Longing for Home in a Displaced Time.

Setting up for the first Gratitude Feast of the season at Sand River Community Farm.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

For those who live locally, the June Gratitude Feast fast approaches. Look for details in Friday’s newsletter and please do consider joining us for this Sunday’s Farm Frolic from 3-6pm, where we will be planting all of the season’s potatoes. Hosting monthly Feasts this summer means squeezing all of the Farm projects into three Sundays a month, and we’re feeling the squeeze right now! If you’d like to help with Feast prep during the week, you can simply reply to this email.

It takes immense courage to speak as if what’s happening is really happening.  To name aloud the ordinary violence of our time.  To acknowledge the accelerating pace at which our modern ways of living are degrading the cultural and ecological foundations of continued human life. 

I have been carrying

Chris Christou

’s courageous and carefully-chosen words since they arrived in my inbox a week ago.  In “A Permanent Vacation”

The Permanent Vacation (A Beautiful Resistance)

Chris writes:

This is the testament of a touristic world: your commitment to community exists insofar as the community exists to serve you, not the other way around. If the people you live near don’t coincide with your politics or perspective or if your investment has reached maturity or if the area gentrifies, you’re free to leave. Being able to come and go is freedom – from responsibility.

I could feel myself squirm as I read his words, each sentence an unveiling of my inherited, rootless, modern ways of being.  A human who isn’t a tourist might be called a neighbor, Chris proposes.  But he imagines community and neighbor as verbs.

To be a neighbour you must neighbour. To be a neighbour, you must understand the function of neighbouring, how it emerges in a place, how it’s arisen in your life or why it hasn’t. If it is to be practised, it must be learned, and so it must be taught. A skill, but not one you can hone from a book or video tutorial; one that requires the lived presence of others.

Chris, thank you for writing such a searing invitation for us to wrestle with the way things are.  This newsletter will serve as my response to your fine piece.      

Sand River Community Farm and the nascent Peasantry School operate under the premise that radical neighboring is our deeply human ecological function. That how we are with one another will be no different from how we are with soils, plants and animals, and vice-versa.  In this light, the ecological crisis becomes indistinct from the degradation of human neighborhoods you describe so clearly.  What you call “the quest for a permanent vacation” might be the final unravelling of our capacity to be fully human in a more-than-human world. 

In my early twenties I began crossing paths with people older than I wise enough to speak as if what’s happening is really happening.  People willing to name aloud the ordinary violence of our time.  To them I tip my hat as I offer the following string of stories. 

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy: “To Be of Use”

A wise old man read this poem to us, a group of thirty-some heartbroken youngsters gathered in a coastal California hillside garden, a maze of fruit trees and flowers, garlic and herbs.  The old man would lay out a feast for us on our first day of class.  He knew the hunger that had carried us so far from home to sit at his feet. 

We were embarking on a six-month apprenticeship—or initiation—in organic vegetable and fruit production.  None in the group had been raised alongside the work of farming; such is our time.  As apprentices, we would live in tents for the six-month summer season, sharing meat-free group meals at a rustic Farm Center.  I arrived in California as a vegetarian with a thorny ecological conscience—in search of something, anything, that felt like home. 

The pitcher cries for water to carry, and a person for work that is real.

I was twenty-three when Oren read that poem to us, on mist-draped morning in a land so far from home.  I have carried it by memory since.  But he wasn’t finished.  If you’ve ever weeded a garden, you can probably picture the motion required to shake soil from grass roots.  Oren had a way of doing this with words—to prepare us for the transplanting he had in mind.  Partway down his river of storytelling he paused, looked around the group, and said:

“To be a vegetarian, you have to kill, kill, kill.” 

Oren tended one of three garden sites at the University Farm that would serve as our home for the next half year.  During my rotation at the lower Farm, I fell under the tutelage of a second-year apprentice named Aaron, who asked me to take on the work of trapping gophers and ground squirrels: vegetable-loving rodents who would gladly eat every single plant in the field.  Without trapping, there would be no food for the hungry apprentices, or for the community members who had paid up-front for a weekly box of vegetables called a CSA share.  Growing vegetables, it turned out, required someone to walk the field perimeter daily to dispatch, by way of a pellet gun, twenty-plus, terrified, warm-blooded vegetarian animals.  If the Farm fields were our castle, the invading army approached in endless waves.  After a week of trapping, I stopped using the V-word to describe myself and asked Aaron to help me prepare a pot of Gopher Stew.  He kindly obliged me.  We must have missed a scent gland.  The stew was more than a bit musky. 

Fast forward fifteen years.  That thorny ecological conscience had been ground down by the push and pull of the marketplace.  Buying a farm brought monthly mortgage payments, which meant scraping profit from every interaction—with soil, plant, animal and human alike.  That’s how the economy gets fed.

To access land or make a living as a modern person entangled in a growth-dependent economy, you have to extract, extract, extract. 

I walked away from the Farm that I co-owned with an incurable case of heartbreak, the profitable bakery business that had always supported my farming habit, and two cows.  My new neighbors generously offered their field for grazing, asking no rental money.  “We would like our land to benefit the whole community,” they said.  I heard them loud and clear. 

The following fall our nascent non-market community homesteading project hosted a Gratitude Feast for no charge at the old Town Hall just down the road.  We slaughtered the first-born lamb from the Gift Flock and slow-roasted his body over coals to serve alongside vegetables and greens from the gardens.  Expecting a maximum of sixty, some ninety townspeople arrived for the Feast.  Luckily, we served the food family-style, placing a platter in the middle of each table.  Sitting around the table with neighbors and strangers, everyone in attendance magically remembered how to share, adjusting the amount they put on their plate to ensure everyone got something to eat.  No one went home hungry.

The pitcher cries for water to carry, and a person for work that is real. 

Back then I stood with one foot firmly in the market and the other floating in the fairy-tale land I’d begun using the term “gift economy” to describe.  My one-person bread-baking business required about forty hours per week, which left another thirty for the Community Farm.  I purchased grain from three local farmers for $1/pound to grind into fresh flour.  To a pound of flour I added nearly a pound of water and a bit of salt, and then sold the resulting loaf to the stores for $5.31.  My bread customers paid the stores $6.49. 

The source of the bakery business’ profits would remain shrouded in mist until one of those local grain farmers wrote an article exposing the extractive nature of what we call “local, sustainable grain production.”  He’d begun testing his declining soil organic matter and calculating the inputs of diesel fuel and farm machinery to grow a pound of grain.  His findings saddened him deeply. 

The industrial production of cheap agricultural commodities—especially grain—has ruined our taste for physical labor.  Long gone are small plots of wheat planted, harvested and threshed by hand.  Long gone are humans who work side by side in the fields with hoes in hand and a shared song on the tongue.  Maintaining soil health would require farmers to plant smaller plots and the grain’s eaters to bring their home compost and human waste back to the field.  And then stay for a few hours to help out. 

As I read this farmer’s account, I realized that the higher-than-average price I paid my grain farmers for a pound of wheat would have to at least quadruple before they could entertain trading their tractors for teams of draft horses, or their mechanical combine harvesters for a fleet of scythes.  Can you imagine trying to sell a loaf of bread for $30?  I couldn’t back then, and still can’t now.  But I can imagine that we would spend less time on vacation if we paid $30 for each loaf of bread. 

The farmer who wrote the searing article wasn’t renouncing the local, organic farming movement.  He wasn’t out to criticize his colleagues.  And he wasn’t writing a resignation letter.  He simply couldn’t keep playing along with a hope-drunk story that claims we are saving the world when we aren’t.  He was asking his neighbors to acknowledge that “sustainable” is not a suitable synonym for “slightly less damaging.”

By the following spring, our neighborhood farming project had found a name: Brush Brook Community Farm—for the cold mountain creek that flowed through the Farm’s main grass pastures.  With the help of a couple of neighbors, I organized a hand haymaking weekend—my response to that grain farmer’s courageous and honest plea.  A young man from the nearby farmer training program—modeled after the one I’d attended years before—showed up to lend a hand.  The way he carried his heartbreak was familiar to me.  That, and his love affair with the agrarian writings of Wendell Berry.  Brush Brook Community Farm’s experiments in gift economy piqued his imagination, and I began leaving an extra loaf for him at the student Farm where he studied on my weekly bread delivery rounds—as a gift.  A few weeks later, the director of that program called to tell me that this young man had left the program.  He’d had some trouble with the other students.  She told me because she knew he’d looked up to me.

I was pushing hard in those days, and I could feel the reckoning coming.  But my building exhaustion stemmed less from the seventy-hour work weeks than the dissonance between the “sustainable” profiteering that was my day job, and the gorgeous neighboring work sprouting from every crack and crevice in the pavement of my days. 

The pitcher cries for water to carry, and a human person for work that is generous.  The human soul cries out for a neighborly life. 

Around that time, I stumbled upon Martin Shaw’s book Scatterlings, a poetic plea for modern initiation, or homecoming.  Early in the book, he asks:

So what happens if we try and root? Rather ironically, the latest addition to hip-speak is a desire to be indigenous.  No work history required.  Well, indigenous is a complicated word.

Martin suggests we might learn to be “of” a place by laboring “under a related indebtedness to a stretch of Earth that you have not claimed, but has claimed you.” 

To be of is to hunker down as a servant to the ruminations of the specific valley, little gritty vegetable patch, or swampy acre of abandoned field that has laid its breath on the back of your neck….To commit to being around, to a robust pragmatism as to what this wider murmuring may require of you.  It’s participation, not as a conqueror, not in the spirit of devouring, but of relatedness. I think this takes a great deal of practice.  It doesn’t mean you never take a life, live on apples and peas, or forget that any stretch of Earth holds menace and teeth, just as it does the rippling buds of April.

These lines read to me now as marching orders, and not all that different from the opening morning of the organic farming program that set me down this road a decade and a half earlier. 

In Scatterlings, Martin describes his work leading vision quests: “To this day, wilderness fasting disables our capacity to devour in the way the West seems so fond of: in the most wonderful way I can describe, we get devoured.”  I decided I’d give it a go, for three days.  I scouted a secluded spot up high on the flank of the Mountain above the Farm and called the stores to let them know that I wouldn’t be delivering bread that week. 

I would walk into the woods with only a water bottle, sleeping bag and tarp to listen for words to describe the neighborly farming work by which I was being actively claimed.  The day before I left for the fast, a package arrived in the mail.  A book I hadn’t ordered. It was a gift.  It took a moment to realize that the sender was actually the young man from the farmer training program I’d met a month prior, the one who suddenly disappeared.  He had mailed me a collection of Wendell Berry’s new essays.  I began reading the back cover:

We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature.  We seem to have no idea that the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and in the world, might be the cause of our trouble.  Our trouble nonetheless exists, is severe, and is getting worse.  Instead of settled husbanders of cherished home places, we have become the willing parasites of any and every place, destroying the source and substance of our lives, as parasites invariably do. 

Like the final stanza of Marge Piercy’s poem, Wendell’s finely crafted words etched themselves into my memory almost immediately. 

I lasted only two days up there on the hill.  The epic slowness of wild time gnawed away at my final reserves of willpower.  Before packing my bags and walking back down, I scratched the following into my journal: 

Radical localism as a choice today amounts to a willingness to live alongside the consequences of our living, and then responding meaningfully in the ways we choose to live.

That’s where it all began: a bone-deep longing to learn how to stop being a tourist, to bed down alongside my consequence, to practice making home in a displaced time. 

With care,

Adam