N: Where are you living right now, Ben?

B: I’m floating right now…there’s sort of a contradiction, I feel like out of the people I know, I am one of the most connected to a place as a home, yet I don’t have a home, really. I have a lot of places that feel sort of like home but no place that feels totally like HOME. It’s funny that you mentioned ‘exile’ because I feel like that has sort of been my theme…

[More:]

N: Do you mean that you feel like you are” in exile” or that you are ready to leave?

B: There are just elements of ‘exile’ in my life, and I think there is an over-arching sense of exile whether people realize it or not, in that we live in a culture of exile, from culture, from our connections to our youth, but I don’t think that people are really conscience of the lack of those connections, I’m conscious of it, and I’ve just become really conscious of the different senses of exile within my life; within the landscape I identify with as home, and within the people I identify with as home.

I’ve got people that share my views but they’re not part of my sense of home and in terms of how I want to relate to the big picture. I don’t have that support in the locality of my home and in the personal relationships that I identify with as home relationships, and I feel like I want to be in my home place and be in my home relationships for my entire life, but I also need those people that I am a little more on the same wavelength with to be a part of my life, and I don’t know how I am going to make this, I’ve sort of been having a lot trouble with that, actually.

N: So are your home folks not at this local that you’re talking about, this land that you’re talking about? Would you describe what you mean by ‘home’ more geographically?

B: I suppose I’m talking about LaSalle County Illinois. I grew up in southern LaSalle county and my family on both sides has been there for about four generations so I still got a lot of family in and around that area, and I’ve really come back to a sense of family after it wasn’t important to me through my teenage years and early twenties, over the last couple of years I have been really coming back to that. It’s strange in that I’ve had to come back to it theoretically almost, whereas it’s sort of inherent to my parents and grandparents who live with a close sense of family, particularly on my mother’s side. I’ve had to see why it’s so important to feel that way and then feel that way, where as it’s just ingrained in them.

That’s where there’s a break in our culture. Maybe it’s just a gradual break and I’m just seeing one little part of the fracture of it, but you can see it in who is becoming farmers now, too, and who is relating to land. They are people who see the connection, intellectually, and then do it, rather than it being handed down to them. I don’t know if I’m answering your questions…

N: So you’re talking about this relation to land being ingrained, and you rejected that relationship for awhile, that you stepped away from it and now you’re accepting that?

B: It just wasn’t there for me. I didn’t understand the… like I went to a residential high school and I remember my main motivation for doing that was to get out of my small town three years earlier. There’s the ‘small town loathing’ mentality which I think is a part of it, where you’re not taught to value your small town or your place in the world. You’re not really taught to value the humble family things in this culture right now, if you’re going to be an upwardly mobile, intelligent college graduate.

N: Who are these people that you are trying to pull together in terms of ‘home’ in LaSalle County, and why do you think you cannot find those people where you’ve placed yourself or where you find yourself needing to do your work with land? Also can you talk about what you think your work is in this area?

B: Most tied into the center of home is family and the people I grew up with in my hometown. It’s blood relations in my hometown. And another orbit out from that is the local sustainable farming community, that’s sort of like the middle ground and I became a part of that four years ago I guess. That has expanded my sense of home, to the north – geographically. I now identify with the northern parts of the county, a lot of the wild spaces in there I spend a lot of time in now, and also in that community that is slowly growing.

Even above and beyond that, I don’t want to be a vegetable farmer. I feel like that element of the movement now made one realization: that people need to grow food. Then they stopped. And now it’s: ‘Let’s cater to this fast-capitalist-fossil fuel economy”. There’s more analysis on places that are growing at home and addressing things on different fronts, but there’s just a lack of analysis of the basic structure of our society… I don’t feel very optimistic about us making any sort of real change, with that short of an analysis.

I’m trying to solve things… It’s all still a very commodity orientated, the way we approach food, and it doesn’t even feel right for me in terms of my relation to the plants and lots of things. Food security wise it’s ridiculous to think that as long as your seeds come from Maine or California or wherever the hell they’re coming from that you have food security for more that one season, and also they’re not staple crops that you are growing that you may as well be eating weeds. Sustainable farms are not raising staple crops that are actually going to feed people when they need to eat.

There are a lot of issues that aren’t really addressed and it’s sort of just ‘sexy’ to be a vegetable farmer, and at the same time I support anyone whose doing it as any step in that direction is good. But it’s not for me; it really doesn’t jive with my big-picture, in terms of what I want to be doing.

N: What do you want to be doing? I know that you’re already engaged in your work, that’s why I’m talking to you!

B: The past few years it’s been wild foods, one because I ‘get off’ on it. It’s just pleasing to me to harvest wild foods, but it also makes a lot of sense, because they generally are improving soil in our degraded landscapes, with no human effort and no fossil-fuel expenditure or anything like that.

I feel that particularly in this landscape, probably in any landscape we don’t look at land as ‘functional wholes’ and so the ways that we split up land is just assinine sometimes. I’m just trying to think of ways to relate to regions and landscapes as wholes and I think about what makes sense in terms of lots of people relating to it in that way. I don’t know if I have hope for any knowledge that I gain of being passed on, but that’s the goal. What’s going to be useful to people when there is no more cheap energy and no more cheap food and what people need to know and what makes sense and how we’re going to do that without killing each other. So I am just going to grab all the fragmented knowledge that I can and unify it the best I can and…

N: Are you talking about just within your own self, or being apart of the world and being engaged in those things?

B: Just understanding the connections between land and food and land and building material and land and spirituality and land and water. A lot of times I don’t feel too hopeful about it, we’ve had some pretty good inertia going, a pretty destructive sequence of events and it’s hard to say how that will play out. At some point people are going to need simple knowledge for the hope of human history, some common sense

N: What other things do you think are relevant, or that you have been learning and connecting?

B: I guess the it always starts with plants or in my life it started with plants and mushrooms. I just started learning plants and mushrooms and the I started eating them. That’s a constant thing: studying plants then going out and finding them, and if they’re edible, eating them and if not, just watching them.

Also ‘shelter’ is huge for me right now. I was at the stage where I needed shelter and I was almost going to build it and unify it with everything right here, and I realized a lot of my food stuff cannot be a project unless I have a space to keep it in, so I was almost ready to do that when I realized that I wanted to study plant-medicine more intensively and do that before I build a home, so that sort of put the breaks on in July.

So now I am going in that direction, I’m trying to learn about things and not trying to accumulate tools and that kind of thing. I’ve been feeling the need to focus on healing on many levels, I’ve become aware of the need for emotional healing in my life, still, you get so far in some areas and you realize that you just haven’t healed. I’ve had the privilege of having powerful song experiences, of understanding what a privilege it is to have this voice and learning the proper way to use the voice in this world and how powerful it is to have it, and singing to the trees and giving back my voice, I really like going to places that don’t get sung to often and singing to them, we need to give that back, and also the plant healing, many different layers of healing, I think is where my focus s going to be in the upcoming year at least, certainly down the road.