Culture Feeds the Wild

A story for the dead and the living.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

It’s really a huge honor to sit at my desk each Monday morning and listen for stories to tell.  Often it’s difficult for me to stay asleep when newsletter morning rolls around.  I feel immensely lucky to be employed by your listening ears, by your generous written replies and comments, and your willingness to cover my personal stipend.  I don’t take the responsibility imparted by these relationships lightly.  Being granted weight to carry can keep a person alive.  I say that from experience. 

Later today I will host the third monthly Peasantry School Community Call, an experiment in asking modern technology to serve culture work.  This month I will speak with Kathryn Edwards on her work as a funeral celebrant and a ritualist out on the wild edge of the marketplace.  The question for the call will be:  How will culture workers be sustained in a time that suggests they go get a real job?  Or, how will a healthy culture be sustained within a market economy that warns, “no money, no life”? 

The Peasantry School Community Call will last 90 minutes, beginning at 3:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time, which is currently 7pm London time.  Monday 3/18. All are invited.  There will opportunity to join the discussion, or simply listen.  The Zoom link is HERE. 

Sleeping bag cinched tight around my face.  South Wind whistling the bare branches of ridgetop Oak and Cherry.  Crescent Moon.  Black tent of Sky offers to hold weather in, not keep it out.  I’m just warm enough—I mean just—and it’s only halfway through the night.  But halfway is just a guess, based on the current position of Big Dipper overhead.  My wristwatch sits unclasped on the kitchen counter and my cell phone lies buried in the mud at the bottom of the stone-lined well back at the old Farm where I tend, tinker and attempt to make home. 

Two weeks back, flip phone in breast pocket, I leaned over the well with a battery-powered shop vac in hand, cleaning in preparation for removing the old cover and building a new one, replacing the old bucket and rope with an electric well pump.  The phone leapt from my chest, making a perfect swan dive into the watery abyss. 

A while back a neighbor told me that this Farm has the deepest hand-dug well in the region—about sixty-five feet from my measurement.  How did they do it?  Two years later the question remains unanswered.  I’ve asked dozens of old timers.  No one remembers.  Perhaps wooden buttresses kept the soil from collapsing inward as the digger dug.  But what about the in-seeping water?  Maybe someone up top hauled alternating buckets of water and soil through the day.  But if they took a break to sleep wouldn’t the hole have filled up again?  The next morning would have been wasted just bucketing the worksite dry. 

A gray-haired man, upon his first walk around the Farm, a tour that included a stop at this miraculous hand-dug hole lined with a 65-foot tall dry-laid stone wall, began to notice the regard I seemed to carry for the place we call in modern English “the past.”  I say that the well’s subterranean stone wall is 65-feet “tall” rather than “deep” because it was surely laid from the bottom up—after the hole was completed.  Gravity doesn’t reverse itself when you go underground, however convenient that would be for the well diggers.  I almost used the past tense there, as in “however convenient that would have been for the well diggers.”  But the past tense in modern English doesn’t leave much room for the possibility that the dead are still among us, or even that they are us.  There will be water to drink here at the Peasantry School as a direct consequence of their craft and concern for us, those with thirst—cattle, sheep and humans all. 

Modern English doesn’t afford user-friendly syntax for describing the place/time we call “the present” as a tangled consequence of the lives of those people who walked their “presents” keeping us in mind.  Surely some of them struggled in moments to hold us steadily in their awareness, slipping into self-concern or fear, taking more for themselves than would keep us in good stead, fouling the rivers or cutting down the forests for a quick profit or simply to pay the taxes.  But a healthy culture, as Wendell Berry so gorgeously describes, “clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other.  It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.”  It makes some beautiful irony that the old well swallowed my cell phone, does it not? 

This gray-haired visitor to the Farm, a lifelong historian of the built landscape, could tell that I carry a degree of ecological grief that isn’t advisable, hence the tight shoulders and cyclical headaches.  He could hear all of this in the stories I told him about the Farm.  At tour’s end he said, “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, and it appears that we would rather cover the world in solar panels than imagine that there is anything worth remembering about how they knew how to live.”  Brevity isn’t my strong suit as a writer, and so such fine distillation enters these ears as a remarkable blessing. 

Living without a cell phone for two weeks made it a whole lot easier to pack a sleeping bag and pad and walk from the Farm to a small mountain a few miles away, wristwatch and headlamp safely at home, food still in the fridge, sunrise the next morning the only signal of “time to walk back home.”  Abstinence from food, clock time, written words, heated housing and other living human beings seems to bring the past and the present a bit closer together. 

I roll out my pad on a strip of exposed ledge in a ridgetop clearing overlooking broad Lake and rippled eastern horizon.  From here I can see much of the watershed that I have called home for nearly two decades, her hills and drainages now etched as memory.  Even glimpsed from afar, the distant landscape’s rise and fall begins to whisper stories. 

Chilled, I climb into the sleeping bag with all my clothes on and zip up.  Sleep comes easily.  I wake to the calls of geese on the wing.  Scanning the blue-bright above, these eyes finally hitch a ride on that sing-song caravan.  They pass in waves through the afternoon, kindly waking me each time from my cat nap so I can wish them well.  The sheer magnitude of their ancient story washes over me.  There is healing up here for the grief-addled soul, but it isn’t a therapy office.  Insurance doesn’t cover these visits; instead, the payments must be negotiated over the span of geologic time.  In The Sibling Society, Robert Bly writes:

It is an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while.  They created it, they wrote its literature, and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how the children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going.  The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them. 

By “the world” Bly is clearly referring to the culture, but without differentiating it from landscape or ecology.  If he and Wendell Berry got together and talked this one out, they might report to us that cultural and ecological health are one in the same thing.  A sick or dying culture results in a sick and dying land.  This ecological connection is a far cry from what we commonly use the word culture to describe: simply whatever happens when humans interact with one another. 

I’ve been working on a progression that helps me imagine the difference between a culture and what we might call instead “modern Western society.”  Granted, the scenario described in this progression I’ve never seen with my own eyes.  As a student of anthropology, however, I am quite convinced that the world has seen—and been sustained by—such sequences before, perhaps even for the vast majority of the time humans have been around:

The wild feeds humans.

Humans feed a culture.

A culture feeds the wild.

How else would there still be endless waves of geese flying north overhead on this bright, blue late-winter day?

Bly wrote The Sibling Society back in 1996, when I was just a teenager.  His observations of onrushing modernity read to me now as searingly astute.  “From the community’s point of view, an adult is someone who knows how to preserve the larger group of which he or she is a part.”  Someone who knows how to feed the culture, in other words.  “Today’s adolescent, by contrast, wants his of her needs gratified now, and seems not to notice that he or she is living in a complicated web of griefs, postponed pleasures, unwelcome labor, responsibilities, and unpaid debts to gods and human beings.”  Bly suggests that we are now living in a society run by half-adults.  “A problem develops…when people remain in adolescence long past its normal span.”  Maybe a culture could be described as the grown-up version of a consumer economy. 

It took two weeks for me to get a working phone again because I stubbornly refused to buy one.  I posted a note on a local farmer list-serve asking for a gift of a used flip phone.  Kia-Beth wrote back immediately to let me know that a phone would be in the mail to me promptly.  A few days earlier Kia attended the talk I gave about food gifting at the Food Justice Summit.  Reading the email, I remembered that bright spirit right away.  Kia runs the farm they grew up on.  Tucked into the package with the phone I find a kind note explaining that the phone belonged to their mother Ann, who died earlier this year, as well as a packet of the celery seeds Ann saved and selected for cold-hardiness for nearly two decades. 

The wild feeds humans. 

Humans feed a culture.

A culture feeds the wild.

It might actually be a bit too easy to say that I’ve never seen such an achievement with my own eyes.  But, boy, is it difficult to keep one’s eyes open in a time such as ours.  As we shield ourselves from the grief of all that is disappearing, we can miss the brightly colored threads of human culture that remain, scattered about everywhere, waiting for us to pick them up and begin weaving again. 

In a time like ours it can be difficult to imagine that this body and mind might be capable of reclaiming such world-feeding ways of living.  At least that’s how it looks from the vantage of a half-adult, the only way of seeing I’ve ever known.  Rather than “reclaiming” a capacity for culture, perhaps the maturing move would be to lower my defenses and allow my-self to be claimed by them: the dead to whom the world belongs, the ones who have entrusted this life to us for a little while.  The ones who created the world, told its stories and sang its songs.  The ones who dug the mysterious, stone-lined hole in the ground that swallowed my phone.  The ground from whom I will drink when I am thirsty.  The ground into whom I will plant Ann’s celery seeds. The ground into whom the young will lower me when I die. 

Many blessings to you,

Adam