November 2, 2003
Today is the day I will write my big essay about agriculture--the one that will explain everything. It will tie together the micro scale and the macro scale, our personal relationship with every bite we eat and humanity's relationship with the planet and the cosmos. It will give a global perspective, and also be full of personal stories. Taking as grist my own experiences working in farming, gardening, and gardening education, it will make the odd behavior of gardeners and farmers understandable to everyone. Never again will I or any other soil-worker feel under-appreciated or un-supported. Our national and global culture will undergo a transformation in which entering into a co-creative relationship with the land in order to sustain the life of people and the planet will be a laudable, rather than lowly, occupation. My essay will spark a revival of interest in small-scale, community-based agriculture--and not only interest, but an intense desire to participate. After reading it, everyone will want to get their hands in the soil. Gardeners and farmers will no longer be the lonely shepherds of a widely forgotten art as we pass through the "dark ages" of the industrial food system, but will be joined by everyone in creating a much more hopeful future. We will all be gardeners and farmers, and we'll all be applied ecologists, because by engaging with the earth directly we will learn the lessons that no amount of abstract information about the environment can give us. In short, it will be heaven on earth...if only I can write that big essay.
Today would be a good day to do it. Rain has been falling all day, and I'm huddled next to the woodstove in my yurt. Yesterday would have been a good day to do it too, but I knew rain was coming today, so I had other priorities. I wanted to clear the dead squash vines and borage plants from the beds in one of our gardens, which will make replanting them with something else easier. I also wanted to harvest our yacon tubers before the soil turned to mud. I had to make sure the greenhouses were sufficiently ventilated during the sunny parts of the day, and buttoned up against the cold once evening fell. I also had some laundry I wanted to wash and hang outside on what may have been the last line-drying day for a while. I wanted to spend at least a little time playing the guitar, and to go to a musical performance in town in the evening. I did all of those things. But I didn't have much time to write. And I didn't write.
About a week ago, inspiration also struck, and almost took me
somewhere, but again real life interrupted. This is how my essay
started:
All modern-day food gardeners and farmers live in a world of paradox.
On September 10, 2003, South Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae martyred himself in protest outside the World Trade Organization's fifth ministerial in Canc�n, Mexico. Like hundreds of thousands of small farmers every year, he had lost his farm four years before to the forces of corporatization and international trade.
I planned to continue by talking about the thousands of farmer suicides that have resulted from the "get big, get modern, or get out" policies of our government and of corporate agriculture. The only way many despairing farmers see to save their families from economic ruin is to kill themselves (often through on-farm "accidents") and let their survivors cash in on their life insurance policies. Less dramatically, many farmers are dying a slow death of the spirit, as they see the communities that once embraced and shared food-growing disintegrate into a farmer-hostile, earth-alienated, profit-driven, highly-consumptive, sped-up society of economically fragmented individuals and families. The lessons of gardening and farming are so alien in this world of all-you-can-eat fast food, all-you-can-absorb information, all-you-can-stand TV, all-you-can-consume everything, and all-you-can-feel emptiness, that the serious gardener or farmer can't help but feel like a stranger in a stranger land--or rather, like a familiar in a familiar land surrounded by strangers prone to destroying the grounds of our collective existence.
I think I must have been feeling kind of down to have started my big essay that way.
In some ways, true enough, it had been
a difficult year, during which I myself
had experienced this endemic "disintegration of agricultural community" on a small scale. My fellow staff member in our gardening apprenticeship program had left midway through the season (one month into a two-month apprentice group's stay) to pursue her path as a solitary artist, and I had dropped almost everything else (including writing and working on this magazine) to try to hold the program, as well as the garden, together. It turns out that perhaps that wasn't the best choice, since, during that second month, neither I nor the apprentices and short-term interns had the variety in work or social environment that we probably needed to create a healthy, satisfying balance in our lives. I realize that I sacrificed my well-being out of a sense of responsibility, as well as from a passion for seeing our garden through to the end of the season. The garden I oversaw was--and is, as I write this on a rainy Sunday afternoon--incredibly abundant this year, but the result of my taking on too many roles at once was that in some of those roles (such as attempting to keep everyone in the program happy while maintaining sight of the "big picture" of the garden), I, frankly, didn't always excel. I did well with the garden part, but, in the role of facilitating the well-being of these particular six people, all in their early twenties, all with different needs and many with frequently-changing plans and moods, I (two decades past my early twenties, and quite different in temperament) was far from expert.* [*In all fairness to myself, it could have been a lot worse. In many faming/gardening educational settings with which I am familiar, it is frequently worse. And at the very least, everyone agreed, we took some great field trips this summer.]
It takes a village to raise a child, and ultimately it also takes a village to run an educational program or grow a garden sustainably. One of the lessons from this year for me was that when food-growing becomes an isolated task, cut off from the people who are consuming the food, it can transform from a source of joy into a source of burnout and resentment. I was happy this year whenever I had people to work with in the garden. I was especially happy when community members took the time to walk past the meadow, across the creek, and into our main gardens to see what was going on. Those who pitched in earned an extra measure of gratitude. Whenever we had visitors, I saw that we gardeners and gardening students were not alone in this community! Someone else had discovered, even if just for a moment, the joy of working with plants, soil, worms, and bugs, being serenaded by birds, feeling the effects of sun and clouds as they moved across the sky, dodging raindrops, getting hot, cold, sore, reinvigorated, having free-flowing conversations with the wind, with ourselves, with each other, with the earth. Someone else was touching the magic we had discovered. Someone else was finding the walls breaking down between ourselves and the rest of the earth community. Someone else was re-indigenating, re-connecting with the land, becoming immersed in the constant exchange of energy between the constituent parts of one big, miraculous whole. It was bliss.
But too often, it seemed that weeks went by when everyone else in the community was too busy to come out. Somewhat like the dwindling number of farmers in the larger society, the people involved in the garden apprenticeship program were cranking out vegetables for the rest of the population. When my co-facilitator left and the feedback went somewhat sour in July, few other community members had any real connection to what had been happening in the garden. Sadly, this is not just a small problem confined to one intentional community whose members tend to get overextended and/or have other preferred ways, besides gardening, of spending their time. What happened this year at Lost Valley is merely a mild, solvable microcosm of a less-easily solvable, growing worldwide epidemic of disconnection from the sources of our food and from the people who produce it.
The "paradox" that original essay
referred to consists of this: there is
nothing more joyful than that connection to the earth (and by earth, I mean the entire earth community, which includes one another) that gardening and farming can bring. At least, there's nothing more joyful in my experience. It's not necessarily a bounce-up-and-down, broadcast-it-all-over joy, since gardeners and farmers have to conserve energy for the ongoing tasks that will invite their attention for as long as they're alive, but more of a sustained, quiet joy, a sense of deep, abiding communion. It's a peacefulness inside, a knowledge that, ultimately, all is right with the world, that turkey vultures, sparrows, earthworms, millipedes, butterflies, deer, and we are all brothers and sisters, and that dandelions, squash plants, blackberries, tiger lilies, and fir trees are our cousins. It transcends language, and in fact can make it very difficult to write, since writing always seems like a pale imitation of the reality of life, a vast oversimplification and breaking-up of a complex, interconnected oneness that would need millions of words at once--and none--to explain it.
The other half of that paradox consists of the fact that there is also no work, apart from other forms of hard physical labor (coal-mining comes to mind) or being a soldier in combat, that is potentially as demanding and difficult in a purely physical sense, and that puts one so at the mercy of the elements, of largely unpredictable and uncontrollable weather and other forces of nature (pests, diseases, invasive plants, etc.). Like various kinds of work caring for people or animals, gardening and farming demand constant attention; one can't set aside the "vegetable-growing project" for six months and come back to it where one left off, the same way one can put a building renovation, an essay, a Ph.D. thesis, or a painting on hold (all other factors being equal). And, adding to the physical demands of sustainable farming methods, and the constant attention required, is the general cultural ignorance about agriculture that I've already mentioned, society's general neglect of the farmer. So just as being a farmer or gardener can be exceedingly joyful, it can also be exceedingly difficult and even depressing, given the wrong combination of circumstances.
The activity of food-growing requires
multiple leaps of faith, and an ability to surrender ego: one can never be certain of the results, and the results are always temporary. The gardener or farmer must love the process, and must love the work, because in the end (usually 100 years or less into the future), we and everyone else we fed will be dead, and the land we cultivated will quite likely have reverted to a weed patch, leaving no physical monument to our accomplishments. These words I'm writing now might conceivably be preserved for as long as time exists (not that I'm suggesting they should be), but the kale and lettuce I'll be harvesting tomorrow morning will be eaten before the end of the week, cycling through several dozen people who will take that energy into the world in hundreds of different ways, most of them not directly traceable to either kale or lettuce. But tomorrow morning, what will be more important to me: harvesting the kale and lettuce, or working on this essay? I'm sorry if this disappoints you, but it's the kale and lettuce. This is partly because I can't eat my words, and neither can the community of people who are being sustained by this garden's bounty. It's also because harvesting the kale and lettuce puts me in direct relationship with a world that is ever-changing, yet far more enduring and real than the words I piece together in an attempt to explain it.
I have to admit, though, that putting these thoughts into the form of words is a satisfying way to spend a rainy afternoon in front of the woodstove.
I realize that I wandered off into paradox before finishing my "microcosm"
story. So to complete the tale of this year in the garden, I was blessed with an extremely dedicated apprentice in August, and several very helpful work-exchangers in September and October, who arrived just when I feared that isolation in the garden and an imposingly impressive number of seasonally necessary tasks would overwhelm me. During the last few weeks of October, especially, the weather was benevolent, and a number of Naka-Ima participants helped out for several days both before and after their weekend workshop. This is the most exciting development for me yet this year, because Naka-Ima is without doubt our most successful program, and yet the missing element in this personal growth workshop has always seemed to me to be some concrete connection to on-the-ground, physical sustainability. The free flow of energy that has now started between Naka-Ima and the garden, the chance for attendees to participate in both, provides a model for the kind of integrative work that Lost Valley has always aspired to, and that I myself want to be part of. Gardeners and farmers need connection to other people just as much as anyone else does. Our society has left them "out standing in their fields" for too long.
It's time to erase the boundaries that separate agriculture from the rest of life--to see that "agriculture" and "culture" are inextricably intertwined, for better or for worse, and to consciously choose the "for better" option. When we all either get our hands directly in the soil or take even a small role or interest in the growing of our food, that "for better" option will become the dominant reality. When we're each intimately familiar with the life history of what we put into our mouths, today's earth- and people-alienated, corporatized, industrialized food system will seem like a bad dream from which we are glad we awoke. It will be a new day in the garden, and on the farm, and we will wonder how we ever denied ourselves this fundamental connection to the ground of our being. But this is all dependent on my writing that big essay, which will cover many more issues than those I have mentioned above, from nutrition to ecology to the preservation of native cultures and everything in between, yet will be so artfully concise that it will almost instantly convey everything I know I'd like to say. It will take the connections found in hundreds of garden conversations I've been part of or witness to over the years, and create an integrated picture of our individual and collective relationships to food and food-growing that anyone can understand. It will transform lives, lead the masses to enlightenment, and yet convey the humility that has heretofore prevented me from tackling it.
I hope I will be able to write it soon. But that definitely won't be tomorrow morning.
As a deliberate exercise in spontaneity and an affirmation of the perfection of non-perfection, Talking Leaves editor and Lost Valley gardener Chris Roth recorded the above musings, except for the italicized passages and a few minor word changes, within a five-hour period, including breaks, on a Sunday afternoon. The next day, he was back to the kale and lettuce patch, where he could finally think clearly again, put aside delusions of literary grandeur, and set himself on tasks that are actually accomplishable.
Although he hasn't yet written that big essay, more garden-related ruminations can be found in his review and essay, "Teaching Organic Farming and Gardening: Between the Covers, and Between the Rows." See also "Bringing the Food Economy Home" by Helena Norberg-Hodge and Steven Gorelick on pages 12-15 of our Summer 2003 issue.
�2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony
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