Service Learning

The view through the cracks in the old Barn where we gathered for the Farm’s first Gratitude Feast last Sunday. Thank you Emmie for the photo.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Could a simple, four-word question underwrite an entire modern society even though we rarely speak it aloud? For the next several minutes, I will invite you to press your ear to that possibility. 

Spending time around people who know and love birdsongs—their names and melodies—can change you.  At least that’s how it went for me.  Once someone teaches you a particular song, what was previously wallpaper often pops into three dimensions.  Your route of travel through the room, or through a spoken sentence, might be slowed by the presence of animate Others.  

Talking on the phone last week with a man named Timmy about his upcoming trip to the Farm, the swamp chant of Redwing Blackbird passed through the speaker of the phone, making it difficult to stay focused on Timmy’s words.  It sounded to me like Blackbird was sitting on Timmy’s right shoulder.

The English handle for Redwing Blackbird’s song is “Con-cor-eeeee!”  Handles are nonsense word-phrases that aid the human mind in finding a grip on something elusive or slippery.  Handles are mnemonics, or memory-aids.  Can you picture affixing a handle to a small feathered songbird?  I chuckle at the image often.  This is how all language functions really: to sort a flood of sensory stimulus into user-friendly categories such that we can describe the world to one another—the word describe means to capture in fixed text.  The danger of affixing user-friendly handles to everything we see, hear, feel, touch, eat, breathe or drink?  If we’re not careful with our handle-making, the world might stop being able to fly.  Or rather, our language might become less a memory-aid than an agent of dis-memberment.  Our un-cared-for language risks turning the world into wallpaper, or a grocery store shelf.  The two aren’t all that different when you think about it.  Language is a powerful and dangerous tool. 

Blackbird’s song captivated my attention so thoroughly last week because those beauties don’t frequent this particular Farm.  In my previous home, they sang from sunup to dusk, late April through mid-summer.  The conditions here aren’t quite right for them, and it took hearing that emphatic song through the phone speaker to realize how much I missed them.  The next day a group of Blackbirds passed through the Farm as I worked in the sheep pasture.  Again, they rendered me a captive to their chanting.  Enthralled.  Thrall, as a verb, means “to bring into bondage.”  Yikes.  But that is exactly what they did to me, for at least half an hour before they moved on to find swampier ground.  They enthralled me. 

I can drive people crazy pointing out the unconsidered consequence of our spoken conventions.  A couple of weeks back I wrote about the word “busy.”  I heard from more of you in response to that newsletter than any piece I’ve written.  It means a lot to me to hear from readers, and you might find the conversation that emerges in the comments feed, well, enchanting.

The largely-unspoken question I am describing is a kissing cousin to the word “busy.”  Before I tell you what it is, I’d like to invite you to join me and Michael Reynolds, founder of the inspiring Roimata Food Commons, for a Peasantry School Community Call this Friday 5/10 at 3pm EDT, which will be Saturday morning where Michael lives in New Zealand.  He respectfully uses the Māori name for the place he lives, and I’ll let him pronounce it properly for anyone who joins us for the 90-minute call.  All are welcome.  Here is the LINK. 

How does the global economy continue to grow?  By converting human people to the belief that they will be able to free themselves from bondage by pursuing the following question, silently in their heads all through the day: 

“What do I want?” 

Globalization is told as a story of mass human liberation—freeing people from need into the promised land of want.  From hand-to-mouth to happy, healthy consumers. 

Who are the needy?  It is a strange thing to be asked, but let the question hang in the air for a moment.  Or, rather, how do we determine when someone is in need?  It’s still not the easiest question to answer, but we can eventually stumble our way towards something about inadequate access to food, shelter and clothing.  But what about piano lessons?  Or personal computers?  Vacations in the tropics?  On-demand cancer treatments? 

Who, then, are the wanty?  Based on the formula, the wanty are those who live in a state of want, or “the want-beset.” 

The etymological dictionary entries for these two, easy-to-miss four-letter verbs, want and need, stretch on for pages.  They are clearly important words in the language, serving as signposts for human motivation and decision making.  As I read through the many now-obsolete meanings, I notice that the words appear to have been used almost interchangeably in the past.  Both want and need were measures of poverty.  But then something began to change.  The development in meaning from ‘lack’ or ‘need’ to ‘wish, desire’ occurs relatively late in the history of the word want.  Unambiguous examples with the sense ‘wish, desire’ are difficult to find before the 18th century.   It appears that the needy and the want-afflicted were the same people until fairly recently.  What happened?

One written account of the glorification of wanting comes from a Protestant preacher and U.S. agent of Indian affairs named Dr. Merrill Gates, writing toward the end of the nineteenth century:

To bring the Indian out of savagery and into citizenship we must awaken in him wants…Discontent with the teepee and the Indian camp…is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars!

Would the rabbi known as Yeshua, or Jesus, have been pleased to learn that his teachings would become joined at the hip with a project of material accumulation and personal preference seeking?  Gates continues:

Our teachers upon the reservations know that frequently their lessons…are effaced and counteracted by the Indians’ old communal instincts and customs.  We have found it necessary, as one of the first steps in developing a stronger personality in the Indian, to make him responsible for property.  (quoted from Money and the Soul’s Desires)

Some eighteen centuries before Gates wrote this, Yeshua invited his Jewish followers to disperse their possessions and serve others.  He encouraged people to re-member what Gates calls “old communal instincts and customs.”  From this angle, the missionizing project begins to look quite blasphemous, no? 

What I am proposing here is that these four words strung together in this order—What do I want?—create such a powerful handle that they keep us enthralled even though we rarely speak them aloud.  We needn’t ask the question aloud because it’s imagined conversation partner is the very same human self as the one doing the asking.  It sounds fairly boring when you think about it this way: asking the self what it wants, on repeat.  Scientists have recently begun describing a modern loneliness epidemic. 

As I approached forty, I found myself desperately exhausted from pursuing and gratifying my own desires.  It not that I was an exceptionally greedy or selfish person.  I was an average American citizen.  “Out of savagery and into citizenship” Gates describes. 

But the treadmill cannot slow down.  The economy to which we’ve wedded ourselves doesn’t work that way.  Ask Americans in their twenties today about the gap between their desires and their capacity to earn the money required to access housing, entertainment, recreation, transportation, food and so on. 

About five years ago, I found I could no longer keep up.  I fell off the back of the treadmill, landing flat on the ground and hitting my head.  By the time I stumbled back to my feet, the Want question was simply gone.  How would I decide which pair of socks and shoes to put on before I could leave my house and begin the day?  How would I decide what to cook for dinner?  How would I navigate through the world? 

Of all the people falling off the back of the treadmill in North America these days, I count myself as one of the lucky ones.  Several friends of mine have decided to end their lives with their own hands.  Attending a suicide funeral can change you forever, if you let it.  Others I love get by from one therapy appointment to the next, one promotion to the next, or one vacation to the next.  A story of marketplace liberation doesn’t offer the soul much for sustenance. 

In his remarkable book Long Life Honey in the Heart, Martin Prechtel describes his exposure to the initiatory rituals of the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala.  Martin isn’t an anthropologist.  He was a mixed-blood American teenager who fell off the back of the treadmill in the 1970’s.  When he fled home and crossed the border into Mexico, he remembers, “I was fleeing ghosts.  I wasn’t headed toward Guatemala, but away from what seemed to be destroying my people and the beauty of the Native New Mexican cultures I’d grown up with.”  After a time of wandering south, Martin found himself adopted and then initiated into a remote Mayan village. 

Initiation wasn’t optional in the village where Martin made home.  “Initiation rituals were not done for the initiate’s benefit.  They were done to keep the Universe alive for all of us,” by relieving young people of the “What do I want?” question that helped them grow to full size and then placing a very different question into their empty hands: “How can I be of greatest service?” 

When the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries arrived in Guatemala, they rode into town on “a tornado of shame, hatred and numbness from centuries of wars with their own people, wars that had originated with other traumatized people like themselves.  Generations ago they had forgotten what it meant to be truly at home in the natural earth.”  The violence unleashed upon the native peoples here in the Americas wasn’t difficult to understand from the Mayan perspective.  It was simply uninitiated behavior, the result of a “mass cultural depression.” 

The passage of a small group of redwing blackbirds through the Farm last week, the day after hearing them recorded in Timmy’s phone speaker, came as a very good omen for the upcoming Gratitude Feast.  I do indeed ask aloud, each morning upon stepping from the house, “How can I be of greatest service?”  Every once in a while I get a clear nudge that I’m on the right track, but those nudges don’t usually come in English words. 

Service and servitude are complicated words within a society storied in liberation and freedom.  Serving food grown here at the Farm helps me begin to disentangle service from slavery.  In fact, I don’t ever feel more alive than when I am serving people food that I’ve participated in growing, harvesting and cooking. 

My neighbor Maria began insisting back in January that she was going to prepare traditional Romanian cabbage rolls for the first Feast of the season.  It isn’t easy to say no to Maria, and foods that carry cultural memory really get me excited, so I easily relented.  She would use a mix of ground beef and lamb from the Farm, and prepare enough to feed a hundred.  When she told me two days before the Feast that she would also make deviled eggs for the whole crowd, I pushed back a bit.  I was worried she was underestimating the labor required.  Then Maria explained to me that the Gratitude Feast would fall on Orthodox Easter.  Eggs are very significant to Romanians on that day.  Maria is no longer a practicing Christian, but as she told me about her childhood home, she began to cry.  Easter in Romania is less about this living than the dead, she explained.  People light candles and walk from the churches to the cemeteries, to ensure the dead are not left in the dark.  As I listened, I remembered Martin Prechtel’s description of his North American adolescence: fleeing ghosts. 

During the Feast, Maria insisted on serving the deviled eggs she’d made, walking around to each table rather than sitting down to enjoy the meal.  When it came time to bring out a second round of cabbage rolls, she said, “Adam, you must sit down now.  Please let me serve these.”  It isn’t easy to say no to a woman with tears in her eyes and an Old World story about flooding the cemeteries with candlelight on her tongue.  So I decided to stop protesting and sit my ass down.  Before the Feast, Maria had explained to me how painful it was for her not to walk to her father’s grave in Romania on Easter.  Serving food to her neighbors would have to stand in, I realized.  If I continued to resist letting her serve me, I would be committing an act of stinginess. 

For a few precious hours at the Gratitude Feast last Sunday, I got to step off the treadmill of modern life, together with about eighty other humans.  Within the context of a ritual meal, serving and being served feels less like bondage than community.  Less like enslavement than enchantment.  Less like wanting than being needed.  Less like a grocery store aisle than an old village square, where life must be renewed through celebrations of thanksgiving, again and again. 

There are still a couple of spots left in one of our 5-day Gratitude Feast Immersions this summer—opportunities to join the Farm’s ongoing experiments in radical hospitality.  If you’d like more information, you can simply reply to this email to begin a conversation. 

Many blessings to you,

Adam