A Prayer for Something Forgotten

Plus a video from the archives.

The image above links to a video made in 2020 about the distinction between “food as a gift” and “free food.”

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Last week I wrote a love poem to Rain.  It was at once a thank you note, a prayer and a song of courtship to another who I wished to call closer.  Rain arrived in soaking waves through the week, and the Farm now wears the sparkle of rehydration.  Birdsong quilts the clear morning air.  Grasses break droughted dormancy, extending green leaves skyward.  Slugs paint glossy slime trails across waxy purple Cabbage leaves.  Mosquitos rejoice in moisture’s return.  Sand River flows full and clear along the foot of the Farm.   

Acknowledging limits and then deciding to cancel the July 2^nd Feast has brought both agony and relief this week.  The next Gratitude Feast will be the first Sunday in August, 8/6.  We will continue to host weekly Farm Frolics—work days—rain or shine at 3pm.  Increasingly, we will be working together in the kitchen preserving food to feed our neighbors through the winter months.  Sunday Farm Frolics conclude with a shared meal at 6pm. 

Urgent projects include forming the organization that will shepherd the work here at the Farm.  The organization to which I will pass the title for these 113 magical acres placed in my hands as a gift a year and a half ago.  The first steps: to draft vision and mission statements and then a website to articulate the work to the world.  As you might guess, I don’t take such word-craft lightly. 

War-like words often creep into the language surrounding both social and ecological activism.  Phrases like “fighting climate change” or “a war on poverty,” wash over me as waves of sadness.  Who are we are fighting—our indulgent or ungenerous selves?  Will we ever be done fighting, or does our activism only find fuel in the presence of an enemy? 

As I look for inspiration in the websites of local non-profit organizations, it strikes me that a vision or mission statement, at its best, serves as a distillation of longing.  A concise prayer.  A song of courtship for that which we wish to draw closer to us.

I began the work of food gifting at Brush Brook Community Farm, where we hosted weekly Sunday Work Days for the first twenty months of the Pandemic.  Each week, my companion Ava gathered us into a circle and opened with the following prayer:

Here at Brush Brook Community Farm we long to inspire, or re-member, mutually sustaining relationships, both human-to-human, and human-to-all that is not human.  We do this by working with many landowners and neighbors to graze animals on unused fields, grow and gleaning vegetables, bake bread, make soup and offer all of this food as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. 

I never grew tired of hearing these words.  Perhaps that’s a sign that we had formulated a decent prayer.  To my ear, this love song is less a call to arms than a single candle lit in vigil for the possibility that it hasn’t always been this way—for us, and therefore for them.  I hear it as a song of courtship for something forgotten.  For a culture asunder.  For a village dis-membered.  For a lonesome self adrift on a threadbare raft in a gathering storm. 

Describing the work that might take place here, on the sandy shore of Sand River, begins as an act of memory.  In this Newsletter, I will recount the story of finding the words for that Brush Brook prayer.  But first, this week’s invitations and requests:

The next Gratitude Feast will be Sunday 8/6 at 4pm.  All are invited.  The food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.

We have a few more spots in the upcoming Gratitude Feast Immersions, the first offering of the Peasantry School.  You can read about the School HERE. 

Sunday Farm Frolics at 3pm.  Join us for an afternoon of neighborly work in the gardens, fields and kitchen.  Stay for supper and a song at 6pm.  A main dish from the Farm will be served, and we welcome your additions of sides and desserts. 

Feast Supplies:  We are still looking for large ceramic of metal serving platters, a few more 10” cast iron pans, and table clots 9-11’ long for the Feast tables. 

A Prayer for Something Forgotten

I kept just two pregnant Cows—Meredith and Rosalyn—from the large herd I managed at the 200-acre Farm that I co-owned and then walked away from.  I wasn’t walking toward something just then, but rather taking some needed distance from the tight grasp the market had placed upon my imagination.  Farming for business for a decade had asked me to fall out of love with the place I lived and worked, with the animals and plants I ate, with the humans I was laboring to feed.  My heart simply couldn’t bear it any longer.  Brush Brook Community Farm slipped out of the crack in that broken heart. 

Our first community event would be a weekend-long effort to mow hay by hand, using traditional scythes.  A young man arrived early, and as he introduced himself to me I could tell immediately that he was unique.  I explained to him that the Farm offered everything as a gift.  He labored for hours with us in the hot Sun over the next two days.  Phillip was a student at a University-based farmer training program nearby.  On my bread delivery route the following week, I left an extra loaf of bread there for him.  A few weeks later I heard that he had left the program, and the state, suddenly.  I had no contact information for him.  Phillip had disappeared into thin air. 

Brush Brook Community Farm was growing quickly that Summer, and I knew the project needed a clearly articulated vision statement.  I planned to go sit on the shoulder of the Mountain that watched over the Farm, to fast for a few days and listen for words—a wilderness vigil.  Just before I set out, a package arrived in the mail.  A book from Phillip.  My father spells his name the same way, so it took me a moment to realize that the book had arrived as a gift from this mysterious young man.  I read the following words on the back cover:

We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature.  We seem to have no idea that the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and the world, might be the cause of our trouble.  Our trouble nonetheless exists, is severe, and is getting worse.  Instead of settled husbanders of cherished home places, we have become the willing parasites of any and every place, destroying the source and substance of our lives, as parasites invariably do.  (Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush, 2017)

The dictionary defines the act of sustaining in this way: upholding the course of, enduring without failing, or bearing the weight of.  Forgetting how to live in mutually sustaining relationships leads to the dismemberment of the social and ecological fabric, “destroying the source and substance of our lives.”  I have carried Wendell’s heartbreakingly beautiful words with me ever since. 

A year and a half later the Virus arrived and brought a halt to Brush Brook Community Farm’s monthly Gratitude Feasts.  I stopped selling bread and began offering the loaves I baked each week, alongside the Farm’s homemade Soups, at a weekly Gift Stand.  I wrote up a budget request and asked the community to sustain me and the growing Farm Team.  This they did for twenty months.  

Long lines at the Gift Stand betrayed the fear and scarcity of those early Pandemic days.  We were attempting to create a medicinal fount of abundance.  Some people drove from several towns away to ask for ten or even twenty loaves of bread to distribute in their neighborhood.  People wondered how our “free bread project” was going, and whether we thought it was going to work out.  One day, when again the bread was all gone halfway through our weekly gift distribution, I turned to Ava and said, “It feels like a feeding frenzy.” 

Can you picture a pile of household belongings set by the side of the road with a FREE sign?  Can you picture how we interact with stuff that is labeled FREE?  Ava helped me to craft a card to go into each bread bag the following week.  We labored over the words. 

Brush Brook Community Farm

This food is our gift.

It is offered without charge to

anyone who is hungry for any reason.

This is not ‘FREE’ food.

It is not value-less.

It emerges from immense and careful labors.

This food extends an invitation

to trade

transaction for relationship,

commerce for community.

Would you join this Circle of Eaters?

There is no barrier to entry.

Rather, a responsibility

to consider:

What are my gifts?

And how might I join hands with others

to sustain the whole?

Many people told us the following week that the message had brought them to tears.  And we noticed that fewer people asked for dozens of loaves.  In fact, the bread numbers at the Stand stabilized after the card went out. 

From that point on, we more often had to convince people to take a second loaf amid their steady protestations, “Surely someone else needs it more than me.”  Can you imagine how different things would be, both socially and ecologically, if we carried that level of concern with us down the aisle at the grocery store, the clothing store, or any other place of commerce?  Imagine if nonhumans were included in the list of somebodies to be considered before filling our shopping baskets?  The line about the food emerging from immense and careful labors refers mostly to the work of nonhumans—soil, sunlight and rainfall and their plant, animal and fungal progeny.

Many weeks we ended up with leftover soup and bread.  It turns out that inviting people to join a Circle of Eaters isn’t quite as popular as handing out free food.  In fact, a Circle of Eaters has so many strings attached it begins to look like a spider web, a dreamcatcher, or just a healthy ecosystem.  Village membership, as far as I can tell, was less a list of freedoms than a bundle of entanglements and responsibilities.    

This Circle of Eaters image entered my imagination some decades prior, when I heard the following story.  Several of the early farms in this country that called their project CSA—for community supported agriculture—offered a radical proposal.  These farmers labored over their projections and came up with a detailed budget proposal, which included numbers for farmer salaries.  They invited their neighbors to form a circle and consider the budget, pledging different amounts of money until the budget was covered.  This process sometimes took several rounds.  Once the budget was covered, the farmers worked as hard as they could to grow food.  Almost immediately, however, the CSA movement aligned itself with market norms and most farms now sell memberships at a fixed price, save a few low-income or work-share opportunities. 

Imagine the courage it took for those farmers to invite such a village-making initiative, and the courage it took for those consumers to set down their allegiances to fairness and freedom and participate in such a subversive cultural activity.  Imagine joining hands with your neighbors and saying, “We all live here and we all eat food.  How might we eat in such a way that ensures mutual sustenance, for humans and nonhumans both?” 

I often say, once you’ve heard something you can’t un-hear it.  That’s what this story about the origins of the CSA movement did to me, and I’ve been enchanted by the possibility ever since: A Circle of Eaters in search of an ethic of mutual sustenance.  It sounds to me like a project of re-membering. 

Thank you for reading.  Perhaps we’ll see you at one of the upcoming Circle of Eaters meetings.  We call them Sunday Farm Frolics and monthly Gratitude Feasts.

With great care,

Adam