The Deep Green Gift of Life

From denunciation to renunciation.

Green season and non-green season. From the same spot.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Digging through the freezers the other day I found parsley pesto so green it could make your eyes hurt this time of year. Six weeks from now I’ll start scanning the garden for the first, tender leaves of dandelion—or ‘tooth of the lion’. I scratch my head when I imagine anyone living in this area without feasting on those hyper-abundant greens, ready to harvest before grass has reached grazing height. It’s all I can do to keep the spring-drunk cattle and sheep from breaching the fences as I gleefully fill the salad bowl. From what I’ve heard, the old timers used to dig and boil the whole plant, root and all.

I have a practice I call ‘trading personal preference for willing participation’. It threatens to terminally sink any advertising campaign. Learning to love dandelion greens, which took me about ten seconds, is one example. It is a gift practice as well as a neighboring practice in a world where only some of the neighbors are humans and the gift directs our gaze back toward the source.

The Life that enables these human hands to type out this newsletter passed from Sun to Dandelion to me and now on to you. The fact that such a sentence sounds like a new-age platitude should have us very worried. This newsletter is being offered to you as a gift, which means that you will have to figure out what to do with the gratitude you’ve accrued by reading it. That ‘figuring out what to do in the wake of the received gift’ could become our social organizing principle once again. That’s the prayer encoded into every one of these newsletters.

Life passes between human hands every minute of every day. The same set of interactions can be viewed as a grab-and-go contest or a high-stakes game of hot potato. The difference between the two has nothing to do with the potato or twenty-dollar bill or yacht or hour of labor in question. It has everything to do with the way the participating humans make meaning.

The gift, received, rests heavily in the hands. The market commodity, a relative newcomer to the human story, invites other patterns of behavior. The consequence of that difference is being etched into the Earth every minute of every day. The same Earth that keeps showering the winter-weary human with life-renewing greenery each springtime. I can almost hear her whispering, “It’s not yours. You didn’t earn it. That’s where the fun begins! Welcome back to the party.”

This week’s newsletter is a bit of a pep talk for the book project, which has been sitting idle as a first draft for six weeks while I wait on word from a prospective publisher and work to turn many hundreds of pounds of stored foods into soups and stews with the help of my beloved neighbors Terry, LeAnne, Ben, Catherine, CJ and Kelsey. Friday marked a turning point: for the first time, a small freezer lives at the public library in town full of Sand River Community Farm Chili, Tomato Soup and Beef and Cabbage Stew. During past winters, we set a cooler full of frozen quarts on the front steps each Saturday. Now, Robyn can offer the gift of soup every day she’s open. Each quart says ‘this food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason’.

The fact that many of the folks who accept the gift will perceive it as free food doesn’t concern me as much as you might think. In fact, that’s another one of the book’s central practices: reckless generosity. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable, even scary; that’s what makes it a practice. It’s supposed to work on me as much or more than the person receiving the soup.

If you practice yoga, you will spend that hour abstaining from other, more habitual, comfortable or affirming behaviors—for example, scrolling on your phone. If you practice harvesting dandelion greens in the springtime you will abstain from more-familiar activities such as strolling the vegetable aisle of the grocery store choosing between plastic clamshells of baby spinach from California. If you practice receiving gifts of clothing, you will spend less time searching the internet for the right color at the right price. You may also spend less time convinced that you don’t matter; handouts don’t seem to have a similar effect.

You practice something specifically because it isn’t your preference. Practices aren’t action plans toward a specific outcome; they are thresholds to the unknown. They deliver a very different kind of freedom from the consumer version we commonly use the word to describe, and different from what the word ‘free’ has come to mean in relation to commodities whose price has been crossed out and replaced with a ‘zero dollar’ sign.

‘Freedom from relational obligation’ is a relative newcomer to the human story. I remain under-convinced that it is working out for anyone—rich, poor, human, nonhuman, man, woman, child, elder and everywhere in between. When you live at the expense of others to whom you have abandoned all relational responsibility, it becomes mighty difficult to make meaning from a human life. Fidelity to the dollar-empowered, desiring self makes for a terribly lonely road, as even mainstream voices are beginning to admit.

I’ve been re-reading The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, in which Illich describes the version of freedom that can emerge from abstinence. It is the type of relational freedom that I experience while harvesting dandelion greens, to which I point with the word gratitude. Illich, a committed Catholic, uses the term renunciation. Deciding not to eat meat on Fridays or giving up cigarettes for Lent can be understood as methods for practicing the renunciation represented by the cross. It is worth quoting him at length here, speaking in 1988.

It reminds me of the things which, in the modern world, we can give up—not because we want a more beautiful life, but because we want to become aware of how much we are attached to the world as it is and how much we can get along without it. These unnecessary things have now multiplied to such an extent that you can’t easily give a social shape to them…The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free. Self-imposed limits provide a basis and a preparation for discussion of what we can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood.

A couple of years ago, I listened to a string of keynote presentations at an Agroecology conference. Most of the speakers said some version of ‘capitalism is the problem’, and yet every one of their proposals included continuing to sell the food. Reading Illich this morning, I am appreciating the move from denouncing to renouncing. From cursing to abstaining. The reclamation of agency feels profound.

And such renunciation is especially necessary in the world in which we live. Tyranny of old was exercised over people who still knew how to subsist. They could lose their means of subsistence, and be enslaved, but they could not be made needy. With the beginning of capitalist production in the spinning and weaving shops…a new type of human was being engendered: needy man, who has to organize a society, the principal function of which is to satisfy human need. And needs are much more cruel than tyrants.

During the decades since Illich made this observation, human needs have increased exponentially. Consider the possibility that modern humans have more met material needs than the world has ever known, and a lower felt sense of abundance. More services, more stuff, and less satisfaction. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that this is the essential architecture of the marketplace: needs must be created through the same process by which they are satisfied.

On Thursday the 26^th, I will present at the Adirondack Food Justice Summit. I will try to describe the difference between the market/charity complex and neighboring—between ‘food that is for sale,’ ‘free food’ and ‘food that is a gift’. There will be a lot of folks at the conference whose work includes increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables. In a market-enclosed world, this is often accomplished by getting more dollars into people’s hands. The burnout rate is high among care worn employees in the nonprofit sector. Maybe I will invite them all to join us for a dandelion harvest party at the Farm this April—a chance to set down their unrelenting search for dollars for a few precious hours. Dandelions don’t sport price tags, but they are packed full of Life.

The market’s foundational stories of restricted access and personal preference have cracks running all through them. Out of those cracks, gifts are popping up like weeds. By the end of April, the dandelions start to get a bit tough. As if on cue, tender young basswood leaves come ready to harvest, then nettles galore. Once we’ve allowed the deep green gift to pass our lips, what will we do? How will we live? The resulting conversation could become the rest of our lives. For that I pray.

With love,
Adam