Extending Welcome to the Unchosen

Upcoming events at the Farm will always be described in more detail in the Friday Sand River Community Farm email.  Here’s the short list:

Barn Choir Practice Tuesdays 5:30-7pm, followed by a simple potluck supper.  All ages and abilities welcome.

Sunday Farm Frolics (6/30, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28) 3-6pm.  Community work day followed by a shared supper at 6pm.  Dinner contributions welcome.

July Gratitude Feast and Barn Dance 7/7 at 3:30pm.  Like all events at the Farm, this event has no financial barrier to access.  This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.  If you are willing to lend a hand in the days prior to the Feast (chopping vegetables, setting up tables, giving rides to folks without transportation) please email: sandrivercommunityfarm@gmail.com. 

As always, you can help these story-pleas find their way out into the world by pressing the heart button, leaving a comment, or sharing this post.

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Sometimes the world has a plan for you.  Less a demand than an invitation.  A plate of food set before you, the face of the giver long gone by the time you turn to look.  The plate sits there on the empty table of your days.  To take a bite is to accept the invitation.  To take a bite is to step toward the reason you are here among us: to receive hospitality and then allow yourself to be broken open.  Again and again. 

Halfway through

Elizabeth Oldfield

’s stunning new book Fully Alive, I come across this one-liner: “Apparently humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”  She’s tucked this glossy little gem into a chapter that issues a similarly profound invitation: Envy: From Status Anxiety to Belovedness.  Elizabeth has re-cast the seven deadly sins as seven spells of disconnection.  I’ve been stumbling to write a book for a year and a half now, and Fully Alive brings to mind the subtitle I’ve settled on: longing for home in a displaced time. 

What if home is less a place to dwell than a capacity to extend welcome to the unchosen?  Less where we are than how we greet the stranger at the door?  Less a thing to be possessed than the act of letting it go?  Less a secure front door than a set of well-oiled hinges?  Fully Alive reads to me as an invitation to oil our hinges—to practice being human together in a turbulent and troubled time. 

Etymologically speaking, belonging doesn’t extinguish longing.  The prefix be- serves to intensify the root, transforming longing into a faithful practice.  That faithful practice could become the reason we’re here.

The old people say that when the Makers sang the world, they gave everything its song, its mark, it’s way of being itself…The makers sang the birch, and that’s how birchness came into the world.  The song included that magical bark and that sweet sap, and other things.  The song also included birch wisdom, you could call it, the way by which the birch knew where and how to grow into itself and spread its seed. ¹

I walk to the flock at dusk.  The buzzing hour.  Recent heat and rain have brought on the mosquitos.  They love sheep blood, feeding around the face, bellies and legs—wherever thick wool doesn’t deter them.  As I approach, I see forty sheep standing, clustered and white, against the darkening meadow.  The seem utterly unbothered.  Cud-chewing.  Grass-dreaming.  Manure-and-milk-making.  My ears tip me off to their companions, the click of wing against wing, the hum of wing against air.  My eyes re-focus in the half-light.  A school of dragonflies ply the air space just above the sheep, feasting upon those who have come to feast upon the sheep.  Hundreds of these four-winged wonders hunt mosquitos in a rising cloud of sheep breath on a muggy Solstice evening, so far from home.   

And the birch never wondered how to do these things, or whether it should, or when.  By being a birch, it knew.  And it never wished it was that granite stone lying at its root.   It did not envy the granite stone its stillness or its firm ability to stay put, which is graniteness in the world.  And the granite did not envy deerness in the world as the deer went past…

Dragonflies hum, click and zip just inches from my eyes and ears as I stand among the clustered cud-chewers.  It isn’t envy I feel as I take in the scene.  The people I come from cleared the old forests here in New England and New York, planting grass for these hungry, wool-clad ruminants.  Their breed-names remember the places from whence they came:  Leicester, Dorset, Finn, Romney.  Long before that it might have been Bethany, Bethsura or even Bethlehem.  And yet the way they articulate their sheepness has already begun to build topsoil from sunlight and rainfall.  The way the sheep and cows drop their manure and press their hooves into these degraded fields helps dormant clover seed to germinate, brightly-colored blossoms now abuzz with bees.  This place grows twice as much grass as it did when they arrived just two years ago.  I keep thinking: their way of living is their way of being at home.  Or, more simply, their way of living is their home. 

And they say that people were made in the same way, at the same time, with the same ability to be people as the birch had to be birch, the granite granite, and the deer deer.  It is hard to remember those days, they say, but it is so.  People had two things that no other made thing had: they knew how to be people, and they were confused sometimes about how to be people, or when, or why.  This was part of people’s nature, to forget what all the others knew: how to be themselves.

It wasn’t envy I felt, exactly, standing among the calm flock the evening before last.  Perhaps awe. Admiration.  Even inspiration.  Darkness fell as I walked back to the house, opened the front door and quickly shut it behind me, careful not to let the mosquitos in.  Lying in bed, I watched following thought buzz across my awareness: it is only for this human hunger that those dragonflies ate so well this evening.  This is a story of longing for home in a displaced time. 

We are the original forgetters.  And the old people have forgotten all of this more times than anyone else.  They are here to remember all that forgetting, and to tell this very story when they do…

After dreaming of dragonflies, I woke Sunday morning, put on clean clothes and went to church.  As with farming, my return to church a year ago arrived on the coat tails of a bone-deep longing to find in myself a capacity for ancestral forgiveness.  There’s plenty to hate about the way things went for the people and places on the blunt end of the histories that made me.  It sounds appealing to run headlong in the opposite direction.  But what if home is less a place to dwell than a capacity to extend welcome to the unchosen?  Apply that question to a European American ancestry and it might begin to shed some light on very shadowy terrain. 

The story of Yeshua, or Jesus, reads to me as a litany of invitations to practice remembering how to be human together:  loving neighbors as selves, dispersing possessions, crafting a life of service, and so on.  G. K. Chesterton wrote, “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”  That’s a brilliant summary of my resistance to calling myself a Christian.  Belief and practice are not synonyms. To practice collectively what that man actually preached would change everything, and quickly. 

I have a sense that Western industrial society wouldn’t last a week once exposed to a blistering encounter with radical, more-than-human neighboring.  A friend of mine smiles when he removes the “g” from the word “Kingdom” to make “Kin-dom.”  Making kin means making family and, by extension, making home; the word kin is not species-specific, or exclusive. 

After church, people hang around to visit for a bit.  I hear someone say, “Oh no, he’s back.”  I turn around to see a man just outside the door—tall, lean and African American—with trash bags slung over his shoulders.  “He was here this morning camped out under the Church awning in the rain and I had to ask him to move on,” I hear someone else say.  “Too bad we don’t have coffee hour today, or we could feed him.”  Another person says, “I don’t think we want to get started with that.” 

I can feel my heart begin to race.  My 95-year-old friend Kitty is trying to tell me a story and so I’m listening close to her, but the scenario with this unchosen neighbor at the door has my attention, and my heart, stretched to the breaking point.  At one point I turn again and see that he has opened the door and stepped inside.  A couple of men walk back to have a conversation with him.  I think: as soon as Kitty finishes her story, I will go introduce myself.  But I can tell it’s an excuse.  I am actually frozen with fear.  By the time I look again he’s gone, and I can feel the tension easing in the room.

There are no dragonflies feasting outside the front door of the church this morning.  Not a single one. 

On the way home I call my friend the town librarian to ask her if she knows this man and where I might find him.  She tells me that he has been around town for a couple of years, but she doesn’t know where he sleeps.  We talk for an hour.  She describes the homeless encampment along the river and the motel that receives state vouchers to house the destitute, the recently-released from prison and the addicted—the unchosen, in other words.  I knew about the run-down motel; its resident riff-raff and recent-immigrant-owners receive the scorn of many in town.  I’ve heard people say again and again that the state has been negligent in its responsibility to provide social services.  A petition has been circulated to shut the motel down.  I have considered raising my voice in defense of neighborliness.  Thus far I have mostly kept quiet. 

Before we finish the call, I tell my friend the librarian that I’m pretty sure the strange man showed up at the church this morning to issue me an invitation, but I’m terrified I won’t have the courage to accept it.  She says, “You can’t do it all at once, Adam.  Or all alone.  But I trust you will begin to follow this thread.  I will be here to help you, as your friend and neighbor.”

The day this Farm closes its doors to the world, or begins to feel like a retreat center, this work will lose its integrity and begin to die.  What oiling the hinges looks like today, I can’t tell you exactly.  After I send out this newsletter, I’ve got to move the cows and sheep to new pastures, which might take until lunchtime.  After that, there is other, more courageous work waiting—for me and perhaps also for you, or for us together.  Fear and longing offer us trustworthy signposts. 

Building cross-class and cross-species relationships of mutual trust and care will not be easy or painless or fast, but the slow work might help us remember how to be human in a time of social and ecological collapse.  The work might teach us how to make home in a displaced time. 

With love, Adam 

1. This inset story comes from Stephen Jenkinson’s Come Of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble.