Place-Based, Post-Colonial Culture

Is such a thing even possible?

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Sun climbs higher each day, penetrating deeper into the slumbering psyche of the landscape.  Dawn comes clear, blue, gold and black.  Woodpecker drums a courtship call into a taught hardwood trunk.  Chickadees sing their Phoebe song.  “Pheo-be, Pheo-be.”  South wind has whistled through the night, whisking lingering snow from the fields, glowing gold-brown in the morning light. 

Sheep, dissatisfied with the hay I’ve offered them, take to grazing the brown meadow.  Perhaps they can smell the greening everywhere, just beneath winter’s gold, gestating in the dark womb of the earth.  Their young grow inside of them, larger each day.  Some twins.  Some triplets.  Sleeping babes, springtime’s promise.  Safe from winter’s chill, they rest now in the warm, wet dark.  They are lovers of milk and grass.  Four-legged leapers.  They are the spring song of these slumbering meadows. 

Glenys, the flock matriarch, watches me whenever I’m in sight.  She always has.  She paces the fence when I approach, inquiring as to what I’ve in store for her brood this fine morning.  In the old stories she would have been part human and part sheep, an edge dweller.  “You feed us and we feed you,” she would say. 

She has watched me kill so many of her sons by now.  Watched this body receive her meadow song again and again.  Watched this displaced human person, suburbs-raised, struggle to imagine that he could become a part of her song.  Watched patiently as I fumble to learn to sing. 

The arrangement doesn’t seem to trouble her, this deep relationality between living and dead.  Between soil, sunlight, rainfall and grass.  Between flesh and hunger, prey and predator.  Between desire and longing, love and grief.  She bears the old covenant by feeding life and then asking to be fed by the place that is her home. 

Glenys is not stingy with her love.  When her twins nurse this spring, she will turn her head back to touch each one on the tip of a waggling tail—first left, then right.  Again and again she will do this until they’re weaned.  First left, then right. 

When I cross the fence into the winter sheep yard she walks to my side and presses her shoulder against my leg.  Her request is clear.  She expects scratches down her midline.  Shoulders to rump.  Better hay would be nice, but this morning these scratches will have to do.  Satisfied, she walks back to the flock.  This life will have to do—this clear-blue birdsong morning on the trembling cusp of the greening in a land so far from home.  This life will have to do. 

I haven’t been able to shake something that I read in a post from

Dougald Hine

. In

Digging Where We Stand

Dougald relays a story of an indigenous elder who says to a European-American person, “Your people seem to be committed to talking through your entire personal stories and having others listen as an effort toward healing.  We are afraid there isn’t enough time.  We have ways of doing the healing you seek all together, in a couple of hours.  We call it a ceremony.”  But the elder’s invitation isn’t for all of the European folk to show up at Sundance next year, rather to remember that our own people have access to remaining threads of culture that we might still labor to weave into some sort of place-based, post-colonial cloth. 

If I told you that I am lonely most of the time I wonder if you’d be surprised.  “But the work at Sand River Community Farm sounds so remarkably community-oriented.”  The work is remarkable, but it isn’t a remedy for longing or loneliness.  Rather, drawing closer to a living culture seems to intensify the sensation.  Think of the way our stomachs grumble as we walk into a house with the smell of supper on the air.

During the opening panel at a farming conference a couple of weeks back, an older man began by telling the story of the organic farming movement in the state.  This man spoke well, and his memories of those early days began to stir the room, particularly the older folks.  I heard them making those sounds we make without meaning to—soft guttural affirmations.  And then suddenly I noticed that I was being stirred as well as I listened to a story that includes me, one that seems to embody rightness, generosity and struggle.  A healing story.  I got this same feeling once when I watched a documentary film on the AIDS epidemic in which the early gay men’s movement struggled for social acceptance amid the sharp grief of illness and death.  A remarkable solidarity emerged among gay men in that time, a sense of community that I didn’t experience coming of age just two decades later.  Once the struggle dissipates, or changes names, the fellow-feeling appears to slip away. 

The fact that I can tell you the two times I got the feeling of being a part of a meaningful social identity that extends out beyond my lifetime might be linked to the intractable modern loneliness I am naming.

The man on the farmer panel showed the crowd a black and white photo of a group of long-haired, hippy-types trying to drag a tractor out of the mud with ropes.  “We didn’t know much about farming back then.  Most of us grew up in the suburbs,” he said.  Some of the skeptical old-timers in this town refer to me and the other young farmers on this road as “the hippies on Mace Chasm Rd.”  We are all first-generation farmers, minus the long hair and bellbottoms.    

Then the man on the panel said something that made my heart sink.  “We were rejecting much of what our parents had stood for.”  He went on to describe how a movement for heathy soils, food and community became co-opted by profit incentives, multinationals and the USDA.  He had come to the conference to promote a new label and movement called “Real Organic.”  That initial stirring feeling had dissipated by now.  Interestingly, none of the young farmers on this road have organic certifications.

Last Saturday evening I got the “part of something” feeling again, when a group of us from the Farm took a field trip to a monthly contra dance held a couple of towns away.  The regulars looked to be mostly in their sixties and seventies.  Many of the men wore plaid shirts.  All brought dancing shoes to change into.  Some in our group—mostly in our twenties and thirties—hadn’t read the invitation carefully, and ended up dancing in socks or bare feet.  The caller began by telling the history of Contra Dancing: European settlers arrived in New England and Quebec with their varied local cultures and began mingling with one another in their new home.  This dancing tradition survives as a memory of that time of upheaval and dislocation.  Before each song the band leader would tell us the origin of the tune: France, Ireland, Scotland, England and so on.  That’s when I got that feeling of being part of something. 

Over the following two hours I got to wrap my arms around dozens of old ladies and hold hands with lots gray-haired men.  Everyone I met was incredibly welcoming.  The organizer actually thanked our group of young farmers aloud for coming.  It was a big turnout for them.  It’s been two days now and that feeling of being part of something still hasn’t dissipated. 

The work here at Sand River Community Farm articulates a longing to be part of something, but I’m beginning to worry that the word community struggles to point us in that direction.  Culture is a complicated and often confusing word, and very difficult to define.  It might be easier to list a few things that I am beginning to suspect a culture isn’t:

A single-generation friend group.  A chosen family.  A like-minded “tribe.”   A movement or activist effort.  A sub-culture.  An online community.  An articulation of personal preference. 

To be clear, I am connected to every one of these modern social groupings, but I am increasingly unsure that they are actually cultural endeavors.  Those two hours at the dance seem to have done more to address the root loneliness condition than any dinner party or birthday gathering I’ve ever been to, or any number of minutes spent checking messages from my subscribers here on Substack. 

I spend a fair amount of time idealizing the past, but I have begun to notice that it is always a distant past.  I’d like to make the following commitment publicly: every time I hear people of my parent’s generation talking about their securities and investments, their hardened political stances, their entitlements to medical technologies or love for finding deals at Costco—or anything else they talk about makes me want to reject everything they stand for—I’m going to travel back to that dance floor in my mind, where it is socially acceptable to hold hands and even wrap our arms around one another. 

The indigenous elder said to the European American, “We have a way of doing this healing that you seek.  We do it all together, in a couple of hours.  We call it a ceremony.  Maybe you could remember that your people have them too.” 

With care,

Adam