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Naomi's Internship, Week 1: The Tryon Farm Institute

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning with the Tryon Farm.

I got home yesterday evening from my first formal week as an intern for Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana. So far, I've been working in the Institute office, helping in the preparation for The Birds + The Bees Festival, which TFI is putting on during the week of June 22nd in honor of National Pollinator Week. In addition to these and a few other duties, I've also been learning the land and figuring out what place I have in it.

The Birds + The Bees Festival, which will consist of some public, educational-entertainment events and some private educational events for children in school and foster home groups, is by no means an inexpensive endeavor for the Insitute, so the bulk of my work this week went to the task of finding sponsors for the events, making cold calls and sending emails to members of the local business community. Talk about working outside my comfort zone! As my best friend will tell you, I'm a hard woman to get on the telephone, so it took me a little psyching-up to call total strangers and eloquently request monetary support. But all in all, I managed to not make too much of a fool of myself on the phone, and helped to get three sponsors on board with the event. One of these sponsors specifically mentioned that she wanted to contribute because of her preexisting concern for the bee population crisis. The Birds + The Bees events will include the screening of a documentary on that very topic, as well as hands-on workshops in beekeeping and cultivating pollinator-friendly gardens. For more information, see the poster below: 

I think the experience of confronting and conquering my phone-phobia provided me with a good lesson that I hope will follow me for the rest of my internship at Tryon and, perhaps, my professional career in the green construction field: not everything is easy or immediately enjoyable for you, but when you know you're working for a good cause, even those tasks for which you may not be initially suited have meaning, and keeping that in mind makes them easy and enjoyable. Even talking on the phone can be Arendtian, philosophically-rewarding action when it is toward a considered end.

Besides securing sponsorships, I also made plans for upcoming projects. On Tuesday I'll be putting in a large pumpkin patch on TFI land near the back of a large meadow, and there are endless considerations--water, humane deer-repellent--to be made. I also spoke with a fellow intern from the IIT Architecture program, with whom I'll be working on the construction of a bird-watching blind in that same meadow. I'm excited to work in these different areas of Tryon's life, and to approach the work of conservation from several angles.

I also began reading one of the books which has been lent to me for my edification from my various Tryon mentors, but I'll confess that I haven't made much headway. I'm around a hundred pages from the end of War & Peace and its story and characters run through my mind throughout the day. It's wonderful to feel this way about a book again--the way I felt as a child, reading--but I really should get down to my work reading, both for Tryon and for my upcoming Shimer senior thesis. Hopefully I'll finish my foray into the Napoleonic Wars soon and knuckle down.

In conclusion, here is a picture of a chicken. I'm afraid that I don't know this chicken yet--or rooster--but there's plenty of time for that, I suppose.

 

A love letter to libraries

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

We heavy readers all have those moments.  You know, the ones when we realize the book we're reading is so good that we just have to tell our significant other/sister/brother/friend/hairstylist/feline friend about it?  I'm having that moment right now, and even better, the book is relevant to my internship!  So I decided, since my internship hasn't started yet, I would tell you all about it, faithful blog readers.

The book I'm currently reading is called The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, and at this point it is mostly just getting me even more excited about my internship.  Ostensibly it chronicles the completion of Manguel's own personal library of over 30,000 volumes, in his home located in the Poitou-Charentes region of France.  In writing about that, though, he also tells of a great many different kinds of libraries, and different ways of looking at them, from the library as mythology, to the library as home, to the library as island.  He chronicles the mysterious demise of that fabled colossal library of old, The Library of Alexandria, the crafting of the Laurentian Library by Michaelangelo, and even of the creation of the Dewey Decimal System.  It is both personal memoir and something of a history of libraries, though by no account does it attempt to be extensive; I think of it right now as a love letter to libraries.

Ths is a bit of a long quote, but it is a story I particularly enjoyed and wanted to share.  Recounting a story told in Oudane, Mauritania (a country located in the northern tip of West Africa), Manguel writes:

[A] beggar [....], early in the fifteenth century, appeared at the city gates, famished and dressed in tatters.  He was taken into the mosque, fed and clothed, but no one succeeded in making him reveal his name or the city of his birth.  All the man seemed to care about was spending long hours among the books of Oudane, reading in complete silence.  Finally , after several months of such mysterious behavior, the imam lost his patience and said to the beggar, "It is written that he who keeps knowledge to himself shall not be made welcome in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive.  Do you wish such a fate for the books who have served you so well?"  Hearing this, the man opened his mouth and gave a lengthy and mavellous commentary on the sacred text he happened to have before him.  The imam realized that his visitor was a certain celebrated scholar who, despairing of the deafness of the world, had promised to hold his tongue until he came to a place where learning was truly honored.  (Manguel, 167)

I have found this book particularly inspiring to read before the internship I am about to embark upon, and I think many Shimerians will also enjoy it.  I also own, but have not read yet, his A History of Reading, which is more relevant to Shimerians in general.