Digging Shallow Graves

Amaryllis and her healthy son. Thank you JaeCub for the photo.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I’ve been putting off writing down this story because it doesn’t have an ending yet. Or at least no tidy one that I can see from here. That, and it might unsettle or disturb readers. I offer that as a simple warning before I begin.

A search for meaningful adult vocation began in my early twenties at a series of organic farms. At a hand-dug market garden perched on a sandy hillside above the Salish Sea, we made compost from the dead bodies of salmon that returned each year to the tribal hatchery down the road. We layered the glossy dead fish between as much carbon as we could gather—woodchips, dried leaves, and the golden standing stems of grass from the meadows below the garden. Still, as the piles began to break down the smell of off-gassing ammonia turned our stomachs for weeks. We grew spinach leaves the size of dinner plates from that rich compost. I remember weighing out six-ounce bags of greens for the farmer’s market one sunny Friday afternoon. Only six leaves of that salmon-fed spinach fit into the bag.

The second Farm was connected to a university perched above the Pacific Ocean a ways further south. As an apprentice, I spent a few hours each week tending the organic research plots on the periphery of the Farm’s main fields. The coastal climate there lends itself to strawberries, and the surrounding landscape produces many of the clamshells to be found on American grocery store shelves. In order to produce grocery-store-grade organic strawberries, growers needed an alternative to synthetic fertilizers. In one of the research plots, the drip irrigation line was injected with blood meal—dried and powdered blood from slaughterhouse floors. The strawberries in that plot grew to the size of small peaches.

I stopped calling myself a vegetarian that second summer, in part because the plants I harvested and ate for food weren’t themselves above transforming the dead bodies of their animal kin into more Life. Perhaps you’ve heard a story about native people burying a salmon under each precious corn plant. The poetry of the image only deepens when you see a standing corn plant as a human being with her arms outstretched: Generous Mother Corn.

My meaningful adult vocation as a sustainable beef and dairy farmer came to a painful and humbling end fifteen years later when the human relations at the root of the project I’d co-founded decayed to the point of no return. Six months after I walked away from the Farm where I imagined living out my days my ex-business partner asked me not to contact her again.

Amid the ashes of a well-planned life, I embarked on a second-round search for vocational wisdom—this time in the nascent era of podcasting. I must have listened to every episode of Krista Tippet’s ‘On Being’ several times through. I heard her say once that the show’s listener demographic has been steadily swelling with young people hungry for the voices of elders. I can testify to that hunger.

Partway through Krista Tippet’s conversation with a catholic priest named Richard Rohr, his humble patterns of speech had already begun to alter the way I imagined my relationship to the world around me. Then he said, “I wake up each morning and ask God for one good humiliation”. I tried to imagine doing that every day for the duration of an adult life. As a practice, it sounded at once utterly repulsive and absolutely necessary.

The question I came up with sounded a little bit different, but I realize now that it leaned in a very similar direction. I didn’t use the word God in my phrasing, choosing instead to address the greening landscape that begins just below the set of steps leading out of the tiny house that I built around that time as a refuge. I began asking, “How can I be of greatest service in a time of social and ecological unravelling?” I spoke those words aloud every morning and then stretched my listening ears into the anything-but-silent air space just beyond the skin-boundary of the self. I’d been lugging that ‘self’ around for nearly four decades at that point. After several months of this morning practice, I began steadily slipping into the alternative universe I write about in these newsletters. A world woven from goodwill and embroidered with birdsong. A world wherein ‘the market is just a story that some other people believe in’.¹

The humiliations began rolling in on the regular once I stopped selling anything at the beginning of the Pandemic. It wasn’t so much that I looked like a fool in public, although that was certainly part of it. It was more that the landscape around me began claiming this human body and its various capacities—for physical labor, for speech and song, for relationship—as soil food. That’s the shared root of human, humus and humiliation: earth, ground or soil.

Five years later, I have become a someone who speaks in public about ‘agricultural gift economies’. A filmmaker from Sweden even traveled to the Farm last fall to ask me some questions about it. Mattias just released the following outtake from his forthcoming short film titled Radical Neighboring. As the work here becomes more public, however, I do worry that the anecdotes I have to offer will be mistaken for a victory story, a ‘viable alternative to capitalism’ or a ‘visionary plan for the renewal of local food and community’.

Remember that line from Richard Rohr about daily humiliations? It isn’t always pleasant receiving the gift you asked for but someone else picked out. If I wanted the story of ‘my life’ to work out in the manner that best suits me, the market offers a much more effective strategy: procure dollars. Money can be imagined as a tool for the articulation of personal preference. The universal key to every locked door. Richard Rohr seemed to be pointing in a different direction with the word humiliation.

Historically speaking, market economies don’t seem to do a very good job orienting human life toward the humiliating work of making soil humus. One prominent example from this continent: in a few short centuries, forty feet of epically-fertile Midwestern topsoil—once home to shoulder-high perennial grassland, bison herds that took days to pass, and humans who knew how to limit their appetites—has been reduced to mono-cropped corn and soy fields, feedlots for cattle, pigs and chickens, strip-lit grocery stores, lonely suburbs and extra-large cars.

Shortly after Mattias came to film here, I wrote a piece titled ‘The Gift Flock’ that ended up being selected for publication in The Dark Mountain Journal’s Spring Issue. In that piece, which turned into a bit of a summary of the book that I am trying to write, I describe some of the lessons I learned early on from the two founding ewes of the Gift Flock, Glenys and Beatrice:

My neighbors and I began an agricultural gift economy by drawing an imaginary ‘not for sale’ boundary around one fertile flock of sheep. But we would soon discover that the Life in which their bodies participate could not be so narrowly defined. What about the cows with whom they shared pasture and winter housing? The vegetables rising from their Life-giving manure? The human labors enabled by their flesh? At one of our early neighborhood meetings, Carl said, ‘This work is like a contagious virus. But when you catch it you come down with a case of kindness’. The pandemic arrived two years almost to the day after Glenys gave birth to those healthy twins.

On the first day of the pandemic, I dove head first into the river of Life by discontinuing the bread sales that were paying the bills for that joyful community farming project. I would offer all of the food I grew, harvested, cooked and baked as a gift to anyone who was hungry for any reason. I would ask to be ‘sustained’ rather than ‘paid’, just as I’d heard the landscape and its depleted soils quietly asking for human care and concern. I am still alive and thriving five years later. So far, so good. A bit like a victory story.

A few months after I wrote that piece about the remarkable generativity of the Gift Flock, I began to notice a few droopy ears and eye discharge in some of the yearling sheep. I checked for pinkeye and parasites and found nothing. Maybe it was just a different kind of cold than I’d seen before. I brushed it off.

But on shearing day in March the scope and severity of the illness in the flock came thundering into view. At least two-thirds of the thirty-two overwintered animals looked terribly thin, and mostly not pregnant. There were quite a few neighbors present in the barn on sheering day, so I mostly kept the building terror to myself.

Over the past six weeks since I’ve watched animals who looked like the picture of health last summer emaciate and slowly die with no illuminating test results. The vet has ruled out every major disease vector except a few really-scary ones not often seen in these parts, incurable lentiviruses that are considered ‘biosecurity risks’, meaning that anyone with sheep or goats at home who visits here should wash their boots before leaving—at least until we rule those out.

Only seven or eight of the oldest ewes, including the matriarch of the Gift Flock named Glenys, appear to be fully healthy at this point, having birthed full-sized, healthy lambs. But these illnesses can be transmitted from healthy-looking animals to their young through milk, breath or other body fluids. If we get any positive tests for the diseases in question, we may end up killing most or all of the Gift Flock.

I couldn’t bear the thought of Farm visitors seeing the slowly-dying sheep and asking me to explain to them what was going on over and over again, so we sorted out a ‘sick group’ and moved them down to a pen below my house, right next to the patch of grass where I still ask that service question aloud each morning. I buried the first three who died in the Farm compost pile, but the smell of it was a bit much, given the pile’s location near the kitchen entrance. So, I began burying them in place in the yard below my house. Hence the title of this piece: digging shallow graves. Yearlings and two-year-olds require more shovel work than the stillborn or undersized lambs who die within a day or two after birth. Watching ewes circle and call to their dead lambs has been particularly heartbreaking, bordering on the unbearable.

Fourteen of my beloved sheep remain in the pen next to my house, all of whom look like they could die in the next few weeks, barring a miracle. Perhaps they’ll hold on longer. I’ve been feeding them the best hay we’ve got left and spreading it out to form a thick layer on the rectangle of ground where they watch their family members die around them. The other evening, as I walked among them, I finally got to cry, the kind of wrenching sobs that change you for days. “I don’t want you to die” I cried out, over and over. “Please, God, help us.” I was surprised to hear the G-word fall from my own lips. Perhaps those lips stopped being mine for a moment.

Once the nightmare shakes out, I can imagine covering the patch with tarps and letting the soil do its miraculous work. The sheep we planned to feed to our neighbors as roasted lamb are becoming food for the soil instead. That’s the story that I’ve been unsure how to tell, perhaps because it has no ending in sight. The humiliation of it has invited me to relinquish any remaining control I thought I deserved over how the story turns out. It that way, the story of the dying flock bears an eerie resemblance to the cultural and ecological unravelling in the wider world. A diagnosis and treatment plan for a terminally ill way of living would be so much more appealing. Years ago, when I heard Richard Rohr suggest praying for one good humiliation a day, it sounded simultaneously repulsive and absolutely necessary. It still does today.

My friend and mentor

Dougald Hine

hosts a podcast aptly titled The Great Humbling. In his book, At Work in the Ruins, he uses the evocative phrase ‘making good ruins’ to describe the work that’s called for in a time of endings. As I dig shallow graves here in the sick sheep yard next to my house, I have been wondering about another phrasing, something like ‘making fertile soil for those who will come after us’. What cultural capacities will our great grandchildren need that we might be able to cultivate here and now? Humility must surely be one of them.

I can imagine pulling the tarps back next spring and burying corn seeds into the composted hay and manure covering the shallow graves of my beloveds. If that corn grows to maturity, we could grind the kernels into cornmeal and bake skillets of corn bread to share with our neighbors, as we won’t have nearly as much meat around here from the looks of things. But that’s just one imagining of how this story will turn out. For now, it appears that the answer to my ‘How can I be of greatest service?’ question includes cultivating my capacity to bear faithful witness to the unravelling of a societal story in which I need know how this is going to end before agreeing to set out from the house each morning.

Thank you for daring to bear witness. Your prayers for the flock are welcome.

With thanks,
Adam

1. This line is from my friend Sam Bliss.