Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
I extend my thanks this morning to the hundred-odd folks who have chipped in to cover my personal stipend request of $6k/year by becoming patrons of this newsletter. Please don’t send any more money just now. As you’ll hear if you read the story below, I am wondering how others farmers could be similarly sustained. I also extend my deepest regards to the folks who took an hour to join the Peasantry School Community Call last Thursday. Regular monthly calls are in the works, thanks to Katherine and Jeremy’s initiative. Look for an invitation in next week’s newsletter. The articulations of longing and courage I heard on last week’s call stirred me deeply, and the following story gives voice to those stirrings.
Many thanks to you for your companionship in a troubled time. —Adam
An Ecology of Selves
Winter mutes and muffles. Into the spareness some step forward boldly. Crows carry a starkness of sound and color across the sky, cartwheeling silhouettes in the morning gray. They are fond of the Farm compost pile right now, covered only by a thin layer of snow. No frost makes for easy digging. It is the only birdfeeder at the Farm. Lamb fat from the last butchering seems a particular favorite, as well as the leftover noodles in the kitchen scraps dumped by a neighbor. A few days of warm rain brought the smell of moist soil back into the air before North Wind returned to crust the ground. The aroma of earth has receded now. On the breeze another odor steps forward boldly. Skunk stirred from slumber on those warm days, leaving his marks--muddy tracks in the melting snow, and a sharp tang in the back of my throat and nostrils as I bike down the road to the Creamery to check email.
The human ecology in the winter North Country hunkers, hibernates, and hugs close to the stoves. I smell wood smoke on the air, the telltale aroma of human life in this season. Summer’s heat and light stored in dried bones of forest, released into the house by fire. Every morning I strike a match and speak this sequence of goodwill aloud, in awe, again. My words ride the drafting smoke into the still-dark morning. My nose finds fragrant pot roast in the slow cooker once I cross the threshold into Ashlee and Steven’s house, where I visit for a while. Winter means crossing thresholds, our doors closed to keep the warmth in, and the chill out.
Last Thursday I biked this same route to the Creamery—the land of milk and internet—to gather with some twenty folks from near and far in an odorless online meeting room for the first ever Peasantry School Community Call. No fragrant pot roast, no puff of smoke from the woodstove, no sour breath or tang of skunk, no spread of germs, no cartwheeling crows. Just pixilated human faces and voices. And yet a conviviality emerged in the following hour that bears honoring here. I am grateful to have been alive for that time, with others, imagining a recovering ecology of selves.
The opening round invites names and spoken longings. A name to go with a face, a voice to suggest lips, tongue and lungs, a word of longing to reveal a tugging heart. The tenderness of the storytelling drops in quickly as Jeremy names the love affair that sits at the heart of his neighborly efforts. Gardening has swept him off his feet. This dance with soil, sunlight, rainfall and plants. The produce that he pulls from the earth. He is aswirl in the telling of it, allowing strangers to bear witness. This is something that could happen more often within modernity. We could name our loves aloud in each other’s presence, and acknowledge the sharp pain of loss. If grief and love are two sides of the same hand, Jeremy’s story extends an open palm in greeting.
I am struck as I listen by a simple, profound thought. The gifting work on whose behalf I plead here in this newsletter begins with a love affair like the one he’s naming. A wild love for an earth that makes human hearts and tongues, lips and lungs, and stories. The work he describes—approaching his neighbors and inviting them to grow food with him—aims to plant the human story back into the local earth, as food for the home ground.
He tells of the terrible vulnerability he feels in the approach, the knocking on doors, the asking to cross thresholds, the blurring of property boundaries. The tenderness of making invitations into relationship. He is reflecting my days back to me. I am deeply stirred by his candor. “This is way outside of my comfort zone,” he says at one point. Amen to that.
“Worthiness is a big part of this work,” I say. “You have to imagine that you might be worth your neighbor’s time in order to extend the invitation. They have to be willing to take a risk on you.”
I didn’t know we would arrive at this point in less than an hour.
The next day I ask a friend about her sister’s family. Two kids, both parents work, no grandparents nearby. Exhausted all the time. Standard fare these days. Mom and Dad long for a night out without the kids, just a concert or a play. It seems hard to justify hiring babysitters. My friend asks, “Do you have anyone who might be willing to spend a few hours with the kids so you can go out?” Her sister replies, “I don’t want to burden any of them. They are all so busy.”
This is the modern story that Jeremy is leaning into by inviting his neighbors to grow food with him. He’s all the way in Australia, at the far end of the Western empire. It sounds like the conditions aren’t all that different there. The soils and rainfall patterns, yes, but not the grocery store offerings, the isolation in the neighborhoods, the epidemic busyness, or the tenderness of the work of cultural repair.
Last night, awake in the dark, I pull an old favorite from the shelf. If you haven’t read David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, please do. The first chapter alone will reconfigure your imagination permanently. The paragraph I’m looking for begins with this sentence: “The traditional or tribal shaman….acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth.” I found this book six years ago. On my third or fourth read through I noticed that I had begun replacing the word “tribal shaman” with “farmer.” A farmer could act as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field. A farmer could ensure an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth. I began to wonder what happens to a society that abandons these cultural functions altogether, training consumers instead. My friend’s sister tells her on the phone, “I don’t want to burden any of my friends or neighbors. They are all so busy.”
The book continues, “By [the farmer’s] constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and ‘journeys,’ he ensures that the relation between the human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it--not just materially, but with prayers, propitiations and praise.” Let’s replace “rituals, trances, ecstasies and ‘journeys’” with “love affair.” We stretch our attention toward the ones with whom we are falling in love.
The farmer I began imagine as I read isn’t a Green Peace activist. She isn’t chained to a tree before a line of approaching dozers. She is madly in love with an earth that is madly in love with humans, and so this farmer’s love affair is not species specific. Humans must eat in order to sing, dance and pray, and the earth longs to hear these songs of human conviviality. Humans must eat in order to become deep practitioners of gratitude.
This farmer labors on behalf of humans and the earth at once by sensing how much the landscape can sustain, by learning “too much,” and then by translating her love affair with nonhumans into human language. This farmer is a healer of relationships. David continues:
And it is only as a result of her continual engagement with the animate powers that dwell beyond the human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within the community. The sorcerer [or farmer] derives her ability to cure ailments from her more continuous practice of “healing” or balancing the community’s relation to the surrounding land.
When this farmer delivers supper to the village square, the townspeople ask her how she could be more deeply sustained and encouraged. They ask her about the appropriate portion size. They ask her to help them figure out how to live.
Clearly we don’t cultivate farmers of this kind today. The tight grasp of the market pushes them away from the work at an alarming rate. Rising land prices mean many young people must give up on the possibility before they can even begin. And yet I’ve met hundreds of humans with these relational proclivities. If you could have seen the trance that overtook Jeremy when he began to talk about gardening you would know what I mean. Walk with me out to the sheep flock and you will see something similar. Humans who can’t hold themselves back from falling in love with the earth will necessarily be baptized in the grief of our time. They are the canaries in the coal mine. The book continues:
Western industrial society, of course, with its massive scale and hugely centralized economy, can hardly be seen in relation to any particular landscape or ecosystem; the more-than-human ecology with which it is directly engaged is the biosphere itself. Sadly, our…relation to the earthly biosphere can in no way be considered a reciprocal or balanced one: with thousands of acres of nonregenerating forests disappearing every hour, and hundreds of our fellow species becoming extinct as a result of our civilization’s excesses, we can hardly be surprised by the amount of epidemic illness in our culture, from increasingly severe immune dysfunctions and cancers, to widespread psychological distress, depression and ever more frequent suicides, to the accelerating number of household killings and mass murders committed for no apparent reason by otherwise coherent individuals.
I keep coming back to the following thought: how we are with one another will be no different than how we are with them—nonhumans, the givers of life we call God or Gods, the no-longer-living and the not-yet-born. David writes, most gorgeously, “We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”
That sentence would make a decent vision statement for The Peasantry School. A statement of mission would describe the work of dreaming these farmers back into the world by remembering the old village medicine women and men who performed their seasonal rituals of renewal out at the edge of town. The labor of re-membering would involve the whole village, seated around the feasting table, voices hoarse from so much singing, becoming full-bellied practitioners of gratitude. No longer consumers but participants in a dance of thanksgiving and restraint. Participants in a culture that feeds its home ground—the repository of its past and the wellspring of the lives to come.
Thank you for dreaming with me. The day dawns windless and gray. Squirrels dance and chase in the meadow beyond the window pane. Crow caw-calls from the compost pile. Wood smoke disperses slowly into a snowflake-studded sky. The sheep await their morning scratches. The world invites us to fall in love, again, each morning anew. Don’t hold yourself back. In the falling we might just remember how to catch one another, and then to dance.
With care, Adam
I would have loved to be in on this call. I’m hoping that time allows me to be present the next time. I’m going to check out David’s book! Thank you Adam for creating a shift in what community means ❤️
very sad to have missed the call! had a business planning meeting with a close friend at the same and didn’t want to cancel on her as she was giving me the gift of her knowledge! Looking forward to the next one.