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Heather Blankenship's avatar

Thank you for these morning tears… tears of sadness for what has been lost for the majority of us, and tears of joy for the way you are excavating the generosity of others. This is a beautiful sharing and inspiration, thank you Adam. Blessings.

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Adam Wilson's avatar

Thank you, Heather.

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Perry J. Greenbaum 🇨🇦 🦜's avatar

The train carrying the wood from trees (living things) and the fuels from fossils (the remnants of plants and animals), while polluting the air, says so much of what is wrong with modern civilization.

I say this as someone who resides in urban Toronto, surrounded by concrete, cars and soul-destroying condos and shopping malls. If it were not for the soulful sounds of the birds and the sights of the squirrels, to whomI happily provide food, I think I would lose my mind. This is not a healthy way or place to live.

Humanity's disconnection from Nature is what explains much of our social ills and our physical and mental illnesses. We have built things up to the point that Nature is protesting. Understandably so. The madness can't continue.

Thanks for this essay.

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Adam Wilson's avatar

Hi Perry, Thanks for your note. From what I can tell, Nature protests by loving us even more wholeheartedly, by refusing stinginess as a survival strategy. She's a potent teacher in that way.

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tmtheletters's avatar

Once you hear a song of human beauty like that, it can be difficult to un-hear it. Amen.

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Adam Wilson's avatar

I'm glad that one grabbed you. It's got 'hold of me good.

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Carrie Triffet's avatar

Inspired writing as always. Thank you. Question: 100 loaves? What kind of kitchen infrastructure do you have there that supports such a thing?

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Adam Wilson's avatar

I had a production bakery business before I stopped selling food, big enough that I could bake 450 loaves per week. Selling bread always supported my farming habit. Until I began asking my neighbors to support it instead.

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Carri's avatar

I am challenged and heartened by your thoughts, Adam. And I'm thinking about what it all means in the practical realities of my life. It seems to me that there are many simple ways to start.

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Adam Wilson's avatar

Carri, I realized over time that calling the work a gift economy was way too grandiose. As a way of beginning, it seems more do-able to notice the relationships in which we don't keep track, and then begin adding on more of those. The richness of those relations jumpstarts the work of remembering, in my experience. Sometimes I straight-up ask people if they are willing to practice mutual sustenance with me, "practice" being very different from "achieve" or "enact."

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Carri's avatar

Thank you, Adam. The idea of not keeping track is helpful and so is the notion of relations. That is where it starts I guess, with relationship. And practice, yes, an ongoing journey of deepening.

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Adam Wilson's avatar

The vision statement for this Farm is: "We long to remember our deeply human capacity for mutually sustaining relationships, both human to human and human to all that is not human." "Fair," "even" and "just" start to sound pretty flimsy once you've tasted reckless generosity as a cultural organizing principle.

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