Last week, we visited Kris Walter at her West Street compact paradise, focusing mainly on her rainwater catchment systems. Today, we check out practical methods and philosophical perspectives that inspire Walter to live in ways that are both sustainable and spiritually nourishing.
Walter unabashedly uses the term “Great Mystery,” and speaks as frankly about wonder and awe as she does about the roots of American democracy: “The founding fathers thought that human shortcomings could be held in check by a system of laws and structures,” she said. “That great experiment has shown that external checks and balances don’t suffice. It’s we who must become different.” Walter puts her money where her mouth is, striking a balance between the philosophical and the practical.
“My part to play is to acknowledge that the Great Mystery is real in all things – in all places and times – and to listen for guidance about my next step along the unfolding path it lays out for me,” she said. “Following its lead is how I choose to become the change I want to see in our world; the Mystery has proven itself to be trustworthy.” Walter honors that trust as she loads her freezer with homegrown provisions, heats her home with wood, powers appliances with solar energy, and efficiently tends her garden through all kinds of weather conditions. “It’s we who must change, individually and thereby collectively,” she said, “in order to understand and frame the problems we face and to hear from the Great Mystery [regarding] actions to address them. Clever ideas are insufficient when we – the vehicles for change – cannot experience ourselves as expressions of the unity of all life and find inspirations to act from that source.”
Walter puts thoughtfulness into action as she pursues projects as seemingly simple as growing spuds. Piggybacking onto last week’s vignette about one winter squash seed that grew into a vibrant plant yielding 120 pounds of food, it’s worth taking a look at her method for cultivating potatoes. “I pile up about eight inches of mulch hay – that’s hay, not straw, because hay provides more nutrients to the soil. I make an opening in the mulch and put a seed potato on top of the ground; then I pile finished compost on top before covering it all back up.” Because the method retains moisture, Walter only had to water her crop twice this season, despite the dry summer. “If I planted potatoes conventionally in the ground, they’d require much more water.”
On a .17-acre plot, Walter grows a wide variety of crops. Vegetables include leeks, tomatoes, summer squash, kale, parsnips, cukes, rainbow chard, garlic, snap peas, beets, asparagus, carrots, and one new to me: perennial tree cabbage. In addition to bush beans, she grows rattlesnake pole beans, an heirloom cultivar, and eats them as snap beans while allowing some to dry on the vine for next year’s seed.
Fruit crops include four blueberry bushes from which Walter harvested 30 pounds this year, though they produced considerably more. “I kept about two-thirds and left the rest for the birds,” she said. She has raspberries and – as we sat on her porch – her postal carrier was invited to snag some red beauties, which he did, happily. Walter has two pear trees, a fig plant, and elderberry bushes. She grows herbs and flowers and gets out of nature’s way by letting some spring up without human interference. Her yard is dotted with nasturtiums, Queen Anne’s lace, echinacea, turtlehead, butterfly milkweed, and rudbeckia. Morning glories grow up the back of her house; Walter watches birds up close through a window as they land on the morning glories and eat the seeds. She allows comfrey, jewelweed, bee balm, various docks, and stinging nettle to grow at will, since “they add beauty and shape to the lawn.” She makes liquid fertilizer from whatever’s growing: “Joe Pye weed, mullein, yarrow … I just use what’s here and spray it on my crops.”
The retired software engineer and rainwater catchment designer recalled her maternal grandparents. “When I was little, we lived with them near Boston. They knew how to live through fat and lean times; they’d experienced the Depression. My grandmother was a nurse and my grandfather was an electrical engineer during the era when X-ray machines were just coming in; he was involved with the technical side while she trained to use them. They started a successful business manufacturing neurosurgical equipment.” Walter learned that both skills and character are vital: “We need to take responsibility and have something to offer.” In adulthood, she became aware that supply systems are fragile and embraced the concept of stewardship.
“I’m part of a long arc; I take ruthless self-inventory,” said Walter. “I want to contribute to building a better world. Humans do terrible things to ourselves and one another, but we can do better.” She added, “People in authority have lost the threads rooted in reality. I re-root myself in reality because we need to find real solutions, inspired by the Great Mystery. Our lives have become so technological and removed from natural systems, from the spiral of life. I’m looking for ways to be inserted back into support systems.”
Glancing at the American flag displayed in front of her home, Walter said: “For me, that flag represents people who tried to do something better, and I honor their revolutionary impulse. They tried to make something different: out of many, one. It’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Eveline MacDougall is the author of “Fiery Hope” and can be reached at eveline@amandlachorus.org.