s yard that read, “God save the left.” It was three days after the NH primary.

Here are two questions I was recently asked by people who don’t know me:

“Are you a therapist?” and “Are you retired?”

“Are you a therapist?” was asked by someone I had got to talking to at a local historical society event.

The presentation was primo—historian Dan Harrison unearthed ancient artifacts (a hand-carved wooden funnel, the storied wrought-iron fence topping from the old Treat Peirce house!) from a treasure chest and had elaborate stories about each of them.

After the presentation, I made my rounds around the room, where I learned that even the most “normal”-looking elders, such as the one who asked me if I was a therapist, are concerned about societal collapse. This one’s advice? “Start a vegetable garden. Buy silver—it’s the only currency that will still have value. Forget about guns—ammunition won’t mean anything. Community will.”

“Are you retired?” was asked by a retired person who couldn’t understand how I can attend so many meetings.

If you’ve been following along for a while, you may recall that I quit my last "real”/salaried job last May Day to work for myself. On the one hand, being self-employed gives me great flexibility.2 On the other hand, it brings great fluctuation and unpredictable income.

In this time of my retirement,3 I have been seeking out humans, mostly 70 and up, with a few exceptions, who can help me better understand what rural resilience and organizing is, what it has been, and what it could be.

One day, this quest brought me to the home of Peter, who I first encountered when he was somberly escorting a coffin (democracy, I believe, it contained) as a pallbearer at the Women’s March in Augusta back in January 2017. The next time I encountered Peter, he was holding the door open for me at the Belfast Co-op when I was riding postpartum hellwaves and had a baby in one arm and groceries in another (this was before the automatic door was installed). Then, he turned about to be the father of a friend and the grandfather of my kid’s schoolmate. And, the one who was behind the mass production and proliferation of the heart signs that popped up in Belfast, also in 2017.

On the winding road to Peter’s house, I listened to a podcast episode featuring Jeff Sharlet who wrote The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Sharlet spoke of strip mall churches, civil war accelerators, insurrectionists, conspiracy theorists, and Nazis who work at ski mountains. I worried as I sometimes do, that community building work through One Small Step is another version of neoliberal salvation—that it’s akin to thinking that an individual’s choice to throw their cans in the recycling bin instead of the trash bin is going to save the world or makes them “better than.” But Sharlet talks about hopefulness vs. moments of hope, how important those moments are, and how we need to savor them.

I walked up the steps to Peter’s toasty off-grid home at the top of a hill. I shared my misgivings and fears, even as I asked Peter (an apple ladder builder, activist, grandfather, homesteader, and “ex-officio mayor”) for ideas about how we might continue this work. At times, he stared off into the fields. He also said, “The microcosm is the macrocosm.”

We talked about prepping and decisions made from fear and decisions made from love, the impact of our decisions on the people around us. Of One Small Step conversations, Peter said, “People may say it’s a drop in the bucket but if you put that bucket under a tap that’s dripping, eventually that bucket will overflow.”

A sign on Peter’s wall reads, “THINK BIG.” It’s about the stretches he does to reduce his Parkinson’s symptoms and slow its progression. Expanding in the face of contraction. Peter spread his arms wide and sent me on my way.

I recently updated my website to reflect my retirement hobbies. Visit michelechristle.com if you’re so inclined.

Enter Audio

I’m in the midst of a four-week audio storytelling workshop through SALT with Jules Bradley. In this class, we’ll make one short audio piece.

At first, it was a toss-up between recording my mineral-obsessed five-year-old talk about his rock collection and fascination with meteors hitting the earth and creating an audio portrait of one of the sailors I met on a shared journey across the Pacific thirteen years ago but boy howdy, I spent the past few days listening back to that tape and it is polluted with so much background sound and vibrations from the containership and my lack of recording skills at the time that it’s likely unusable. 😩 But now, the kid is clamming up every time I get the mic out.

Alas. Here are the sounds of the ice breaking in the river a few nights ago, under the magnificent stars.

Big ups to journalist Murray Carpenter for dropping by Torchlight earlier this week to walk through his recording kit and give us some tips for recording on the fly. I’m grateful to be (earnestly) learning a form I’ve been curious about for so many years.

New Work in the World

Of published written words, I have nothing to report. There is this, though: a live broadcast we did last week featuring One Small Step on WERU. You can listen here, on my website, or via WERU.

I am infinitely grateful for the time and space to reflect on the impact of this initiative (through a short spurt of continued support from WERU!). We’ve got two future happenings up our sleeves: an audio piece and a community supper, *likely* on March 1, at the Legion Hall in Belfast, and *hopefully* featuring our new friends from the Civic Standard in Vermont.4 Donations/community support may be essential to our ability to pull this off. Stay tuned!

Probably you already know all about One Small Step and are tired of hearing me blabber on about it but if you don’t (or want to check out some of our conversations), click here.

Currents

Learning

Experiments in Oral History Methodology: Fantasy oral history - Filling the gaps between oral history and silence — Thursday, February 15, 2024, 6:00 PM 7:30 PM (A workshop from Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts FREE Experiments in Oral History Methodology series)

Food + Drinks

Roasted chickpeas and squash with za’atar and hot honey

Wintery Leeks + Potatoes (you don’t have to add the eggs unless you want to)

Space Travel tea via Moon of Hyldemoer Herbals — rowan berry, hawthorn berry, pine, hibiscus

Films + Media

Kindred Futures: Through Our Eyes — “On view at the Clifford Gallery at Waterfall Arts, Kindred Futures: Through Our Eyes features works in sculpture, video, and digital collage by four Maine-based artists: Ashley Page, Eli Kao, Lokotah Sanborn, and Shane Charles. Exploring themes of language, land, environment, and memory through embodied experience and site-based processes...” Artist talk and reception Saturday, February 10, 4–6 p.m.

Poor Things —seen at the Colonial Theatre in Belfast (donate to their essential infrastructure upgrades fundraiser here so we can keep going to a locally-owned, community-minded movie theater)

Conspirituality podcast — “A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds.” I started with the episode featuring Jeff Sharlet discussing leftists who turn right.

The Birchbark House book series by Louise Erdrich — “an essential nine-book series chronicling 100 years in the life of one Ojibwe family.” I was reading this with my seven-year-old recently but we had to pause because the last chapter we read had me crying so much I could hardly read. That chapter took place in the winter. I know what kinds of things happen in the spring of books but my kid is not so sure. We will keep at it, nevertheless.

“BYE BYE” from Kim Gordon’s new album

PS: Where the Money Went

Maybe you know that every year I donate 10% of my writing profits (including from this Substack). FWIW here’s where the 2023 funds went:

Niweskok: From the Stars to Seeds, Out in the Open, Palestinian Youth Movement, Rockweed Center, and White Ash Learning Cooperative

Thank you for reading, thank you for sharing, thank you for supporting (the breath behind) these words.