The Problem with Pockets

And the forgiveness of the wild.

There’s nothing that warms the heart more than watching your beloveds fall in love with one another. Annie showed up a the Gift Stand last Saturday with a sweater she’d knit for Maizey. Oh my! These two are keeping me afloat in these turbulent times, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The other day, as I looked at the sleeping puppy named Maizey—the one who has been walking alongside me for the past eight weeks since she left her mother and siblings and took up residence here at the Farm—I felt like my chest was going to explode.  To be honest, I didn’t see it coming, this sort of overwhelming, capacity- and cavity-stretching love.  I have a sense the cows and sheep are a bit jealous, wondering why I have been so distant of late.  How many beings can we love at once?  How many will we allow to love us in return?

But this kind of love isn’t one bit safe.   I can feel already the grief of her going.  Whether to old age or tick-borne illness or under the tires of a passing car, she will likely die before I do.  Her defenselessness intensifies the emotional exposure.  Which brings to mind some lines that sit near the center of my capacity to make meaning from the work here.  Keep the Farm’s tagline—This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason—in mind as you read.  From Stephen Jenkinson’s Come of Age:

The wild seems terribly vulnerable in our time.  Were it to respond to the indignities and rapacious practices we oblige it to endure, the wild would practice our kind of “desolation by payback,” our kind of retributory justice.  It would be the very undoing of the wild’s other-than-human ways of being itself.  So this defenselessness sustains the wild’s soul, you could say.  It is heartbreaking.  And if the wild expires in our time, species by species, place by place, it does so as the wild does, not in soullessness, not in punition, but in wild silence. 

I picture a standing forest, watching as the machines move in.  Maybe they’ve come for pulpwood or lumber, to clear a field for row crops or housing development.  Above the din of the chainsaws, I imagine one tree saying to another, “They must be suffering from a hunger that will find no satisfaction, a thirst that will not abate.  What poor, poor creatures.”  This food—and shelter and clothing—is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry—or frightened or cold—for any reason.  Forgiveness might be the deepest form of generosity. 

If we discovered that we are still worthy of forgiveness, how would we tell the story of our time? 

If you’d like to have a good cry, I recommend listening to John Lewis describe how he and his fellow civil rights demonstrators practiced for the march on Selma—role-playing for hours in church basements, cursing and even pouring cold water over one another, looking the pretend police officer in the eye with love.  Only love.  As he proudly tells it, not a single demonstrator struck back on that bloody day. 

John Lewis describes the practice he relied upon in the heat of the demonstration.  He kept his gaze fixed upon the police officer who was beating him and pictured him as a young child.  Then he imagined what might have happened to that child such that he grew up to be filled with so much fear and hate.  According to Lewis, “Dr. King used to joke sometimes and say things like, ‘Just love the hell outta everybody. Just love ’em.’”  This love is offered as a gift to anyone who is hurting for any reason.  Forgiveness might be the deepest form of generosity. 

Once we’ve been forgiven—by a forest, a friend, or a formerly-enslaved person—what will we do? 

The Problem with Pockets

At the end of a talk I gave once on food gifting, someone in the audience raised a hand and asked, “How is this generosity you are describing not a luxury?”  The question might be paraphrased this way:  Don’t people need to have full pockets before their generosity can begin to spill over? 

It’s not an easy one to answer.  From within the story of our time, full pockets make upstanding citizens.  Even if every study looking into such things finds an inverse relationship between affluence and generosity—as in, rich people give less proportionately and report a greater felt sense of scarcity than people with less financial security—I can admit that the “full pockets” story is very difficult to shake. 

Don’t we see more crime and drug abuse in lower-income neighborhoods?  I think it depends on what we consider a crime and what we consider drug abuse.  As my friend Sam likes to point out, unhoused people simply practice their addictions in public.  Absent a stock portfolio or a suite of rental properties, petty crime in public will have to do. 

Where did the “full pockets make good citizens” story come from?  Here’s one clue, from Dr. Merrill Gates, a protestant pastor and director of Indian affairs, writing in the late 1800’s:

To bring the Indian out of savagery and into citizenship we need to awaken in him wants.  In his dull savagery he must be touched by the divine angel of discontent….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!¹

When I received that question about gift and luxury I didn’t quite know how to respond, in part because I wasn’t familiar enough with the word luxury.  Tracing the word through the pages of the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology I find unsavory, archaic meanings such as vicious indulgence, lust, appetite and desire. 

If the desire for full pockets does indeed make good citizens, what would we call an uncivilized, pocket-less man?  More from Gates:

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.  Even if he learns its value only by losing it, and going without it until he works for more, the educational process has begun.

Preacher Merrill Gates must have skipped over the following passage from Acts 2:44, “And all who believed were together and had all things in common.  And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.  And day by day….they received their food with glad and generous hearts.”  I hadn’t yet read that bit from Acts the first time I said, “This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.” 

I like to picture the radical rabbi they called Yeshua back then, fresh in from forty days fasting in the wild, a pair of scissors in his hands and a mischievous grin on his face, walking barefoot from town to town cutting the bottoms out of people’s pockets. 

Without pockets to fill, we might find it easier to remember our human capacity for generosity as none other than the forgiveness—the grace—of the greening land. 

The puppy named Maizey slept peacefully through the writing of this entire newsletter.  I’ve just let her out to pee and I can see from the window that she’s already up in the hedgerow chasing squirrels.  She came to this Farm with a job to do: to put just enough pressure on the resident chipmunk and squirrel populations to allow us to harvest some of the flint corn we count on to feed the hungry humans who live, work and gather here at the Farm.

I love watching the residual, instinctual wildness Maizey carries in her domesticated body.  Perhaps that’s why we love our pets so deeply.  Could they help us remember that we, too, emerged from the wild?  That we, too, might carry some lingering traces of that enduring generosity, even here in the thick of the modern world?  Could they help us remember that we, too, might be worthy of forgiveness? 

Once we’ve been forgiven, what will we do?

With love,

Adam

1. I draw this quote from Stephen Jenkinson’s Money and the Soul’s Desires. He draws it from Jerry Mander’s 1991 book In the Absence of the Sacred.