REFLECTIONS

FROM THE FIELD: WINTER BARN DANCE

1/31/26: Yesterday morning, I was eating breakfast in the cramped kitchen of my friend’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, listening to the typical cityscape of car horns and machinery; tonight, my car glides down the riverlike country highway that leads to La Farge, Wisconsin, a town with a population of about 700. The sun is setting; some snow still lingers on the hillsides, although this past week has been unseasonably warm. On the edges of the woods are innumerable deer, with their dark gray coats of late winter, and black turkeys, perusing the sleeping cornfields. Few other cars are on the road; the only sounds are the wind and the quiet mutterings of the radio. The contrast in place between one day and the next, to put it mildly, is jarring. Arriving at the La Farge Community Center, an unassuming brick building on a quiet block, marks the end of around 27 hours of travel, from New York City back to the Driftless. I’ve been away from my little community in Wisconsin for over a month, and I can’t help but think there’s something that feels fitting about tumbling right out of the car and into a humid room full of fiddle music and sweaty, dancing bodies—sort of like a bucket of cold water to the face to wake you up from a long sleep.

Setup for the barn dance is almost done by the time I arrive; tables and chairs have been set out in preparation for the potluck dinner, there’s some minor fuss upstairs over whether an online payment option will be needed for participants paying at the door.

Folks begin to arrive almost exactly as the clock strikes five, bearing a parade of casseroles and hot dishes. The attendees range from infants to elders, with practically every age in between solidly represented as well. A contingent of young adult students from Thoreau College are huddled in a cluster, learning to fold paper cranes. Children run around the legs of their parents, who stand around catching up on winter news before the dance begins. The band, an infamous little group known as the Farm Market Buskers, is tuning and warming up in the back corner; twangs, plucks, and murmurs echo through the large room which will soon be filled with music.

The energy in the room is palpable, and this is before the moving even begins, which will undoubtedly churn the comfortably warm air up to sauna levels. It’s a feeling of conviviality, of coming together against the cold, inhospitable night outside, of reveling in the simple pleasures of warmth and good company. Looking around the room, I am struck by the knowledge that people have been doing this same thing for centuries, even millennia, often in buildings much less tight against the wind and cold, feasting together not on food bought from grocery stores and cooked on gas stoves, but scraped together from dwindling stores of fall crops. For most of human history in cold climates, this time of year has signified the nearing of the end of great scarcity and hardship, the glimmer of light at the end of long darkness.

Then I get the heads up from the caller: the band is about to start. I go downstairs to tell the folks still lingering around their dinners, and then dash back up to take my place in the circle. Conversations dwindle to an end, wild children are hushed, anticipatory eyes turn towards the band—and the first song begins.

Barn Dance photos taken by Armando Jose Jenkins-Vazquez

FACES OF THE FOLK SCHOOL: MEGAN EBERHARDT

Will Young: Could you tell me your story of first getting interested in astronomy?

Megan Eberhardt: It was coming across the person that became my teacher and mentor. That's how I learned, a one-on-one mentorship that involved other topics as well. She taught stargazing at a women's herbal symposium in Northern California, and a friend of mine that I met here in the Midwest used to live out there, and she was like, Oh, you gotta check this person out. [My mentor] makes a version of a Mayan calendar that she publishes one each year, and that's actually how I got looped in. Eventually I made it out to this herbal symposium and got to be out under the stars with her. I was just totally blown away. A couple years later I went back and then we met. I told her that I've been following her calendar and loving it. So I started helping her in her life, I moved to California and slowly we stepped into an old time apprenticeship; she was my mentor and I served her for nine years. That meant going with her to every event, working in her home on her business… It was more than just learning the stars. She taught herself [about the stars] through her own interest years prior.

WY: So was it ever anything you anticipated might become such a big part of your life?

ME: No, I had no idea. I learned so many amazing lessons through her, but who I was as a younger person really changed when I moved to China at 23 years old. I found out who I was apart from just my culture; it was like stripping all that away. I feel like it made room in my being for things I never was exposed to as a child, things that were not around me in my small town. I can think of threads now, like the time that I was traveling in Vietnam and got out of the bus somewhere in the dark and almost fell over at the stars. But it never connected that that's what I would do. It just so happened to be that this mentor of mine was into the stars; really, I was drawn to her as a being, and the stars were my way in, but it was an apprenticeship on presence, and becoming a human, and nature connection, and so many things. Stargazing is a part of nature connection, which was in my life already a deep love. It really is a part of knowing the world you live in, and how the Earth interacts with beyond the Earth.

WY: That type of apprenticeship is sort of a lost relationship in our culture, right?

ME: Right, and I think what's lost for young people is service. I didn't get a degree [from my apprenticeship], there was no quick thing I was in for with her, but something in my being knew that I wasn't developed, that I didn't have a lot to offer the world, and this person 20 years older than me was the most interesting and amusing person I've ever come across. I served her for nine years, and most people just want something right away. So there's something that I think is lost in devoting, and doing hard work, or work that doesn't pay you out right away, or give you a great social media presence.

WY: What’s a story that comes to mind about your mentor?

ME: So many, so many. Well, somehow, amazing things would just happen around her. Her way of stargazing, which has been transmitted to me, is that it's a conversation. So she's in relationship, and she's conversing with the star. She's not like, Look at that thing way out there. She’s like, Hello, Jupiter! Hello, Moon! Good to see you again! So one night we were stargazing, and we were all in this one spot in her property facing west, just watching the stars of the west come out, and a great blue heron flew across between us and the stars. They're so big, and they fly so slow, and it’s unusual to see them flying at night. And then the heron circled over our heads and landed in a redwood tree 10 meters above our heads stayed there and stargazed with us. When I talked to my mentor about it later, she said, When we saw the heron, I just invited it to join us with my conscience. There have been many other times where I witnessed her do things like that. It's just unforgettable.

WY: What do you enjoy the most about teaching stargazing?

ME: That it’s actually so simple. Where it reaches people is like, Oh my gosh, this has been here all along, and I could know this. I've gotten feedback more than once, that a lot of people say, I've never felt more here on Earth after learning with you. The wonderment is a part of that; it’s just fun! It's full of wonder, it's joyful. I can give something so simple that can change people forever and lead them on the path of their own journey with knowing the stars.

WY: You also work as a community song leader. How do you see the interplay between those two lines of work? 

ME:  Both of these arts feel like simple, ancient ways that people once lived, that have been only recently forgotten. Two hundred years ago, we had to sing if we wanted to hear music, so part of being human meant using your voice to make song. Now, 85% of people say, I don't sing. It’s these things that are so simple, and in some way, low-tech; to look at the stars, anybody can do it wherever. Same with singing a song. I heard a story about the Bushmen of South Africa, that when the author Laurens van der Post came and lived among them, there was a moment where he was talking with them and they were like, Wait a minute. You can't hear the stars singing right now? To imagine that indigenous people could hear the stars singing… So there have been riddles and mystical experiences that have pointed me towards a connection between singing and stars, but they actually developed as things in my life independently of each other.

WY: Why is folk education important to you?

ME: My life was changed from alternative ways of learning that weren't in the government sponsored school system. Everything that I've become has happened outside of those institutions, including university. It feels really important to give people a chance to have their gifts sparked out of them, gifts that already live in them, perhaps dormant, because the culture couldn't spark them.

WY: Well, I feel I can’t end without asking, do you have a favorite constellation?

ME: Well, every season there's a different one. Right now in my mind, I’m oscillating between Cygnus the Swan… the myths of the Waterbird flying across the Milky Way river, and how it teaches people about migration, wow. And then, the Great Bear, the Big Dipper. Everybody knows it, but it has layers and layers and layers of story in the way it pops up in all different places. It exists in North America, Siberia, Asia, Europe, all different cultures have this [constellation] as a bear. Not everywhere, but the bear motif lives all around the world.

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