Healing and Wholeness.

Late afternoon photo shoot with Hank and Giles. Thank you, Allison for the photo.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

A single sip of hot tea brings a slick of sweat to my forearms and brow. Suddenly moist skin maps the slightest movement in the mostly-still midnight air. Blessed breeze, come wash away the heat of the day.

The all-night rave we call a cricket meadow pulses beyond the pane, penetrating the quiet house. This is a high summer praise song. Yes, I am listening. Yes, I will tell them about it in the newsletter.

Yesterday, gentle rain began just after sunup and stayed with us until early afternoon. Every pore in this thirsty place opened wide. This was no gully-washer or drought-breaker; this was a good old spring rain. Every generous drop was drawn in. Porosity is the way Life has of being itself, the way Life passes between bodies. It can be easy to forget, given the way things are.

Pushing aside rain-wet garden leaves, I find spine-skinned cucumbers, gloss-red tomatoes, fuzz-rough yellow and green beans. The salad bowl overflows with these drought-sweetened fruits. If food is a form of courtship, eating is no less than an act of intercourse with the landscape. Hunger is the way Life has of drawing us back for more. Pleasure, received, clouds our careful judgement, begets all sorts of irrational behavior. We call it ‘falling in love’ for a reason. Such loss of control seems a bit dangerous, given the way things are.

Over the past few weeks, the word ‘healing’ has been coming toward me in a way that has my interest piqued, and my listening ears open. As I do, I consulted my ancestors by leafing through the trail of breadcrumbs they left for me: the etymological dictionary. Ah, yes. Of course. Healing suggests the act of making whole something was temporarily sundered or separated. Health is a quality of relationship, not a personal possession or consumer good. Relationships begin by releasing control. Given the way things are, it would be so much easier if it weren’t so.

A couple of summers back, an attentive reader of this newsletter emailed with a linguistic suggestion. In his own experiments in gift economics, he’d begun to wonder about the consequence of the phrase “give away”. As with any medicinal criticism, I felt a moment of defensiveness rear up in me. I’d been using the phrase “giving away food” for years at this point. He was asking me to consider where the “away” was that the food was going when it left my hand. Of course he was right. I asked him if he’d come up with a better phrase. “Giving into” was one he’d been trying out. It didn’t roll off the tongue smoothly, but I could immediately see where he was pointing. So long as there is a place called “away” where the consequences of our everyday acts of stinginess and generosity live, the healing we long for—that imagined state of wholeness and belonging—will similarly remain out of reach. Thank you, James R. Martin for the nudge.

The separate self is a persistent bugger, and a painful one. In response to a U.S. Surgeon General survey on loneliness a few years back, two responses rose to the top. “I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens on my own”, and “If I disappeared tomorrow, no one would even notice”. Such conditions are helpful for selling insurance policies, supplements, health remedies, numbing agents and every manner of screen-borne distraction. After reading though the survey results, our nation’s highest health official issued a report declaring a loneliness epidemic, with negative health effects similar to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. But relationships remained stubbornly un-marketable. As such, the stark warning did little to slow the rising flood waters.

This newsletter might sound like a broken record at times. As in, market = bad; gift = good. Let’s try switching the descriptors and see what comes into view. Market = an exclusively-human invention for maintaining an illusion of separation; gift = an age-old tool for building a nest out of one’s relational consequence. The problem is that relationships are a whole lot of work.

A couple of summer’s back, I sat at this same writing desk at this same time of year, looking and listening through the window pane. I noticed a bit of envy for the apparent effortlessness with which nonhumans build healthy neighborhoods, more commonly called ecosystems, or environments. Even the ‘invasive’ grasses who arrived as seeds in the pockets of European refugees have made home here by giving and receiving hospitality. Through the window I watched native songbirds feast upon the mature seed heads of Canary Grass, the stalks bending under the bird’s weight without breaking. The practice of hospitality builds a home by keeping the threshold between bodies porous. As I watched this dance of Life beyond the pane, the following words came: Their way of living is their way of being at home. Or, more simply: Their way of living is their home.

So how do we begin to heal within a modern world where the consequences of our ways of living flow effortlessly away from us? How do we pursue wholeness in a time where the landscapes that feed, clothe and medicate us lie out beyond the horizon? Some clues might lie in the language. Hospitality shares a root with the word hospital.

Perhaps this is what my friend James was imagining when he suggested that we give gifts ‘into’ rather than ‘away’. Each time we share food across the threshold without allowing money to even things out, we could imagine that we are putting clean sheets on a hospital bed. If the gift is the medicine, its ritual passage from body to body begets healing by re-membering the whole. That whole, or hospital, is the culture.

In the presence of the gift of food, people say the most beautiful things to me. In the early days of the pandemic, an older couple brought their autistic grandson to the Gift Stand. The boy’s parents were struggling with challenges that had rendered them temporarily unable to care for their son. The boy seemed to light up when he visited the Stand, so his grandmother worked out another day to bring him out to help with a project. As the three of us stood around a table peeling gleaned sweet potatoes, she reflected the meaning of the Farm back to me in the form of a story.

Over her decades as a nurse, she had noticed an increasing number of her patients struggling with depression. She worked out a prescription that would cost them zero dollars: start a gratitude journal and take up community service.

The gratitude journal would encourage them to notice all of the ways in which the world was already offering them hospitality every minute of every day—to train their attention on their fullness rather than their emptiness. The community service practice would allow them to pass the gift along by making a hospital bed for the neighbors.

That was her prescription for healing.

With care,

Adam