Alongside the echoing green and swelling buds, every spring the Environmental Working Group releases its “Dirty Dozen” list. These are the twelve vegetables and fruits with the highest levels of pesticide residue. Note that it’s the twelve dirtiest, not the only twelve that are dirty.
Leafy greens, pears, peppers, green beans. Nearly always at the top of the list is strawberries. They sound less tasty when paired with chlorpyrifos, fludioxonil, and pyrimethanil. They identified 209 different pesticides on the dirty dozen. Science endlessly argues what levels are safe for consumption.
The potential contamination of our precious bodily fluids is not all. The EWG annually acknowledges that farmworkers invariably experience the brunt of the risk. Many stay lathered in these fungicides and are subject to, among other things, extensive DNA damage. The cost of neurological impairment in farmworkers’ children is not factored into the price of a quart of strawberries. That’s a bitter aftertaste.
The technical argumentation over whether consumers intake of dangerous chemicals surpasses certain thresholds pales, it seems to me, beside the moral quandary of our sustenance depending on a sacrificial population of poisoned, unseen people. It’s disgraceful that this is still the state of human affairs. Modern conveniences are laced with inconvenient truths.
While we cannot totally extricate ourselves from the inexorable flow of economic externalization, when it comes to strawberries and green beans, we have a fairly clear path to rectifying this rapacious relationship with our nourishment.
Rather than measuring poison residue, we wheelbarrow compost. Strawberries are often sensational. No toxic spills. Exploitation seems insane; creatures in this community are sweet and generous as the earth. Our feasts are homegrown. We serve and thank each other abundantly, sharing surplus. Ours is not a banquet supplied by the unseen and unacknowledged. Our waste is compost, in a regenerative cycle.
In reclaiming a right relationship, we triumph and grieve together. We eat, we don’t consume. While we don’t solve the world’s problems, we diligently work at the problems of a particular place on earth. An unabashedly biased observer, I assert that, though most injustice remains intractable and we’re ever complicit, in this one essential way of life—eating—we have a way to live by love. Why choose instead the devil’s bargain’s cheap, dirty dozen?
Feeling febrile
Feeling anew the resurgence of spring fever is somehow surprising every year. I love the dormant season, slow as a tree, revolving around wood and books, and I hold fast to my hibernation. With some fear and trembling, I anticipate the turning tide after winter solstice, soon and very soon to be carried away by the whirlwind lives of annual, ephemeral plants.
Then, again, like ever, spring swells with its glowing greens and hopeful buds. The fever and the lengthening light melt away William Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.” Life wants to live. Eternal delight. Songs of experience will come, but in spring we sing songs of innocence, joining all the excited birds.
Come and eat where birds build nests, where dirty is a good thing, the opposite of poison.
Language Arts
Congratulations to Clark! A year ago, he set a goal of making it onto the podium for the statewide middle school Governor’s Cup. Five categories are tested, and the top ten finishers in each category are recognized. Clark decided he would master Language Arts and trained like a champion. He placed first in his district competition, then first in his region, and finally third place in the state championship. He was awarded a huge trophy and shook Governor Beshear’s hand. What a great thrill to see a dream realized.
The day before his decisive test we read together Blake’s “The Lamb.” It happened to come up on the test, and it sweetly sings an innocent spring song:
While the weather wobbles back and forth, winter delivering its final salvos, it is decidedly spring on the farm: future food plots are plowed, perennials begin to peek out, baby chicks fledge into birds, fruit trees’ buds bulge. The great awakening on a vegetable farm, though, occurs in the greenhouse. It’s nursery time. Each week, the population further swells. Our youngest, Campbell, had an epiphany last week: “I know why it’s called a greenhouse—it’s a house full of green things!”
We tend tenderly to each baby’s needs, knowing that a healthy start is essential to their successful maturation. The time will come when they will be released into the unruly world, mostly on their own, when they must lean on the strong foundation we’re now building and overcome the tribulations life provides aplenty. Some consider this the most tedious and tiresome part of the process. But for me, spending hour after hour standing still, moving only my fingers, this is a time for meditating on the miraculous nature of new life. I love this slow and often unsung work.
This year, beyond plants and farm animals, I find myself reflecting on the nursery years that are coming to a close. Since November 25, 2010, this farm has been a nursery for first Clark and then Campbell too. From fragile, dependent babies, our children have grown into strong, bright, semi-autonomous boys. And now a watershed moment awaits us. Campbell has two months left in his last year of preschool. He, like Clark, has had a wonderful preschool experience, three days a week for three hours, with our friend, neighbor, and fantastic teacher Bonnie Cecil. Come August, he will join his brother doing all day every day at the elementary school.
Both Clark and Campbell have thrived with this farm as their nursery. The freedom of open spaces, the simplicity of outside play, the confidence of being good helpers, the education of nature, the modeling of how to be good humans by the wonderful people who work here, the joy, camaraderie, challenges and triumphs that mark our days. Your support of this CSA has not only produced tons of produce but has also supported the safe and healthy start of two beautiful boys. While they will still belong and learn and grow here, their world widens away from this place and their peers become ever-greater influences. They’re venturing into the unruly world.
Of course at times it has been crazy to juggle parenting and farming, but I will cherish these last eight years for the rest of my years. I knew before that farming did my own soul good, and now I have learned that it is also a boon to babies and young children, and I have re-learned in some ways how to see the world as a child, full of wonder, awed by newness and surprise. Work and play are indistinguishable, means matter more than ends, time is unbroken from eternity, any fraction of the world, like a hologram, contains all. Though at times the barrage of questions can be wilting, each question has the potential to turn the world on its head, to illuminate an unexplored facet, to bow before mystery and infinite complexity. I love life more than I used to.
As I prepare myself to drop off Campbell at The Big School, I recall vividly the weeping that accompanied my first days dropping off Clark, watching him inch away, his small, unsuspecting frame swallowed by a foreign edifice . It was on the one hand a stabbing grief, mourning for a time that will not come again for me. But all the sadness we experience is somehow commingled with delight and leads us deeper into our truer selves. I come back to George Sheehan’s words:
“For me such moments come more easily now. Goodness and truth and beauty suddenly possess me. I am surprised by joy, filled with delight, and there is nothing to do but exult in tears. And I think of Housman, who said he was careful not to think of a poem while shaving, lest he cut himself. And I must be careful while in company not to think on my dear dead friends who wrote so truly and so beautifully of what moved them to tears, lest I be thought senile and childish sitting there weeping. …
“Crying starts when we see things as they really are. When we realize with William Blake that everything that lives is holy. When everything is seen to be infinite and we are part of the infinity. Tears come when we are filled with joy of that vision. When we finally and irrevocably say yes to life. When we reach past reason and logic and know that the test of what we do and how we do it is delight.”
Had these boys not charged me with delight, there would be no well of tears to draw from. Had we not ever found something so immeasurably indispensable, there would be nothing to lose. Still, after these eight years resounding with shrieks and peals, hysterical laughter and devastated weeping, I’m a bit scared of the deafening daily silence to come, when from 8-4 I work and eat alone, no child to tease, comfort or cajole. I am a contemplative loner by constitution, and I do believe I will eventually embrace the time to myself. But boy is it going to be an adjustment.
These newsletters could be much more informative. I hardly write anymore of the day-to-day frustrations and accomplishments—the maddening mice eating seeds out of our greenhouse trays, the iron bar that smashed my foot, the immaculate fencerow, the new varieties to be trialed. Perhaps I should be explaining about the farm bill, about corporate organics, GMOs, rural decline, etc. Instead here I am again writing about crying and the passage of time. And a better farmer, I know, would be concentrating more on pH, cultivars, efficiencies and infrastructure projects. But there I am, planted at a greenhouse bench, spending this nursery time mulling over our crop of humans and how much I love them.
The times are always changing, but this time hasn’t passed yet, and I hear a sweet voice calling out my name, “Dad,” which was not my name eight years ago. “I’m coming.”
Food is awfully important, but there is nothing we’ve nursed along on this farm nearly as precious as Clark and Campbell. Thanks for your help in giving them a great start at this place on earth.
Postscript
Just after I finished writing this, I happened upon this piercing note, written I remember not when:
“Dear Dad, I enjoy working with you! It does not matter if I have to go somewhere because I will always have time! Love, Clark”
There is still lots of food, so we are offering our usual Extended Season Share–3 more deliveries, every other week for $100. Delivery dates will be Friday afternoons, November 17, December 1 and 15. The gorgeous growing season leaves us well-stocked with sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, and winter squash, while out in the field remain copious amounts of greens, carrots, beets, cabbages. We have yet to even start harvesting parsnips, rutabagas, celeriac. Let the good times roll!
The earth and elements have conspired with us this year. We know how lucky we are. For other farmers it’s been flood, or fire or storm or drought, and our hearts ache for all those dealing with desperation, trying to refrain from resignation. We are all but a flick of fickle fortune’s wrist from that “darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,” and so in our bounty “we pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,” creating a more compassionate world. Let us share the generosity we have received.
Thanks to our guardian angel friends in the field. It’s a great honor to work with you and learn from you. Thanks to all of you for the choice you’ve made to join us, for the work you do to honor and enjoy the vegetables of our labor. This place on earth thrives because of so many unsung hands-on acts of washing and chopping and cooking and sharing. You’ve acted on conscience, not convenience. We hope the process grounds yet uplifts you, making mealtime more meaningful.
Exactly ten years ago Courtney and I committed our selves to each other and then committed ourselves to this place. It continues to be a beautiful journey, one that could easily satisfy many lifetimes. Thanks for believing in us then, and thanks for your steadfast faith. Our family is blessed to belong to this community.
Here the problems of the world, if not solved, are at least elucidated. Also lots of good food eaten.
I have been farming for fifteen years. My spirits tend to rise and fall with the annual successes and failures in these fields. The tiniest bug can be my nemesis. A herculean weeding job, completed, can be as epic a triumph as anything Odysseus encountered. Someone dedicated to the grand political issues of our time might find my life insufferably parochial, but I have found that my psychological survival depends upon my focusing on what needs to be done now, here. I have given my all to make this place on earth healthier, more fertile, more welcoming and loving.
Given this track record, the blister beetles destroying our chard crop would garner my full attention, the gorgeous winter squash crop would make me sing the body triumphant. This year has felt different, however. While I have wanted to write newsletters of my provincial concerns, I have instead been stymied and stupefied by the goings-on in the world at large. The megalomaniac we elected, the hatred spewed, the violence incited, the nuclear bluster spouted, the overt racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc.—all this has sapped my strength. I, like many of you, have felt sickened and powerless.
It seems to me inadequate to draw back, to turn off “the news,” to cross my fingers that we are not hurtling collectively toward disaster, repeating grave historical tragedies. Do we have to all be waist-deep in water or worse to wake up? Can we realize our common humanity? Can we stop giving away our chances for decent survival to the ultra-rich hoarding all the wealth? What will it take for us to put down our diversions and care for the future that we, individually, will never see? Though we are lost, can we still find ourselves?
I could fill pages with these dismal questions. I would love to conclude with the answers, but I am flummoxed. How comforting it must be to feel in possession of the truth, to cling to simple answers, but I can only side with Socrates, who admits “that I do not think that I know what I do not know.” All the great leaps forward in the last 2500 years have not left this intelligence behind. Can we all just admit our ignorance and be wary of those who would serve our brains irrational diets? We aren’t nearly as smart as we wish we were.
Answerless, gasping for hope, I still believe in this human experiment, in us binding together in communities of compassion and conscience. As much as I rely on my heroes from literature—Thoreau, Joseph Campbell, Chomsky, Zinn, Dylan—I lean on and revere the great persons in my small circle—Hankins, Bruggman, Priester, Willis, Fitzgerald, Brewer, Kalb, Berry, so on. We find hope in one another, in our humor and determination, our work and play. I have had the great fortune to pair with a soulmate nonpareil, a love who keeps me alive and humble. Our two children mean we can’t go nihilistic. We have to keep our queer shoulders to the wheel, to rage against the dying of the light. It’s not about us—any of us. The baton must keep being passed, and any decent teammate better not leave the next runner a big hole to climb out of. We won’t give up, but we might better act up.
Thank you for belonging to this Place on Earth, for working for justice, for fighting the good fight. We are honored to do our small part. If you have any answers for us, please do share.
As the planet’s population more and more migrates away from farming, people must mostly use their imaginations to conjure up what a Farm and a Farmer look like. A garden variety of misperceptions persist, but the one that is pushed most aggressively by advertisers and marketers is the Garden-of-Eden-like romance novel. “Foodies” can unconsciously latch onto this archetype: all creatures are smiling, the sun always shines, and the lush, swaying green growth has always been recently rained upon, the machines always purr and are well-oiled, the fox is nowhere near. Heaven and nature sing.
Bombarded as we all are by negative news/noise, I have been reluctant to join the chorus. But only a dishonest person could paint the picture of the smiling farmer holding his trophy harvest here. We were still reeling from the death of our beloved dog when an army of raccoons moved in to capitalize. I’ll elide over the lurid details, but for a number of days the stench of death resided over the farm. We began the spring with 25 pullets (chickens destined to lay eggs), and at present four remain. We have tightened up chicken houses, and it has now been a week since the last kill, so finally we feel relief from the daily body-bagging detail.
Sometimes the lion, instead of lying down with the lamb and nuzzling with its favorite farmer, gets hungry and ransacks the place. Bugs descend like buckets of rain. Deer have demoralized us before. The plagues of the Bible can seem less extraordinary from the farmer’s point of view. The harmony of nature is sweet but also replete with appalling, gratuitous violence. This is farming. This is the deal we farmers must subscribe to. We dig in deep to life’s mysteries. Inevitably, we sometimes stumble into the heart of darkness.
Every tale of woe deserves a heroic figure, so behold the power of the will to live. Unbeknownst to us, three weeks before Tierra died one of our hens began sitting on a secret clutch of eggs in the barn. She wouldn’t be discovered until the day after we lost Tierra, when she and her twelve baby chicks noisily emerged. They owned the farm, going here, there, and everywhere in one of farming’s most endearing glimpses: the instincts of mother and babies. Even as chickens in other quarters were being slaughtered, the busy family continued its far-ranging discourse.
Until one morning I noticed the sound of a lost chick, then another. For the duration of the morning five 4 week old chicks squawked heart-wrenchingly for their mother. A pile of her feathers was found near the house. We eventually (after gathering up other raccoon-ravaged bodies) moved the orphaned chicks into safe housing for the night.
In the morning, I had trouble believing my eyes. Outside the little brooder house was a bird acting like a mother to two baby chicks. Looking battered and bewildered, missing several chunks, the mother hen had survived, found her two missing, surviving babies, and brought them together with the others. We let the three of them inside.
It was already amazing. The resurrected, raccoon-rebuffing nature of motherhood. The next day Clark came running inside, sad and sincere, to report that the hero’s journey had ended. After having saved her brood and reunited them, the next day she died from wounds that would have immediately killed creatures with no fierce feeling of children to protect.
Good news!
We are harvesting the most beautiful crop of onions I’ve ever seen. The reds are almost all in the barn, Candy onions come next, then our long-storage onions. I’ve been drooling over this crop for a number of weeks now. After two years of rescuing onions from rotting in the field, this is a rewarding triumph to see them coming in so impeccably. Look forward to sharing these lovely bulbs with you for the rest of the year.
Thanks to a devoted group of friends in the field, the garden is looking great. Should no further plagues ensue, we should be in good shape for a summer of bounty!
In the end, she departed us the same way she moved about us—quickly and quietly. Yesterday she was not herself, and so today, if not all better, she was going to go to the vet. Instead there she was this morning, lying on her bed, peaceful, still, a stone’s throw from where she was born 9 ½ years ago.
Since this place became A Place on Earth, it has been Tierra’s place on earth. She lived here before we did, by a couple weeks. When she was five-weeks old, she moved one hill away from her mother and eleven fellow litter-mates into our house. She knew, from birth, what her purpose on this planet was: chase down and retrieve. She preferred sticks but anything that could be thrown would do. If you didn’t seem to understand what you were supposed to do, she would make it perfectly clear by repeatedly dropping the object of choice on your hand or foot. She’d wait patiently and unwaveringly. Don’t pet her, don’t talk to her—just throw it. You had to follow her rules, but if you did she would go until she wore you out. Lifeless sticks lying around will poignantly point to her absence.
Tierra embodied the fairer qualities of this farm: free, friendly, fun-loving, focused, often fixated. She was also the face of this place. If you ever visited us here, chances are she was the first to greet you. Her energy hardly mellowed with age; it brimmed over and zoomed around. She was never a threat to hurt a soul on purpose, but she certainly could bowl you over with her exuberance. A void will be felt now upon arriving home.
Tierra was terrified of storms and fireworks and gun shots. She never wanted to come inside the house except when the great sounds were pounding. Our neighbor was shooting off fireworks Monday night, and I let her in for the last time. When at first she was missing Wednesday morning, I assumed it was because she was hunkering down from the thunder rumbling about. It was as if she could endure the commotion no longer.
Tierra was a steadfast companion. Countless are the times she led the pickup truck out back to the deer fence and then again back home. As she loped ahead of the truck effortlessly—an athlete ever in peak form—the boys would holler, “Faster, Tierra! Go faster!” In the last 6 months, I took up jogging around the farm, and without fail she would glide along beside me, at times darting off towards movement or splashing into a pond. I will feel with full force now the loneliness of the long distance runner on my trail runs, a boy without his dog.
We named our baby German Shephard “Tierra” because it means earth in Spanish. She was one with this place on earth. She belongs here, and today she transitioned from gracing the face of this earth to melding with the very soil that sustains us. We give deepest thanks for the blessing of her existence. We won’t be the same without her.
Political proceedings of the past year have elicited much-needed discussion of the urban/rural divide in this country. As a child of the city who has called the countryside home for the last 12 years, I have lived within and witnessed the ignorance of both sides. We can all reside in our bubbles, smugly superior, failing to acknowledge our interdependence. Community supported farming is a rare yet desperately needed bridge that brings us back together.
Before I became a farmer, I was already appalled and ashamed of the mining that powers our supercharged lives. Be it blasted-off mountains or blood-soaked diamonds, wars over oil or fools rushing off a cliff for gold, our species’ heedless greed is well-documented and often unabashed. Over these years in Henry County, Kentucky, I have come to understand that the ravaging of the land for “resources” is everywhere. Here, corn and soybeans grow green. They don’t look like oil rigs, but nonetheless they are pumping the wealth out of our communities in a direct pipeline to Coca-Cola and Cargill. We have rendered soils lifeless, murdered waterways, choked the airs, snuffed out biodiversity, ghosted the towns. Residents have lost livelihoods and have moved or must commute to where there are “jobs” and, in return, get to buy cokes at our gas station grocery stores and get diabetes. The land and rural populations are collateral damage, sacrificed to a lust for profit.
On this farm, we have been spoiled.
Much of the land around here is steep and rocky and not conducive to agriculture or other “development.” We are not next-door to wall-to-wall Roundup Ready crops. We don’t live near pig or chicken concentration factories. There are lots of woods around. On our quiet, narrow road, there is more tranquil than traffic.
Until this spring. Just down the road from us (about a mile), a neighbor mined his property for lumber through most of March and April. Day after day, pre-dawn to dark, the big machinery groaned—bulldozing, banging, sawing, loading, hauling. The few regular drivers of Long Branch Fork Road had to be extra alert in the blind curves to dodge the massive trucks, barreling past the infinite, innocent greens of spring, weighed down with now-dead, brown logs. It felt to me like living on a construction site or in coal country. The sound was the endless gnashing of teeth, the sad shrieks of a peaceful village being pillaged by steel.
I dwell on all this ugliness to make a plaintive appeal for community supported farming. In the city, it is easy to regret far-off drilling, far-away indigenous people suffering and displaced. The truth is that such shattered worlds are not so distant. In the country, it seems obvious that city folk would rather stereotype us than care about our shattered world. I have come to believe that we either actively and cooperatively take care of the land, water, and people around us or, unfailingly, these will be poisoned for profit. They will die out anonymously, invisibly.
These two different visions—mining and mindfully farming—were in stark contrast this spring. While our neighbors made a lot of noise (and money, I presume), John, Stan, Jonna, and I (and sometimes Campbell)
planted peaches, pears, plums, apples, pawpaws, grapes, strawberries. We dug holes and filled the air with laughter, ate lunch and solved the world’s problems. We stewarded carefully, shovelful by shovelful. Some apple varieties are slow to bear; it could be ten years to a future feast. With community support, we have made a commitment not just to nourish people but also to respect and enrich the earth.
The hell-scape that mining manufactures is not the only way. Rather than dealing the world death and dying, we can choose to belong to community supported farming. We can all together take responsibility for what we eat and how it is grown. Right relationships can be restored. When we see outside of our own bubbles, we realize we had better lift up all the lives around us with reverence. There is no telling what a difference we can make.
With little exertion, sweat drips. Grass greens. Trees bud. Spring peepers resound. Some find this February weather charming, perfect to cavort like carefree children. But if you take seriously the dire forecasts of global warming (and who among us is qualified to challenge the scientific consensus?), rather than tidings of joy you hear at least rumblings of discontent. Spring arriving three weeks early is a symptom of dangerous chaos. We know the water is rising, the droughts and floods deepening, the diversity of species declining. We shouldn’t have to wait until we’re clinging to a shoddy raft in a maelstrom to recognize a problem.
If human beings are worth a fraction of what we seem to figure we are, we have to conceive of the vastness of this enterprise: our individual three-score-and-ten years or what-have-you is infinitesimal. In a blink, our children have succeeded us, and so on. If we trash this singular earth for fleeting fortune, we have no claim to holiness or heaven or honor—whatever one’s particular bible holds up as good. Our children should neither honor nor trust us, for we have cashed in their trust. Our world is then endlessly out-of-joint.
I don’t know when, or if, global warming is taught in schools. But I know that it is not soon enough. When I spoke with Clark, my 6-year old, about it recently, I was refreshingly touched by the depth and intelligence of his comments.
He hasn’t yet subscribed to nihilism. He hasn’t yet determined that humans are superior to and more deserving than other forms of life. He hasn’t yet succumbed to apathy or hopelessness. He hasn’t yet decided political ideology or profit trumps all else. Before I dropped him off at school, he said, “Well, what can we do?”
Well, what can we do?
I don’t have a handbook of appropriate actions, and one size does not fit all. It seems to me trite and cavalier to say, “Plant a tree. Recycle. Adjust the thermostat.” What will make a difference and see us through, I think, is a fortified mindset, a resilient attitude, a strength of character. Although Laurence Gonzales’s book Surviving Survival is about surviving personal trauma, his conclusions equally apply to the collective struggle we face. What we can do is adopt these twelve traits and blaze our own brave trail:
1) “Develop an active, problem-solving way of looking at the world.” This is instinctively how Clark reacted. Wallowing in misery and pointing fingers keeps us mired in idiotic gridlock, giving up, bouncing from diversion to diversion. We need a lot of Clarks on board, ready to plan a way forward and pursue passions.
2) “Take time every day to tune out all the electronic noise, the chattering voices that clamor for attention, and then listen to your own mind and body….You may find an intuition, a gut feeling, a sixth sense that saves your life.” We become so infatuated with our technologies and tools that we become the tools of our tools. The Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree. Enlightenment is unlikely to arrive at the base of the Twitter tree.
3) “Surrender control of the outcome and trust the process.” Have we passed the tipping point? Is there any halting catastrophic climate change? What good do these questions do? As the Bhagavad Gita teaches: “Your right is to action alone; never to its fruits at any time.” Good work done well is reward in itself.
4) “One of the best ways to deal with suffering is to look around you at the suffering that is not happening to you. When it does happen to you, expect it and experience it. Say: This is my suffering. It is my turn to suffer. Use it to prepare for the next stage in the journey of survival.” I’ll always remember one of the last things my grandfather, having been stripped of most of his physical faculties, said to me: “Life isn’t just a bowl of peaches.” It’s not, and it’s going to take a lot of tough cookies like my grandfather to fight through the tribulations to come.
5) “Get the small picture.” Gonzales writes about the artwork that people tortured in Nazi death camps produced. However grim our predicament, life is worth preserving because it is so beautiful. We all need to be uplifted, time and again, without denying reality.
6) “You should learn to tell the difference between a hazardous situation and one that is safe. When the hazard is real, do something about it; don’t remain passive. Learn to tell whether what you did was effective. When it isn’t effective, change your strategy. Last, when things don’t go well, find ways to blow off steam.” I need at present to take to heart this message of putting things in their place. Seventy-degree, sunny days are not an immediate hazard, and it is not effective to gripe about them. Perhaps it is effective to write about disturbing weather trends?
7) “Don’t sit around brooding on whatever’s eating you.” We’ve got a lot of work to do of all different kinds, so we best get busy and do it. Working diligently towards a goal keeps us focused and engaged.
8) “You have to be all right, because you have to take care of the children.” Global warming isn’t so much about you or me; we’ll be dead before too long. It’s vital that we get away from egocentric thinking. Concentrate on others—and not just other people and not just pets or our “property.” The world is full of life that deserves respect and love, and we’re exceedingly more lost and lonely when we think so much of ourselves.
9) “Staying socially connected is one of the most important and effective adaptations.” Join a CSA. Already in a CSA, work on the farm, share recipes and meals. The modern world atomizes and alienates us, making us believe commercials and corporations are our friends. The products we buy are disembodied from where they came from and who made them. Seeking out in-the-flesh community charges us with compassion and inspires us to take offense at degradation, take to the streets, and take responsibility for our interconnectedness. “Skin-to-skin contact reduces pain and produces oxytocin, the hormone of love. There is good scientific reason that people hug when something bad happens.”
10) “Be grateful.” Be it spontaneous or ritualized, say grace. Somehow, despite everything, our cups and tables overflow. We’ve been shown mercy. However bleak the prognosis, we’re still here, loving and luxuriating, planning our tomorrows, dreaming of an ever better world.
11) “Even on days when I lacked self-confidence, I chose to put on a smile. I acted strong when I didn’t feel strong—and before long, I was strong.” Put on your Super(wo)man shirt. Save the day. Remember that whoever your personal heroes are they too often felt small, but they rose to the occasion. Why not us?
12) “Life is deep; shallow up. Humor is essential, quieting the amygdala and reducing stress. Laugh at the world. Laugh at yourself.” It’s hard to make a persuasive argument for sustaining a world that’s not fun or funny, full of wild, contagious laughter. Global warming, cancer, starvation—none of these are humorous on the surface. But we’ll surely never survive if we don’t laugh in the depths of the struggle.
These are Laurence Gonzales’s twelve “Rules of Life.” I’ll add just one more. There are very few things in this life that we have to consume. But approximately three times a day we have to find caloric nourishment. Make it count, whenever you can. Imagine the chain of events that leads to food on your plate. Care. Give thanks. Laugh. And don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.
Businesses come and go like the flashings of fireflies on summer nights. The numbers don’t add up sufficiently and they’re snuffed out. I am not a business person; I make poor business decisions, sometimes intentionally. If a vegetable business is going to survive around here, it should be located on flat, fertile ground, close to the city with no significant, indigenous deer population. It should invest heavily in infrastructure improvements and specialize in high-value crops, perhaps value-added products and sell at high-end farmers markets, charging appropriately high prices. Employees should be hired, interns and apprentices employed. The stuff should probably be USDA-certified Organic and branded attractively. Profit should rarely—if ever—stray from the mind of the business owner. She should quantify every square foot and every hour input. Margins are small; you can’t afford to be generous.
So how is it that A Place on Earth CSA Farm continues into year 13? The answer is simple, it seems to me: the dogged work and faith of a small number of beautiful people finding joy and meaning in rich relationships. We don’t think we can save the world. We’re not even sure we can save ourselves. But we cling for life to bygone virtues like dignity, integrity, compassion, love, humor, perseverance. We see not just the beauty in carrots germinating and tomatoes ripening but also in stately ancient trees standing, oxygen exchanged, soil replenished. There is a truth in sweating and stooping and chopping and smelling that won’t ever be quantified or monetized. There is an honesty in our nourishment that will never be found in a pill or a drive-thru window.
Gratitude must go beyond giving thanks to this place on earth; we are compelled to give of ourselves as much as we are given. Our transactions can’t be measured by the pound or the bushel, the hour or the work week; they are invaluable as courage and strength, as a bulwark from despair. Rather than, “How can we make more money?” we ask ourselves, “How can we humble ourselves further? How can we become more balanced? How can we make ourselves worthy of belonging to this awesome mystery?”
Seven generations ago, people could not have conceived of where we are today. And, as broken and tragic as our world can feel, none now can conceive of seven generations out. A good business person would probably wager his money on calamity—indeed they do all the time, elevating quarterly profits above all else. But I think we’re here today because we are hopeful people, investing our cents and souls in a world where right relationships reign supreme. It may seem clear that we are in the minority and overmatched, but it also may just be this flash of light we embody that gains momentum and turns the tide.
There are plenty of sour people accumulating billions of dollars. It is my great honor to share in the wealth of a small circle of wonderful lives, gathered around a welcoming table, radiating out from a sacred place on earth.
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