Why Can't We Live in that World?

Plus a Gratitude Feast invitation.

Poster by Annie Bingham, color added by young Elin.

As always, these stories are offered as a gift to anyone with a bellybutton for any reason. If you’d like to help sustain the work, you might consider pressing the heart button, leaving a comment, or sharing this post. With thanks, Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The night is thick.  With sound, yes.  Distant thunderheads grumble about their heavy-laden-ness.  No lightening to be seen from here.  Full black beyond the pane.  The night is thick.  With sound, yes.  Lest they go one week un-mentioned, I tell you that crickets chant their praise song into the pre-dawn dark.  One morning in October, this green season will draw to a close on the occasion of a frost-crisp cricket silence.  Until then, it shall be all praise.  The song-thick air is moist.  Midsummer warm.  Windows wide.  No breeze.  A single bead of sweat on the brow.  The world applies a gentle pressure from all sides, patiently waiting to be let in. 

At the gate this morning crowd an unruly gaggle of stories; I will try to let them through in an orderly fashion.   

Why can’t we live in that world?

Late March, 2020, a week into lockdown.  One-on-one walks with neighbors replace dinner parties, dances and church services.  The austere format, and the reason for it, press upon the conversations.  Concern, candor and vulnerability are all present in spades.     

“I am going to stop selling food,” I say.  “Instead, I will offer everything I grow, cook and bake as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.”

“But what’s going to happen to you?” replies a concerned neighbor.  “Who is going to take care of you?” asks another. 

“I wondered if you might help me out if I got in a bad way?”

“Of course I would,” each and every replied.  Their words rose like water from a deep well. 

“What if there were sixty of you, and why can’t we live in that world?”  The question surprised me as it flowed from the pitcher of my mouth. 

Four and a half years later, that neighborly world still tickles, tempts, teases from the peripheral vision.  Each month at the Gratitude Feast, we play-act for a few hours, assembling the village before dispersing again into the night.  The following morning, the tidal wave of the way things are comes crashing in.  Is there anyone out there dreaming such a dream?  Carrying such a bone-deep longing?

Last month, a young woman arrives at the Feast alone.  Bright smile, heart wide open, smartly dressed.  We visit briefly in the driveway before she heads down to the Barn to find a seat.  After singing, the gathered crowd sits silently for a few minutes, scribbling words of gratitude onto a card.  Some in the group speak aloud.  This woman’s words have that overflowing pitcher feel to them.  “I am grateful to be in a place where I can acknowledge and begin sharing the love that I have inside of me,” she says.

A few weeks later, with her permission, her afterglow email makes its wending way to my ears, and then to my inbox.  To the friend who encouraged her to attend the Feast, she wrote:

I'm thankful to say that life has taken a decidedly euphoric tone around me since I attended the Gratitude Feast….I've been much less hesitant to show kindness in my daily life. There's been a sort of heart-opening in me after I saw such neighborliness modeled at the Farm. I've always wanted to live in a world that embodies these values, but have been afraid to show the vulnerability required to truly connect. I've made a number of new connections with my neighbors this week and have deepened pre-existing ones. I also feel a renewed sense of courage to show up in new places and be fully present to the experience and people around me.

If Sand River Community Farm ever puts out a year-end appeal letter, this would make an ideal testimonial.  Her afterglow story arrived as medicine for the modern weariness that comes around the Farm just as it does everywhere else, especially in the wake of each Feast.

The Farm doesn’t offer a solution to the way things are, but rather shines a light on the cultural poverty, casting the modern condition in high relief.  Longing isn’t extinguished by the presence of the real thing; it is renewed, or re-ignited.  As

Caroline Ross

writes, we might allow ourselves to be “made long by” life by opening the door just a crack.  In response to this woman’s generous testimonial, I could say, “I am glad to hear that you have been made long by the work of the Farm.  I feel myself stretched beyond what I thought was my breaking point almost every day around here.” 

I’ve got this woman’s story tucked close to my heart as I attend a birthday party for my dear friend and Farm artist Annie Bingham.  She has extended a party invite to the Jamaican-born chicken-slaughter-and-butcher crew she crosses paths with each Monday morning at the farm where she lives.  When they arrive, the host introduces me as a fellow farmer from a few towns north, which piques the interest of a man about my age. He’s got a bundle of dreadlocks beneath his cap, and a young daughter by his side.  He goes by “Jolly.”

“What do you sell?” Jolly asks me.

You can probably imagine a bit of what followed.  From the vigor of Jolly’s engagement, I can tell that the work of food gifting isn’t hard for him to make out.  He works at a large organic vegetable farm, a job that includes selling the produce at several farmer’s markets. 

“What differences do you notice between America and Jamaica?” I ask.

Jolly thinks for a minute before replying with a story.  “At the end of the market, I often have a flat of tomatoes or bin of lettuce that won’t hold.  When I go around to the other vendors and offer this food to them, I notice that their impulse is to trade me something that they have leftover.  Otherwise, it’s hard for them to say yes.  Back in Jamaica, if someone offers to give you a gift, you would receive it gratefully and feel so happy.”

You can probably imagine that my ears are standing at full attention now.  It’s already well past my bedtime, but I’m no longer in a hurry to go, despite the fact that I promised the cows a new paddock before dark. 

“Here in America, it seems that I am supposed to put up a fence between what’s mine and what’s yours,” Jolly continues.  “Back home, employment comes and goes.  Three weeks of steady work, then a stretch of none.  But no one there would ever worry they wouldn’t be carried when they don’t have work.”

“Do you mean by your family?” I ask.

“Family, yes, but also neighbors.  If you are out of work, your neighbor would say to you, ‘Here, the tree in my yard has fruit on it.  Please pick and eat.’”

I happen to have a small flyer for the upcoming Gratitude Feast in my pocket.  I hand one to Jolly.  He’s already told me that Sundays are long farmer’s market days for him.  “If you’ve still got energy after the market next Sunday you could come over and watch a group of European Americans trying to remember their way towards what you’ve just described.  You might find it entertaining.” 

In the gathering dark, I can make out the flash of his teeth as he gives me a knowing smile.  It feels so easy to describe the work of the Farm to someone with a line of breadcrumbs leading back to the village.  Or is it an umbilicus?

There is a tree in my yard.  It was planted before my time.  I have tended it as faithfully as I know how, but the fruit wasn’t ever supposed to be for me to eat.  I’ve been told that the fruits are as sweet as you could ever want to taste.  But I can’t tell you for sure.  I can tell you, however, about the fruit from the neighbors’ trees.  I have eaten from every one of them, received their sweetness gratefully, and felt so happy.

Upon waking this morning, I open Norman Wirzba’s remarkable book This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World and read the following section, which sheds a light on the relationship between ecology and culture that sits at the center of the work here.

The origins of America’s environmental consciousness presuppose that to protect nature it had to become necessary to remove people from it, or at least significantly curtail the activities they perform with it.

Replace “nature,” “national park” and “wilderness” with “neighborhood” and “neighbors” as you keep listening to Norman’s astute observation.

For their entrance into a [national] park to be admissible, [people] must, therefore, first shed themselves of normal economic behaviors and assume the position of a tourist.  Although people are invited to “connect” with nature….they must, while there, not really be themselves or draw their livelihoods from it.  As various “don’t take” rules clearly communicate, wilderness is not supposed to enter materially into the livelihoods of tourists.

I can picture Jolly shaking his head and grinning.  If you keep your hunger hidden from your neighbor, never eating from her tree, you risk becoming a tourist in the very place you wake each morning.  If you plant trees with the understanding that you and your family should be the ones to eat their fruit, you risk becoming an American.  You risk losing the trail of breadcrumbs leading back to the place where life is made and sustained—village, neighborhood, wilderness, Nature. 

Press your fingertip into the small depression at the center of your belly.  That’s the first breadcrumb.  The place from which your hunger and associated longings emerge.  What a remarkable thing it is to be alive.

Perhaps we’ll see you at the Gratitude Feast this Sunday.  Please arrive at 3:30 with empty hands and a hungry belly. 

With care,

Adam

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I send along a joyful update on the budget request issued by

K. Annie B.

last week: