Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
With a Gratitude Feast this coming Sunday, the list of preparations crowds the writing table. What’s more, I’ve been asked to contribute to a remarkable conversation this evening, accompanying Petra and Matthew of Fruition Seeds as they describe to their customer-community a transition away from the market economy. They will stop selling seeds and begin offering the many varieties of vegetable and flowers they tend as a gift to anyone who gardens for any reason. They embark on an agri/cultural experiment many times the scale of the work here at Sand River Community Farm. I am shaking with excitement, but also a tinge of responsibility.
Petra and Matthew have cited this newsletter as one piece of the kindling in the signal fire they lit last Friday when they pressed send on an email to their nation-wide listserv. I can already feel the warmth of that fire from many hundreds of miles away.
I still remember how one of my neighbors back in Vermont described the community food-gifting practices as they were just beginning to emerge there. Carl said this into a circle of neighbors gathered just a few weeks before the Pandemic’s arrival. He couldn’t have known how appropriate it would end up being. In response to the question, “What have you seen that’s been of service?” Carl said, “The Farm is like an infectious virus, but once you’ve caught it you come down with a case of kindness.”
In deep admiration for the infectious agent that Petra and Matthew are releasing into the world, I offer this piece of writing, one of the draft prefaces for the book I’ve been trying to write on non-market, neighborly farming and feeding.
Until next week,
Adam
Radical Hospitality
High summer has arrived here at the Farm. It is almost dawn. These hours carry a pregnant stillness that renders words easier to hear. Half Moon, high above the house, does little to disturb the inky black. Without warning, the air fills with song. Some of the singers I know by name: Song Sparrow, Mourning Dove, Hermit Thrush and Crow, even Rooster in the distance. Others, nameless, ask only for my deepening attention.
Picture a mother cat carrying one of her babes by the scruff of the neck. Now imagine that you are the kitten and the mother is the Earth herself. This is a story about a bone-deep longing to be picked up and carried home. To be claimed by a specific stretch of river or a mossy, wooded slope. By a meadow and its seasonal songbirds. By a flock of sheep or a fertile garden bed.
The society in which I was raised taught me to become autonomous and well-defended, self-reliant, self-made, self-possessed and self-directed. That’s a whole lot of self to carry around. Nearing forty, I staggered under the weight of those lonely instructions.
Picture the stance of that kitten as he waits to be gathered in. I noticed that I was heavily defended against being claimed in the very way I longed for, with layers of body armor protecting the soft nape of my neck. Disarming, or dis-armoring, would involve, most uncomfortably, bending my head in prayer. If the word prayer raises the hairs on the back of your neck—as it did mine—that might be a sure sign that we have stirred a slumbering giant. Or, to stay with the metaphor: the dog locked in the basement.
Prayer begins by speaking not about, but directly to, another who stands only partially revealed before you. Landscapes are like that—mysterious and slow to reveal themselves. Prayer shifts the other from the third to the second person, initiating a conversation with a partner who is not likely to reply in English words. If that prayer courts an intimate relationship, one must begin to hold their plans—for the day, the year, a whole life—loosely. A simple spoken prayer can beget a process of learning to listen through the cracks. This is what I mean by bending my head, by exposing the scruff of my neck. By asking to be claimed.
Places have teeth, sharp enough to draw blood. Getting claimed isn’t going to be painless. This story is full of pain and beauty both, and the effort of its telling stirs in me an awe-struck gratitude for the willingness of this blue, turning world to grab ahold of human people and usher them into the big story—and I don’t mean the one you can hear on the news. Rather, the story that slips in through the open window just before dawn.
I can’t promise that the same thing will happen to you, but I will do my best to tell you what happened to one heartbroken European-American kid from the suburbs who bent his head and began to pray.
㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃
Throughout my adult life, I have labored to serve food to humans—by farming, baking and cooking. But extending hospitality to others seems to me now to be the easy part. Asking the nonhuman neighbors for food and shelter is an entirely different story, and decidedly uncivilized. Pleading for the gift of continued life is almost unthinkable within the walls of the way things are.
Learning to receive hospitality begins by letting go of the reins.
A guest must cultivate keen skills of observation—of the household etiquettes, the resident patterns of speech, the appropriate table manners. A guest eats, graciously, whatever the host has served, and develops a hundred different ways to say thank you. “A guest” is what becomes of “the self” who knocked on the door and crossed the threshold just hours earlier, if the host has done their job well. Enchantment is at play. Landscapes extend hospitality to humans in this way. From what I can tell, this type of courtship is one thing they know how to do very well.
Learning to be a guest begins by noticing all the work going on behind the scenes, all that was prepared ahead of one’s arrival. By bearing witness to the outrageous goodwill of which we are on the receiving end every single day–the goodwill we call being alive–and allowing oneself to be weighed down by the magnitude of the gift. Not in guilt, but in awe, and inspiration. And then in gratitude. A grateful guest carries that burden by learning how to say thank you in a hundred ways—by saying thank you in the way they live.
The work of the host is the articulation of reckless generosity, to proceed through the day with their guest always in mind. The guest might be a neighbor or a stranger, whose arrival is expected or not. The presentation of radical hospitality, however, can appear graceful, elegant, even effortless. Like birdsong at dawn.
㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃
With ever-increasing efficiency, modern humans are dismembering the ecologies within which we live, destroying our only home. What if our landscapes never stopped hosting us with their signature generosities? What if we simply forgot how to be guests? Stopped allowing ourselves to be claimed?
But for a place—or landscape—to become a home, it must include other human people who have been similarly claimed. There’s an old-fashioned word for the dwelling-place I am imagining: the village. But attempting to assemble a modern village becomes mighty complicated once you involve other similarly unclaimed, humans. This story will include a good number of those complications.
It is the following possibility that this story will pursue, perhaps relentlessly at times: that owning and selling things amounts to a form of preemptive self-defense against the assumed ungenerosity of the other, the neighbor. Receiving a gift invites us to remember our deeply human capacity to extend goodwill. Gifts invite consumers to become sustainers.
This story does not aspire to overthrow industrial market capitalism, or convince everyone to begin a gift economy in their neighborhood. Instead, the suggestion here is a bit more modest: that we might begin to remember how to be guests on the Earth by practicing hospitality with other humans. By giving and receiving the body of the world as gifts.
Environmentalism can come across as a long list of transgressions to feel guilty about, a list of comforts that we should give up. A project of misanthropic austerity. Alternatively, we are handed a ticket for a greenwashed, techno-utopian fantasy future. Either way, these proposals emerge from a conversation between humans about the Earth. Perhaps it’s no surprise the environmental movement has done little to slow the rising tide of losses.
At some point, I began to imagine a form of environmental activism that seeks to animate the conversation by asking nonhumans directly how we could go about healing the grievous wounds inflicted by our kind upon theirs.
Radical Hospitality is my attempt to translate what I heard once I started asking, and listening.
㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃ ㇃
My gaze drifts out through the window pane once more. Sun has risen from beyond the rippled eastern ridge. The morning meadow blushes with the white spray of Bedstraw, the bold yellow of Black-Eyed Susan, the purples and pinks of Vetch and Clover, and the ruddy stems of Red Fescue. Rising high above the rest, seed heads of Canary Grass bow and bend in a warm morning breeze.
It seems to me that they have found a hundred ways to say thank you. Their way of living is their contribution to the song of the place. Their way of living is their way of being at home. Or, more simply: their way of living is their home.
In a few weeks’ time, the sheep flock will graze this wildflower meadow, taking its wild song into themselves, growing fat and flesh, bone and wool. Sometime after that, we will sharpen the knives and turn well-grown lambs into humans. Sun-and-rain-become-meadow-become-lamb flesh will be offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. None of them have asked to get paid. They’ve asked instead, to be kept in mind. And in heart. Remembering how to do that will be no small task, but it might be a whole lot more delicious than we can imagine.
This gift of a glimpse into the book you are creating is moving… I’m so glad you’re writing your journey to share. My heart is being sustained and inspired by your words. Thank you Adam ♥️