Mutual Cherishing

Proud mama Ginny.

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Some years back, I began to notice that we accuse one another of being busy all the time.  Say, at the post office, by a well-meaning neighbor I haven’t seen in some time.  “Hi Adam, how are you doing?  Busy?”  Or, simply, “You are so busy.”  Admittedly, I love to work.  But the word “busy” poorly describes my experience of moving through the world, or the sense of agency to which I aspire. 

With my ear tuned to the b-word, I began to hearing it everywhere.  In modern English, “busy” seems to have become almost a badge of honor.  What are you if you’re not busy?  A slacker?  A social outcast?  A freeloader?  Depressed?

Walking around the back side of the word, I began to catch a glimpse of its shadow.  If I bump into someone at the post office who I haven’t called in months and they ask me how I’ve been, I could say “busy” as a way of excusing myself for not being in touch.  The b-word might signal to them that I’d like our conversation to last no more than three or four minutes, that slowing down long enough to hear about their sick cat or kid or coworker simply isn’t in my plan for the day/week/year.  The b-word might suggest that they should ask someone else for a ride to the hospital next week, or even consider hiring a cab. 

I began to notice that people rarely asked me for favors because, well, they saw me as one of the busiest people they knew.  At some point I noticed that the word busyness is only one letter away from business.  A visit to the dictionary confirmed that, yes, indeed the two are Siamese twins.  Business = busy + ness.  The root meaning for “business” might surprise you: a state of being troubled or anxious; solicitude. 

The word favor, on the other hand, means “to cherish or protect.”  Turned into a noun, a favor is a gift that renews a bond of affection and care.  Favors are acts of relational courtship.  They survive only outside of the marketplace, because they aren’t meant to be tracked.  Once you keep tabs on a favor, it becomes a time barter, and the ceremony of mutual cherishing promptly disappears. 

My heart began to stage a quiet revolt.  Right around the time I stopped farming for business I also tried to quit the word busy.  In line at the post office I would say, “Thanks for asking.  No, I am actually not busy at all.  I am engaged, at times overly so.”  I noticed a sense of agency returning.  But agency—a proxy for the word power—isn’t all comfy.  Agency asked me to remember that the choices I make every hour of every day—where I direct my attention and where I don’t—inflict real consequence upon the people around me, even the neighbors I haven’t seen in months.  Some of those neighbor-people are humans.  Many, many others are nonhumans. 

I began to wonder if we might describe the ecological crisis as an epidemic of human busy-ness.  I began to wonder about the consequence of billions of human people frantically trying to numb and distract themselves from the unbearable disappearance of webs of mutual cherishing. Webs once woven from countless little favors. 

Once we’ve stopped living in ways that assure us we’re worthy of being cherished—by our human and nonhuman neighbors—what becomes of our shared life? 

Perhaps we stop asking for favors and strive for self-reliance instead.  Perhaps individual human lives begin to look like sole-proprietor businesses, each a mad scramble to pay the bills, to stay out of the red.  Modeled after a business, the benefit of a modern human life accrues primarily to its owner and their heirs.  To stay afloat, one must build a profitable life by “earning a living.”  Profit means, literally, “advantage taken from an interaction.”  Under such conditions, people might begin to experience chronic, low-grade anxiety. The word “busy” might accurately describe the feel of a market-driven, profit-reliant society spiraling out of control. 

In How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human Eduardo Kohn coins the term “ecology of selves” to describe the perceptual relationship of the Runa people of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon to their more-than-human neighbors in their forest home.  Healthy ecologies grow from the give and take—literally the eating and being eaten—of diverse multispecies agents.  If a certain animal, plant or human person ensures too much benefit for themselves, and their way of living fails to serve as food for others, the health of the whole will be diminished. 

Wendell Berry suggests the following radical path in his poem Manifesto: “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”:

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit.  Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

In a healthy culture, could it be that human people stay alive not by chasing after advantage but by asking to receive favors—from one another and the fields and forests that are their home?  Rather than “busy,” might such people respond to the question “How are you?” by saying, “I am hungry today.  Do you have any food you would be willing to share with me?” 

Lewis Hyde explores the difference between gift circulation and commodity exchange in his important book, The Gift.  Of the experience of living in a world of gifts, he writes: “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.”  That simple sentence has been breaking my heart for years now.  It sounds to me like an ecology of selves.  Emptiness, not self-sufficiency, provides the force that keeps us alive. 

Can you imagine a world in which hunger and need aren’t problems to be solved, but rather essential daily invitations to renew our inextricable bonds to one another and to the earth?  I have been working full time for four years now to imagine that world, and the occasional glimpses I get are not easy to describe in words.  Hence these long-winded weekly essays and the Farm’s oft-repeated tagline: “This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.” 

When I stopped selling things, I quickly realized that staying alive would entail asking for a lot of favors.  If you don’t get the Sand River Community Farm Newsletter, that shorter weekly email includes invitations to the Farm Frolics, where community members help with various projects.  Some weeks a dozen people show up.  Other weeks, zero.  I have come to see that these regular—or incessant—requests for help function as exercises for my atrophied worthiness muscles.  Yesterday, when no one came to the Farm Frolic, I was offered yet another chance to perform emotional calisthenics.  Luckily, I was still riding high on a string of interactions I’d had over the preceding days. 

I mostly don’t leave the Farm during the fullness of lambing season, but Friday I made an exception for a funeral.  With the three-hour round-trip drive, the outing would take most of the day.  The woman who died lived across the road from the Farm where I last ran a business.  By modern linguistic standards, Sarah was one of the busiest people you could ever want to meet.  I would go to have dinner with her on occasion, and I can remember scheduling two months out, as every evening she had a meeting for one of the dozens of organizations and activist groups she upheld.  Several of those groups she’d founded.  Sarah told me many times how important her church was to her, but her funeral would be my first occasion to step inside the building.

I anticipated bumping into some of my old neighbors there, including my ex-business partner and her family, from whom I have been estranged for eight years.  Our relationship struggled under the pressures of running a business together.  When I decided to leave, the process of financial disentanglement eroded our remaining goodwill.  Completing the logistics of our “farm divorce” took a full year and stretched our time and attentional constraints to a breaking point.  Six months afterwards, my former friend-turned-business partner asked me not to contact her again.  It was back then that I began to wonder about the consequence of busyness, but I didn’t learn of its connection to the word business until more recently. 

I don’t get to cry often, but I wept through most of the funeral service.  As I listened to stories about Sarah’s life, I realized for the first time that the way in which she crafted a life of service has deeply influenced the path I’ve found over the past eight years.  Sarah wasn’t busy.  She was head over heels in love with the possibility of leaving the culture healthier than she’s found it.  She simply couldn’t hold back from serving anywhere she saw an opening.  She used to stop by several older church member’s homes every week to sort their mail and write out their checks.  She never spoke to me about her relationship with Jesus, but at the funeral I saw clearly that she had given her life to the radical neighboring he recommended.  After the service, my ex-business partner and her husband came to find me, carrying a warm embrace and word of forgiveness.  We traded stories for the first time in nearly a decade, and they re-introduced me to their now-teenage children.    

The next day people responded to my many pleading emails by driving from near and far to help raise a new floor in the old barn here at the Farm where we will invite the neighbors to gather for our monthly Gratitude Feasts and Barn Dances.  On the very same day a neighbor called to ask if I would consider being a support person for someone in the community gripped by a shame-riddled darkness that threatens to swallow them whole.  The person had asked for me by name.  I couldn’t say yes any faster.  And by “yes,” I meant, “This is all I long for, to be deemed trustworthy in this way.”  In order to make the request, this community member had to wrestle with the societal impulse to assume I was too busy to bother. 

As I said, I get occasional glimpses of a human life entangled in a web of mutual cherishing, in which all community members feel worthy of asking for favors.  It wasn’t easy to end the phone conversation with my neighbor who’d called to relay the request for assistance, even as the hour grew late.  For perhaps the fourth time, I said, “I am so honored to be entrusted with this story.”  My neighbor replied, “Well, you’ve kind of set yourself up to be open to this kind of thing, by inviting people to the Farm in the way you do.”  There it was.  After years of trying to quit being busy—in part by stepping away from the model of farming for business—a neighbor reported to me that my efforts had, against the odds, born a single, life-sustaining fruit. 

This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. 

Sometimes a simple story can act as food.  This one has been nourishing me for days now, and I couldn’t be more grateful.   

Many thanks to you for reading.

Adam