Much Obliged

More money stories.

It's hard to imagine this little munchkin keeping thousands of hungry rodents at bay, but at least we'll have some fun along the way.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

This Farm has a new resident: a rambunctious Wire Fox Terrier puppy named Maizey.  As I write, she is chewing up a worn-out running shoe that I’ve agreed to let her destroy.  How else would I get the newsletter finished?

The woman who raised Maizey reached out by email back in August after I mentioned, in a post, the chipmunks and squirrels feasting in the corn patch.  “We have a litter of puppies,” she wrote, “ready for adoption next month.  Their mother is a great chipmunk chaser, and a fantastic farm dog.” 

But the patch of flint corn we had planted with plans to serve polenta and cornbread at next year’s community suppers was disappearing before our eyes.  In a month it would be long gone.  So I called the local kennel and adopted an adult Jack Russel.  If you look through my spending pie chart below, you will notice a category called Dog.  Exasperated by Ronnie’s vocal outbursts, I ordered a bark collar online.  Six hours later I borrowed a car and drove to PetSmart to purchase another one.  The situation simply couldn’t wait a week for shipping.  To say Ronnie the Jack Russell was anxious would be an understatement.  Five days after I brought her home, I drove her back to the SPCA. 

In a fit of desperation, we cut the corn early, carting the whole stalks with ears attached to the old, abandoned farmhouse, the only building on the Farm large enough and safe from critters.  The house is already a bit spooky—think old shag carpet, antique wallpaper and plaster peeling away from lath, a bathtub full of mouse-mummies.  Hundreds of drying corn stalks leaning against every wall added another bizarre dimension.  We saved the corn, but it was an insane amount of work.  Leaving corn in the field to dry would be ideal. 

I called the woman who’d written about the puppies.  Sadie lives not far from here, and reads the newsletter.  “There’s only one left unclaimed,” she said.  Without delay, we drove down to meet Peaches’ daughter Apple—a name that served as a placeholder.  The whole scene was dreamy beyond belief.  The mother dog Peaches was alert, athletic, generous to strangers, and not one bit anxious.  The puppies were, well, the kind of creatures that invite you to set down the weight of the world for a few precious minutes.  Good medicine for someone like me. 

I assumed Sadie was looking to sell the puppies, as the rest of the litter had already been reserved.  Given the way I interact with money, I couldn’t imagine buying a purebred dog.  Despite the fact that I was falling in love, I readied myself to walk away, or go ask for the money as a gift and come back.  Then Sadie surprised me by saying, “My husband and I talked about it.  We would like to offer Apple to you as a gift to support the Farm’s mission.”  There it was.  The gift unleashes magic everywhere it goes. 

We named her Maizey Corn Dog.  She wasn’t purchased.  We were entrusted with her exuberant, young life.  She was given as a gift to this place.  She might belong here by serving and strengthening the web of neighborly relations by which those who live here are sustained. 

The money that would have normally changed hands remains un-transferred.  Something else moved instead.  But that something can be very difficult to describe in modern English. 

I called Sadie last week to let her know Maizey was thriving here.  She was glad to hear from me.  “I have been worrying a little bit,” she admitted.  She knows that I am a first-time puppy parent.  Sadie is already planning a reunion for the litter’s one-year birthday next July. 

Receiving such a precious gift of life inspires me to keep Sadie in mind, to wonder ongoingly whether she and her family are being sustained, and how my way of moving through the world might contribute to that possibility.  If I told you that receiving a gift of life imparts a burden, you might cringe a bit.  I’m guessing Sadie might be discomforted to hear me describe it that way.  But you can trace the roots of the word burden back to bear—meaning to carry or bring forth.  Add the suffix -th and you get the word birth.  The transfer of a gift from one set of hands to another initiates the birth of a relationship.  The puppies’ one-year reunion will also mark the birthday of an unprescribed relationship between Sadie and me, between Sadie and this place.  Maizey’s joyful presence here serves as an ongoing reminder.  In fact, she generates gratitude unrelentingly.    

The old-timers around here used to say, “much obliged” upon parting.  The statement can mean “thank you” or “you’re welcome,” but, unlike those common modern formalities, obligation implies a never-finished-ness to the relational entanglement.  Consider the possibility that we might say “thank you” and “you’re welcome” in the same way we pass money back and forth.  A wiping clean of the slate. 

The root of obligation is the same as ligament—something that binds two disparate entities into purposeful or useful articulation.  “Much obliged” implies, “I acknowledge that I will never be off the hook with you, and wouldn’t choose to be even if I could.  I entrust you with my ongoing gratitude.”  That’s the kind of language that grows neighborhoods and cultures rather than market economies.  That’s the kind of language exiled by the doctrines of fairness and personal freedom.  That’s the kind of language in whose service this newsletter will labor ongoingly. 

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I ended last week’s newsletter at the opening of an event I co-hosted to lift up the remarkable work and writing of one of my mentors,

Dougald Hine

.  I promised to pick up the thread of that story, in which we invited everyone present to consider making a transparent financial gift to cover the $200 budget request from the host organization, a collective of artists and culture workers called Spiral House.  The collective pays over $2K each month for continued access to the room in which they host community events. 

This Farm’s mission statement reads: “We long to remember our deeply human capacity for mutually sustaining relationships, both human-to-human and human to all that is not human.”  This is another way of describing the invitation we extended to the sixty-some folks gathered in that circle.  To practice becoming sustainers rather than ticket-holding consumers.  When I sat down to write a description of what happened next, it became clear that there was some pre-work to do.  I sorted through my bank statements and discovered that I spent $3881 from my personal account last year.  My spending can be broken down into the following categories:

As I began building a scaffolding of stories around my financial stay-alive-strategy, I realized that it might take a couple of weeks to see this one through.  For now, I offer a little preview of one of the stories I will lean on in the weeks ahead.

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Sending these love letters out into the world entails relinquishing control over where and how they make contact.  Occasionally, someone arrives at the Farm with some miles under their tires.  They’ve read these newsletters and would like to see if this place is the real deal.  Is the house in order, so to speak?  Usually, I wish I’d taken an extra hour to pick up—such is the host’s burden.  But the mess in the corner might have the most important story to tell, and so this week’s letter will try to pull the curtain on the always-unfinished work of inhabiting the tragic gap between a heavy load of aspirations and the way things still, frustratingly, are. 

On a cool early-summer day, a man in his mid-thirties joins us in the tomato patch during one of the community work days we call Farm frolics.  It is almost supper time before I catch wind of the longings that brought him here.  He is an active student of the social forces we call money, land access and community, including a relational form known as Nonviolent Communication, or NVC. 

The visitor-from-afar tells me a story about an NVC teacher whose books had some influence upon me several years back.  This teacher has begun to experiment with a deeper application the NVC practices, by allowing money to move between members of a group on the basis of needs and requests.  Each person in the group identifies three income tiers: baseline, ideal, and dream level.  The group then allows money to flow, like water, to the low spot, as it might within a healthy marriage or family. 

As I listen intently to the man’s story, I begin to notice something.  Finally, I interrupt him to ask for clarification.  “Is the dream income level the highest or the lowest?” I ask.  He looks at me as if I have two noses. 

Look for more on Nonviolent Communication and what it means to have two noses in next week’s letter. 

Thank you for your interest,

Adam