Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
Crescent moon. Dark tent of sky. Pricked with twinkling openings to the Otherworld. What we would do for just one moment of clear seeing through those cracks. Clear day arrives, and clear night. The first like this in months. It is a lot for us. We grew accustomed to grayscale, and half-light. We are reminded and remembered both. Midwinter was a threshold. Her water broke. We slipped through. Life will be renewed by our labors now. As it has been, forever and ever. Amen. The Greening listens for our songs, our chants, our many whispered prayers. Call her back with me now:
Unfurling bud, fragrant blossom
wet lamb, watchful mother
grass blade, clover leaf
dark soil, thawing.
All the buzzing and crawling ones
after nectar, shit, sugar, blood.
We call the humans back as well, the Old Ones. Ask to be remembered. And forgiven. Their names rise from our tongues around a table lit by four candles. They are humans and they are animals, the ones whose lives allowed ours. Their going granted us home. And supper. Here, on the far side of the threshold.
A palpable quickening has come over the Farm. The skin of ice on the cow’s water tub seems thinner by the day. Snow might be gone by week’s end. All Sun they’re saying—the ones who proclaim such things. The book draft is out for review and consideration. If you’ve a prayer in you, now is a good time to release it. My friend Sam and I will be speaking about food gifting at the NOFA NH Winter Conference this coming Saturday 9/10. They have put together quite an impressive lineup. If you live within range, please do come say hello.
There is a remarkable kindness afoot in the world it seems, plying the wreckage of a society in tailspin. It would be so much easier if it was all bad news all the time. Don’t get me wrong—the news is bad out there. The terror filters in, unbidden. But human hearts were made for breaking. Given what I do, I get to see this again and again. We were made for this work: turning toward the trouble, crossing the threshold, and then making beauty here. Together. In this world granted to our safekeeping for a season, sometimes longer.
Two weeks from today we will host our second Peasantry School Community Call: Monday 3pm-4:30pm EST. That’ll be Tuesday morning early in Australia. I say we because an ad-hoc Aussie planning committee sprung up after the first one. Thanks to Katherine and Jeremy for their initiative: A three-month trial at the same time each third Monday of the month. Here is the Zoom link:
Peasantry School Community Call 2/19, 3pm EST.
I don’t ever use the word community lightly. It seems to me the thing the word actually points to is woven from care, responsibility and limits. If weaving is the labor of building community, the never-finished cloth isn’t assured to comfort or shelter its weavers directly. Community isn’t a good deal like that, from what I can tell. And yet, the longing remains.
I looked back at a piece I wrote in September, and I offer it to you again here, as it seems oddly appropriate for the early-going of this monthly Peasantry School Community Call. As David just wrote in a note left on my writing table:
Many blessings to you,
and to all the life unfolding from yours,
and all the life yours unfolds from.
Labor, Leisure, Service and Belonging
—from 9.13.2023
Does it sound odd to call 2020 the good old days? I have been working on the book this week, which places me squarely in the stance of remembering the day I stopped selling things, the way so much seemed possible in a time of crisis that no longer appears likely in a time of business-as-usual. Last Friday I attended, along with my fellow board members, the thesis defense presentation of my dear friend Sam, the anarchist in our Animist and Anarchist duo. He and I wrote a series of letters back and forth to one another last year, and plan to speak together at some conferences this winter. I love this man, and was thrilled to see that his presentation was packed. I sat on the floor for an hour nodding my head and smiling as he described his study of non-market food in Vermont—food that’s not for sale. In the room were a handful of his comrades from Food Not Cops, a group that has served—they use the word shared—lunch behind the parking garage daily since the beginning of the pandemic. Food Not Cops lunch is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. Service and sharing are important words in the book I’m trying to write.
On the way home, as we waited in unusually long lines for the ferry, I learned that a music festival was on tap for the weekend. Cars full of twenty-somethings were on the go. Apparently, the festival sold thousands of tickets. The good old days of 2020, eh? Back then, during the first summer of lock down, our weekly work days used to regularly see thirty people show up, many of them in that same twenty-something bracket. Convincing people to come to our weekly Farm Frolics in a post-pandemic 2023 has been slow going by comparison. Community service is a hard sell, it seems, absent a crisis.
Maybe I was a bit jealous when I looked up the website for the music festival that had drawn such a big crowd a couple of towns away. Interestingly, the word community was central to the marketing strategy for the event. The word clearly illuminates a longing in a lonely time. And yet, anything that actually delivers the state of belonging the word points toward wouldn’t ever be for sale. It’s not just that we haven’t figured out how to restore people’s sense of community; consumers can’t actually be the same people as community members. Un-belonging is required for the economy to grow. As is the apartheid of labor and leisure. You can probably hear in my tone that I’m still a bit jealous. Or just sad.
I’ve often considered abandoning the word community all together. Too flaccid, or watered down. But I can’t shake a memory of the time I attended Food Not Cops lunch behind the parking garage, where I saw all sorts of folks—heartbroken graduate students alongside heartbroken street addicts—sharing a meal together with no money exchanging hands. “It’s not charity work,” Sam will tell you. In his dissertation defense he quoted William Paley who, in 1825, defined charity as “promoting the happiness of our inferiors.”
I’ve just received Gordon White’s new book in the mail, sporting the evocative title: Ani.mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos. I spent $40 of the $500 monthly stipend that ninety of you have generously afforded me on Gordon’s book, and I will do my darndest to press those dollars into service. I don’t take my remaining interactions with the market lightly. In the opening pages, Gordon offers a simple definition for animism. Reading it, I am struck that it might be a helpful replacement for the term “community service” in a time where leisure can be billed as community. Animism: “the belief that the world is made up of persons, only some of whom are humans. These personhoods are constituted relationally with other persons, and it is the business—busy-ness—of the animist to ensure and promote right relations.”
As an anthropology student, I read accounts of times and places where right relations between humans, and also between human and nonhuman persons, were commonplace—where a culture of right relation was inherited. What we call leisure abounded in many of those same places. From within the story of modernity, it’s a head-scratcher. How were they not toiling all of the time? I then saw a book in which people from different parts of the world were photographed with their household belongings spread out around them. It is ironic that we use the word belongings to mean possessions. Perhaps possessions stand in for belonging, creating the connection between the words. The following, painful realization struck me back then: the people who had all of that elusive leisure time demanded unimaginably less from the world than I do. Absent machines and fossil fuels and sweat shops, they knew, unavoidably, that wanting more would mean working more. Local provisioning obliged them to know, intimately, that wanting more and then taking more would diminish the lives of their neighbors. The desire for leisure in our time might betray a longing to remember how to want and take and therefore work less.
I love that Gordon White says, “it is the business—busy-ness—of the animist to ensure and promote right relations.” I have been tracking the words “busy” and “want” in modern English, and I can report that they are ultra-prevalent. I invite you to notice how often we use the word “want” to describe someone’s motivation and “busy” to describe the resulting state of being. Busy + ness does indeed give birth to business in the etymological dictionary, with the following definition: a state of being disturbed, troubled, or anxious.
2020 as the good old days, eh? Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that business as usual is the real crisis, not the other way around. I offer my thanks to Sam and Gordon for holding a candle to the shadowy regions of the “way things are.” I’m glad to have companions to be troubled alongside. Perhaps that’s a more fruitful path toward community in our time: belonging by being troubled together. I doubt an event with that slogan will sell thousands of tickets, but that is what you will find if you make your way to one of our weekly Farm Frolics—or the monthly Peasantry School Community Call.
With a broken heart,
Adam
You sign your post as brokenhearted. I hate to think of your heart as broken, Adam. Because your heart creates the space to ask the questions you ask, that resonate with so many of us, that invite us to feel into a different paradigm, where our comfort and security is reciprocal with those beings upon whom we rely for well-being, down to the soil biota. I see you as whole-hearted. Yours is a heart that beats a rhythm calling us back to interdependence. It’s hard to ignore that drum beat. That is not a broken drum.
Hi Adam, I receive a ton of inspiration from what you are doing, and from how you describe what you are doing. Talk about jealous! I'm jealous to live my life more like you live yours! I'm taking steps toward that, though they feel like baby steps by comparison, and your work inspires me to take more. Agree and appreciate what you wrote to Sally about being broken-hearted as being much better than numb.