Divine Appointment

Maizey Corn Dog keeps watch over the gardens.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

In search of a story to help us find our way through the mounting troubles, I wake from slumber hours before dawn. My gaze passes through the window of the dark house, into the heavy, still heat of the night meadow, grasses grown to chest high. I see a thousand lanterns there, dancing wildly. Every one of them offers to guide us home.

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I couldn’t be more grateful for the generous gifts given over the past week by folks from near and far to sustain the work here at Sand River Community Farm, homeplace of this Peasantry School Newsletter. Our 2025 Summer Budget Request of $10,400 has been half-way covered, leaving about $5K left to raise. Would you consider joining hands with others to help us keep the lights on here at the Farm?

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A few winters back, on that same search for story, I slid into the lunch line at a local Food Justice Summit. The person standing in front of me turned around and said, with flair, “They’re serving cornbread? Mmmm, mmmm. Now we’re talking.” Hair in tight braids and many, brightly-colored strings of beads around her neck, she didn’t strike me as from these parts. I’d just moved to the area a year prior, coming to the conference in hopes of meeting some of the local players in food and farming. When I wandered into the dining hall a few minutes later, my eyes scanned the room for a familiar face. The woman from line sat alone, and so I asked to join her. “Sure thing,” she said. “My name’s Leisha.”

I love the way meeting strangers focuses my attention. I sit down and ask Leisha for a bit of her story. She’s flown in from Stockton, California where the kids know her as Chef Leisha, lead local food instructor for the Edible Schoolyard Project. She pulls brightly-colored fruits and vegetables from inner-city community gardens and works them into irresistible dishes. The way her eyes light up in the telling, I get a sense that she might be carrying a piece of what I’m searching for. Her lantern is shining brightly.

I ask Leisha if the beads around her neck carry a story as well. As it turns out, she is a preacher’s kid, like me, but as an adult she’s found her way back to the West African religion of her ancestors. The beads are for the Orishas with whom she walks through her days, in prayerful conversation.

I don’t hold back when it comes my turn. I tell her how I stopped farming for business a few years prior, funding a gift-based local food project with profits from the sale of bread that I baked. After walking away from a Farm that I’d owned, my new neighbors offered fields for grazing sheep and cattle, space for gardens. The abundance born from that neighborly gift of land begat monthly Gratitude Feasts at the Town Hall, a sort of town-wide ceremony of thanksgiving.

For two years, I stepped from my house each morning and asked aloud, “How can I be of greatest service in a time of unravelling?” A week and a half after the Virus drew the curtains on that whole neighborly arrangement, birdsong and brook-babble eventually gave way to a crystal-clear reply. “Stop selling the bread. Give it all away. Now is the time. People are willing to consider things they wouldn’t have been able to just a couple of weeks ago.” I don’t recommend asking how you can be of service if you insist on having a plan for the path ahead.

The Gift Stand opened just two weeks after I heard those unmistakable instructions flow from the invisible mouth of the world. I pause and look over at Leisha. She is wide-eyed and nodding, urging me on.

Every loaf of bread and quart of soup we distributed from the Stand carried an inscription which read: “This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.” But I struggled to explain to my neighbors how the gift differed from charity. “How will you get the food to the people who really need it,” they asked. I finally found an honest answer to that well-intentioned charity question, saying “The work of the Farm is not to help poor people get rich, but rather to invite rich people to consider voluntary impoverishment as a moral, even a joyful choice in a time of cascading ecological and social troubles”.

“I am trying to write a book about what I learned,” I tell her.

Suddenly, I’m snapped back to a dining hall at a Food Justice Summit where I am sitting next to a woman who works in a community that couldn’t be more different from the mostly-white, middle-class neighborhood where we set up our weekly Gift Stand. I notice that I am nervous about how my story will land in Leisha’s life experience.

She looks me straight in the eyes and says, “Adam, this is important. Please tell this story.” But the next bit of advice she has for me comes as a bit of a surprise. “There will be parts of your spiritual practice that aren’t meant to be included in your book. Hold some of it close. I wrote a whole book that I eventually ended up deciding not to publish.” It’s been two and a half years since I ate cornbread and chili with Chef Leisha, and I’ve scrapped most of two manuscripts already.

Leisha looks down at her phone and then lets me know that she has to leave the conference to begin her travel home. She’s given her presentation already, during one of the morning sessions.

“My father, the retired preacher,” she says, “he wakes every morning and asks God to lead him to the conversation he’s meant to have on that day. He calls it a divine appointment.” Leisha pulls on her coat, pushes in her chair and says, “Adam, I think we just had one.”

These stories are offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. Mighty you consider voting yes to this work by making a financial gift?

With so many thanks,

Adam