How is it working out?

What is a human being if not a food-art-assemblage? Thank you, Allison for the love and inspiration you bring to the Farm every single week.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Soil turns to dust underfoot. Hilltop pastures take on the pale hue of drying hay. Whole portions of the Farm stop growing entirely. I slide back the heavy cover of one of the Farm’s two stone-lined wells, fearful of what I’ll find. I see the top of the pump above the water’s surface, and the earthen bottom less than a foot below. Not good. No rain in the forecast.

Practicing for the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves becomes an entirely different matter during a drought of this severity. As my friend Sam likes to remind me, the grocery stores already stopped having food for anyone without reliable access to money.

Every Saturday, we tape 50-80 small flyers to doors in town, invitations to Sunday Lunch, a table under a pop-up tent in an empty lot along main street where the food is shared family style, for no charge—as a gift. For one hour we step from the blast furnace of the way things are into the shelter of a possibility, at once a plea and a prayer for our human-ness. Some weeks no one comes beyond the three of us who have set the table. This isn’t a victory story. And I can’t imagine doing anything else.

To be healed we must come with all the other Creatures to the feast of Creation.¹

The food served under the tent is offered as a gift by the gardens and fields here at the Farm, their generosity underwritten by resident soils, plants and animals in conversation with sunlight and rainfall arriving from above. To say that humans ‘grow’ food is more than a bit misleading. To say that humans must have money in order to eat is a relatively young experiment in the arc of human social life. How is it working out? The answer depends on who you ask.

Under the tent at Sunday Lunch, where the words grocery store and money have been temporarily decommissioned, we stretch for other phrasings. Here’s one: in a time of deepening drought, the gardens and fields will stop having food for anyone without well capacity, irrigation infrastructure, or a culturally-inherited capacity to communicate with the unseen through spoken or sung courtship. I experiment with various forms of rain prayers and songs; I’ll admit that it feels like an uphill climb.

Even if soaking Rain arrives on the far side of the ten-day forecast window, there will be significantly less food for us to share outward this winter. If soil, sunlight and rainfall form a trinity, or a tripod, or a three-legged stool, well, I think you get the picture. Two legs won’t stand for long.

Can you imagine the camaraderie that may have emerged among neighbors living through a drought when all food was local food? In these parts, that wasn’t very long ago, and yet the seduction of placelessness appears overwhelmingly powerful. Today, the caloric survival of our moneyless neighbors becomes a problem that some agency or government official or market force must surely be responsible for solving. During my flyering rounds in town I’ve gotten to know some folks who fit these descriptors. It’s not that we are bad people for withholding food from our moneyless neighbors; we are modern people staggering under the weight of an utterly incoherent set of social instructions. The personalization of guilt and shame may be one of the clearest indicators of culture loss. Living without a culture is a relatively young experiment in the arc of human social life. How is it working out?

It is shocking to consider that a local drought will have almost no impact on the short-term availability of food on the local store shelves. It is similarly unsettling to consider the long-term impacts of the colonial project on the minds and hearts of its supposed beneficiaries. We don’t call it colonialism any more, but the fingerprint is readily identifiable.

I had a phone conversation recently with someone who had heard about the work I’m involved with from a friend. The person on the other end of the line owns a historic farm a couple of hours from here and would like to find a farm manager to bring the land into productive life. I got a sense pretty quickly that I wouldn’t have much to offer, in part because I heard the word ‘want’ in nearly every sentence as the verb driving the plan-making inquiry. This is part of what I mean by the legacy of the colonial project—the land as a backdrop for human desire. I gently tried to suggest that the land might have guidance for us if we ask creatively and practice listening through the cracks. Over the past month, drought has become my principal listening partner. Social and ecological collapse ask us to relinquish preferences, to let go of the wheel. To become participants in a larger unfolding.

The person on the other end of the line asks me how the gift-based model I’ve created works. “It doesn’t work in any of the ways we generally use that word to describe,” I reply. If you keep planting the same seeds into dusty soil, you won’t end up with any more food to eat. In the days after the phone call, a story comes to me.

Last November we set up a Gift Stand for the first time downtown in the empty lot where we eat lunch under the tent. We put out word that we would be distributing boxes of grass-fed beef raised at the Farm, for no charge. We would also serve bowls of warm soup and have a fire going. Some seventy people stopped by that day to pick up food. Most of those people I’ve never seen or heard from again. It is difficult to describe in modern English how something can cost zero dollar and also not be free.

A few weeks later a thank you card arrived in the mail from a woman named Jane. I nearly cried when I read the simple handwritten note, which included a story about serving steak for a special birthday meal. Then another card arrived from Jane around Christmas. A few months later someone arrived at one of our weekly work days saying that they’d met a woman at the dog park a few towns away who had a lot of kind things to say about the Farm. They couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but she was the reason they looked up the website. Then another person showed up with the same dog park story. “I’m pretty sure her name is Jane,” this person told me.

In the heat of summer, I find light-colored khaki pants the best suited to Farm work, providing protection from Sun, Poison Ivy and scratchy grass stems. But thin cotton doesn’t last long, and I don’t buy clothing. Instead, I rely on a small circle of thrift-shopping fairies to keep me descent. As such, I reach occasional pinch points. About a month ago, I was down to one intact pair of pants. I haven’t gone so far as to put a clothing request in the newsletter, so I was surprised to receive an email from a woman saying that she’d already found a couple of pairs of pants my size at the thrift store where she volunteers, that she would send them with Allison to the Farm. Her name was Jane.

In response to the ‘How does it work?’ question, I keep circling back to that haunting line from Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift:

Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then tugs gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.

The wells are nearly empty here at the Farm. We prayerfully request the arrival of life-giving Rain.

With a care-worn heart,

Adam

1. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry.