Civilizational Disobedience

Before I jump into this week’s story, I would like to share some heartbreak with you. Much of my work of food gifting has been informed by my meetings with old people over the years, and particularly old farmers. One of those luminous meetings took place last winter, with organic farmer Chuck Cox. The stories filled two newsletters, The Old Farmer-Man in Tweed, and Village Mindedness. Last week I described the time Old Sally broke her leg and all her neighbors figured out how to get her cows milked until her leg healed in What Do You Do? A few days after I sent that one out, I received an email from a young farmer letting me know that the Cox family Farm, called Tuckaway, experienced a devastating barn fire last weekend. Miraculously, the nearby family home survived. I was heartened to hear that goodwill is pouring in, but there is still another $15,000 left to fulfill the family’s plea for financial support. You can read about the fire and make a financial gift here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/tuckaway-farm-fire-recovery

A Japanese saw and a dovetail joint in the old barn here, where we are rebuilding the hay floor in preparation for a lively Feast and Barn Dance season.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Four years ago, nearly to the day, I stopped defending myself against the ungenerosity of other humans.  The Gift Stand opened the first Friday of April 2020, two weeks into the pandemic. 

The scene is wild.  Snow fills the air and begins to blanket the greening hayfield next to the bakery where cars pull in well ahead of the announced start time.  Neighbors, unsure how far apart to stand, form a long, hyphenated line out the drive and down the side of the paved road.  When they finally get up to the Stand, they want to know what this is going to mean and how to make out their checks.  “I am unwilling to accept money at this time,” I say.  “Please receive the bread as a gift.” 

The wooden boxes, as they empty of fresh loaves, fill with cards, chocolates, homemade herbal hand lotions and immune boosting potions, hand-sewn masks, a bottle of red wine, and even home-canned tomato sauce.  It is a madhouse of uncharted social etiquette; I remember those first two hours at the Stand as some of the most beautiful I had yet known in my forty years.  Tears flowed for many of us on that day, and I can feel them rising again this morning. 

The bread, just a hundred loaves, lasted only an hour.  The second hour would be for visiting—speaking face to face, neighbor-to-neighbor, as wet early-April Snow landed on our shoulders.  The Gift Stand had been born into the world. 

It seemed to me that people, myself included, came to the Gift stand grasping something tightly in each hand.  In one hand hunger.  In the other fear.  Into the first hand I placed a loaf of bread.  Into the other hand I placed a second loaf of bread, and asked them to drop it off at a neighbor’s house on the way home.  Only by loosening my grasp on what I thought was mine did my own hunger and fear begin to subside. 

If I had accepted people’s financial gifts right off, our interactions would have molded themselves to what we had known.  Can you imagine opening Christmas gifts with your checkbook in hand, ready to reimburse the giver for the estimated value?  I know it sounds ridiculous, but let it sink in for a moment that we withhold immediate payment only in certain ritual-bound circumstances.  I could never have guessed back than that what I used to call “my life” would permanently take up residence within a tangled web of ritual-bound circumstances. 

Four years ago, nearly to the day, I stopped working for money.  It wasn’t an act of visionary brilliance.  It was a moment of heartbreak so unyielding that there appeared no way forward.  At forty, I had been standing before a doorway for several years.  The Virus simply gave me a push from behind.  Rather than fall flat on my face, I stepped across the threshold into the abyss. 

Living from the generosity of others looks a lot like dying from within the imaginal confines of civilization. 

It can be difficult to remember those early pandemic days, when the arrival of a novel virus cast into high relief the precarity of our wholesale dependence upon industrial civilization and its attendant security and accounting forces.  In this country, people began hoarding toilet paper of all things.  Dried leaves can work quite well in a pinch, followed by a damp soapy washcloth if you prefer a sparkling bum.

Questioning the merits of civilization will confuse some readers.  Aren’t the kind and generous interactions that you write about in this newsletter examples of civil behavior?  The short answer is no.  A more thorough answer will take a story or two.

I often get phrases stuck in my head as I travel by foot through the woods.  If praying involves speaking and listening in turn, then my regular trips to a patch of rewilding ridge-land a few miles from the Farm could be described as prayer services.  Some might call them trail runs, and I have at times used those more socially-acceptable words.  But I find the practice of listening much more demanding than the physical exertion of running, so prayer outings they have become. 

To reach the unmarked trails—really abandoned logging roads—I often run along the railroad tracks that connect Canada to New York City.  On this day, I can feel the telltale vibration of a train approaching, well before I hear the roar of the engines.  I hop off the tracks and scamper up the forested hillside.  Like the others I’ve seen, this southbound freight train carries mostly liquefied petroleum gas and framing lumber out of rural Canada.  On this day, a northbound train waits where the tracks double, just a few hundred yards down.  For a solid ten minutes I hide out in the woods, listening only to the wheeze of metal against metal and the groan of combustion engines.  Black, acrid smoke fills the air.  The lumber cars are empty on the second train, heading north from the big city and the sprawling suburbs back toward the steadily-disappearing boreal forests.  Birdsong becomes audible again as the northbound train chugs off.  I descend to the quiet tracks and continue onward.  This is when one of those phrases comes into my head:  living from gifts is an act of civilizational disobedience. 

Words are like precious stones for me.  Back home, I begin turning these two over and over in my hands, watching to see how the light reflects differently from their glossy surfaces once they are placed next to one another.  I consult the etymological dictionary for clues.  Civilization, civility, and citizen all grow from the same root as the word city.  Obey means “to hear or listen to,” sharing a root with “audience” and “audible.”   

Ecologically considered, a city differs from a village in that its residents live at a greater distance from the soils, plants, animals, and other humans whose lives and labors become breakfast, a pair of shoes, a pillow, and so on.  Once that southbound train’s thousands of 2x4’s arrive in New York, the work of the civilization will be to carefully account for the passage of these living trees-become-resources-become-property from one owner to the next, ensuring their dispersal into the marketplace.  The work of the citizens will be to purchase them without pushing or shoving at the checkout line of the local lumberyard.  This is civil behavior.  Supply shortages would threaten a breakdown of the whole polite arrangement.

Absent combustion engines and train tracks, it wasn’t all that different back in ancient Mesopotamia where the earliest civilizations began recording incoming grain tallies on clay tablets.  Cities run on tracking and recordkeeping, buying, selling and owning.  As the soils in the surrounding countryside become depleted and the humans who live there grow weary of the city’s increasing appetites, civilizations are sustained through programs of coercion and military expansion.  From Mesopotamia to Rome to London to New York, the patterns are recognizable.

And then it strikes me: if obey means “to be an audience to,” civilizations don’t obey the laws of nature because their citizens live out of earshot from both the dreadful silence of the clear-cut and the generous symphony of the living forest.  If a city survives on assured imports, you could make a case that most rural places in the West are cities by now.  You could also make a case that the modern individual consumer amounts to a city-of-one.  Self-defended living looks like a practical necessity.  The castle—with its stone walls, draw bridge and a moat—is an iconic image in the Western imagination, perhaps for good reason.  Modernity seems to promise us a castle-of-one. Or, if you’re lucky, a castle-of-two.

My friend Sam likes to tell the following story to illustrate the emergence of money and markets, two cornerstones of civilization.  In order to keep its citizens content, the Roman ruling class had to ensure the steady flow of grain and other life necessities from the countryside into the city.  Through ongoing displays of military might, this effort became a continental affair.  Given the transportation options of the time, it made no sense to send grain from the outskirts of Rome to the soldiers stationed in the British Isles.  Peasants on the ground there were already growing food, but why would they be inspired to offer that food as a gift to the brutal occupying army?  In fact, the Roman military invasion had begun to short-circuit longstanding local practices of life-sharing.  What’s more, the peasants seemed stubbornly uninterested in the silver coins jangling in the purses of the hungry soldiers.  So, Rome began to charge native people a tax to continue living on the land that had previously been their home—home being a place where life is not for sale.  The tax would be collected, by force, in silver coins.  Voila.  The occupying Roman soldiers, themselves exemplars of humans displaced from webs of kinship and goodwill, suddenly had access to food as long as they had money.  This is how the countryside becomes civilized: by separating people from their fundamental sense of belonging to a healthy home landscape and severing the cultural ties of gratitude that help them remember to share the land’s abundant gifts with one another.  Why would people spend all their time dividing and keeping track of everything if the world was absolutely brimming with goodwill?

Like I said, I didn’t expect my pandemic-inspired gifting experiment to last.  The Gift Stand emerged as an articulation of heartbreak, not as a rational plan.  But one particular story had been tickling the back of my imagination for years.  In 1986, a group of three biodynamic farmers began a remarkable conversation with their neighbors.  Suburban expansion and relatedly rising land prices had all but extinguished the possibility of economically viable farming in the area.  These farmers asked their neighbors to help them gain access to land and then invited them to gather in a circle to consider a detailed budget for a trial season.  With prodding from the farmers, the prospective members went around the circle pledging different amounts of money until the budget was covered.  They weren’t starting a commune or a cult, or even an intentional community.  They were simply attempting to open up a space between the land’s natural abundance and the market’s required barrier to access.  Those neighbors are still sharing food with one another forty years later. 

Last winter I contacted the two surviving founders of Temple Wilton Community Farm to ask them about those early days.  The following story might help to bring this phrase civilizational disobedience into view. 

A few years in, a woman approached one of the farmers and said, “My husband and I have both lost our jobs.  Our family will have to drop out of the Farm this season.”  The farmer replied, “I think you could do the farmers, and the membership as a whole, a real favor if you came to the annual meeting and pledged zero.”  By golly, she found the courage to do just that.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the circle.  On that day, a group of middle class, European-American people wept together in a way that would have been downright embarrassing in public. 

What happened in that teary circle?  If obedience means listening, civilizational obedience entails submitting the human imagination to a deafening story of scarcity—specifically a scarcity of goodwill.  As that group of farmers and neighbors leaned in close to one another and to the land that they’d asked to feed them, they began to hear a different story.  When one of their neighbors asked to receive a gift, the floodgates of goodwill sprung open, unleashing a madhouse of uncharted social etiquette—a madhouse of uncivil behavior.  Charity articulates a response to civilization, not a threat to its basic claims. 

Living from the goodwill of others looks a lot like dying from within the imaginal confines of civilization. 

Living a life of self-defense begins to feel like dying once you’ve heard the haunting song of the village.

A few months later, the unemployed couple found jobs and the floodgates closed.  But once you’ve heard a song of human beauty like that, it can be difficult to un-hear it.  The story of the woman who pledged zero haunts me every day as I make my way around the Farm. 

What if the collapse of civility begins to look like a community?  What if the end of civilization begins to sound like returning home? 

Many blessings to you and yours,

Adam