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(05/23/20 12:40am)
Ruhamah Tess Weil ‘21
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Submitted May 11, 2020
It's incredibly disheartening to live somewhere you are not meant to be.
For the last few years, I have been struggling with mental illness, and have certainly managed to make myself feel out-of-place without help from Covid-19. Anxiety and depression are like two voices in my head that speak up every time I walk into a room: one tells me that I am occupying the space incorrectly, the other says I wasn't supposed to be there to begin with.
My family lives in Switzerland and due to various constraints and worries, I have yet to go home. I began this period in Boston, staying with long-time family friends. The house was crowded and every morning I had to fold my bed back into the sofa it had come from. Despite being surrounded by love, it was exhausting. I felt awkward putting away the dishes, having to ask where this-or-that goes. I felt awkward pouring out the last bit of milk in my cereal. I felt awkward without a room to myself to chill out in. Eventually, I decided to fly to Chicago and live with my older brother while his roommate isolated elsewhere. The situation here is definitely more comfortable; we're close and we're having fun. But I still feel out of place. Nothing around me is "mine."
If you're working your job from home or doing middle school from home, life has changed, but mostly just in aesthetics. For college students however, we've lost our purpose and our place. We're meant to be on campus. It's a full time job, 24/7, and it's impossible to do anywhere else, like a fish out of water. Pile on anxiety and depression and you start to feel like a whole whale out of water.
What has been your greatest worry or day-to-day concern as coronavirus has spread?
I have found myself binging TV shows (“Game of Thrones”), reading aggressively (Zadie Smith) and scrolling endlessly (Pinterest). While I truly enjoy each of these “activities,” I am aware that I am craving them for their escapism. They let me forget the long distance relationship that grows lengthier and lengthier with every day; the work that I am wholly unmotivated to do; and that the world we are living in is so, so different from the one we had hoped for. I'll admit, I'm scared by how hard I am trying to hide from reality.
What has made you happy over the past few weeks?
My brother left our home for Middlebury nine years ago. By the time I arrived at the college, he had graduated. He's my best friend and we never expected to live together again. If this pandemic has a silver lining, it’s these weeks (months?) I get to spend bunking with my brother — time I couldn't have even imagined asking the universe for.
(04/19/18 1:10am)
MIDDLEBURY — Located fifteen minutes north of Middlebury’s campus is a small farm called Treleven, where many Middlebury students have spent long nights. Why? For a process called lambing.
Annually, each night during a multi-week-long stretch, students leave the College and make their way to the farm, returning early the next morning in dirty shoes, fatigued, smelling and exhilarated. They spend the hours in the Treleven barn, keeping the farm’s flock of sheep company, watching the pregnant ewes—female sheep—and assisting when one goes into labor.
However, the story begins much earlier. Just over five decades ago, two Swarthmore College students headed West, stopping only when they reached the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. It was 1967 and Cheryl and Don Mitchell were chasing the Summer of Love. They were avid readers of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine preaching what Cheryl describes bluntly as, “that ultra purity” lifestyle. While at Swarthmore, Don was set on becoming a writer, Cheryl a high school English teacher, and they were growing up in a place where people experienced nature by “riding around and mowing the lawn and having a small yard.”
Despite this, and against all odds, hippies on the West Coast swept them up with the Back-to-the-Land Movement—a campaign to reinvigorate appreciation of nature and rejection of rampant consumerism—inspiring them to move back to the opposite coast and buy a farm. That farm is known today as Treleven.
Recruiting students to assist with lambing was Don’s idea, or as Cheryl described it, “Don’s wonderful gift to all of us.” When the couple moved to Vermont, they were young and without any farming experience. “We [were] not your prototypical family farm,” Cheryl said. “We had to work off the farm.”
Participating in the dairy industry is how many Vermont farms profit, but the Mitchells explained, “We knew we would never have the capital or wisdom to be dairy farmers.” They bought two sheep instead. The following year they expanded their flock to ten. They would shear the animals, drive the wool to Maine and have it spun into yarn for sale. However, this was not enough. “It’s very, very difficult to make a living with just the farm,” the Mitchells said.
So in 1984, Don got a job. He became a Middlebury professor and taught the class now known as “Contested Grounds”. Don found that discussion in this class always circled back to grappling with the construct of the idyllic family farm lifestyle, so eventually he decided to add a component to the syllabus: a night at Treleven during lambing season. He hoped the hands on experience would allow his students to complicate this myth themselves.
Though Don retired as a professor in 2009, the Mitchells have continued the annual lambing process with Middlebury students for the past nine years. Since Don first conceived of the idea, nearly a thousand students have spent a night in the barn. It was ironic; the mantra of the Back-to-the-Land Movement that led him to Vermont in the first place was something he was now, in a way, a tempting to deconstruct for new generations.
Indeed, the couple brought a young lamb to the lambing orientation they hold in Weybridge House, and over oohs and ahs of on-looking students, Cheryl provided a disclaimer: “It may happen. A lamb might die while you’re there. And that’s okay.”
Life at Treleven isn’t perfect, they insist, but it’s natural. Some of the young are even sold for meat. That doesn’t mean the farmers don’t connect with the animals. “I still don’t do it very well,” Cheryl admitted of her ability to cope with the death of a newborn. She explains that other aspects of her life, the non-farm related parts, have helped her along in this—and vice-versa.
Cheryl was a founder of the local Addison County Parent-Child Center, an organization dedicated to providing support for families. While there, she focused on a program that worked with children with serious disabilities of all sorts. Gradually, her two professions began seeping together.
“We would do everything we could to keep a lamb alive, that the mother knew wouldn’t make it,” she explained. Later, her parents moved onto the farm, and she was there as they passed away. It was after this loss that she began to see the lambing process—even when the lamb didn’t make it—as part of a larger process of life and nature, “something that’s bigger.”
Whether it was this revelation, Treleven’s roots in the wider Back-to-Land Movement or something else, the Mitchells approach their life and work through a holistic lens. On their fridge is a flyer titled: “Actions for the Earth.” Next to their front door is a white board with musings and deliberations. The farm is not merely a place for cultivation of all sorts. The Mitchells host camps for young children to learn about the environment, they welcome artists for retreats and residencies and they hire a summer intern through Middlebury College.
Cheryl and Don are uncertain whether they will continue lambing next year. While they do not want to end the tradition, they are aware that continuing to run it on such a scale could become too taxing. In the barn, alongside sheep and hay, is a shelf with a stack of journals dating back to before 1998. Each is filled with entries written by students, late at night or early in the morning, some before, and others after, ewes had given birth. Even if the Mitchells decide to move on from the job, it certainly won’t be forgotten.
(11/16/17 1:02am)
The Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life opened the Mosaic Interfaith House at the beginning of this school year. The house, a residential space intended for those committed to education through cultural exchange, strives to form and nurture a bonded community. Mosaic, located in the Porter House just off South Main Street, houses 14 students of different faith backgrounds including atheists, Muslims, Catholic and Protestant Christians, agnostics, Hindus, and Buddhists. According to the Scott Center, the students meet weekly to discuss the state of their community and program events. They also pick various holidays and rituals to observe together. The Interfaith House’s primary purpose is to provide a learning environment for its residents.
Varsha Vijaykumar ’20, who was raised in a Hindu household but now identifies as a spiritual atheist, expressed her desire to fight misconceptions of those who “do not necessarily agree with organized religion or believe in any supreme, universal force.” She said that through the Interfaith House she hopes to show that she doesn’t have to “believe in a God” in order to “live just as intentionally and kindly as others.”
Dean of Spiritual and Religious Life Mark Orten, who helped found the Interfaith House, emphasized the need to remember religious diversity, which is forgotten in many conversations of inclusivity.
“If we are to live fully in the world, much less to effect real and positive change, we must be more knowledgeable, more literate, about where these frameworks come from and what lies beneath them,” he said. Orten hopes the house will help raise awareness of secular philosophies and minor religious communities.
While Orten stressed the importance of discussion and spreading awareness, he believes that experiential learning is a vital step towards understanding the role of spiritualism in our world. Rather than merely debating and advocating for the effects of religious diversity, the residents of Mosaic live it. Toni Cross ’18 described how students in the house encounter “opportunities for divergence, conversation, and finally, reconciliation” in their day-to-day activities. This idea of reconciliation, of having to mediate differences, makes the Interfaith House a unique residential space on campus. Cross cites the most tangible example of this as, “how to use the kitchen space in a way that’s cognizant of people’s dietary practices.”
Vijaykumar agreed, explaining that when her housemates worked through this issue, she felt they respected her and her needs. She called for this active sharing of cultures in order to distance ourselves from the stereotypes we have embedded within us “in a time in our history in which people are being denigrated simply because of their beliefs.”
The creation of the Interfaith House comes on the heels of several acts of hate speech against religious minorities on campus and in the wider Middlebury community. Following the presidential election last year, one student found a derogatory message on her dorm room whiteboard. A week later, a swastika was drawn on the door of the Havurah House in Middlebury. Cross feels these cases crystallized the need to celebrate and honor the campus’ religious diversity. “[It] felt like it was more important than ever to show that peaceful, intentional coexistence is possible and preferable,” she said.
Dean Orten affirmed that Mosaic is, by nature, a space for “cooperation” and “communication.” As Cross said, the diverse residents must be “interested in different faiths” and still “be flexible about living with other people whose values might be different than theirs.”
“[The students living in the Interfaith House are] just a group of people living together who talk with God, or don’t talk with God, in different ways,” Cross said.
Vijaykumar described how her housemates take care of each other by making tea, baking treats, and getting caffeinated candies for each other ahead of a long night.
“[Living in this house] is an experience that I wish everyone at Middlebury could take part in,” she said. “The sense of community that I feel with all of these people that come from backgrounds completely different from mine proves that love and respect erase all of the walls and borders that otherwise separate us. No matter how cheesy that sounds, it’s still completely true.”