by Devon Kehler of Hundredfold Farm, USA
August 20, 2050
4:37-7:45 p.m.
Dear Simone,
As our eldest, most conversational grandchild, I’ve chosen to write to you as I sit here regulating my body temperature in the coolest place I can find: the root cellar of our community’s Common House. The heat has been sweltering this month. Thankfully, I can access a reptilian self I developed 30 years ago when I lived in the Sonoran desert region of Arizona.
Speaking of reptiles, do you remember when you first saw a snake, Simone? It was during your first visit to Hundredfold Farm (HFF). You were playing hide-and-seek in a rocky area; I was watching the game unfold from afar. Unbeknownst to you, an eastern rat snake was sheltering in between the rocks. The snake was startled by your game and released the distasteful smell it’s known to do in the presence of predators. As soon as you saw it, you yelled: “Big, stinky, worm!!” I realized then that you’d never seen a snake. You’ve lived in Alaska since infancy and were using your frame of reference of ice worms to make sense of the snake encounter.
Thinking back to your first visit to HFF draws into sharp relief how differently we’ve experienced the world, Simone. My childhood held summertime visits with my grandparents that were full of story-telling. Those visits helped me understand my place within an ancestral lineage. But we’ve only had 3 visits together in the 13 years you’ve been on earth. Even with our regular video calls, the closeness that grows only through being able to sit on the same soil at the same time breathing the same air is not available to us. I worry what it will mean for your sense of ancestral connection to have spent so little time with me and ZeZe.
And so this letter. I want to share stories that give you a sense of where you come from–stories that tell you how we became the people you know us to be as your paternal grandparents.
These stories also need you.
There is one story that definitely needs you: the story of how we survived the passage through “the great fall” of 2035 at HFF. I often think of what we lived through in 2035 when I’m in this root cellar. ZeZe and I spent many nights down here during the last half of that year. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Our great fall survival story begins about 13 years prior to the fall itself. Stories like to live inside other stories. This story is no different.
From 2022-2024, HFF participated in the Global Ecovillage Network’s Resilience Project alongside 19 other communities from around the world. We recognized the need to understand ourselves and our community’s systems through the framework of the multiple crises arising from accelerating climate degradation. Importantly, the project surfaced the need to train our collective attention on HFF’s social and economic dimensions.
In late 2024, I honored the lessons learned from the Resilience Project and shifted my communal labor towards bolstering our social networking with other communities. Simultaneously, Sandra, a fellow community member, was teaching me loom weaving. Sandra worked with me weekly for a year until I reached some semblance of basic proficiency. By late 2025 I was ready to use my burgeoning weaving skills as a vehicle for addressing our community’s resilience goal of improved networking and partnering.
I started researching and contacting nearby communities focused on regenerative agriculture and textile production. A community in Nova Scotia that produced linen fabrics responded to my outreach. Patricia was my community contact from the very first inquiries I made. She invited me for a visit and I spent two beautiful weeks making a pilgrimage along the eastern seaboard. We became good friends, mutually energized by shared interests in relocalizing our community economies and protecting our community’s commons. It helped that Patricia was just 2 years older than me, too. HFF’s demographics were shifting during the 2020’s; by 2025, over half of the community was 65+. Patricia provided a level of social interaction that was largely unavailable to me at HFF during that time.
In 2030, I had developed enough skill to start making clothes. That year, I began making an annual pilgrimage to Nova Scotia to get my supply of fabric. Surprisingly, my fellow community members took interest in my textile forays. I was making tailored clothes for 5 people at HFF by 2030.
There was also another milestone moment around then. In 2031, we were able to employ many of our members in a cooperative business called The Joy and Rest Collective (JRC). This name was framed by our relationship to de-growth and re-localizing as both joyful and restful acts. We hosted a range of events and became well-known for an educational series called “Trans/planting” where we featured
trans folks with skills in regenerative agriculture and arts.
I tell ya, Simone, getting the JRC off the ground was anything but joyful or restful. It took 8 years to get the right people, energy, and resources in place. The true tipping point was in 2027: several members left HFF because the monthly household dues reached $400. Those who left were beloved; we suffered from their departure. Only then did we get serious about running a business that could pay for the expenses of our commons. As it so often does, it took a major loss to disrupt the status quo.
Then, in April of 2035, most of what we’d considered the cornerstones of industrialized living in a late capitalist society began to collapse for real—in a way no bank bailout or governmental maneuvering could salvage. The U.S. empire fell… this time, with an industrialized twist. Little did I know that the Joy and Rest Collective, the weaving, the Canadian networking—all of it was cemented “just in time” in relationship to the timing of the fall.
HFF was more prepared than most. Still, we faced significant difficulties navigating the psychological, emotional, and physical variables tied to consumer goods and services going offline (literally and figuratively).
By June of 2035, medication access became an especially big issue. Three of my HFF friends—Jonas, Onyx, and Lenny—were managing diabetes through medication when the great fall began. But we had no reserve supplies of insulin or suitable substitutes. Why had we not stock-piled medications for those whose biochemistry required medicines? As a death doula, I should have foreseen this sort of need. I knew how uncontrolled blood sugar levels can lead to fatal diabetic coma. And yet, we didn’t take any preparatory steps to support people with managing diabetes in the event of wide-scale supply chain interruptions.
Those 3 friends all dropped into a diabetic coma. Crushingly, they died within 72 hours of each other. Our burial rituals were poignant, albeit simple. Most of us were struggling to regulate our systems, particularly with caffeine withdrawal. Typically, ZeZe and I would’ve implemented more elaborate rituals than we ultimately did because we were experiencing debilitating headaches from caffeine withdrawal. Since caffeinated beverages aren’t widely available anymore, I know what I’m saying sounds sort of… historical. Back then, caffeine fueled how many people in the U.S. worked and lived. Any gas station or convenience store greeted you with rows of offerings. HFF was no different; the majority of us ingested caffeine daily. ZeZe and I drank coffee everyday— and had been for decades—by the time coffee stopped being imported in June 2035. ZeZe and I were fully aware of our dependence. We just didn’t have the will to wean ourselves off until there was no choice. It’s better to make decisions when there’s some degree of choice, Simone.
All of this to show: we hadn’t adequately planned or prepared for how we would live without the biochemical interventions that mass-produced medicines and imported foods provide.
These memories make me angry. We could certainly see this form of civilizational collapse as a possible future. It was palpable back when we were involved in the Resilience Project. Strangely, planning for biochemical resilience just didn’t surface during that work.
How did we not anticipate the need for budgeting money and time for training someone in herbalism? Or natural compounding? Or behavioral therapy? Or survival training specific to the fall of empires?
It was civil turmoil, however, that created the conditions for a turning point at HFF. As the summer of 2035 rolled on, armed vigilantes began roaming the mountainsides, causing us to take a proactive stance on community safety by setting up a night watch. Those not on night watch started sleeping in the root
cellar. It just kind of happened. There was no meeting, no consensus process. People simply began choosing communal sleeping arrangements.
Music played an important role in regulating our nervous systems during those frightening months. It started on July 4th. On July 4th, we gathered for sunrise and sunset rituals that were based around freedom songs from the 1960s. We felt so uplifted and calm from singing together and letting music hold us that we continued these rituals for the next 30 days. We greeted each day and welcomed each nightfall in song. 30 nervous system re-setting song rituals, sung mostly a cappella. We needed to re/ learn what our voices sounded like after experiencing such massive stress.
The following month, we set up a poetry sharing rotation where we read aloud together each morning and evening. Whereas the singing showed us how we could sonically soothe ourselves enough to not individually overload our own social systems, the poetry helped us find words for articulating a creative plan for transitioning out of crisis management mode and into strategic survival planning. The poems I brought to the group dealt with chaos. Speaking words that named chaos as a tool, as productive, as malleable, helped get me out of bed. Stress was pushing each of us to the brink of personal collapse in our own ways. We all needed to believe that we could touch chaos without being consumed by it.
Our community connection to poetry runs precedes 2035, though. Our community’s name, Hundredfold Farm, originates from a Chinese poem composed around 400 B.C.E. My favorite stanza is this:
“By sowing seed once, you will harvest once.
By planting a tree, you will harvest tenfold.
By educating the people, you will harvest one hundredfold.”
Shaping. Sowing. Teaching. Harvesting. This is what we’ve done since the community formed, Simone.
This is what we continue to do, although in a radically reduced manner.
Everything is scaled down now, post-fall. The massive metropoles, emblems of progress during the 21st century, are deserted–uninhabitable from biological contamination. We did foresee that much coming in 2019 with what was then called the “novel” coronavirus. ZeZe and I moved to HFF because we knew cities, as they had developed, were unlikely to survive the intensification of climate degradation. Our middle-class socio-economic positioning, along with the privileges we carry from racialized whiteness, enabled us to leave on our own terms, rather than in a state of duress, or under government evacuation orders.
The way we live now is more pleasurable, more beautiful, and more interconnected with the earth. We have more time; we have cleaner air; we have greater quietude. The great fall was loud. Now it’s quiet, in a way that quivers with life healing itself.
Well, the time has come for me to start closing this letter. The sun has set and I’m sufficiently cooled down from being in the root cellar for so long. I’m going to bed early tonight. I promised the crops claimed by this recent heat wave that I’d do a burial ritual for them at dawn tomorrow. ZeZe and I learned this lesson from the Sonoran desert: rise with the sun in the summer. Dawn is just about the only time to do anything outside without inducing any further heat stress—both on the human body and the land.
I hope you’ll find meaning in the stories I’ve shared with you, Simone. Stories are part of your inheritance. You will inherit all that we leave undone as much as you will inherit the physical manifestations of what we have done. Inheritances come in many forms. Remember that, Simone.
Love you to the stars and back,
DeeDee
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