We Decide to Un-Witness

Flyer by Annie Bingham. Annie and I started taping these on doors in the town’s low rent district. The responses we received were welcoming, warm, generous, grateful.

After Thanksgiving, I’m going to try to pull back into book-writing mode, working within a window of time that ends upon the arrival of newborn lambs in mid-April. This may mean fewer newsletters in your inbox. If you’re willing to assist with the birthing of such a book into the world, you can do so by sharing these stories and wonderings outwards. If you find any medicine here, please consider passing this post along:

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

West Wind climbs the steep bank from Sand River and pours over the grassy hilltop, whistling and rattling every above-ground body here at the Farm.  The cabins we’ve built to keep us alive seem, suddenly, more porous than they did just yesterday.  Woodstoves draft energetically with such a gale tugging at the tops of their stovepipes.  I add another log and whisper a few prayers into the air-intake slit.  For continued life, for good work and right action, for the health of my beloveds, for the regular arrival of rains, for the promise of new life gestating in the warm and watery dark.  You know, the basics. 

I love imagining my whispered requests hitching a riding on a trail of wood smoke, the telltale scent of human life through the winter months in these parts.  I love imagining our fragrant smoke signals as incense for those who remain busy outdoors—winged hunters, furry ground burrowers, dormant leafy ones—while we hunker and tend in our above-ground burrows.  I love imagining that they’re still glad to have us as neighbors, even though we’ve come down with a terrible case of self-absorption and disregard.  I love imagining their persistent forgiveness as the medicine we don’t yet know how to swallow. 

I love imagining the healing that awaits us, and the broad smiles on their faces as they feel, once again, the warmth of our gaze. 

But to gaze upon the nonhumans and humans who bend beneath the weight of our lives—to truly behold them—would risk turning most of what we call modern life suddenly unappetizing.  At least that’s my hunch.  As

Martin Shaw

writes, “We are becoming a ghost cult.  Ghosts because anything of weight tends to be consciously unwitnessed, or if even suspected, resolutely shunned.  We decide to un-witness.”¹ 

We decide to un-witness.  That string of words might break your heart if you’re willing to let it in.  But Shaw isn’t quite done yet.

When we don’t have thirty pairs of curious eyes on us it creates the suspicion we need thirty million.  And that something is deeply wrong with us when we don’t get it.  And so a protracted annihilation of character begins, a kind of long-winded, low-key suicide attempt.   

It’s strong language, I know.  But consider a human in the forest cutting a tree for firewood or lumber, a human upon whose awareness the knowing gaze of the other trees—the ones who won’t die on this particular day—still presses.  Consider the possibility that the thirty pairs of curious eyes we long for aren’t all human eyes.  Consider the possibility that our way of living relies upon shielding ourselves from the warmth of their gaze.  As we decide to un-witness, we also refuse to receive witness. 

After a few generations of such un-beholding, we might forget that we are being held.  We might thereby forget how to hold.  In older usage, the word “hold” meant “to guard, protect, or keep in a certain condition.”  To behold was to agree to uphold. 

Consider the curious tree eyes watching that human cutting down one of their neighbors, the gladness they may have felt, their covenantal understanding that a human neighbor would labor to keep their kind in a good way—a custodian, of sorts.  Consider the steady unravelling of such covenants and the loneliness that might ensue, the dearth of meaning, the apathy.  The social and ecological disregard. 

At the Gift Stand last Saturday a man stopped by for a bowl of soup.  He carried a number of middle-class markers: a full set of straight teeth, clean clothes, and a car.  We’ve had the Stand open now for four weeks.  I’ve met people who carry all sorts of different class markers.  Cars and dental care cost a lot of money, and their absence can’t easily be covered up. 

Each week at the Stand I’ve been baptized in a grief for the way things are that borders on the unbearable.  Disdain for the poor, un-witnessing of wealth disparity and the shunting of neighborly responsibility to the state/charity complex: it was easier to look away from the tattered social fabric when I stayed up here at the Farm.  I thought I had quite enough on my plate attempting to build mutually sustaining relationships with grasses, sheep, soils, forests and garden plants.  Un-witnessing can become an emotional survival strategy, I am learning.  Un-witnessing can also become terribly habit forming and dreadfully lonely-making.  I have a sense that the Gift Stand is offering me the medicine that I needed but don’t quite yet know how to swallow. 

Before Allison had even placed the bowl of soup in his hand, this man had his wallet out, bills flashing.  She said, “We don’t actually accept money here.”  What!?  I felt a flash of pride to think I’d played some small part in bringing this interaction into the world.  I looked over and saw a good bit of confusion on the man’s face. 

“We ask you to walk away feeling grateful and then figure out what to do with that,” I chimed in.  I couldn’t help myself.  The Gift Stand was having its way with my tongue.  Allison handed him a little flyer with an invitation to our Sunday Farm Frolics. 

This morning, I am picturing Allison as one of those old-growth trees, looking out with curious and loving eyes.  If you get to meet her, you’ll see the resemblance immediately.  This woman is large-hearted to a fault, and I couldn’t be more blessed to labor alongside her.  The man upon whom she placed her gaze had seen the sign and pulled in for a warm bowl of soup.  He could just as well have walked into a forest in need of a bit of firewood.  After selecting a suitable tree and making his cut, he could have pulled out his wallet and flashed a few bills.  “We don’t actually accept money here.  We invite you to walk away feeling grateful and then figure out how to be a neighbor.”

What if hunger and need aren’t problems to be solved but rather daily invitations to practice our earthly belonging?   

What if the solution we’ve come up with for the gratitude dilemma—get enough dollars in everyone’s wallets to save them from the indignity of receiving unpaid help—has led to the social and ecological unravelling of our time? 

We have decided to un-witness the reckless generosity of this living world. 

After a few generations of such un-beholding, we might forget that we are being held.  Once we’ve forgotten that we are being held, we might forget how to uphold.

Thank you for considering with me for a little while.

With a curious set of eyes,

Adam

1. From his preface to Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, by Stephen Jenkinson.