Regarding: Gustavus Adolphus College

(Dear friends; I know I have been lax in the extreme about blog posting over the last few years, but this is very important to me.  Please pass this on to anyone you know who is concerned about Gustavus.  It's time to take action.  Since this letter was sent, President Ohle has publicly stated that he will not resign.)

On Wednesday December 12, 2012, over 30 students and alumni of Gustavus Adolphus College gave President Jack Ohle letters asking for his resignation. Accompanying the letters were gifts, as a gesture of good will and respect. This is one of those letters:

December 6, 2012

Camp Amnicon, South Range, WI

Dear President Ohle,

I’d like to extend my sincere congratulations for the work you have done to promote Gustavus’ core value of excellence. Last year, I was present for Homecoming, Nobel and sesquicentennial kick-off events, and I saw excellence on display everywhere. Every event I attended spoke to the greatness of Gustavus, an institution that I am proud to call my alma mater. I’m grateful for the work you’ve done with fundraising. I want Gustavus to be everything that it can be. It is because of this honest desire that I am respectfully asking you to resign from the post of president.

I care so much because my educational experience at Gustavus was incredible. Because of my truly great professors I learned more in the classroom than I could have imagined possible. I was challenged and stretched, and became not just a better writer and a better thinker but a better human. My professors taught me excellence as much by example as by instruction. I learned about community in the dormitories, first as a resident and then as a Collegiate Fellow, where the
girls I lived with and the colleagues I worked with taught me about laughing together and caring for each other as equals. It was as a member of I Am We Are that I embraced Gustavus’ value of justice and began speaking out for and with those who go unheard. I learned about service on the couches of the Center for Vocational Reflection, where Chris Johnson and Amy Pehrson, along with my friends and peers, challenged and supported in my desire to be a servant leader. Finally, it was as a volunteer and worshipper in Christ Chapel that my faith came to life; the mentorship and care of Chaplains Brian
Johnson and Rachel Larson taught me to engage in the struggle of living out the values of excellence, community justice and service with hope, joy and trust in the love of God. Without these experiences I would not be who I am today—I would be a smaller person with smaller interests, revolving mainly around my own happiness. It is thanks to Gustavusand those who live out its core values that I find myself on the journey to live them out as well in full-time ministry.

So I applaud the advancement of Gustavus as an institution, and the celebration of its excellence, and am glad to know that excellence continues to be a priority. All the same, over the homecoming weekend and in the year since then I have found myself asking how the other four values are being advanced. As a community, Gustavus is more fragmented than I’ve ever seen it; too many community members feel that they aren’t being valued or heard. It breaks my heart to see the very staff and faculty that taught me so much about living well near tears due to your leadership. How is justice valued at Gustavus when I Am We Are is asked to censor its message for the sake of appearances? How is servant leadership being
played out in your administration? And finally, faith: in my view, the loss of Brian Johnson and the subsequent unilateral restructuring of the chapel staff has been a tragedy for Gustavus. It is my fear that it signals a change in the ethos of Christ Chapel, which had been, in Brian’s words, “a tent of meeting” where difference was encountered with love and where faith was both challenged and deepened.

Yes, I am pleased that Gustavus is advancing; but my fear is that institutional advancement is valued over institutional humility. It is my prayer that the Gustavus community continues to ask the hard questions seeking the truest—not the most attractive, convenient, or marketable but the most real— ways to live out its values.

I hope that you will accept this letter and gift in the spirit in which I send it—one of trust in our shared concern for the institution of learning we both value. I’m sending you a tin of my favorite home-grown herbal tea; I pray that you will accept this gift and the comfort it provides as you walk through this trying time. Its ingredients are nettle and mint, herbs traditionally used for healing and clarity of mind—traits that we all need in this season. I wish you no ill-will, Mr. President; I honor your contributions to Gustavus, and ask you to make one more by stepping down at this time.

With Sincere Hope,

Bethany Ringdal, Class of 2011

P.S. It is the season of Advent—the time of hopeful waiting. Many of us are directing our Advent prayers towardsGustavus this season. Know that my prayers are with you and your family as well.

I know, I know, it's been a long time...

But I'm still alive!  Once a person gets behind on blogging, the amount of things that COULD be said is overwhelming, and one just doesn't even want to try.  But here I am, nonetheless!  I'll deal with my little problem with a random list of things I've been thinking about, in no particular order.  I'm just going to be ok with being a sloppy blogger. 

1. This is my first fall without school in 19 years.  Which makes me feel excited and nostalgic and unprepared and lonely and excited again.  I do miss the grand adventure of learning, every day, as my main task.  Always at this time of year I get itchy to start writing papers, thinking new thoughts, being challenged by ideas that I never would have encountered on my own.  I particularly miss the tactile bits right now: new notebooks, not yet the unorganized chaos they would become mid-semester.  New pencils.  A daily schedule, written out and full of possibilities!  But that's my life looking forward... I mean the "full of possibilities" part, not the "written out."  It is entirely unwritten.  
2. Yeah, about that future... Coming towards the end of something always makes me anxious and day-dreamy about my long-term future.  Brendan and I dream out loud a lot about what we could do.  Start a farm/commune/social justice community?  Organize communities around food availability and intimacy?  Find some community without a co-op and start one?  An apple orchard?  An off-the-grid house on our own plot of land?  Notice the theme: FOOD.  
3. My amazing friend Amanda asked me recently how I came to care about food so much, and I had a new realization today on that front.  I believe that there are two basic categories of human need: the physical (food, shelter, etc.), and the spiritual (community, nature, pleasure, God).  Food is one thing that can fill both of those needs.  Obviously everyone needs a certain amount of daily calories, but we can become just as sick without our spiritual needs met.  People gather around food, find pleasure in it, get to be outside when they grow it.  Making and eating good food forces us to slow down and just do one thing.  And (of course) food is theologically significant, a major part of Jesus' ministry, the center of Christian ritual in the eucharist.  Ask me someday about a eucharistic ethics of food justice.  Or go read Sara Miles' really really good book, "Take This Bread".  Anyways.  Food.  Love it.  
4. And just for good measure, some things I've been doing lately: harvesting and processing food like crazy--roasting and freezing tomatoes, canning salsa, drying pears, storing potatoes.  Today we picked two bushels of apples from a friends trees, so we'll be elbow deep in applesauce and apple butter soon.  We're almost done putting up a high tunnel (a sort of unheated green house to grow produce in the winter!)  Generally loving up this place all we can while we can. 

Life and Death

It's been a while since I've written, so I thought I'd make up for it with some really intense subject matter--Life and Death.  I used to have the impression that farmers were people who made life happen--farmers help plants and animals to grow and thrive, so that the people who eat them can grow and thrive.  And this is true.  I understand myself as a food midwife, ushering zucchini and eggs and cheese and jam into the world.  But farming is undeniably also about death.  There's a lot of casual death around here.  Out in the garden, where we are helping the tomatoes and carrots and beans to grow, we pull out any plant that we don't want there, starve it of water and nutrients, and throw it on the compost heap to rot.  The beautiful red beetles that were munching on the potatoes last week were smashed under my boot by the handful.  Of course, too, we know that the turkeys that I've fallen so in love with will be dinner come November, and that we are raising two beautiful calves that will likely be dinner too, and that soon we have to slaughter a couple of roosters because we have too many of them.  I know that life and death is everywhere in the world, but the interplay between them is so close to the surface here on the farm.  Yesterday it bubbled up right in my hands.  We had a little chick, two or three weeks old, who couldn't walk.  Something had gone wrong with his or her legs, and the poor little thing would flop over every time it tried to stand.  We tried nursing it, separating it from the others and giving it its own food and water, making little splints out of pipecleaners... but none of it worked.  The Chick sat in one place for a day and a half, unable to hobble even to the dish of food we'd put out for it.  And so we had to kill it.  I know that I kill mosquitos all the time, and weeds, and that I've eaten meat for most of my life and so am implicit in the killing of animals, but this was the first creature that I've had to take in my hands with the implicit purpose of ending its little life.  I could feel it breathing, and hear it chirping, and he relaxed in my hands when I turned him on his back and through my tears I had to twist its neck.  I don't think I was decisive enough--it kept breathing, chirping, flopping.  Brendan gave it a few more twists and we left it on the compost pile and went to eat breakfast.  And our lives go on.  One becomes very aware, on a farm, how much our living is tied up in dying--not just our own eventual deaths, which color everything, but the little lives extinguished for our survival--or even just our comfort--every day.  It's enough to make one stop and think, isn't it? 

Baking Day

Friday is baking day.  We get up early, let Sue do all the morning chores, and roll our sleeves up for a long day.  I run the inside oven, making pastries and sweets, and Brendan bakes the bread out on the patio in our wood-fired clay oven.  Here's what we have for tomorrow's farmer's market:

Raspberry Cream Cheese tarts, with our own berries!

Elderflower cupcakes, garnished with black raspberries and crystalized elderflowers

Of course, the sourdough bread.  We make white, whole wheat, rye, and multigrain, and score each with a different pattern so we can tell them apart.  These are rye and white.

Come see us at the market in Downtown Rochester or at the farm, any weekend!

God, bless the little berries, black, blue, rasp, and otherwise...

Guess what this is?  Ah!  Our first beautiful ripe red juicy RASPBERRY!  We've been harvesting strawberries for a week and a half now, but we only get a handful every day--soon we'll be simply SWIMMING in raspberries.  Can you tell I'm pumped?  Yesterday we had buttermilk pancakes with raspberries and rhubarb syrup for breakfast.  YUM. 

P.S. Extra points to anyone who gets the title reference...

Turkey-Love

You know how you always hear that turkeys are stupid and mean and ugly?  I vehemently deny it!  I am quickly falling in love with our little turkey charges.  We have ten of them, and Brendan and I share most of the turkey duties--mainly giving them food and water, changing their bedding, and spending some time with them each day to make sure that no one is acting funny or sick. 

Ok, so other people might think our little turks are ugly, but I think they're... endearingly ugly.  Like little dinosaurs.  They're definitely not mean--though they are a bit clumsy and keep on accidentally stepping on the ducks.  And they may not be the brightest birds in the coop--they can't find any kitchen scraps we put in unless we put them right in their dish with the feed--but they're sweet.  They're really curious, and will peck lightly at any speck they don't understand--a colored patch on your jacket, a picture of a chicken on a feed bag. 

And they're growing so fast!  Already it takes two hands to hold one, and they get bigger every day.  The toms have started getting red on their necks (you can see a little in the picture above--it's more pronounced now) and they've taken to puffing up, holding out their wings, fanning their tails, and turning in little circles, showing off for anyone who will watch them.  They think they're pretty tough, but when we tried to let them out of their little pen to explore today, not a one would leave the coop on its own.  I think they're shy around the big chickens. 

My mom is ordering one of these babies for thanksgiving.  I look forward to sharing my handiwork with my family, but I know there will be a few tears shed and many thank-you's said when I eat one of these sweet little critters.  

The Deluge

There's a section in my favorite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where it rains for something like 20 years straight.  That's what it feels like this week, although it's really only been 4 days or so.  The chickens have been hiding under the truck bed to keep dry; I guess they have cabin fever too and want to stay out of the coop.  I have a lot to do in the garden (the weeds!  the rain is helping them out TOO MUCH.) but the whole garden is a mud puddle, and every step I take compresses the soil into a concrete brick, which I absolutely want to avoid, so... I have to find other work to do.  I'm getting a head-start on baking for the weekend (this week: lemon-poppyseed chick cookies, peach-strawberry tarts, rhubarb cupcakes, and, of course, wood-fired sourdough bread...) and I've been cleaning out the barn... an adventure that could take a loooong time.  Yesterday I faced the extra-glamorous task of scraping chicken poop out of the barn loft, where they roosted all winter.  Today... I think I'll organize the GIANT PILE OF TOOLS in the front part of the barn--they'll be much more useful if we know where they all are!  My mucking-about boots are getting a solid workout in all of the mud.  Here's hoping it clears up for the weekend!