Calling Songs

After a week away.

Sheep In Ink, by Annie Bingham.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Swollen stream, roiling river.  Wind-shaken and rain-wetted place.  Dusking cricket meadow, pulsing.  Well-walked field rises and falls underfoot.  Familiar flock and herd.  I stretch the fences tight and call them into fresh paddocks.  My calling songs remained unsung for nearly a week.  They’ll take scratches tomorrow.  Full bellies before affection, thank you very much.  I missed you, too, my loves.  More than you might know.  More than you might ever know. 

When you live from a particular patch of ground, or at least labor and long in that direction, leaving for a while can bring all sorts of things into view, into the ears and nose, and onto the tongue.  Places have specific ways of holding the last light of late evening, or gathering rain drops into long lines on tip-tap metal roof panels.  Places carry specific tastes and smells.  They emerge as recognizable patterns of fellowship and conversation. 

Places sing calling songs.  Just now, they might be missing their people.  We might learn that by allowing ourselves to miss them.  In our bone-deep missing, and in our willingness to be missed, we might begin to hear our human-specific calling songs. 

Back home, light switched on, I pour a glass of water and open the book left for me on the table while I was away:

Much of the world now appears as a store or website stocked with products ready for purchase.  In part, this is because an enormous amount of effort and a massive infrastructure consisting of mines, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and transportation lines have been devoted to commodifying places and creatures, and then making them available to people to buy them.  It has also become the primary means through which people construct their identities and measure their success.¹

As the story goes, we left the garden for the lifeless and well-lit aisles of the marketplace.  As the story goes, they’ll be better off without us.  Or, at the very least, they have no need for us: God(s), the dead and not-yet-born, animals, plants, soils and increasingly-unpredictable weather patterns.  As the story goes, the world doesn’t long for us or our particular human calling songs. 

The logics of the store, the consumer, and shopping hang together and reinforce one another.

As the story goes, life became a logical affair.  Reason-able even.  Own-able, profit-able.  As the story goes, life was placed behind a locked gate and put up for sale.  As the story goes, there’s nothing to do about all that now.  Oh well.  What’s for supper?

As the story goes, we forgot that the work of being human is to hear ourselves being called to.  And then stumble our way toward a response.  They aren’t going to sound pretty right off, these modern human calling songs.  That’s what practice is for.  This newsletter is one of my practices.  Story, syntax and rhythm each play a role.  As do sorrow and longing. 

Places sing calling songs.  Just now, they are missing their people.  We could allow ourselves to miss them in return.  In our bone-deep missing, and in our willingness to remember ourselves as worthy of being missed, we could begin to hear our calling songs.

After two weeks away from the writing table, Sun rises noticeably later from beyond the wood’s edge—a rippled line of black silhouettes against the blue break of day.  We’ve slipped past the peak of high summer and begun our initial descent toward the long winter dark. 

Last week, out in the world, I got to meet a few folks who regularly read these letters.  They asked me to know that to be the case, and urged me to carry on.  I am so immensely grateful to hear from a few people, every once in a while, with reports that these written labors offer sustenance in places I may never meet. 

After two weeks away from the writing table, the stories are stacking up in long lines.  Some have already headed off in search of other places to land.  I’d like to set a course here for the next couple of months at the Peasantry School.  First, there’s housekeeping to do.  Last August, I asked this readership to sustain me with a gift of six thousand dollars.  I called it a personal stipend request.  A collection of you sent in about nine thousand. 

Transparency is extremely important to me, and so I’d like to send out a spreadsheet of expenses before I update the budget request for the next year.  The work of learning to live from relationships rather than money sits at the center of this Peasantry School project.  I think of it as a practice of homemaking.  As such, a house meeting is in order.  Look for that in the weeks to come.

Also, I’d like to walk through some of the root practices that animate the work here at the Farm.  Some have names such as: trading personal preference for willing participation, reckless generosity, voluntary impoverishment, and radical hospitality. 

These are terribly humbling practices that offer to cast our cultural poverty into high relief.  They aren’t personal growth mantras or solutions or pain relievers.  As Stephen Jenkinson said to a group of us gathered in the teaching hall last week, the invitation isn’t to feel better, but rather to feel more.  Take, for example, Norman Wirzba’s suggestion that consuming places and creatures has become the primary way by which modern people construct their identities and measure their success. 

If we allow the sorrow of that statement to settle among us, we might strike up different conversations.  Once we allow for the possibility that it hasn’t always been this way, we might slip the unbearably-tight skin of a story in which the world has no interest in having us around.  It can be desperately lonely to wonder about these things in isolation.  Perhaps that’s why you’re here.  That’s why I’m here.    

For now, I’d like you to know that I am immensely honored to be granted access to your listening ears and your beating heart.  I don’t take the responsibility lightly, not for a second.  In fact, I spend a good bit of time worrying that I’ll never live up to the task.  Thank you for leaning in close as I stumble to remember my calling song. 

I couldn’t be more grateful.

Adam

1. Norman Wirzba: This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World.