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Many religious traditions, among them Buddhism, emphasize right livelihood in which one provides for oneself and one’s family by performing the greatest amount of good for other living beings, the Earth included, and does the least amount of harm to all. When I was growing up in Santa Cruz in northern Santa Fe County that was fairly easy. My family and I spent our summers growing corn, squash, chili, melons, cucumbers, apples, peaches and pears. These we consumed when in season, put away for the winter, or made available to the nearby Pueblo Indian people by going house to house and offering a dozen ears of corn for sixty cents and a bushel of apples for three dollars. While some might think that our prices were unreasonably low, our efforts were generously rewarded when on feast day we were invited into every home and fed without reservation. Forty-some years after the fact, these families and I remain intertwined in an ongoing relationship of friendship, mutuality, and caring. It is hard to pinpoint exactly the causes for the disappearance of small-scale agriculture in northern Santa Fe County, beginning in the 1950s, but mostly it had to do with the material carrot that mainstream culture dangled in front of our faces in the form of energy-saving devices, creature comforts, modern dwellings and automobiles. This process was much aided by the active devaluing of self-sufficient traditions and rural life carried |
out by mass media and the schooling process which occurred simultaneously. Indeed, it was not long before we were all searching for jobs, just as a few years before we had looked for stands of wild asparagus and patches of wild spinach or pinon trees, which were particularly loaded with nuts. Together, those forces unleashed by mainstream society were highly effective, and helped turn generally happy, hardworking land-based people into the generation of restless, highly pressured institutional workers and consumers that we have become. Certainly, by the 1980s this many hundred-year way of life was nearly defunct. Both psychologically in the individual, and in community, its sudden disappearance left a vacuum of such magnitude, that drugs, alcohol, medications, gambling, and the cult of the automobile, ATVs, cell phones, television, guns, and a myriad other technological toys have been used to fill. These are hardly sustainable alternatives to the once highly productive and integrated way of life common to this region. Those replacements have themselves become the agents of yet further levels of disintegration within communities, which had no hand in their development. As a result of the destruction of a historical right livelihood and the vain attempt to compensate for it by extreme measures of desperation, a deep sense of alienation from self, from the land and from cultural, spiritual and economic roots has occurred in northern Santa Fe County and adjoining Rio Arriba that is all together difficult to address. While the wealthy are off in Africa big game hunting thanks to the high salaries paid by the our neighbor, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, the poor are sleeping under bridges or looking for their next fix, and middle income people, stretched and strained in every department of their lives perform endless economic juggling acts just to “keep it together for one more day.” As a kind of insurance for finding work, I was talked into spending eight years at various colleges on the East coast, where I earned an advanced degree in education and racked up several thousand dollars of debt. Even so, upon my return to Santa Fe, it was nearly impossible to find work as a result of endless bureaucratic barriers and requirements that rendered people such as myself
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