A Bundle of Relationships
Brightly-colored nasturtium flowers adorned the Feast platters on Sunday, so you can imagine my joy at receiving this gorgeous drawing from Annie this morning. I send my thanks to the dozens of people who pulled in a common rhythm to pull off another remarkable Gratitude Feast. If you’d like to help these stories find their way out into the world, you can give them a push from behind by pressing the heart button a the top of the email, leaving a comment or sharing this post.
This work is offered with no barrier to access, which means that it leans heavily upon your willingness to push and pull.
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
The Feast came and went under a string of hot, heavy days. Corn-growing, tomato-ripening, river-dipping days. Short nights of blessed, restful, reprieve. How would we remember to greet the evening’s arrival if the day hadn’t pressed upon our sweat-slick skin? The woodstove fills with junk mail awaiting the return of morning chill. One sip of hot tea brings sweat beads to the brow, even now, well before dawn. They call these the dog days. Perhaps we become more animal in the heat. I say thank goodness. If the days didn’t press upon us, how would we remember that we are alive in a world not of our making and not of our choosing? I say thank goodness. A goodness for which some use the name God.
As the pursuit of comfort and personal preference becomes a way of life, might we lose more than our capacity to give thanks for all the times we didn’t get our way? Might we lose track of the benediction song? The way the world sings to us in glistening sweat beads and fleeting moments of blessed, evening reprieve? In the buzz of mosquitos at the widow screen and the shadow cast by an afternoon thundercloud? In a bug-bitten boredom that invites a practice of listening through the cracks? In the chorus of birdsong that patiently and persistently calls us home?
The Feast came and went under a string of visitors carrying stories from afar. Stories and smartphones. The arrival of guests here at the farm helps to keep the membrane porous, and the meaning of the work in view.
Enrique’s mother thought it would be good for him to get away from the city for a week at the Farm. To his immense credit, he said yes. That, or he simply didn’t protest with adequate and timely vigor. Either way, he rolled up the driveway with his mom a week ago Tuesday, just in time for Barn Choir. They would stay for five full days. A Gratitude Feast Immersion at The Peasantry School. The name sounds a bit grandiose when I write them out like that, but there it is. Everything needs a name, and “Farm Boot Camp” didn’t quite fit.
Stubbornly refusing to sell anything means that spending five days at the Farm has no price tag. But it also isn’t free.
Almost immediately, upon their disentanglement from the marketplace two and a half years ago, this land and its many-voiced denizens began issuing invitations. No, that’s not quite right. They’d never agreed to be put up for sale. “Being freed from the market” refers less to a change in their behavior than a subtle shift in the quality of attention on the part of the humans who passed among them. It’s less that they began issuing invitations and more that their age-old petitions became more audible. Their morning prayer began filtering through the cracks.
Eat from the body of this place. Drink from this cup. Become “that portion of the landscape that temporarily abides in humans form.”1 There is a dent in the world called “you”—keep that dent it in mind by keeping it in view. Trade personal preference for willing participation. Roll up your sleeves. Relationships require a lot of honest work. That work might begin to feel like home.
Here at Sand River Community Farm, the food stubbornly isn’t for sale. The food isn’t for sale because the land isn’t for sale. The land isn’t for sale because one human person decided to dig a hole and bury five hundred thousand digital tick-marks in the ground—a treasure chest for the generations to come. That act of courage invites any- and every-one to listen for the acts of courage calling out to them. Two years into the experiment, it appears that composted money can increase the fertility of depleted soils, and the capacity of the human heart.
The food isn’t for sale, but it also isn’t free. Partaking bestows a bundle of relationships. Carrying those relationships requires a lot of honest work. That work might begin to feel like home.
Folding a fourteen-year-old from the city into the work of the Farm presented me with a steep learning curve. Our cultural references began by crossing like ships in the night. My enthusiasm for birdsfoot trefoil and alsike clover changed his flat facial expression not at all. His stories of junior-high school band, while interesting, had no obvious folder in my mental filing cabinet. I began to wonder whether different branches of the English language should be categorized as distinct dialects. Each time he retreated to his phone I wondered whether he’d rather be elsewhere.
But slowly and steadily, we began to find our way towards one another. Can you picture a Venn diagram? Perhaps the two circles in the image have to bump into one another several times before they begin to overlap. Shared life experience doesn’t seem to grow on a timescale marked by minutes or even hours.
One day, I placed a scythe in his hands, knowing full well that the Farm has no insurance policy of any kind. His mother had made it clear to me that she was not a helicopter parent, that safety was not her top priority. Learning was her priority. If you haven’t held a scythe, picture a two-foot-long razor blade attached to the end of a broom handle. There’s a reason we fear the grim reaper; the possibility of imminent injury must become a trustworthy companion in order to build a relationship with this remarkable tool. Enrique’s initial enthusiasm for the humbling, technique-intensive work of mowing grass by hand wore off within an hour, but I got the sense that my trust in him paved the way for what was to come.
Down at the river the next day, while his mom rested back at the cabin, Enrique asked me to teach him how to dive. We’d taken the canoe out to our favorite swimming cliffs. After watching me dive from a rock shelf a few feet above the water, he told me that he longed to learn how to hold his body in that way. I never imagined diving as a part of the Peasantry School curriculum, but here we were. He’d left his smartphone safely back at the shore.
At dinner that evening the three of us sat quietly, listening for a few words of gratitude from the day. Enrique said, “I am grateful for Adam teaching me how to dive today.” Our Venn diagram was beginning to overlap.
On their final day, as Enrique’s mother cleaned the guest cabin to prepare it for the next set of guests, beginning with my mother, he came to me with an empty jar in his hand. “I’d like to make a fresh flower bouquet for the guest cabin. Do you think your mother would like that?”
A few hours later, guests began arriving for the Gratitude Feast, the largest number yet. Imagine the sound of a hundred-twenty people saying, in unison, “For all this goodness and beauty, we give thanks. Blessings on the meal!” The heat of that many human bodies raised the temperature in the Feast Barn significantly. Drips of sweat added seasoning to the already-well-salted food. After supper, Enrique took to the dance floor with gusto. He didn’t miss a song until, finally, it was time for them to go. Baseball camp the next morning made for a late-night drive.
The next morning, I called Enrique’s mother to make sure they’d made it home. I also wanted to let her know that her son’s presence was already being missed here. She had a story for me. After walking away from the Barn dance, climbing into the car, and beginning the drive home, he turned to her and asked, “Mom, have your eyebrows ever hurt from smiling so much and having so much fun? My eyebrows hurt.”
The food isn’t for sale, but it also isn’t free. Partaking bestows a bundle of relationships. Carrying those relationships requires a lot of honest work. If we’re lucky, that work might begin to feel like home.
With care,
Adam
May all our eyebrows hurt 😍💕
Humbling, patience, beauty, goodness, joy… thank you for sharing these (and many more) blessings with us Adam.