Drawing Circles

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Salute' Vittorio!
When I was a child, I enjoyed drawing circles in the sand.  I still enjoy drawing circles, but now I draw larger and more interwoven circles. 
In our garden, I draw circles of fertility with a moving sheet-mulch compost method that builds rich soil by feeding worms, and I paint over this soil with large brushes made of the seed stalks of greens and vegetables we grow and eat.  In the Spring, soon after the last snow has melted from the garden, tiny green leaves find their way through the matt of straw and leaves I spread over my seeds last Autumn, all of them edible.  Our salad bowls are daily filled from this small garden, from May through October.  There are several months of excess enough to share with neighbors, but not enough to preserve for the Winter.  Our garden is only four meters by six, and also has a large apricot tree I planted there in 1984, a plum tree I planted just six years ago, now in it's third season of fruit production, and a lawn just big enough to pitch a tent.  The rest is for growing nutritious food, but we need more than just this to sustain us.
Inspired by frequent reports of unsafe food coming from our super-industrial food manufacturing system, and by your example, Vittorio and Caroline, of an occasional visit to your local winery to refill your large glass jugs with local, delicious house wines, direct from the vintner.  I have followed your example, and sought out growers of vegetables and greens, raisers of chickens, turkeys, lamb, cattle, even yak.  They are expensive, sometimes nearly twice the cost of supermarket meat, but the taste of the local meat and vegetables is so superior, I am quite satiated after eating half a measure of it.  Still, the cost is prohibitive, but I have found a way around this:
I trade with these farmers my homebrewed beer, in limited edition batches, each labeled with special graphics I design, print and apply.  I have learned to brew well, and have found sources for high quality grains and hops at reasonable costs, so I have come to brew rich, flavorful beers in the 8% alcohol range and champagne ciders in the 13% range.  My favorite rancher serves his bottles of my beer only when he has guests for dinner, and he relishes the presentation of it, about which I've heard from his guests.  I make a big deal about him also, when I serve a yak roast from his ranch to a table full of close friends.  More circles.
My business partner Jerome, has greenhouses and gardens full of greens and vegetables all summer long, but much of this he feeds to a constant stream of interns and students, and twice yearly the permaculture design certification courses, when dozens of people will be camped around his half-hectare hillside forest garden, all sustaining themselves from the food he grows.  When they have all gone away, and Autumn is upon us, Jerome has excess greens, root vegetables and fruit to share with me, in exchange for the bread I have been baking and giving him all Summer, when my own garden sustained me.  Jerome is the source for a good share of our Winter vegetables, and another circle I have drawn.
I fell in love with rustic European breads first in your loft on Wooster Street, and again when I went with Jan to Paris in 1978.  A year after that, we moved to Colorado, and there was no source for artisan bread.  Everything available here then was factory-bread, lifeless.  I did determine to learn how to bake my own bread, and as my daughters will tell you, I succeeded very well when they were growing up, and my loaves made our house a gathering place for our daughters and their friends, allowing us a coveted view into the lives of our town's children, and the feeling that we really had a large family at times, with intertwining circles among the families of our children's friends.
Right about when our daughters asked me to please reduce my bread baking, because they were becoming weight-conscious teenagers, the first commercial artisan bread baker opened in Basalt.  It was just a few months later, January of 1999, that I began brewing beer, and buying my loaves from the baker.  When that baker went out of business five years later, there was barely a brief time lapse before another baker moved in, and life seemed back to normal, for another four years before the second one gave up.  With a one week warning before door-closing day, I ordered twenty loaves of my favorite breads to freeze, because the manager told me they had no prospective bakers to follow them, and the equipment would be sold.  "Now what?" I pondered.
The old 1940's gas stove in our kitchen had been giving us trouble baking pies, taking two hours to finish.  Inspired by a potential new romance with bread and pie baking, we bought a new stove, with five gas burners on top, and two electric ovens below, one large and one small.  It wasn't long before I had created a new bread yeast culture, bought two 23-kilo bags of organic white bread flour and whole wheat, cut some marble slabs to fit the large oven, and was baking once a week.  When I began trading with Jerome for his greenhouse greens, it was with my bread, because he doesn't drink beer.
Now I'm baking twice a week, trading beer and bread for fresh roasted coffee beans, locally made bars of soap, and locally raised and cultured goat cheese, in addition to the meat and eggs I described earlier.  The circles are all interweaving together now.
Suddenly the collapse of global financial markets doesn't seem like such a life-changing calamity, if I am grounded in a community, exchanging services and raising foods to exchange with each other, in a sort of "local gift economy".
The simple act of planting a seed, nurturing its growth and harvesting its fruits, seems to me a good metaphor for a good life.  Every kindness given, every seed planted, bears fruit later.

Ciao, Vittorio.