Is there even time to weep when there's so much work to do?

An Israeli-born photographer climbed into the canoe with the puppy Maizey and me last week. Harel, you have graced this place with your craft.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Sun kisses an upturned face, the uncovered back of a hand. Pine and Oak lay long, cold shadows across the hilltop garden, where many hands have labored. These Sun-kissed hands, remembered, are entered into those labors. Beets and Carrots of every color. Rutabagas the size of a small child. Potatoes lifted from beneath a blanket of hay.

There will be food to eat here at the Farm this winter because people showed up on Sundays to dig shovelfuls of compost into compacted ground. They scratched long lines in the earth to make rows. They sprinkled seeds. Rain clouds came and went. Stories rose from human tongues. Pine and Oak listened on. Not for a while had they heard the sound of humans pulling in a common rhythm.

On the off days, in between the public gatherings, their gladness presses upon my awareness. I slip beneath their outstretched arms and descend the hill to Old River. Old River have mercy. Remember us into your circle of trust.

This time of year, her waters run icy cold. Aliveness tingles care-worn skin, catches in the halting breath. This longing, deep and clear, cuts a swath through the heart of town, tumbles wildness over rock shelves, passes the motel where people without names stay alive by sweeping up the crumbs from beneath the tables of the rich. She burbles and murmurs her kindness there. Even there. Especially she murmurs as she flows across the table top where other people without names try to keep poverty at bay. Out of sight and out of mind, as they say. Someone else will surely fix this thing. People without names become populations, income brackets, lifestyle options, gradations of need, bundles of desire. They become good people and bad people.

When your power gets turned off for lack of payment, you might have to run an extension cord from the neighbors. An electric space heater can keep a child from freezing to death. Or it can start a fire that burns the whole place down. When your flight gets delayed, you might have to sleep on the airport floor, the handle of your bag looped around your arm for fear of theft. You might have to decide whether gratitude is worth the trouble in a world gone mad.

But Old River flows down from the high hills, a wild country where none of this makes any sense at all. She has stories to tell, about a Life that passes between bodies. About a neighborhood where health emerges not from fairness, but from generosity. In her quiet way, she carries a capacity for home that threatens to sweep away every category we rely on to keep things from breaking the banks down here. In the troubled town where people with names wonder what to eat for supper. Are the kids being kept warm down the street? When did everyone start locking their doors? What does a single human life mean? Is there even time to weep when there’s so much work to do?

Most of what could be said seems best left sleeping on this cold, clear, moon-drenched night. Windless and frost-nipped. Full of wonder and sorrow. Alive to a degree that quickly becomes too much to bear.

I’m working on book chapter with an auspicious, or ominous, title: Voluntary Impoverishment. The phrase has proven contentious over the years, but it still does something to my heart that no other set of words seems to. It bears an obvious relation to the ‘gift economy’ practice that has become my calling card. In an economy of gifts, once you decide that you have more than you need, you simply give some of it to someone else. You don’t have to wait for someone at a desk somewhere to determine which population demographic you and the other person fit into. You can simply exchange names, shake hands, and pass the gift along. The person who receives it might suddenly decide that they have more than they need, inciting a sort of neighborhood-wide game of hot potato, but without winners or losers.

Releasing possessions makes a person poorer in a world hell-bent on freeing us from the hassle of relationships. Gratitude and indignity become near-synonyms in such a world. Doesn’t everyone deserve to be liberated from the indignity of gratitude? Is there even time to weep when there’s so much work to do? Old River, have mercy. Remember us into your circle of grace.

But there’s another way in which the contentious two-word phrase in question helps me find my way in the world we’ve made. My teacher says it this way: “For every time I’ve been asked how things got to be as they are, I’ve been asked five hundred times what to do about it…how not to be where we are anymore.”¹

In the old stories, a home was an occasion for hospitality. A candle in the window to welcome the weary. An extra place setting just in case. A simple mattress on the floor. A warm hearth fire. Generosity wasn’t institutional or political—or personal. It was cultural because it was ecological. Generosity was the way by which the more-than-human had their way with us—the means by which we got remembered.

I joined a call the other day with a group of local leaders concerned about the break in nationally-funded food benefits. That’s where I heard the term ‘populations.’ Some of the people in those ‘populations’ I happen to know by name. No one did anything wrong, on that call or during the generations preceding this fraught moment. But the candle in the window no longer burns as a beacon. The hearth fire has been forgotten as the forgiveness of the greening land. When did everyone start locking their doors? Is there even time to weep when there’s so much work to do?

In order to draw a connection between material ascendance and cultural impoverishment, we may have to set down our search for solutions for a moment. We may have to stop trying to be somewhere else but where we are. We may have to admit, voluntarily, that the project of dividing the world into mine and yours, rich and poor, good and bad, deserving and not, set in motion something that was supposed to feel like liberation but ended up feeling more like a chronic, low-grade ache. Are the kids being kept warm down the street? When did everyone start locking their doors? What does a single human life mean? Is there even time to weep when there’s so much work to do?

What if the impulse to propose solutions carries the indelible fingerprint of the very trouble that it is proposing to solve? In a world where relationships are a whole lot of trouble, any way forward that asks us to be troubled by the impoverished state of our relationships will be seen as a distraction from the real work of designing post-relational care-delivery-systems. The thought of trying to bear weight on atrophied neighboring muscles is, understandably, terrifying.

Just a few generations ago, real human people stayed alive in these parts without insurance policies or federal food benefits—or grocery stores. Or electric lights. How on earth did they do it? How did they make candles without petroleum wax? And why did they place them in their house windows such that the light shone out as much as in? Is there even time to ask questions like these when there’s so much work to do?

In response to the “What are we going to do about it?” question, the teacher responds:

“You’ll have to begin with your poverty.”

“Yeah, okay,” they’ll say, “but what do you do after that?”

“There is no ‘after that,’” I’ll say. “You ask because you haven’t done it yet.”

“But after I do it? Then what?”

“You begin with your poverty. You won’t ask for ways out if you do.”

“Do you expect to draw people to that kind of thing?”

“I don’t really, no.”

Translating this teaching into on-the-ground practices could be many lifetimes of work. Take candles, for instance. A year ago, at one of our Sunday Farm Frolics, a small group of neighbors made candles from bee’s wax and beef tallow. The labor was considerable, and the number of resulting candles small. This time of year, I switch off the electric lights at my house most evenings and sit for at least half an hour in the soft glow of those labors. The human people I worked alongside on that day spring to mind. The cattle who stored sunlight on their backs in the form of yellow fat spring to mind. The green meadows upon which they fed spring to mind. Honey bees struggling to ward off winter chill spring to mind. Are their young being kept warm—human, cattle, plant and insect all? How might I become an agent of their health?

Others have labored. Even here, in the dark house on the cusp of winter, in the hardened heart of modernity, these Sun-kissed hands are entered into their labors. Old River have mercy. Remember us into your circle of grace.

With care,

Adam

1. This, and the quote below from the chapter ‘Poverty’ in Stephen Jenkinson’s newest book Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work.