The Anarchist and the Animist#1: Radical Hospitality

Greetings Friends and Neighbors,

They say the first nip of real cold will be coming into town tomorrow, riding on a gusty North Wind.  Winter’s Tooth I call him.  The guest for whose arrival I have been readying the Farm for weeks now.  Installing stovepipe chimneys and building roofs in weather so warm that would have been shocking if it weren’t so darn comfortable.  You may have heard the expression, “Make hay while the sun shines.”  There is surely a roofing equivalent, and over the past weeks I have mostly been obedient to the old adage despite the unseasonable temptation to ignore what is surely coming.  To work less urgently.  In my early farming days, on this very date, arrived a week-long cold snap during which the temperature never rose above twenty degrees.  I hadn’t finished winterizing the water system for the Cows and the milk room, and the intensity with which I pushed and pulled to keep water flowing that week landed me in the emergency room with searing abdominal pain.   I carry that story with me as a memory-aid.  It is not only poor form to be running the vacuum cleaner when your dinner guests arrive—it can be very stressful.

Hospitality in its various forms is on my mind.  I have just finished hosting a human guest for two days—a new friend with whom I am quite enamored.  Upon David’s departure I climbed in the mechanical saddle and drove around the Lake to work with another friend on a piece of writing that will attempt to describe our shared work of giving food away.  Sam organizes with a collective called Food Not Bombs, or Food Not Cops, serving lunch seven days a week at a parking garage in Burlington, VT, since the beginning of the pandemic.  Many of those who attend these food distributions live on the streets.  The project that I was involved with for several years, Brush Brook Community Farm, made home some ways up-River from that concrete parking garage.  At Brush Brook, we grew, gleaned and distributed food for no charge in a very different social and ecological landscape.  When Sam and I became acquainted, we realized that we both expend a lot of energy trying to explain to people how our work differs from charity.  In my more candid moments, I have gone so far as to call Brush Brook a soup kitchen for rich people.

As we sit down to draft an outline, I propose to Sam that we use the term Radical Hospitality in the title.  This combination of words, which I draw from one of my teachers, I find most evocative.  Sam, who is a self-described anarchist, loves the word radical.  Hospitality proves harder for him to pin down.  Where do we encounter hospitality these days?  What about hospitality that is exchanged outside of the bounds of the market, with no price tag?  How does it differ from a charitable gift?

As I write this morning in the pre-dawn dark, I notice that I am responding to Sam’s prodding about the aptness of the word hospitality.  Not in defense, or persuasion.  But rather, I am attempting to take a walk around the backside of the word to look for the terrain that is not charitable, the modes of interaction he and I are so convinced exist.  Because we have seen them with our own eyes.  So I am going to change the format here and write a letter to my friend Sam, the anarchist, in an effort to explore and describe the shadowy region where generosity, care, mutual aid, and gift-giving comingle and make home together.  Confused?  Maybe a story will help. 

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Dear Sam,

Last summer my brother and I met our parents at a motel where they had just spent the night.  From there, we would drive together to visit relatives.  They picked this motel because the owner had agreed to allow us to leave one car there in the lot until our return-trip a few days later.  It was mid-morning as Zach and I helped to load their final things while they brushed their teeth in preparation for hitting the road.  The cleaning woman was already making herr way down the hallway, rolling a cart loaded with cleaning products and stacked linens.  As she approached our room, it was clear that English was not her first language and she let me know by her minimal eye contact that my attempt at cordial conversation wasn’t what she was looking for.  I hadn’t been in a motel room for years, but the discomfort of the societal positioning was very familiar.  This person was being paid to provide hospitality services for people who could afford them.  A part of me wanted to tell her, “I didn’t sleep here.  I am just picking up my parents.”  Instead, I thanked her and climbed into the car.   

Sam, many of the people to whom you serve food don’t have houses.  I got to meet a couple of them the other day when I visited Burlington, and the first thing I noticed was the deep affection they have for you.  It was moving to see.  Where I gave food away, to the best of my knowledge, everyone had a house.  The labor I offered them as a gift consisted of growing, gleaning, cooking and serving food.  Imagine if I had offered to clean people’s houses for no charge instead?  How might that have changed the meaning of our efforts and my ability to convince people that we weren’t a charitable organization?  Are farming and cooking not also forms of housekeeping?  Does the price tag associated with a night’s booking at a motel represent a clean—forgive the pun—and reciprocal relationship with the person hired in for housekeeping?  Does our payment leave the social and ecological landscape healthier than it was before we booked the room?  To what degree are we taking, receiving or giving in our relations?  Do we only use the word charity for interactions between human persons of different classes?  How do we imagine our relationship to the labors and lives of non-humans?  These seem thoughts worth thinking.

I haven’t shared the full proposed title of our collaborative writing piece with the Newsletter readership yet.  Here goes.  Radical Hospitality:  The Anarchist and the Animist in Conversation.  If you’re the anarchist, that puts me in the hot seat to define the term “animist.”  Which isn’t easy.  For one, I prefer the term practicing animist, because I understand myself to be engaged in a humbling practice of learning to proceed and speak as if they are all alive and listening.  “They” includes, well, everyone.  And “everyone” includes every-thing beyond the skin-boundary that I call “me.”  While the word “everything” helps point to the scope of the list of names, the word “everyone” more actively begins the practice of extending personhood, of re-animation.  “They” never stopped being alive.  It is my capacity for awareness, attention, and imagination that has become de-animated.  I have heard people say that while it is fairly easy to extend aliveness to other animals, it is less easy to do so for plants and soils and waters, and nearly impossible for things—or people—for which—or for whom—we use names like Stone or Wind.  I am not so sure that we do a better job extending full aliveness to our human neighbors than we do to Wind and Stone.  Your work and your stories have helped to bring this into view. 

I guess I am trying to say that giving food away is a form of animist practice.  After several years of engaging this practice, I have found that I gain access to a fully-animated awareness only in fleeting moments, lasting maybe ten to thirty second.  The moment recedes because it is virtually unbearable to perceive myself as embedded in a landscape saturated with moral implication.  Given our current ways of living, how could I bear it?  This may come as unpromising news.  But there is a silver lining.  During those thirty seconds the world sparkles and tickles the soft lining of my nostrils in a way that includes “me” in the list of those who are fully alive.  The experience is intoxicating and painful at once.  Recently I used the term aching beauty as a descriptor, but the words always seem dreadfully inadequate.

When we were together the other evening, I asked you a lot of questions about your work offering food and other forms of hospitality to un-housed people in the city.  I remember your description of the scene on Church Street, the outdoor pedestrian mall where many of the folks you serve sit during the day, some with signs asking for help written on a piece of cardboard.  I remember you said that you found it easier to extend full aliveness to the beggar than to the shopper walking out of the upscale clothing boutique and briskly past your friend whose sign reads, “Could you spare a dollar?”  Do you remember, as we stood in the bathroom brushing our teeth, delirious after many hours of these discussions, when I asked you if the folks you have made friends with ever come into your house?  As I remember, you replied, “Sometimes, but rarely.  It is tricky.  Because when it would come time for them to go home, there would still be no house for them to go to.”  I inferred from your answer that you mostly don’t invite them in and they mostly don’t request access.  Could there be a connection here to the thirty-second timer that I am describing? 

I have the woodstove going this morning, and the False Ladybugs are on the move.  They infiltrated the house by the hundreds during that heat wave back in October.  Ever since, they literally come out of the woodwork for a crawl-about whenever the indoor temperature rises.  Collecting them live for relocation is very difficult for two reasons.  First, their perfectly smooth, rounded backs make them nearly impossible to pick up.  Also, when disturbed, they release an offensive odor that stains my fingers.  At first, I tried picking them up with pieces of toilet paper, collecting them in a jar and then releasing them outside.  I was making no dent in their numbers.  Then I began killing them with at flyswatter.  When Collin came visit a few days later, I excused my eradication practice by joking, “I guess I am only an animist outside the house.” 

Perhaps the charity you and I are trying to push against works to ensure that we continue to live in separate houses, both in our minds and hearts, as well as on the ground.  Radical hospitality proceeds as if the household and its interspecies housekeeping responsibilities operate at the scale of valley, watershed, or neighborhood—a practice that helps to create memory-aids. 

I will leave it there for now.  There are pasture water lines to drain before Winter’s Tooth lays his icy breath upon the Farm tomorrow.  The outdoor equivalent of vacuuming the house.  I am animated by the conversation, Sam.  Honored to be in dialogue.  May that our work with words build a house spacious enough that it affords shelter to the troubles—and to the troubled—among us. 

Your friend,

Adam