Design & Lifestyle...

If you want to know how my split life began, I suppose you have to start with Zeno’s Paradox.  Zeno, you may recall from High School philosophy class, was perhaps the first person to realize it is theoretically impossible to be happy. Being a philosopher, Zeno expressed his realization as a formula: between any two points A and B, there is always a midpoint.  That is, you never will get to where you want to go.

In my case, point A was my life: a speechwriter supporting a stay-at-home-mother-of-a-wife and two young children in New York City.  Point B was the life I wanted to live: as an autobiographical monologist, with a stay-at-home-mother-of-a-wife and two young children who required less support. Going from points A to B therefore required either that I won the lottery, allowing me to shift from a lucrative profession to a pecuniary one while shouldering my crushing financial burden, or that I lightened my proverbial load.

Using the conventional load-lessening strategy--abandonment of the wife and children-- seemed beyond my limited emotional and logistical capacities.  So I asked my wife to abandon me in New York and relocate to anyplace within a 2.5-hour radius of New York City.  My thinking being, I could travel indefinitely between points A and B e.g. the city and the country.  Just when I thought I was where I was supposed to be, I’d get in the car and drive the other direction.  Zeno on the Taconic State Parkway. 

My wife landed in a little hamlet in upstate New York called Harlemville, a radical leftist biosphere based on the Anthroposophical principles of the German mystical polymath Rudolf Steiner, which residents seem to think is a biodynamic farming community.  The farmers plant with the cycle of the moon, believing the gravitational pull enhances the chances of seeds sprouting and crops flourishing. 

As crops need fertilizer, so biodynamic farmers need cows.  A biodynamic farm is, in a perfect world, a closed, sustainable system. Meaning, you don’t buy manure.  You produce it, along with milk and cheese and whey and quark, and—out of the unlucky males and less-productive females--veal and steak.

Every output (hay or manure) is an input (feed or fertilizer), in other words, and every input (hay and manure) is an output (steak and potatoes).  And the wheel goes round and round.  The cycle of sustainability stops with human waste, I am relieved to report, though many locals do have composting toilets, and of course as in most if not all rural communities, there are no sewers, only septic systems. 

Like Las Vegas, what happens in Harlemville stays in Harlemville. Except for me. I don’t stay – I come on weekends to raise my boys, and go during the week to write and perform in the city.  As Zeno might have predicted, I miss my children when I’m working, and I miss the city whenever I see a middle-aged woman breastfeeding her six-year-old in the pink Anthroposophical house next to the farm.  That this woman is my wife complicates matters, of course. And a house without right angles and doors just makes it harder to be separated yet living under the same roof, at least on weekends.  But Zeno probably knew, in a world where you’ll never get to where you want to be, it’s all about the journey.