A World Woven From Goodwill Stories.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Late day Sun breaks over a rain-wet, swollen-bud world woven from millions of untold goodwill stories. In the Farm kitchen, we’ve been peeling potatoes and parsnips for hours, slicing onions and sliding trays into the brick oven alongside a bright fire of maple logs cut and stacked decades ago by a man we will never meet. Dried thyme sprigs—simmered, steeped and strained—add depth to the broth. We stir in the muscles of pigs, raised and killed by the neighbors, kissed with Maple smoke and sliced thin. Garlic from last summer’s harvest, rough-chopped. Then, once the pot returns to a boil, an overflowing bowl of the first spring greenery: Nettle, Spinach, Dandelion and Scallion, washed and chopped. The hot broth graciously receives the incoming guests. Then the fire-roasted roots, some starchy and some sweet. Flame-browed onions. Just enough salt. A pinch of dried cayenne. That’s it.

JaeCub pulls cornbread from the oven while others, just in from the gardens, move the dinner table out of the kitchen, where, just a few hours ago we lit a fire to ward off the chill. The group won’t fit indoors tonight.

Sun pours through leaf-bare limbs of ancient Sugar Maples, warming a long table laid with brightly-colored cloths, places set with bowls and spoons. Jackets and sweaters, damp from sweat and rain, slide from work-weary shoulders. By the time everyone washes hands and sits down, the season has turned.

In this bright moment, we are alive, together. There is food to eat. I close my eyes. Waves of generosity break across my face. Ben invites a blessing. I join hands with my neighbors, right and left. “Repeat after me”, he says.

For the dark soil that cradles the seed.

For the rains that bring forth the green leaves.

For the warm sun that ripens the fruit.

For the animals whose lives allow ours.

For the hunger that brings us together.

For the kind folks gathered round the table.

For the fabric we weave with these words.

For all this goodness and mercy.

We give thanks.

Blessings on the meal.

Welcome to Sand River Community Farm, home of this weekly Peasantry School Newsletter. My name is Adam. I graze sheep and cattle, make soup and tell stories. I write from a piece of land who is actively attempting to wriggle herself free from the thought structures of modernity. She does this, in part, by insisting that every bit of Life arising from her body be offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. That includes these stories.

The only requirements are (1) that you arrive hungry and (2) that we all walk away from the table willing to practice keeping one another in mind. Once price tags have been removed, keeping one another in mind is the only survival strategy left. The gift of Life is absolutely not free, but that distinction has proven terribly difficult to describe using the rational language of the marketplace. Stories seem to be more effective.

Once, after a brief tour of the Farm, a gray-haired man more than two decades my senior reflected back what he’d just seen and heard. Ecological grief in spades. A willingness to allow the generosity of the past to press persistently upon my imagination. He said to me:

There were people who lived in this very place just a few generations ago whose ecological footprint was almost immeasurably small compared to ours today, but it seems that we would rather cover the world in solar panels than imagine there’s anything worth remembering about how they knew how to live.

Part of that ‘knowing how to live’ surely included making soup from spring-dug parsnips, wild nettles and dandelion greens, plus pork and potatoes received as gifts from the neighbors. But there is something a bit deeper and more painful to be unearthed in the observation.

I squirm a bit every time I hear someone use the word “gift economy” to describe the work of non-market, neighborly farming and feeding that I’ve fallen in love with. I first noticed this discomfort years ago, when I heard someone refer to me as a visionary. Revisionary seemed a more apt description, or rememberer.

I began telling people that I studied gift economics during my visits with the oldest farmers I could find. If I sat with them long enough, they would eventually tell me a story about the time Old Sally broke her leg. What happened to her? Well, the neighbors figured out how to keep her cows milked, fed and mucked until she healed up. No insurance policy. No hours tracked. No barter tab. No money exchanged hands. It wasn’t a gift economy. It was a neighborhood. Overlapping neighborhoods formed a village.

Woven together, the people’s practiced capacity to keep one another in mind formed a local culture. Hence: “For the fabric we weave with these words”.

While the generosity of Old Sally’s neighbors might astonish us today, I find it even more interesting to picture the scene from Old Sally’s perspective. She had to sit there and graciously receive many hundreds of hours of help that she would not be allowed to pay back. Old Sally had to need help, and ask for help, as did Old Hank, Bob, Patience, Gertrude and so on. Otherwise, no neighborhood and no village.

Here at the Farm, we practice this by not charging for the food and not offering to pay anyone for their labor. It’s not comfortable, but the practice does appear to yield some remarkable results.

What’s more, Old Sally had to sit on her porch and watch the passing thunderclouds shower the gardens and pastures with life-giving rain—again and again. She had to take a knee each spring at the foot of Old Maple, whose sweet forgiveness she had done nothing to earn. And then there was the golden butter that graced her table—the distillation of a green Life that still, stubbornly included her. She hadn’t the luxury to forget that she was being kept in mind—and kept alive—by others. Old Sally had to suffer the indignity of gratitude every single day. And then figure out how to live.

How on earth did she do it? If neighboring is a verb, its action is to grant life to others. Having been raised within a neighboring culture, and therefore neighbored as a matter of course, Old Sally’s way of moving through the world may have led to the persistent, even problematic accumulation of gratitude in those around her. In that scenario, breaking her leg served as a pressure release valve. It may not have been comfortable for Old Sally to receive hundreds of hours of help, but at least she could imagine herself as worthy of their care and concern. I’m afraid that sense of worthiness is going extinct in our time.

Every time I tell the Old Sally story, I imagine what might happen to a people after generations spent pursuing the self-reliant story of the marketplace: earning, owning and consuming a life. My parents are in their eighties now, which means they are being forced to consider the final chapter of a modern life. I have heard them say, again and again, “We don’t want to be a burden.” That’s what appears to remain once the façade of self-reliance falls away: burden. My parents are not alone in this dread. Culture loss isn’t personal, but the empty space left in its wake can sure feel that way. I’m not sure the term ‘gift economy’ can shoulder the weight of the conditions from which we long to heal.

Last week I did something that I almost never do: I tried to hire a contractor. To my surprise, the excavator called me back a few hours later. He would stop by the following day. We are renovating a small guesthouse at the Farm and have determined that pushing fill up around the foundation will most effectively keep it from deteriorating. The project involves some urgency; in such scenarios spending money can move things along.

As the excavator walks toward me in the sunny Farm driveway, he appears to be in his early fifties. I notice right away a receptivity to the Farm’s food-gifting story. I explain the way the land was freed from the market by way of a single half-million-dollar gift. He tells me that he’s got some family land in the next town over, where he grew up and raises his five daughters. He would like to get a Farm going there, a place for the kids to reconnect with the land. “What you’re doing here, this is important,” he says to me.

Half an hour after we’ve met for the first time, I ask him if he will write up an estimate for the work he’s proposed: 1.5 days on site, two or three truckloads of sand. “We are putting together a spring budget request,” I explain, “so numbers are helpful”.

“No, I’m not going to give you an estimate,” he replies, “because I’m not going to charge you for the work”.

“We could at least pay for the loads of sand,” I say. The words are out of my mouth before I have the wherewithal to hold them back. Old habits die hard.

“Maybe,” he says with a smile. “We’ll see.”

I hadn’t told him the Old Sally story, but even so he’s got his own version for me.

“You’ll love meeting my mother,” he says. “She spends all of her time doing things for others. She grew up in the world you’re describing.” I insist on sending him home with frozen quarts of the Farm’s tomato soup. He doesn’t resist, even for one second.

It isn’t a gift economy, exactly. It’s more like a neighborhood. Overlapping neighborhoods form a village. A willingness to receive allows the gift to stay in motion. It isn’t comfortable, but it does appear to yield remarkable results. The land underwrites the whole, generous arrangement. Old people speak on behalf of the land. They testify to a life spent shouldering the weight of gratitude—the proper human burden. People younger than them listen and learn.

Thank you for leaning in close.

With care,

Adam