"What do you do?"

"About what?"

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I once overheard environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams describe her impatience with our stilted and stagnant conversational norms.  When asked the standard question “What do you do?” she began to reply with a question of her own: “About what?”  As in, “What do you love, fear, or long for?  What makes your rage boil over?  For whom do you weep?  Where are your dead buried?  With whom do you share favors?  Help stacking firewood?  A ride to the hospital?  Who do you feed?  By whom are you fed?” 

Wisdom can be mysterious, and difficult to define.  I have a growing hunch that wisdom emerges when someone speaks or acts as if what is happening is really happening.  Without seduction, they lift the veil.  The unnerving trueness of the thing said or done bypasses our thinking brain and invites our sensing body to dance instead.  We might feel it in our gut.  In this case, Terry simply responded to the question “What do you do?” by saying, “About what?”  Her words continue to work on me years later. 

Stephen Jenkinson, another human with a finely-honed capacity for observation and articulation, suggests, “Spells are not cast by the mind, in silence.  Spells are cast by the tongue, in speech, aloud.”  That one has travelled with me for years as well.  In order to maintain dominion over the actions of the people it binds, a spell “hides in the shadows of habit, principally in the habits of the spellbound tongue.”

“For money” is the unspoken completion of the question, “What do you do?”  By responding, “About what?” Terry has refused to participate in the polite spellcasting unleashed by our unconsidered patterns of speech.  How would we speak if we remembered that humans aren’t actually sustained by money but rather by an infinitely complex and intimate web of relationships with the humans and nonhumans whose lives and labors have become the bodies that we call us?

When asked, “What do you do?” we could reply, “On whose behalf?”

I generally begin these weekly “newsletters” with a report on the nonhuman doings here in the neighborhood.  The last month of winter in these parts has felt a lot like spring.  New grass growth tempts winter-weary cows and sheep away from their carefully-placed hay bales.  Pre-grazing is strictly forbidden, as those winter-weary perennial grasses are drawing upon precious root reserves to grow those tender-sweet spring leaves.  Picture a mother saying to her children, “You will ruin the bread if you cut into in before it cools.”  In my case, I use electric fencing to keep eager ruminant mouths away from the early-greening fields.  In the wild wolves would have been charged with the work of keeping the grass-eaters on the move.

Equinox came and went under a series of waxing, moonlit nights.  By day we peeled winter wool from the expectant sheep flock.  Freshly shorn, they shivered under the sudden arrival of North Wind.  The second official day of spring brought the biggest snowstorm of the season.  The underdressed flock stayed dry in the shed while the cow herd toughed it out in the field.  The manure they put down out there will increase their forage quality later this summer.  I try to remind them that a bit less comfort now will ensure the health of their people in the future, including the calves growing inside of them.  I think I say it to them because I need the reminder myself.  A bit less comfort now will afford health to my people in the future.  But by the time I’ve gotten to the end of the sentence I’ve already forgotten the beginning of it.  Thats a sure sign of the spell at work. 

When asked, “What do you do?” I could reply, “On behalf of whom?”

I’ve noticed again and again that folks who read these letters tend to make the work here into a sort of victory story.  That isn’t the lived experience on the ground.  The daily rounds greet these listening ears instead as a grief song.  But aren’t those songs the most beautiful ones—signs that we’ve truly and deeply loved and longed for a life that is always slipping through our fingers?  I’ll try to give you an example.

The snowstorm’s arrival on Saturday postponed by one week an event that isn’t being advertised in this newsletter.  We don’t host many invite-only events here, as one of the basic tenets of the work is that all are invited to the table.  But this one is special.  By far the easy part of my work is writing these weekly stories.  Last August I asked readers here to cover my personal living expenses, which you did to the tune of six thousand dollars.  As there’s no way to turn off the subscribe feature, people have continued to send in money through this site, which means that when August rolls around again there will be less than $4K to ask for this time.  I really don’t need much money to continue to do this work; if it’s going well, I’ll need less and less of it as the years go on.  What I need instead is an answer to that question, “On whose behalf do I live?”  That’s the work we might labor to undertake together here in this digital no-man’s land.  For example, last week Sally Shaw replied to the newsletter Culture Feeds the Wild with a beautiful comment that included these gems:   

I have a few stories from my grandmother…the names of all the cows in her grandfather’s barn, and the horse that pulled the buggy she drove her grandma around in, just as I drove her, in her old Ford. How my great, great grandfather would try to sneak down the stairs into the cool of the marble-walled cellar where the cider keg was stored. “Egbert, don’t you break my blue willow pitcher,” great-great grandmother Anne would holler….For all these encounters and experiences—anachronisms in my life, familiar to my granny, handed down from my farming ancestors, I am so grateful.  Because I can see how one could live, and live well, without the modern amenities we think we need.

I propose that we don’t have the communities we long most deeply for because we don’t actually believe that we are capable of doing the hard work required for such sites of belonging to emerge.  I can illustrate with the following story.  I stopped using the term gift economy a few years back when I began to hear, “Adam is such a visionary.”  I began to tell people instead that I studied neighboring by talking with the old dairy farmers.  If I sat with them long enough, I would eventually hear a story about the time Old Sally broke her leg.  All of her neighbors figured out how to get her cows milked until her leg healed.  No money exchanged hands, no hours tracked, no barter tab.  It wasn’t a gift economy; it was a neighborhood.  Overlapping neighborhoods formed a village. 

Old Sally’s safety net was the reliable affection of her neighbors, human and nonhuman.  That way of living is what the term gift economy points toward.  These modern eyes can most easily see the radical acts of generosity performed by the neighbors—milking, mucking and feeding.  But let’s put ourselves in Old Sally’s shoes for a minute.  She had to accept hundreds of hours of help that she would not be allowed to pay back.  In order to be a good neighbor Old Sally had to possess a deep-running sense of worthiness.  She had to need help, ask for help, and then graciously receive help.  Otherwise, no neighborhood and no village.  Self-reliance might be the final nail in the coffin of ecological human culture. 

I think about the mythical character I call Old Sally every day.  I long for the sense of worthiness she possessed—the way she must have believed that her movement through the world provided an ongoing benefit to those around her such that they felt RELIEVED when an opportunity arose to help her.  To my eyes, this is the primary theft of the consumer marketplace: our capacity to craft a meaningful response to the question: “On behalf of whom do you live?” Or, inversely, “Who is grateful for you?”  Ouch, I can feel the sting of that one. 

Sure, Old Sally sold some of the milk from her cows for a little bit of money that she used to buy some flour or pay the farrier to put shoes on her horses.  It’s not that the market wasn’t present in Old Sally’s time.  It wasn’t omnipresent, or omnipotent.  The market hadn’t yet been construed as the giver of life. 

Let’s get back to the Sand River Community Conversation, the one postponed by the snowstorm.  Some of the twenty-odd folks who will sit in a circle in the town library this coming Saturday read this newsletter.  Others I interact with only face-to-face.  As frightening as it is to ask people for money, it is much scarier to ask them if they are willing to be neighbored by me, and neighbor me in return.  To ask them if they might carve out time on Sunday afternoons to help fix up the abandoned farmhouse, plant gardens, can tomatoes, write thank you notes, or keep track of the Farm’s bank account.  Planting Old Sally’s seeds in real ground means facing the possibility of rejection.  Naming a lost sense of belonging brings it absence into sharp relief.

Allison and I originally sent out postcards to invite people to the community conversation.  When it became clear that the snowstorm was upon us, rescheduling on short notice required sending emails.  But I don’t have email addresses for many of the folks on this street.  For months now I’ve been trying to convince myself to stop in and visit with some of these neighbors, all of whom attended one or more of the Farm’s Gratitude Feasts last year.  It took a major snowstorm to get me walking the neighborhood knocking on doors again. 

My first stop was ninety-one-year-old Pat Gordon’s.  I love how much he loves the Gratitude Feasts.  Pat missed the August Feast when he fell asleep in his chair and didn’t wake up in time.  Come October, as I sat reviewing my notes an hour before guests would arrive, I remembered to call Pat with a reminder.  He answered the phone with a hoarse voice: “Oh Adam, I’ve been so sick with Covid.  I am testing negative now but I’m not sure if I should come.” I gently assured him that it would be alright, and might be good for him to see people again.  I told him it would mean a lot to me to have him there.

Nearly a hundred people found their way to the Farm that afternoon and eventually we got them all seated and quiet for the opening of the meal.  After a couple of songs, we invited anyone so moved to say something that they felt grateful for.  For some people, speaking in front of a group that size proves quite frightening.  Not for Pat.  He pulled his mask down, cleared his throat, and said:

“I’ve been sick for weeks and I am so thankful that Adam called me and convinced me to come over to see you all.”

I can feel my tears close as I write the story down.  My visit with Pat during the snowstorm the other day was no less convivial.  He offered to make me a peanut butter, jelly and butter sandwich, to which I said no only because I had to make three more stops ahead of the time people might be trying to leave for the now-rescheduled meeting at the library.  Before I left, Pat reminded me to stop by any time.  How often will he have to say that to me before I can remember that he really means it?

This work doesn’t tell a victory story.  It sings a grief song—for a felt sense of worthiness and belonging to which we moderns might gain access only in fleeting moments.  For the neighborly affection to which a lived worthiness gives birth.  For a capacity to bear the beautiful burden of belonging to our places again.  For a wholehearted answer to the questions “On whose behalf do you live” and “By whose gratitude are you sustained?”

Many blessings to you,

Adam