Timbered Barley House

Thank you Emmie for the photo.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Submerge bare human bodies in recently melted snow on the first warm day of spring.  Bring towels.  Stand on the cobble bank, in awe of the warmth that sustains Life.  In awe of the way cold delivers a breath-stealing, skin-tingling reminder.  Despite all the bad news and all the stresses, we are still alive.  Terribly, tremblingly and tenuously alive. 

Gulls, drawn up-river by the smell of newly-turned earth, fill the air with their dancing, singing bodies—their cartwheeling and their cat-cawing.  Gull song tugs on memories of saltwater and seashore. Of childhood wonder days.  We look out and notice the way a sandy river shape-shifts beneath the surface.  During that storm two weeks back, she must have flooded that new island into existence.  We call her Sand River, a translation from the French AuSable meaning “of sand.”  She made a sandbar for lake gulls with bellies full of earthworms.  Bodies full of the crazy joy of being alive.  Lungs full of the invisible generosity.  Ruach.  Spirit.  Breath.  God.  Air.  Life.  The words co-mingle with the smell of river water.  The out-breath of gulls touches my sun-warmed skin everywhere, armpits to eardrums to soft nostril hairs.  There is no way to escape this wild dance of breathing bodies, except in the temporary confines of a modern self.  Do the bars serve to keep the fearful self safely inside or the world safely out?  Eduardo Kohn writes, “If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted.”  Perhaps the living world still chants to humans—still longs to see us standing naked in the spring Sun. 

Let this spring river song enter winter-weary pores before slipping sock over toe-knuckle and heel-pad.  Before pulling pant leg over knee-bend and white thigh.  Walk slowly the path back to the day’s proper human doings, the to-do lists and the plans.  Pause to notice Trillium in bud before climbing the hill.  Look both ways before crossing the paved road. 

Perhaps the world is enchanted.  Perhaps I will remember if I write the story down.  Perhaps I will remember if I read it aloud into this handheld microphone and send the recording to you.  Perhaps we could remember together. 

In a week’s time we will invite the whole town to the Farm for an event called a Gratitude Feast, a meal of hearty Farm food served family-style for no charge followed by an old-fashioned barn dance.  The event aims to craft a ceremony of re-enchantment by allowing the humans in attendance a break from market scarcity for a few precious hours.  The ceremony begins, most simply, by offering the meal as a gift.  What we call “the market” only functions by maintaining a barrier to access—to the soft body of Earth and every one of her ample fruits.  That barrier to access is built from a chainmail fence of “prices.”  Once the fence is removed, we step into a terrain of mostly-forgotten social etiquette.  Who desires or deserves what portion size?  Who is responsible to whom in this moment and then for how long afterward?  The work of regrowing a living culture from within the imaginal confines of a modern life begins with bumping into one another, a bit like a game of pinball.  Thankfully, we will have an experienced caller for the dance next Sunday, drawing on very old patterns of coordinated human movement.  Here in the post-colonial melting pot, we patch in cultural components from elsewhere. 

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Let me pause to encourage you to consider the work of one of my mentors,

Dougald Hine

.  From him I draw the term “regrowing a living culture.”  Despite my resistance to spending any more minutes online, I signed up for one of his courses a few years back.  I found the name he and his wife Anna had chosen for their project quite enchanting:  A School Called HOME.  The School’s current course offering is: Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture. 

The Peasantry School stands proudly in the lineage of Dougald and Anna’s work, as well as the work of Stephen Jenkinson and Nathalie Roy at The Orphan Wisdom School.  Here at The Peasantry School, we will be offering 5-day Gratitude Feast Immersions, with spots still available in June, July, September and October.  Find more information HERE. 

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Does the barn photo at the top of this email take your breath away?  It does mine.  For the past two months, I have been leaning and dreaming into this old Barn, urged on by a retired neighbor named Steven, the one who famously said to me, “In this very place just a few generations ago lived people whose ecological footprint was almost immeasurably small compared to ours today, and it seems we would rather cover the world in solar panels than imagine there is anything worth remembering about how they knew how to live.”  That sentence sums up the grief song called The Peasantry School in a nutshell. 

Around midwinter, Steven came to look at the Barn with me.  An hour later, he said, “I’d like to help get this old Barn in shape for dancing.”  I imagined we might complete the work by mid-summer, but several gifted visits from an enthusiastic timber-framer and well-attended community work weekends later, the old Barn stands ready to host a dance next Sunday—just one quarter-turn of the seasonal cycle later. 

Three weeks ago, just as the barn renovation project approached its crescendo, the ewes began to drop their lambs a week early.  Resident Jersey cows Maria and Tigger followed suit with healthy calves of their own.  Yesterday’s icy immersion in the mountain snowmelt of Sand River turned my gaze from nursing babes, attentive mothers, growing grass, and the marvel of an old hay barn back toward the wild and willful world that underwrites the whole domesticated project. 

Just two hundred and fifty years ago the place that would become this hilltop farm stood thick with old-growth forest, home to plants, animals, soils and weather patterns whose lifeways emerged in conversation with one another over millennia.  Mohawk and Abenaki people harvested human foods from that perennial conversation.  The landscape wasn’t ownable until the Adgate family received this land as a “patent” from the nascent State of New York in honor of the patriarch’s exemplary service during the Revolutionary War.  The Adgates likely began the settlement process by clearing forests to make fields for grass.  Some of the felled elder trees would have been hewn square by hand with broad axes and assembled into a “barley house,” the literal translation of our word barn.  I like to call them Temples to Grass.  Or Country Cathedrals.  But I can’t help think that the standing Barn would have offered those old farm folk ongoing reminders of the wild, un-ownable generosity of the forest that once shaded that very same spot.  This thought crossed my mind again and again over the past weeks as I worked in the cool shade of that timbered Barn. 

And then, as if by magic, I received an email yesterday with a story confirming my hunch about the wild, non-market memory embodied in these old barns.  Think for a moment that churches are one of the only non-commercial gathering spaces we have left these days.  I have been attending the little Episcopal church in town for over a year now, and not once have I put a dollar in the collection plate.  Instead, I bring boxes of frozen beef and quarts of stew to send home with the six or eight older folks who make up the Church family.  I respond to their request for assistance with various projects at the Church and encourage them to attend Farm Feasts.  Only by going back to church did I make the connection between the quality of welcome I felt there and the absence of any barrier to access--the absence of a ticket price at the door.  It’s not that the inside of the church is more sacred than the hardware store across the road.  Rather, the church serves as a place to gather for ceremonies of remembrance and thanksgiving.  Ceremonies of re-enchantment.  If the market emerges by transforming life into property and then into money and possessions, the market grows through a process of disenchantment, or de-sacralization.    

The email came from my friend Matthew in response to the podcast interview I shared last week: Gift Economy: How does it work?  In that conversation, Sam and I explore the difference between barter and gift giving.  Matthew had that conversation in mind when he stopped to buy some apple trees from his Amish neighbor Johnroy.  They got into “a lengthy conversation about service and how we make a contribution every day in our lives.”  Matthew described his longing to offer more of his work of growing and saving seeds as a gift rather than a commodity.  The Amish man struggled to understand Matthew’s shift from “selling” seeds to “sharing” seeds, saying finally, “Oh, I think I get it.  In our Amish community we do a lot of bartering.  It is outside of the market and there is no cash.  We make exchanges between one other.  I might go over and work in my friend's dairy for the morning and he sends me home with butter.  Or I have an abundant apple harvest and barter with another neighbor who mends our family’s trousers.”

When Johnroy finished speaking, Matthew asked, “Does your community consider barn raising bartering?”  Immediately, emphatically and almost aghast he replied, “Oh no, no, no.  Barn raising is who we are; it is what we do.  It is not bartering at all.”

They lingered there without words in that moment of opening for both of them.  Matthew broke the silence.  “Johnroy, I think that barter is closer in kinship to the market economy than it is to barn raising or gift giving.  Barn raising is your culture, your life, your community, your faith.  You have a practice that is embodied in your people from the day you are born until the day you die.”  Matthew explained his longing to share his labor with his community in the way Johnroy might attend a barn raising. 

Johnroy smiled.  “Ah, I think I get it now.”

A story like that doesn’t need to be dissected.  I tip my hat to Matthew for carrying his longing so wholeheartedly, and for allowing me to share his well-told story here.

Perhaps the world is enchanted.  Perhaps I will remember if I write the story down.  Perhaps I will remember if I read it aloud into this handheld microphone and send the recording to you.  Perhaps we could remember together. 

Perhaps I’ll see you in the old Timbered Barley House this Sunday 5/5 for a May Day Gratitude Feast at 3:30pm.  A hearty meal of Farm food will be served family style for no charge, followed by an old-fashioned barn dance. 

With care,

Adam