October 5th, 2020
What’s in your share?
Leeks
Heirloom Tomatoes
Cilantro
Garlic
Parsnips
Cherry Tomatoes
Carrots
Kale
Potatoes
Excerpts From Wendell Berry’s “Healing” and this farmers thoughts ~
“The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.
In healing the scattered members come together.
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.
A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one creation, and we are its members.
To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the creation, to keep the creation fully alive in oneself, to see the creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.
The most creative works are all strategies of this health.”
Wendell Berry speaks to our interconnectedness - that we come from, belong to, and will always be together. Common. Through an ongoing realization, of our shared commonness, we find a state of health and grace, each mutually reflecting and reinforcing the other. This excerpt maintains in it many lessons and practices that have led me to a life of farming, and also guide my daily efforts and perspective. It recalls the lessons of ecology and taoism, our inherent connectivity and oneness; and the lesson of the zen buddhist, enlightened by mundane, simple tasks, focusing on process rather than results. Making rituals out of life’s recurring chores.
These mindsets are inherent in the farmers mythos. Our interconnectivity highlights our responsibility to other creatures; each of our actions and its consequences tied to everything else. When internalized, this fosters both humility - the wisdom to tread lightly, softly, and slowly - and a wondrous sense of oneness and kinship with all else. Put another way, two almost contradictory states occur - the weight of my personal responsibility to everything, and the vastness of everything beside myself that simultaneously make my existence possible. The subtle oppositions blend into a sense of presence, gratitude, and humbled excitement; an ongoing observance of where, how, what, who, and why I am!
“Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the creation to novelty–the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.
Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”
We are currently strategically divided. Dominance of a few over the many can only be maintained through divisiveness, pinning the many against each other. Divided and conquered, we have been. This is apparent in the elevated status of “the individual”. Self-made and bootstrapping, the individual climbs the infinite ladder of creatures and landscapes before us in search of cold quantities and hollow self-securities. In this we lose grace and patience for the rest of creation and it’s creatures. Consumed by prejudged assumptions, superficial framings and inadequate diagnosis’, our attention and our goal is determined toward distinction rather than resemblance. And in defeating each other, we assure our mutual destruction. However...
“...Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.”
With purpose in presence, gentle preservation, and - when prompted - subtle healing, farming situates one's position in existence. I believe that food can do this for all of us. Re-centering basic necessities - that which makes all of us possible - and subsequently honoring these rhythms for all their grace and substance might allow us to heal; enabling us to “clasp the hands of those” who go before and come after us. On the contrary, emphasis on our differences and disagreements disgrace our far more substantial commonalities. Throughout existence, food has acted as a catalyst for realizing common dependence, shared strength, and the simple truths of our higher callings. By committing to and circling together around food, people can begin to understand and appreciate the vastness that encircles them.
“The teachings of the unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.
The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.
Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.
Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.”