In Search of a Counter-Spell for Ingratitude.

Dispatches from the Farm.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The miracle we call being alive might just come along and sweep you off your feet.  Whether in whimsy, sorrow, or heart-rending beauty, the moment will come as a surprise.  Every time a surprise.  You might even get swept like this multiple times in a single day.  I’ve been granted a string of such days this past week, and by golly the gratitude is building up behind the gates.  How does one choose words suitable for such a moment?

Have you heard Hermit Thrush sing from the woods edge as Sun spreads evening jewels upon a gray-day, rain-wet meadow? 

We had gardened together for hours, a hodge-podge crew of neighbors, sorting through still-rough compost, the rank pile steaming in the cooling mist of mid-May.  Loading wheelbarrow-fuls of last summer’s lamb guts on their way to becoming black gold beneath the hungry corn seeds we will bury in these mounds the week after next, past the risk of frost.  We find a few jaw bones and tufts of wool in the pile as well.  Corn thrives on a hearty helping of death.  We will give Corn a week or two head start before we plant Bean and Squash by her side, lest they smother her.  

Rain showers land on sweat-damp shoulders and slickening shovel handles.  The heavy work brings talk of blisters.  Cathryn warms up Feast leftovers for supper and sets one single table in the old Barn—a brightly-colored cloth and place settings for the bent-backed garden crew. 

Last Sunday this Barn was packed with neighbors.  In the center of each Feast platter we piled Butternut Squash Polenta: ground Corn from last summer’s garden cooked with puree of roasted Butternut, whose vines twined around the feet of those standing corn plants, plus garlic from the adjacent, hay-mulched beds and milk from the cows down the road.  Only Salt traveled from afar, to finish the dish. 

A round of spoken gratitudes before the meal serves to flush out the day’s stirrings.  Last Sunday eight long tables full of human ears sat quietly at attention here in the Barn, awaiting words from those bold enough to break such a well-attended silence.  A week later we all fit around one table, and so the silence is a bit less intimidating to enter.  I listen as my gardening companions stretch for words suited to such a day, to such a life.  They lay out some fine jewels.  Once all have spoken, Ben leads us through the Gratitude Feast Blessing, as he did one week ago, a call and response:

For the dark soil that cradles the seed.

For the rains that bring forth the green leaves.

For the stars that give form to the flowers.

For the warm sun that ripens the fruit.

For the animals whose lives allow ours.

For the hunger that brings us together.

For the fine folks gathered round the table.

For the fabric we weave with these words.

For all this goodness and beauty.

We give thanks.

*with hand joined, and some gusto:

Blessings on the meal!

When you kill lambs whose births you’ve attended and feed their cooked flesh to others, as I do, hearing a barn full of neighbors of all ages give thanks for the gift of being alive with gusto might just make your heart explode.  Before the Feast last Sunday I moved the flock down to the pasture adjacent the Barn, so they could hear it for themselves. 

A week later the flock grazes the hilltop along the road.  After dinner, as Ben washes up the dishes, I ask the other Catherine to walk with me to check on a sick lamb; I noticed his droopy ears and sluggish gait in the morning but right away he sensed the weight of my gaze.  Too wary for me to catch.  I bring the crook with me this time—yes, a shepherd’s crook—one end bent for catching a neck and the other for grabbing a foot. 

On our way up the hill, we notice old Sun pouring through newly-leafing Oak limbs.  Raindrop cling as prisms to Grass blades.  The evening’s reckless generosity stops us short.  I hear Hermit Thrush singing from the wood’s edge.  He’s just arrived this past week.  I motion for Catherine to stay silent with me, ears pointing north.  A long pause.  Then his song comes again.  Hermit Thrush will sweep you off your feet if you are willing to deem yourself worthy of his courtship.  Like a friendly ghost he haunts this place from now ‘til mid-summer with a song both polyphonic and kaleidoscopic.  Doubled, ascending, spiral.  That’s about as far as I can reach with these English words—stretching toward this Farm’s spring song.  

If I were to sell you this piece of writing, or a quart of the nettle soup I just made the other day, a pound of freshly ground lamb or a ticket to the next Gratitude Feast scheduled for the first Sunday in June, I would retain some degree of control over how the story turns out.  I would walk away from our encounter with a fist full of dollars—well, maybe not FULL given the categories of goods and services I offer—but at least with a few dollars.  Each one a hedge against unwelcome surprises.  You would walk away with a full belly and the feeling that you’d done your part, hands passing back and forth against one another in a sign of completion.  Keeping one another in mind would become optional beginning the moment we left each other’s sight. 

From the first time I read Lewis Hyde’s words I knew I was being courted: “Our generosity may leave us empty, but it is then our emptiness that tugs gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.”  Successful courtship begets longing.  A longing this deep and old can begin to feel like a haunting. 

What if the arrival of money in our midst—some hundreds or thousands of years ago depending on where our people hail from—made it all too easy to forget that we are worthy of being courted?  Made it all too easy to forget that our lives are the medium through which the dead sing to us?  That we are their best idea yet?  That their payment comes in the form of our gratitude, woven into every waking and dreaming hour?  That eloquence is simply what happens when our gratitude builds up behind the gates and we stop trying to hold it back—that it’s spilling is our end of the covenant?  That the dead have granted us lungs and tongues and language for this very purpose?  That they are always singing to us, and always listening.

Among un-moneyed people, Hermit Thrush might be heard as an ancestor—a dead Auntie or Grampy—who sings so hauntingly so as to make sure we remember how to live right.  David Abram suggests in The Spell of the Sensuous that birds may have become angels in places where humans began to live at a greater distance from the wild.  Angels have wings, sing songs, and serve as messengers for the unseen.  They appear out of the blue and disappear just as mysteriously.  Check, check, check and check. 

It's not that money is bad.  It is simply the ultimate abstraction of life into property, allowing our life-related pronouns to migrate in a possessive direction, from “theirs” to “ours” and then eventually to “mine” and “yours.”  Property seems to be the ultimate purveyor of ingratitude.  Imagine all the dead aunties and grampies sitting together singing, “Our generosity may have left us empty, but it is from this empty place that we can sing you a love song called Life.”

On the Peasantry School Community Call last week a man named David observed that “complaining seems to be our national past time.”  Ouch.  Perhaps we got ourselves so fixated on private ownership and self-reliance that we stopped hearing the love song in all the little things that didn’t go our way—the little things that went Life’s way instead.  I offer my sincere thanks to my remarkable conversation partner on that call, Michael Reynolds, and to Katherine Brazenor, who labored to clean up the choppy recording.  You can download the recording of that conversation HERE.

Lest you think I’ve mastered this gratitude thing, let me leave you with a story that I’m admittedly a bit embarrassed to share.  My sleep deficit leading up to last Sunday’s Feast was severe.  A thousand “first of the season” details had me up at all hours fiddling and tending.  Once we got the band packed out, the barn doors closed and the lights switched off, I was ready to sleep.  But by three a.m. I woke with my heart racing.  Sleep would not return, so I walked the Farm at dawn.  Air pulsing with birdsong, fields greening, udders full, lambs fattening.  But they couldn’t get through to me.  I wasn’t ready to listen.  Instead, I had the same old story riding like a load of bricks on my shoulders.  The foundational story of civilization.  On that morning it sounded like this: “Adam, you’re crazy for working so hard to put on these Feasts for no charge.  You even forgot to pass around the newsletter signup sheet last night.  That was such a stupid mistake.  No one’s going to keep you or the Farm in mind.  No one cares.  No one will show up for the Farm Frolic next Sunday to help dig the corn mounds or volunteer to contribute money to cover the Farm Budget.  You are just going to break your body and end up slowly dying in your tiny house.  Alone.” 

Ingratitude can be deafening, and crushingly lonely.  But also oddly habit forming, it seems. 

I was still tangled in self-pity when I reached the Farm kitchen where I found Julie, Kia, Sam, Marina and Tyler, already caffeinated and joyfully scooping the final leftovers into containers and warming water for dishes.  Their way with one another and the work rang with residual gratitude.  They hadn’t lost track of the words to the song: “Our generosity may leave us empty, but it is then our emptiness that tugs gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.”

The miracle of being alive might just come along and sweep you off your feet.  Whether in whimsy, sorrow, or heart-rending beauty, the moment will come as a surprise.  You might even get swept like this multiple times a day.  By golly, the gratitude might build up behind the gates.  How does one choose words suitable for such moments? 

That’s as far as I can reach with these English words, these typing fingers and this speaking tongue. 

Until next time, I wish you a few moments of blessed reprieve from the deafening ingratitude of our time.

With love,

Adam