Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The listening is ripe on this late summer night. In the wake of a passing shower, I hear the tip-tap of drip-drops finding their rhythmic way from roof eave to ground. Perhaps that’s one set of instructions for a human life: sing your way slowly back to ground.

Crickets layer their pulsing, tempo-driven love-notes into the warm night air. How many more of these will we get before the freeze comes? Before the ground lays its claim upon us, you and I. Soil makers. Food for those to come. Some of that food takes the form of what we say. The sounds we make on the way back down. Into the big quiet.

I’ve heard that the shops in parts of Spain still close for a portion of each day, a remnant of an older, quieter time. We could adopt something similar here in the north country, but for the portion of the year between the first snow fall and the spring greening. A sort of seasonal obedience. “See you next spring!” the sign in the front window would read. Imagine the joyful noise that would be heard rising from the endless preserving parties crowding the fall calendar—the bubble of canning pots and the crackle of fire beneath the smokehouses where peppers would hang beside drying perch and pork jowl. Imagine the preciousness of salt on the day the grocery stores bent their heads to the season’s turning—the way dried sea water would pass from hand to hand all the way from the coast to the uplands. Imagine the preciousness of a kindly neighbor on that day—the rituals and etiquettes that would re-emerge as life passed from hand to hand once more. Imagine the web of affections.

I met a woman once who grew up in the Korean countryside where the old custom of preserving the fall harvest hadn’t yet gone out of fashion. She told me a story that will undoubtedly feed the soil of human imagination into which the young ones among us will one day plant their seeds. The tradition-bound preparation of kimchi in the place this woman was raised involved specific ingredients and recipes, yes, but perhaps more importantly it involved specific forms of time-tested human conviviality. The neighbors there knew not to make other plans during the kimchi-making season, leaving them free to form a rambling band of choppers and salters and stirrers. From house to house they went, filling at each stop a giant ceramic crock that would be buried in the ground in the center of the family garden where the vegetables had grown. Everyone obliged themselves to the weight of that neighborly grace. And everyone allowed themselves to be pulled into the joyful band as it departed their yard. Can you imagine the songs and stories and kids’ shenanigans that must have bubbled up from those subterranean crocks? Can you imagine eating a story like that all winter long?

Can you imagine instead trying to stay alive on food that has been relentlessly de-storied?

About five weeks ago I began to notice swelling in the left rear quarter of my beloved Tigger’s utter. At ten, Tigger has raised more calves than I can count—at least two per season given her capacity to make milk and her affinity for the young ones. I am alive and writing this note to you this morning as a result of her generous labors. Whoever penned that old line “all flesh is grass” must have spent some time watching a hardworking cow like her.

Tigger had a trio of nursing nippers when the swelling began. A few days later, she began limping on that left side, the rear leg registering pain as it passed. Then she stopped eating. Then she stopped being able to stand. I heard her calves crying out for milk before I reached the field that morning.

Tigger laid on the ground for three days while the flesh melted off her bones. I set a tub of molasses water beneath her head each day, from which she drank deeply. But a cow can’t live without feed for long. And she was way to heavy for me to drag into the shade. But the slope of the field made it so that her repeated attempts to stand had her scooting downhill, in the same direction her herd-mates were moving on their rotation. Proximity to their people is of primary emotional concern to cattle.

It’s mighty hard to watch an animal you love in a state like that. The type of infection she had come down with is called gangrenous mastitis. That’s right, the affected tissue eventually rots and falls off, leaving a gaping wound. Especially during fly season, the condition is considered fatal. I pulled the three calves she was raising into the barn so they didn’t starve there in the field.

Three days in a row I said out loud that I was going to walk down to the field with the bolt gun and kill her where she lay. Three days in a row she was trying to stand when I got there. Three days in a row she drank down another tub of molasses water. Thirsty for life, she was. On the third day, I happened to be by her side one of the times she tried to stand so I slid my hands under her bony hips and gave a lift, a ridiculous move on such a large animal. But up she went and shockingly stayed on terribly wobbly legs. As she swayed side to side, she lowered her head and took in a few mouthfuls.

I’ll spare you the gory gangrenous details, but over the following weeks her belly began filling with grass and then her utter began filling with milk, and so I gave her back one of those three calves. His name is Timothy, the one with the big white blaze on his forehead. She drew Timmy to her bony side and filled his belly with her miracle cow milk. The wound where a portion of her utter fell off is healing over day by day.

If things continue on this trajectory, Tig will finish out her last season with Timmy by her side. The other two calves have settled into barn life, which includes a bucketful of grain each day and a chance to become the Farm’s next team of oxen. They’ve taken to the halter quickly; soon they’ll have a go at walking side-by-side in the smallest training yoke.

At some point this winter, the little bit of flesh left on Tigger’s hard-working body will feed me and others in the form of ground beef. It’ll be a bit lean, but alright for the slow-simmered chili that will make its way around the neighborhood. The mineral signature of her bones will feed the simmering stock pot and her guts will feed the compost pile that will keep the gardens growing strong in seasons to come. And her way of living will leave a generous trail of stories for the young ones to tell around the table at some point on down the generational road. The cow who rose to raise one more calf before the ground laid its final claim upon her.

Oh, how I long to leave a few chewy stories like that on my way back to ground. So that the ones to come find food in the telling.

With care,

Adam

If the name Ivan Illich is new to you, you might enjoy the following guide from :

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Dark thunderheads rumble by, leaving little more than a few drops. They will bless someone else’s garden today. Pears cover the ground beneath a tree down the road; filling crates to overflowing. They coat cutting boards with their sugar-glaze, simmer to smooth in the slow heat of the wood-fired oven. Come winter, this sweet sauce will help us remember the waking dream we call summer.

But not everyone is so content on these lazy late-summer days. Last week, over the span of a few hours, I disturbed not one but two hornet’s nests. I’d never before been stung in the eye socket, or on the shin bone, and I wouldn’t wish that particular experience on anyone. The dozen-some sting-sites formed a sort of constellation of pain. And a potent memory aid.

Days later, while gathering a wheelbarrow of firewood for the brick oven, these newly-heightened human senses detect the subtle buzz of hornet warning sounds. These more-alert human eyes notice a line of those dreaded pain-makers emerging from a crack between boards on the inside wall the woodshed. I pull the final two logs as carefully as if I was transferring a sleeping babe, and walk away without a sting.

Each morning at sunup, I pack a lunch for the Farm pup named Maizey and drop her off at school. The walk takes us past the sheep flock and up the hill, to the place where corn plants stand in lines, like a company of naval cadets. Spent and drooping tassels give them an unkempt, Rastafari vibe. The person-sized-plants stand weaponless, each one cradling a precious babe in her green arms. I walk the patch, peel back a few of the dryest wrappers, peek at the hardening kernels hiding inside—like the most beautiful glass beads you can imagine, but edible and delicious.

The neighborhood squirrels appear to be taking note of Maizey’s school schedule, stocking up during her breaks by stripping husks and feasting upon not-quite-ready-to-harvest kernels. I say the puppy is going to school rather than work because she is practicing something I aspire to learn each day as I walk the landscape I call home. The learning I am referring to sits at the center of the book that I’ve just finished writing. As a practice, I call it “Trading Personal Preference for Willing Participation.” Maizey would absolutely rather stay by my side through the day. The way she greets me when I pick her up from school each afternoon leaves no shadow of a doubt. I’ve promised her that her all-Farm food mix will be studded with some of those orange and red beads this winter, slow-boiled with sifted wood-ash from the wood-fired oven. She loves that fragrant hominy as much as I do. Together, we’re practicing for the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves. For a few weeks in late August, that practice includes being apart from one another for a portion of the day. My classroom lies elsewhere in this ripening season.

Hunger may be one of the world’s most potent teachers, but we’ve mostly banished this deeply human experience from any and all learning environments, even declared war on the condition. I’m not suggesting we withhold food from our children. Rather, I am suggesting that full-grown human bodies may have been designed to dance with discomfort. A cursory look at world history suggests that the majority of non-modern human cultures maintained ritual fasting practices. Place-based people seem to have sought out regular reminders that the endless pursuit of personal preference is ultimately un-neighborly. To suggest such a thing today amounts to heresy.

The often-heretical—and often-prophetic—Ivan Illich had an uncanny knack for turning English words into prayer beads. I find myself running my fingers along the following sentence, on repeat, rosary-style:

Throughout all of human history, the best measure of hard times has been the proportion of food that must be purchased.

No, that’s not a typo. If Illich is right, the times we inhabit appear to be hard in ways we can scarcely wrap a modern English sentence around.

As a formidable student of history, Illich managed to set down the basic assumption of forward-marching human progress long enough to learn something about what we’ve lost sight of on the superhighway to the future. In the aptly-titled Rivers North of the Future, Illich describes his affection for the mostly-abandoned practice of fasting during Lent:

It reminds me of the things which, in the modern world, we can give up—not because we want a more beautiful life, but because we want to become aware of how much we are attached to the world as it is and how much we can get along without it. These unnecessary things have now multiplied to such an extent that you can’t easily give a social shape to them.

In the corn patch, Maizey fasts not from food, but from familiar patterns of interaction. Not because there is anything wrong with us being together, but because we are learning how to live as participants in a larger conversation. In the world outside of the grocery store, hunger arrives not as a problem to be solved but as a signal of aliveness. Illich continues:

The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free.

His use of the word “free” here is one striking example of turning a word into a prayer bead. In modern English, the word “free” is commonly used to mean “costs zero dollars” or “liberated from the tyranny of the non-preferential.” In the non-place we call the marketplace, money function as an all-access pass to the pursuit of personal preference. The fantasy of limitless supply underwrites the story. More dollars, more preference, and more stuff equal more freedom and more happiness. The story’s through line rides on the word “more.”

In a real place, where real people of many species live side-by-side, the unlimited pursuit of personal preference requires increasingly aggressive exclusion and eradication measures. At the end of the day, a can of hornet killer, a private bank account, and an on-call police force function to underwrite the same basic story. I say this as someone who has employed all three as means of getting through the day. I hope I don’t disappoint you when I tell you that I don’t have any of this stuff figured out. Illich concludes:

Self-imposed limits provide a basis and a preparation for discussion of what we can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood.

From within a market-mediated world, proposing the pursuit of less rather than more as a path to collective freedom sounds downright kooky.

At the Farm Frolics this year, we’ve been asking people to join us in a four-hour group fasting practice; not from food, but rather from the pocket-sized personal preference portals we call cell phones. During the opening circle, we simply ask everyone to place their phones into a basket. Schools have begun setting such limits for children. Why can’t we turn the Farm into a classroom for folks of all ages? The results have been remarkable. Strangers find themselves suddenly capable of forming relationships with people they would never have chosen.

Illich suggests that real freedom is relational rather than personal, and his use of the word friend offers a trail of breadcrumbs. As it turns out, friendship and freedom stem from the same Germanic root. The now-archaic meaning of the word “friend” describes a person joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy. A friend was a lover, a relative, a kinsman. Someone who has been liberated from a child-like state of self-concern into the love-bondage we call relationship.

Sun has risen, which means it’s high time for Maizey and I to head off to school.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The first cool night of latesummer has me rummaging the hamper for the sweatshirt and long johns that slipped my mind somewhere back in early June. I just can’t bring myself to close the windows, given the all-night symphony going on outside. So, I come to the writing table bundled, a steaming cup of tea in hand. First light brings towering silhouettes into view: Hickory, Maple, Basswood, Pine. This story has many characters. Only some of them are humans.

To say that a human life is best understood as a web of relationships risks sounding a bit trite, or new-agey. But deep down we know it’s true. Even the most isolated among us has, or at least had, parents, plus a few friends or co-workers who we might call on in a pinch. If we were to set a table with places for all of our relations, how long would that table need to be?

In my early twenties, I decided to do something that didn’t follow logically from a liberal arts degree. I signed up to study sustainable agriculture on the windswept central coast of California, where cool summers create ideal conditions for growing miles upon miles of lettuce, brussels sprouts and strawberries. I was a bit surprised when I learned that the produce giant Dole down the road had granted our group of groovy students a tour of one of their fields. Iceberg lettuce sits like a bleached head of cabbage on American grocery store produce shelves; wrapped in plastic, ready for a BLT in any season. The field we visited would supply the majority of the domestic iceberg demand for a portion of the year.

A giant harvest truck sported a conveyor arm stretching out over twenty beds or more. As the driver inched forward, the dark-skinned migrants hustled to keep pace, cutting and coring the dense heads, placing each one on a sprayer that coated the cut-end with chlorinated water before bumping it onto the moving conveyor. In order to utilize the working space efficiently, half of the harvest crew walked down a row backward; the others stood on the opposite side of the conveyor, and so walked forward. Fifteen-minute breaks came every few hours. If you had a hard time keeping up, there were plenty to replace you. I can feel the knot in my stomach as I remember the scene from here, more than two decades on.

In hindsight, the hardest thing about that hour in the lettuce field was my dawning awareness that the modern slavery project we call industrial agriculture was, and still is, 100% legal and even celebrated as the high-water-mark of human cultural achievement. How else would normal-old Americans afford new smartphones and vacations if they had to pay five or even ten times as much for a head of lettuce? This is how market logic works.

To say that a human life is best understood as a web of relationships can sound a bit inconvenient when most people feel like they’re trapped on an economic treadmill. Why bother taking a look at our unhealthy relationships when we feel like we have no power to change them?

Out there in the iceberg lettuce field, I tried to use a bit of my rusty Spanish to talk with the folks on the harvest crew, but something about them being on display didn’t lead to easy connection. It felt a bit like being at the zoo.

A couple of weeks ago, during our Sunday Farm Frolic, I led a group in the garden. We would turn over spent beds of lettuce and re-plant for fall. I can still remember how much time my early farming mentors took to teach me the detailed work of sprinkling seeds into shallow furrows and covering them with soil. During the Frolic the other day, I must have been a bit hasty during my planting demo. The lettuce seeds ended up too deep; only a few germinated. The salad bowl will be less abundant as a result.

When people arrive at the Farm, I often watch a sense of relief wash across them. A break from the grind for a few hours, from the mechanized efficiency mandate, the miss-your-rent-payment-and-you’re-out bottom line. What scares me is the possibility that older forms of efficiency—for example the fluid movement of finger tips rolling lettuce seeds into a furrow, or a muscle memory that knows how to cover those seeds to just the right depth while telling a story or singing a song—become obscured behind the obviously-toxic brand I saw in the iceberg field that day.

If this Farm appears as a sort of temporary refueling station for modern lives terminally underwritten by the industrial extraction treadmill, the experiment will eventually go quiet, the gardens slowly growing back to brush. If we fail to steer people away from the allure of seeing this place as a zero-dollar retreat center, it won’t be long before the generosity of the greening land returns to its rewilding work. From what I can tell, the Earth absolutely loves hosting human sustainers. But she grows a bit weary of human consumers. The whole insatiable appetite thing, the more-for-less mentality; it gets a bit tiresome after a while.

On the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves, grandma and grandpa will eat if those of us with strength left in our bodies have learned how to move in a common rhythm with generosity we call Life. The toddling babes won’t go hungry if we can remember that these human hands were made to extend grace. That scene in the iceberg lettuce field, and the materially-saturated lifeway it enables, can make it very difficult to imagine farming as a sort of waltz with the land.

In the book I’ve written, there is a particularly fun chapter called “Radical Relocalization: Land Speaks Through Humans.” It includes the story of getting to know 95-year-old retired dairy farmer Florence Miles. In the landscape that grew her to full size, local and organic weren’t luxuries or virtue signals. They were just food. To say a human life is best understood as a web of relations wouldn’t have sounded new-agey to Florence; it would have sounded old-agey. It would have sounded honest, grateful, ancestral.

At Florence’s funeral, her son said that she could pluck and gut a chicken in half the time he could. He described how his mother had sharpened her butchering knives so many times she’d worn them down to just thin bands of steel. I would have loved to watch Florence’s hands dance across a deer carcass. Eyes gleaming, not a hint of drudgery.

Late in the journey of writing the book, my friend and mentor sent me a quote that seemed to sum up the magic I’ve experienced in local food. In 1930, as cheap food imports began flooding English markets, C.S. Lewis recounted a conversation he had with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien:

Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when the family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood—they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We, of course, who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scottish oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.

This is exactly what I saw in Florence’s gleaming eyes as she told me story after story of a landscape absolutely brimming with real excitement, real neighbors, and real food. At her funeral, another man stood up and described the way everyone who stopped by Florence’s at lunch time was welcome to her well-laid table. He was describing a quality of abundance that appears to have gone extinct in our time. As he spoke, tears ran down his face.

If this newsletter ever comes across as endless moralizing, I’ve absolutely missed the mark. This isn’t about what we need to give up in order to stop being naughty consumers. This is about the wild dance party that we’re missing out on. This is about the lonely suffering that must be normalized to maintain life on the industrial treadmill. The strength of the hills could be ours again. The grace of the greening land.

To say that a human life is best understood as a web of relationships risks suggesting that we could still decide to patch things up. That we could turn around, and then toward one another. That we could join hands and start walking home without moving an inch on the ground.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Is gratitude simply a list of the things that worked out for us today? We know in our bones that the answer is no. But I dare say we’ve utterly lost track of what else it could be, or was. I dare say we’ve lost track of how to make meaning out of all the things that worked out for someone else today, lost track of the possibility that things working out for us too many days in a row might spell a whole lot of trouble.

Those troubles appear to be coming home to roost.

After almost no rainfall for the entire month of July, we’ve seen soaking rains on repeat for a week. The other evening, a small group of us stood under the covered kitchen entrance while one of those storms rolled through, watched water fall from the sky in sheets, watched a small creek form in the Farm driveway. The great sponge of soil that underwrites every single word of every one of these newsletters drank so deeply I could hear it. When our dinner guests arrived twenty minutes later, from two towns away, they reported not a drop at home. We piled their plates high with the harvest from these recently-dusty gardens, including steaks from a steer who make fat and muscle and bone from drought-stricken meadows last month. Before eating, we paused for a round of spoken gratitudes.

Every Sunday we invite any and every one to gather in a circle at 2:30 pm in the Farm drive—the same spot where I watched a small creek form last week. Some of those who gather have been here before. Some are still arriving, and some of those for the first time. We begin by inviting people to speak a few words of gratitude into the air before we lay our hands upon the day’s tasks.

One thing I’ve noticed about the practice is how rare it has become to speak face-to-face with fifteen people who have granted you undivided audience. I say rare because I watch people shift a bit as they stretch for words.

A few weeks back I said something into that circle that I hadn’t found the nerve to say before. Now it seems the only thing worth saying when I’ve got fifteen or twenty ears pointed in my direction. And so I’ll write it here:

The only way I can do the work I do full time is because I spend very little money. I can do that because people forego other possibilities to show up on Sundays to care for the gardens and pantry that keep me alive. They split and stack the firewood that keeps me from freezing to death in the winter. The gratitude that accumulates in the wake of such an un-earned living is considerable, and persistent.

This newsletter goes out to over four thousand email addresses. In my imagination, the physical arrangement of the ears and eyes turned in this direction looks less like a circle than a night sky studded with constellations. Each week, I try to write something about gratitude that might deepen your capacity to turn toward the troubles around and within us. Here’s what I have to say to you this week:

The only way I can do the work I do full time is because I spend very little money. About four thousand dollars last year. Every one of the dollars I use to pay the phone bill and the auto mechanic, to order black tea and dish soap and olive oil; every dollar I use to pay for something I haven’ figured out how to grow in the garden, ask for, or live without, arrives as a voluntary gift from one of the stars on of those constellations of sustainers. There is nothing free about this newsletter. It arrives in your inbox or earbud as a gift from the land, the rain clouds, the humans who neighbor me on the ground, and the humans who neighbor me from afar by sending dollars. It arrives as a gift from the people who cared for the butternut squash seeds and the breeds of sheep and cattle long before I came around.

If you’re one of the stars in one of the constellations of financial sustainers you may be getting an auto-renew charged to your card without receiving an email about it first. It’s one of the reasons I will be moving this newsletter away from Substack by year’s end. If this happens to you over the next few months, here are a couple of options:

1. I can put those gifted dollars toward the beginning of a fund that will enable a book tour this winter. I will be writing more about the tour in the months ahead, including a transparent budget of travel expenses and specific requests for hospitality and help with event organizing along the way.

2. I can refund those dollars, and you can wait instead to take a look at my proposal to take some of these stories on the road.

I’ve heard it said that in other times and places the chief of a village would be required to empty himself before the people so that every moment of his service would be undertaken by circulating their goodwill back to them, as a fountain does with water. How else would he remember the danger that emerges when things work out for any one person too many days in a row? In such times and places, people may not have needed the word “gift” to help them remember how to keep the goodwill of the greening land flowing, to keep things from getting stagnant. This doesn’t seem to be one of those times or one of those places. That’s why I’ve tried to write a book about gifts and gratitude.

At the Farm, an overly-large harvest is a burden. The labor of picking, curing, canning, winnowing, hanging to dry, or otherwise preparing the food crop for storage becomes overwhelming in a hurry. In the case of winter squash, which seems to grow unbelievably well here, the sheer volume can outstretch the heated space we have for storage. Distribution is a surprising amount of work in the ways we do it. I have neighbors with whom forty-five minutes amounts to a short visit.

None of those considerations seem to come into play with money. Unlike root cellars or heated squash storage rooms, digital bank accounts swell indefinitely without a lick of effort. Stored dollars will never spoil, that is until the moment we all decide to stop believing in them. Believe me, I have imagined that scenario many times.

I’ve stood in a lot of gratitude circles, and I’ve never once heard someone say, “I am grateful to have twenty-thousand dollars in my bank account.” Why not? Perhaps there’s a little part of us that knows deep down that it can’t work out for everyone at once. Perhaps there a little part of us that knows that holding those dollars out of circulation ensures that it won’t work out for someone else today.

I’ve never heard someone say, “I am grateful that it worked out for me today instead of someone else.”

Money is often described as un-earthly because it doesn’t decay. That’s why gold was selected to represent the idea that we call money; it doesn’t tarnish or rust. In an earthly context, if nothing decayed, Life would cease to be. In the tangled web we call “nature,” things only work out for a butternut squash plant because they didn’t work out for the other beings whose bodies became the compost that became them. I will re-become Adam most days this winter because I’ve eaten squashes that could have kept others alive instead of me. At the end of the day, all of this is true about money as well.

The only real problem that I can see with money is that it does a remarkable job tricking us into living inside a fantasy of limitlessness. Inside that fantasy gratitude becomes a shell of itself, and the troubles go on mounting by the hour.

I am grateful to have been entrusted with something you could have kept to yourself but decided instead to set in motion. For some that was a few hours of time that could have been spent doing anything besides working in the hot sun moving compost around at the Farm. For others that was the eggs that LeAnne mixed into the cornbread batter that fed me last evening. For others still that was the dollars that paid for the passport renewal that will allow me to cross national borders this winter, smuggling a few stories from a farm where nothing is for sale. The gratitude that accumulates in the wake of such an un-earned living is considerable, and persistent.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I have been noticing a pattern of speech that has begun to trouble me greatly. It goes something like this: “There are all of us normal people and then there are the billionaires.” The suggestion is that they have crossed over a threshold of no return. That they are the bad ones. I am afraid that such idle conversation may be very dangerous.

Two days of gentle rain fell on dusty ground last week, waking an army of slumbering midsummer minstrels. They’ve come, it seems, to wage war on the human capacity to forget that Life is a song sung to us by the past. I don’t actually know if it is possible to love crickets any more than I do. And I was worried that they weren’t going to play for us this year. Given the heat waves, the droughts, and the fires, that seemed a real possibility. But here we are again, on the receiving end of an auditory grace that pours in through open windows, saturates the night house. Penetrates the soft skin on the inside of these ears. Pushes its way out through the tips of these typing fingers. If you’re listening to the recording, you might be able to hear these foot soldiers of the midsummer meadow. Having their way with a human heart. I blame this newsletter on them entirely.

The word greedy means hungry; it describes an insatiable appetite, a relentless craving. The ‘pet’ root in the middle of the word appetite can be found also in petition, petulant and compete. The Latin root petere suggests “to seek, ask, or lay claim to.” The word crave, from the Old English crafian, carries a similar spectrum of procurement tactics: “to yearn, beg for, or demand.” The trail of breadcrumbs that begins with greed appears to point us in the following direction:

There has always been human desire, and there has always been the question of what we do with it—what we do in its presence. Perhaps the possibility of our shared life has always hung in the balance.

Some of my teachers never fancied themselves as such. One early conversation partner offered me regular, and quite vulnerable, reflections on the food-gifting work that I’d found my way into. If you’ve been reading these newsletters for any amount of time, you’ll likely have a sense that sharing food as a gift can open a door to “a hundred acres of thought long banished from the West,” to use a fetching phrase from Martin Shaw.

This person had been on the receiving end of a higher-than-average flow rate of family money, and so the questions the Farm was asking about scarcity and abundance, stinginess and generosity, entitlement and gratitude, and the sanctity of private property, weren’t entirely welcome. The property this person’s parents had purchased for her was worth well over a million dollars, with quite a few buildings to maintain. Owning things can begin to feel like a lot of work.

At some point this person reached a breaking point with the questions I was asking, and decided to cut me out. In our final conversation, this person told me that she was grateful that the world had put us together, that she’d actually learned a lot from the relationship. She had been forced to wrestle with unworthiness and guilt along the way, but, ultimately, she’d realized something that felt important to say out loud. With a slight tremble in her voice, this person said: “At the end of the day, this is my property. I earned it.” I stood facing her in stunned silence for a long moment. Then she said, “Well, if I didn’t earn it nobody else did.”

It’s still one of the most revealing lines anyone has ever said to me. If nobody earned it and it ended up with my name on it, what shall I do now? The question applies equally to an acre of land, a dollar bill or a loaf of bread.

The trail of breadcrumbs beginning at the word earn leads us back to Proto-Indo-European grain fields at harvest time. The word earn suggests that you’ll have something to eat this winter if you diligently prepare the ground, plant the seeds and control the weeds. The word earn focuses our attention on human labor as the wellspring of human life. Going steady with a single domesticated grass has real risks, it seems. We might wake up one day and notice that we’ve grown a bit possessive. As in, “I harvested it, or purchased it; now it’s mine.”

I read a study once that attempted to determine which category of Americans has the smallest ecological footprint. By some complex figuring, they determined that Buddhist monks came in second and homeless people led the way in low-impact living. But then they discovered something quite surprising, and unsettling. A street person in American has an ecological footprint eight times larger than the average citizen of Bangladesh. I know, data can be sliced and diced to fit anyone’s agenda. However problematic the analysis may be, it does invite me to ask the following questions:

In whose story am I the billionaire? In whose eyes do I look like a bundle of endless craving?

Christian missionaries often took aim at old practices of venerating the dead; what some call ancestor worship. In The Huron Relations for 1635 and 1636, Jesuit father Jean de Brebeuf describes with awe-struck horror the elaborate annual ceremony during which the Huron exhumed the partially-decomposed bodies of those who had died over the previous year and brought them to a central pit for re-dressing and re-burial. Going to heaven would mean leaving the dead to fend for themselves. That was the choice on offer by the imperial Roman Christianity that arrived on their shores.

But Brebeuf couldn’t help admitting that the Hurons displayed some remarkable qualities. For one, they seemed to endure hunger much better than Europeans. After two or three days without food, you might “see them still paddling, carrying loads, singing, laughing, joking with each other, as though they had recently dined well.” Brebeuf goes further: “Their hospitality to any and all strangers is noteworthy. In their feasts, they give the best of what they have prepared to the stranger, and, as I have already said, I do not know whether anything equal to this can be found elsewhere.” By elsewhere, he is referring to the European civilization with which he is familiar. Brebeuf was trying to make sense of what he was seeing on the ground: the Huron appeared to be living out the Jesus example without ever having heard of the guy.

The First Nations Version of the New Testament uses the evocative name Creator Sets Free for Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, a young man asked him how he could find an honorable life path.

Creator Sets Free told him, “Take all of your possessions and give them to the ones who have none.”

But the young man’s heart “fell to the ground,” for he had many possessions.

A great sadness came to the face of Creator Sets Free as he looked at the man. And then he said, “Walking the good road is a hard thing for the ones who have many possessions. It would be easier for a moose to squeeze through the eye of a beading needle.”

How would someone who hadn’t yet heard of Jesus figure out how to lead a generous life? I find one clue in an old oral story excavated by the Brothers Grimm, to which they attached the evocative title The Ungrateful Son. I encountered this story for the first time in Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift. Last week my editorial co-conspirators David and Sam joined me for one final read-through of the book manuscript before it heads of to the printers. We settled on the book’s title and subtitle: This Food is a Gift: Stories From a Farm Where Nothing is for Sale. When we reached The Ungrateful Son in chapter 5, we decided to cut it. “It’s almost too good,” one of them said. They call this killing off your darlings. Which freed it up to find its way into this newsletter. Here it is:

The Ungrateful Son

Once a man and his wife were sitting outside the front door with a roast chicken before them which they were going to eat between them. Then the man saw his old father coming along and quickly took the chicken and hid it, for he begrudged him any of it. The old man came, had a drink, and went away.

Now the son was about to put the roast chicken back on the table, but when he reached for it, it had turned into a big toad that jumped in his face and stayed there and didn’t go away again.

And if anybody tried to take it away, it would give them a poisonous look, as if about to jump in their faces, so that no one dared touch it. And the ungrateful son had to feed the toad every day, otherwise it would eat part of his face. And thus he went ceaselessly hither and yon about in the world.

Oral tales can’t be carbon dated; they ride on the air from one human memory to another, exiting one body on a series of shaped out-breaths before entering another body by way of the soft skin on the inside of the ears. If the story is a good one, it makes its way to the heart and then informs the action of those human hands.

In the story of the ungrateful son, a chicken has landed in the hands of a man who has, among others, a wife and a father to consider. The man seems to have decided that the cooked chicken makes two decent servings. Hunger is the assumed driving force in the plotline. The drama begins when the man’s father walks up, unexpected.

We have always lived in the presence of desire, the story suggest, and we have always lived alongside the responsibility to decide how we will respond to its unruly demands.

In a flash, the son decides that dividing the chicken three ways doesn’t fit the size and shape of his hunger or the satisfaction plan he’s come up with. The story doesn’t tell us whether the father was actually hungry or not, simply that his approach created a decision point. As far as we know, the father never learns about the darn chicken; he may have walked away thinking, “How kind of my son to serve me a drink and visit for a while.”

This isn’t a story about a vengeful father; there isn’t a lick of punishment to be found in it. This is a tale about the psychic consequence that builds, like a snowball rolling down hill, in the wake of each turn toward self-concern. We might imagine the son in the story thinking to himself, “I worked hard to raise the darn chicken. I planted and harvested the grain to feed it. I’m hungry. It’s mine.”

Once the father is safely out of sight, the son resumes his hunger-satiation plan. He finds instead a terrible toad that must be fed to keep it from eating him alive. Insert “consumer economy” or “civilization” for “toad” here if you’d like. Some of my ancestors lived in the landscape where this story once passed from tongue to ear, heart to hand. They may have seen this thing coming from a long way off. They may have been well acquainted with the ever-present seduction of ungratefulness.

Once a plate of food, or the land from which it has risen, has been transformed from a gift into a possession, and then into a commodity, an old oral story about ancestral goodwill may become more difficult to hear, and then more difficult to remember. The Brothers Grimm had to do some digging around to find whispers of these tales.

Ancestors can be hard to locate using the conventions of modern English. I know because I’ve been trying for some time now. We might point to them with phrases like “the humans who loved Life deeply enough to return it in good shape,” or “the people who receded back into the soil they tended while they were alive, the soil from which the chicken on my plate arose.” Ancestors can be hard to locate when your whole family line has moved so many times that no one knows where that well-cared-for soil actually is, or where all of that goodwill went to.

So, what about the billionaires? What harm could there be in deciding that they are unredeemable?

Limitless desire has a future-oriented, treadmill like-quality. If you think about it, the satisfaction of hunger is how we vote “yes” to tomorrow. Hunger is essential; it only becomes dangerous once it had been divorced from the well-cared-for soils that give rise to human life—the hum- root of humus, humility and human. I am afraid that focusing on the billionaires serves to keep us on the treadmill.

We could risk turning around and looking down, at the generous ground beneath our feet. We could risk losing the race. We could decide to set the table with everything we’ve got left and invite the whole neighborhood over for supper. The billionaires might wonder why it suddenly got so quiet behind them. They might get curious, even jealous. In a moment of gratitude FOMO, they might decide to stop and turn around. They might get to experience the ravenous toad transforming back into a roast chicken. We could give them that gift.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

South Wind tickles Hickory’ thousand leaflets, setting long, strong arms into pleasured motion. Squashes reach furry tendrils in all directions, turning last year’s feed yard into a sea of green. Sheep laze the hot day in the shade of an old field division, where saplings historically found refuge from the mower’s hungry teeth. Left to its own devices, a hickory nut knows how to make a forest. This Farm is criscrossed with old hedgerows—those wind-breaking and shade-laying marvels. In the depths of winter, they bless us by quelling the gale. These days, they cast a cooling spell.

The feed-yard-become-squash patch beside the writing cabin was my response to a drought of epic proportion; one year ago, the fields began turning the type of sickly pale green that you expect to see in drying hay. The wells hovered dangerously close to empty. Purchased hay and a neighbor’s water tanker would end up keeping the cattle alive through summer’s dusty end. By the looks of it, a well-aged layer cake of poo and waste hay makes potent squash food.

“Watch what you say about the weather,” I heard Dakota poet Layli Long Soldier1 say once, remembering her grandmother’s warning. “Speak poorly of winter cold and you might get bitten.” It can be hard to imagine that we’re being listened to so attentively by the powers that be—the real ones, at least. The translation of such a warning into this Orwellian moment is a bit chilling, no?

It can be hard to imagine that we shape the world each time we choose to speak, or not to speak—that we are dreadfully, and exquisitely consequential. Noticing that possibility again—the unsettling return of agency that awaits us on the tip of our tongues—sits at the center of the story I’ve just written into a book manuscript. Handling food as a gift appears to amplify its trembling aliveness, to part the curtain on the ripple of consequence that trails in its wake. We transform a pound of ground beef into a gift simply by calling it so. Remarkable word magic. “Eight dollars” and “free beef” do completely different things to our capacities of eye and ear, heart and mind. It’s not that one set of words is better or worse than another; they simply give rise to different patterns of behavior.

Given the state of the world, it does seem that we could use a little bit of helpful word magic. That’s what I’ve attempted in the book.

Two and a half weeks ago we’d seen storm after storm; the grand finale dropped an inch and a half in ten minutes. We call those gully washers. The shallow well below the Feast barn was full to the top. Low patches of pasture had become ephemeral swamps. Two days ago, that same well hit bottom—such was the drying heat that settled upon this place and didn’t leave. No more than a sprinkle to cut the dust in that time. If it weren’t for the new well drilled here last winter we’d be hauling water again. To the tenacious drill team, and the folks who chipped in to cover the bill, I raise my glass. If you’re reading this, please know that the water I’m drinking is sweet with your kindness.

I am writing this newsletter as a prayer for rain. When I’m finished, I will read it aloud so that all of the listening ears mentioned in the opening paragraph can hear it. I am writing it to you, but everything that I’m saying is for them. The recording will be spirited to your ears on the digital winds—the same ones that might get you in trouble if you speak out of turn.

David Abram2 boldly asserts that we didn’t stop practicing animism when we left the forest and field for the sidewalk and the grocery store aisle. We merely transferred our sensory allegiance from the surrounding landscape to other, more exclusively-human forms of magic. His exploration of the consequence of phonetic literacy on the human capacity for sensorial intimacy is chilling. And yet he wrote his observations and concerns down into a book. (It’s called The Spell of the Sensuous, by the way, and I can’t recommend it more highly) He ultimately addresses this irony. We’re not supposed to abandon the written word. We are supposed to rehydrate it. Reanimate it. Remember that it was born in a specific place and time. That it has an origin story, as do the people of the book who carried the written word around the globe as a sort of disguised weapon. In his book, David discusses the consequence of the non-consensual conversion to literacy.

It’s not that writing is good or bad. Rather, it can be helpful to learn a bit about the water we’re swimming in. Which can feel awfully fetid these days. It can be helpful to remember that we live within a cultural membrane that, out of necessity, only allows certain bits of sensory information to reach us. The old stories often refer to all the other bits, the ones that don’t make it through the culture sieve, as the Otherworld. It can be helpful, and humbling, to remember that most of Life lies out beyond our ability to capture or comprehend it. It can be helpful to leave room for mystery.

Thunderstorms are predicted later this evening, which might amount to drops on dust or a drought-breaking gully washer. Thank God we haven’t figured out how to control that mystery.

Perhaps that’s why we talk about the weather so darn much. Because, while we stopped talking about God in mixed company, deep down we still long to be humbled—to be able to see ourselves as participants in a larger story. The moment we imagine that we’re being listened to by other-than-human ears, every bit of ordinary speech suddenly becomes some sort of prayer. I remember the “oh shit” moment I experienced when I let that possibility sink in. The poet I mentioned earlier had a funny story about this as well. As a kid, she remembers whining to the grownups around her, “All we do is pray, pray, pray.” Couldn’t we just imagine ourselves as inconsequential? Talk about whatever we want? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier?

I have a sense that we tried it, and it did prove easier for a while. But the loneliness of the story eventually caught up with us. One day we woke up to discover that the teenagers don’t see much worth living for. That’s the working title of my friend and mentor ’s new book manuscript: A World Worth Living For: Regrowing a Culture of Beauty, Meaning and Care After the Age of Limitlessness. Dougald has just sent me a draft to look over, as he mentions his visit here to the Farm in one of the chapters. He’d like to make sure his telling chimes close to what I experienced. I am very, very excited to pull up a seat around Dougald’s story fire. The man has a way with words. I will send out details on A World Worth Living For’s publication date when I hear them.

I can hear the wind picking up outside, even over the fan that’s keeping me from running sweat into the computer keypad. I think it’s time to turn the fan off and speak this prayer out loud. I’ll have word for you next week as to what happened.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

During a Farm Gratitude Feast, my friend Sam had the experience of introducing himself to several different people who then said, “Oh, you’re the Sam from the newsletter!” Later that evening, once the other guests had all gone home, he walked with me down to my house in the lower field to fetch a pillow. He would spend the night at the Farm before biking home the next day. The late-summer meadow pulsed with cricket song. Sam turned to face the sonorous dark and said, “Oh, you must be the crickets from the newsletter!” Here, a week into July, I eagerly await the arrival of that sonorous dark. From the sounds of things, the long-legged meadow players are still gathering their members and tuning their instruments for the big performance.

Back in April I pushed off from the Farm for eight days on the road, a trip I imagined as a practice book tour, minus the finished book. Well, I think I’ve just completed the final edits to the fourth draft of the manuscript. I think it’s safe to say that the writing portion of the book’s journey is complete. So many people have pulled up alongside this book to get it to this point. Over the past six weeks, for example, Kelsey (see a story from her below)

Becoming a Mushroom

Turning coffee to maple syrup

Read more

3 months ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · Kelsey Rosenblum

and Simon have been keeping the Farm afloat while I work through the final draft. Allison has been lending her enormous heart to the Friday Sand River Community Farm newsletter—the digital hub for Farm offerings and requests:

Sand River Community Farm Newsletter

Cruising into Summer with Blessings and Gratitude

Greetings, Neighbors and Strangers…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · ALLISON ARNOLD

Others, including the publishing team, will take the reins and steer the project toward its publication day (January 2027 if we’re lucky). Annie, whose Farm artwork you might remember from a couple of summers back, will be working with Charles form As Is Press

As Is Press

Why Publish

Welcome! We’re starting our Substack adventure with an introduction of sorts. If I’m asking strangers for mental timeshare, especially in a hyper-saturated media environment, it feels important to offer up a “why.” So this is my overdue explanation of what the hell is going on over here at…

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4 months ago · 33 likes · 5 comments · Charles Day

on the cover design. The only section left for me to write is the acknowledgements page; in a book about gratitude, no less. That, and I’ll be reaching out to other authors, asking them to write blurbs for the inside cover.

On the final evening of that practice book tour, the crowd asked a couple of helpful questions. One woman said, “It sounds like the work isn’t always easy. What is feeling particularly difficult right now?” It makes me think about one of the most potent conversations I’ve ever heard, an interview between theologian and civil rights elder Ruby Sales and Krista Tippet, wherein Ruby proposes a similar path to the heart of the matter. Her suggested phrasing is, “Where does it hurt?”

I knew the answer immediately. Writing and speaking with people out in the world about neighboring necessarily means that I neighbor less. For example, the whole winter had passed without checking on a family down the road with two ailing parents and one caregiving son under the same roof. I’m pleased to report that already last week, during a 5-day lull between 3^rd and 4^th drafts, I caught that son out in the yard and got an update from him. The next day, I took a bag of lettuce to another neighbor family, who insisted that I take home a dozen eggs. The wife’s elderly parents had recently re-located to her brother’s house a few towns away, as he was more set up to provide the round-the-clock care they needed.

The next question at the book discussion came from a man about my age. I learned later that his wife facilitates grief rituals. He asked, “Do you have any specific rituals that you host there at the Farm, for example any grief rituals?”

The answer was also immediately available. “The form of gathering that I host that most closely resembles what I imagine a grief ritual to look like is what we just did together over the past ninety minutes.” I heard an audible, involuntary sound rise from the thirty-some people in the room—something between a sigh and a gasp. To my ear that sound meant, “Oh, so that’s why it feels like this.” We’d be speaking with one another as if what is happening is really happening. The relief was palpable in the room.

I can’t wait to share this book with you all. It is, by far, the largest and most vulnerable undertaking to which I’ve ever given myself. Over the next couple of months, look for more-regular dispatches from this little patch of Earth where nothing is for sale, interspersed with writing from the remaining members of the book team.

I am generally undone by the weight of the accumulating gratitude.

With love,

Adam

A few weeks back, I introduced the remarkable , who has been lending her ears and eyes to the book manuscript. If you missed that intro, you can it here:

Forty-four of you have chipped in to nearly cover her $4000 stipend request, with just $350 left to go. Might you consider finishing up that gift-gathering effort by clicking the button below?

Ellie's Editorial Stipend Request

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Heavy rain washes gullies in the Farm drive, pools in a cow’s hoofprint, soaks the roots of a thirsty corn plant. Pasture grasses lay down, exhausted by the sheer weight of themselves. Lettuce spills from garden beds into wash bins and plastic spinners, and then into salad bowls up and down the road. Hermit thrush chants from sunup to sundown on Summer Solstice; the day’s long arms wrap around us all, neighbors here on this green patch of Earth.

Darkness has fallen. The plaintive sound of cattle bawling from the field kept me up later than usual. The calves in the barn got them going—crying out for milk. Perhaps the fireflies’ arrival has quieted everyone down. Just the pulse of early summer crickets now. The puppy’s soft breathing from the corner. The tap-tap of fingertips on the keys of this glow-portal.

The final chapter of the book awaits a re-write. Once that final task is done, the whole thing’s off for final line edits—mostly grammar and citations. I’m going to miss this bugger, but also welcome the return of a nighttime sleep schedule.

The working title for the final chapter is A Letter to a Young Culture Worker: For the road home. It will come after the book’s proper conclusion, as a sort of afterword. As in, “if you are someone itching to put this stuff into practice, let me try to pack a few more stories into a satchel, for your safekeeping.” It feels particularly important to me. If you’re one of those people out there and you’re reading this, please know that you are always on my mind.

I have, on occasion, met the parents of someone who credits this newsletter as one of the reasons they quit their job or closed down their business and started offering their life’s labors as a gift instead. Those parents, in full knowledge of my involvement, have been remarkably graceful with me. Bless them for their courage. Here’s one of the stories that’s going into that satchel for the road home.

A Danish man named Peter went to live with the Greenland Inuit for a time. From them he learned to hunt walrus as they did. But there were other things to teach him as well. One day Peter returned emptyhanded from an unsuccessful hunting trip. An Inuit man, seeing this, dropped by with a large amount of fresh meat from his catch. Filled with gratitude, Peter thanked the man profusely. To his surprise, the Inuit man became agitated, saying:

Up here in our country we are human! And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

By gifts one makes slaves, eh? It’s potent language, and probably not what any of us was expecting. I read this story for the first time several years ago, in David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.1 To be honest, there was a part of me that wanted to pretend I hadn’t. It felt almost too hot to touch. When you love the word “gift” as much as I do, the connection between gift-giving and slave-making is troubling. I needed some time to let it cool down.

You could imagine a spectrum of human experience based on proximity or distance from source. In this story, a man raised within civilization—a word that essentially means “source distancing”—comes into close contact with someone living in a more proximal manner. It doesn’t make the Inuit man any better or worse than him, but it might make it easier for him to remember that human life comes from a real somewhere. If you asked the Inuit hunter “from where does your life arise?” he might point to the sea. When Peter thanked him for his generosity, he became irate. Why? Here’s what I’ve come up with.

From within a culture of normative sharing, thanking someone for their generosity might sound like an assumption that they might have considered proceeding otherwise, which could be heard as a sort of character assassination. The fact that it is hard to wrap our imaginations around that hearing of the ubiquitous phrase ‘thank you’ might have a lot to teach us.

From within a society of normalized non-sharing, the language of gift offers a tool for softening the ‘mine-or-yours-ness’ of the world around and within us. But it still gives the impression that our gratitude should flow from receiver to giver. At a distance from the source, there is a real danger that it doesn’t keep flowing, that it pools right there. And we’ve all seen what can happen to stagnant water. From within the world we’ve made, gratitude pooling is not only a danger, it is almost inevitable. Think about institutional charity. I might ask who the generous party actually is, the wealthy person who hands over the token gift, or the receiver whose face, name and story provide a short-term hit of guilt relief. This may be what the Inuit hunter was trying to teach there on the shore of that vast and generous ocean.

I have a sense that the medicine carried in the word gift will be essential for a couple of generations, after which time it will become less valuable, even offensive. It is medicine for here and now, not forever and everywhere. Like all medicine, it must be administered carefully.

So, in this final chapter of the book, I am attempting to offer a fledgling gift practitioner—what I’m calling a culture worker—some tools for navigating the near-inevitability that people raised in a society where philanthropists are considered generous will have a hard time seeing them as “windows to source.” Here at the Farm, at a distance from the sea, sunlight falls not on ocean water but on the leaves of perennial grasses and corn plants. Rather than a hunk of walrus meat, I might drop a quart of frozen beef and corn chili at your feet. I haven’t yet yelled at someone for thanking me, but perhaps that’s coming.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Friday afternoon, moving cattle and sheep into new paddocks, Bird’s Foot Trefoil in full yellow flower underfoot, I fell in love with this Farm, again, for the thousandth time. Perhaps you’ve fallen in love before. The willingness to go without sleep—that alone can upend a well-planned life. Then there’s the quality of gaze—a stare so full of adoration that it might be a bit embarrassing from an outside perspective. But that’s the best thing about the kind of love I’m describing: no outside perspective. Just presence. This is enough. This place. This face. This yellow-flowered beauty at my feet, on its way to becoming fat on the back of my bovine beloveds.

Perhaps it’s the blessed arrival of enough that carries such strong medicine for a modern mind.

I’ve been deep in it the past couple weeks, hence the break from the regular newsletter schedule. Late spring has set upon the Farm such that every germinating, growing, birthing and nursing being is asking for the quality of gaze I’ve just mentioned. If you’ve left me a voicemail and I haven’t responded, or sent an email, well, that’s where I’ve been: on the other side of a veil called Love Land.

That, and I’ve been pulling a nocturnal schedule that has me sleeping from 4pm ‘til midnight, then up all night with the final edits on the book manuscript, which is another sort of love affair. A bit more like a teenager who’s getting ready to head off to college. It won’t be easy to stop tinkering and let him go. To trust that he’ll find his way through the harsh world without Papa by his side. Plus, I’m still learning from and with the stories in the book. Learning how to tell them more faithfully, more gracefully. Learning what they mean in this particular season, and this particular place—here in Love Land.

Perhaps that’s one of the main differences between a story and a fact: stories ask us to make meaning, again and again, in each setting anew, forever. If facts offer us consumable truths, stories true us by handing us an oar and inviting us to pull in a common rhythm for a few minutes. Is the boat of our shared life heading in a healthy direction? If not, maybe I can make a slight course correction by pulling a couple of strokes with everything I’ve got. Suddenly, I’m noticing the texture of the water, the wind direction, the others in the boat. If you missed the last Newsletter, my collaborator Sam riffed on these distinctions: story and fact, truth and truing.

A few weeks back, I introduced Ellie Robins, the remarkable thinker/writer/storyteller/editor who has leaned into the labor of the first of two final-round book edits. Unlike David and Sam, who have been reading and responding for several years, Ellie climbed aboard the story-boat fresh, and from a very different landscape to the one I inhabit. As such, she is well-positioned to raise a warning flag on behalf of people who live in cities, don’t eat meat, or haven’t steeped themselves in thousands of hours of Steven Jenkinson teachings and therefore might not catch the sideways reference I’m pulling on.

Also, Ellie’s been the first from the book team to engage one of the book’s central practices: asking to be sustained rather than paid. Rather than logging hours and sending an invoice, she put forth a personal stipend request of $4,000. As of this morning, thirty-two of us (those aboard this story-boat, that is) have chipped in $3,065 toward that total. Would you consider picking up an oar to fill in the final $935 dollars?

Sustain Ellie’s Editorial Labors

Here’s a little window into the work Ellie and I are doing together here on the story-boat:

Self Service: The birth of the supermarket

We’re nearing the end of the book, in a chapter called Radical Hospitality. The paragraph in the draft Ellie’s working reads:

Consider, for a moment, the potent alchemical relationship between the arrival of grocery stores, the emergence of institutional food charities, and the promise of unlimited material progress–the promise of ‘more for less’. Before long, you might end up in a world where it has become undignified for any human to have to feel grateful against their will. Gratitude might become a recreational activity. A lifestyle option. Something people spend good money on meditation retreats to get a chance to experience for a few precious minutes.

If you’ve been reading these newsletters, the components probably won’t surprise you. Ellie highlights the first sentence in the paragraph, wondering, on behalf of the book’s future readers, how those historical events pulled up alongside one another. What was the causal relationship, actually? Could you be more specific? I’m not writing a researched book, but occasionally the internet has something interesting to offer, so I accepted Ellie’s invitation and decided to ask. Here’s what I found.

In American English, grocery store and supermarket are used interchangeably, but not so in the UK and elsewhere. The point of conversion, from mom-and-pop to Price Chopper, has been debated by the historians, but one specific moment stood out in my research. The first self-service grocery store, called Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916. The move toward nighttime re-stocking saved on staffing and delivered a never-before-seen anonymity to the shopper. Profitability increased significantly. Piggly Wiggly became the template for the modern supermarket, which quickly spread around the globe.

Around the time of Piggly Wiggly’s world-making innovation, a powerful colonizer/banker/industrialist named Jose Mendez and his son-in-law Mauricio were making a killing down at the far-southern tip of South America, clearing the countryside of inconvenient native people and grazing millions of sheep for wool and meat exports. The actual English translation of one of their business ventures: The Exploitation Company of Tierra del Fuego. Yikes.

Local inhabitants came up with another name for the family’s exploits, “La Anonima” (literally, The Anonymous) which ended up sticking, and survives to this day at the name of the supermarket chain the family opened and still operates, the fifth-largest in the country.

The subheading in the book manuscript immediately following the paragraph in question was already titled Self Service, as it tells the story of the second summer of the pandemic, when the drumbeat of back-to-normal was getting louder, pulling our neighbors’ attention away from the weekly Soup and Bread Gift Distribution. Suddenly, we began having significant amounts of food leftover at the end of our normal hours. So, we began setting the extras out on a table for self-service, with convenient, extended hours all weekend. On the table, we placed a little note that read: “If you would like to leave a financial gift, you can do so in the sculptural mailbox at the far end of the parking lot.” Little did we know that the same convenient and anonymizing forces that catapulted Piggly Wiggly and La Anonima to profitability would work to bring that chapter of gifting experiments to a close.

The question I began to ask myself: How do we behave when we think no one is looking? And how does anonymity set the conditions for a great falling out of love—a form of estrangement that underwrites the deal-seeking consumer mind?

The dawn chorus is calling, and the cattle are waiting for a patch of breakfast grass. I am grateful to share a few stories with you, here on this story-boat. If you find yourself willing and able to pick up an oar, please consider clicking the button below to close out Ellie’s editorial stipend request:

Ellie's Stipend Request

With gratitude,

Adam

Soft soil makes for easy digging. A hardy crew planted tomatoes and peppers, onions and leeks at yesterday’s Farm Frolic. We weeded garlic and dribbled lines of many-colored dry beans into the dark earth of the Farm’s main garden. A steady rain has arrived this morning to settle that newly-stirred soil around a transplanted root and a swelling seed coat.

This week’s book team intro comes from my friend Sam. The conversation we struck up a few years back has deeply informed my work. The book wouldn’t have found its way without his persistent, not-always-so-gentle nudges. He asks me to labor on behalf of these beautiful ideas and stories. He isn’t afraid to point out the weak spots. He teases out the deeper telling.

If you missed last week’s note, that one came from the remarkable from How to Go Home, including her personal stipend request of $4000 to complete the manuscript editing. Thus far, twenty of you have already chipped in nearly half of that amount, with $2055 left to raise. Would you consider voting ‘yes’ to Ellie’s labors on behalf of this book by clicking over to the book’s website and joining the conversation?

Editorial Stipend Request

Now onto this week’s note from Sam Bliss. I strongly encourage you to read his note to the end, and especially to listen to the song he wrote about the archetypal neighbor I call Old Sally.

The Ballad of Old Sally, by Sam Bliss.

In the part of the world that Americans now call “the northeast,” the descendants of Europeans used to keep account books in which they wrote down everything neighbors owed each other. This practice was prevalent in the early 1800s. I learned about it from Jack Larkin’s fascinating history of early America, The Reshaping of Everyday Life.[i]

Account books were a ledger of labors and goods exchanged between households. Every item was assigned a precise monetary value. But money was often too scarce to actually settle up. Neighbors would track their transactions for years without ever closing out their tab, so to speak. They knew where to find each other if they needed anything.

Reading about these “account books” popped a beautiful bubble I had conjured in my mind. I had been sure that before greedy businessmen commodified just about everything sacred and infected us all with the disease of calculative self-regard, our ancestors had engaged in untracked reciprocity. I thought the commerce of quaint New England villages must have resembled what we might now call a gift economy.

After all, pretty much every household in rural New England was a subsistence farm at that time. Nobody could make a full-time living practicing crafts like carpentry or milling when all their neighbors were jack-of-all-trades peasants. And since everybody farmed, there was not much of a market for selling one’s produce.

Many men would make one weeklong trek to Boston or New York City each year, driving fatted cattle to sell there and spending the resultant cash on the few goods they consumed but couldn’t produce. They would load their carts with their annual grocery haul—salt, spices, coffee, tea, cod, molasses, and rum—and head homeward on rutted roads through fields and woods.

Where there was a country store in the rural northeast of the early nineteenth century, farmers would keep a tab rather than exchange money every time they purchased or sold things there.

But even with so little money in circulation, people would basically pretend to be buying and selling each other things instead of just giving gifts and doing favors.

Why keep track at all? Didn’t people trust their neighbors? Has friendship really consisted of sending each other the same $20 back and forth on Venmo for centuries?

I was working on a doctoral dissertation on non-market food practices in Vermont when I learned, disappointedly, about these account books. Their existence messed up the narrative I was trying to construct: that neighbors generally do not start selling each other their daily bread until some authority forces them to, by taxing their land or privatizing shared resources or making them repay debts with interest or extinguishing the old institutions of charity and solidarity that kept villages fed and cared for before some imagined fall from pre-capitalist grace.

The world seldom lets itself be theorized so neatly.

I thought my friend Adam Wilson might want to know about this. It was partly his influence that had led me to believe in this primordial gift economy. Plus, my role in Adam’s writing and thinking is to provide something of a scholarly fact check. The trusting, generous villagers we fantasized about turned out to be tightfistedly quantifying and dollarizing every neighborly exchange, I told him.

I have been contributing this naysaying editorial service to draft after draft of the book Adam and company are now birthing.

I find the project that this work serves—building an agricultural gift economy, to put it bluntly—to be of immense importance, for all the reasons readers of Adam’s newsletter know well. When food is not for sale, our relationships with each other, with the beings that become our food, and with the landscapes they inhabit are all stronger, more intimate, than when food is a market commodity. That’s what I found in my Ph.D. research on the topic.

As the global climate system goes haywire and the American empire lashes out against its own impending end, we are going to need to get in the habit of helping each other out with no expectation of direct return. We need to start paying attention to each other’s needs, keeping each other in mind, sharing food and other necessities with those who are unable to pay for it, person to person, not counting on crumbling bureaucracies to do this for us.

We don’t actually have to pretend that the people who came before us were perfect at these things to learn from what they did know. They managed to scrape their shared livings from this soil with little money and no oil or gas. That we are here today is evidence that our ancestors did in fact get by.

One of my favorite lessons from the old ones is a story with which you might be familiar, about Old Sally. She broke her leg and had to watch her neighbors milk her cows for six weeks while it healed, knowing they would not let her pay them a cent for the favor. “Don’t mention it,” they probably told her when she tried to thank them.

This story is, among other things, Adam’s response when others give him too much credit for coming up with all these ideas about gift economies. He says he learned everything he knows about the gift economy listening to ninety-year-old dairy farmers. Deep enough into a conversation, they would always bring up that time Old Sally broke her leg.

A couple years ago, Adam let slip to me that Old Sally was made up. She was a mythical amalgamation of real-life people, a composite character.

I was crushed. It was like when your older cousin told you about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

Adam then told me about a different conception of truth than the empirically verifiable facts my work as a social scientist had taught me to pursue. It took me some time to understand it.

In essence, stories have consequences. They “do work” in the world. Adam quoted a teacher of his who thinks of “true” as a verb, not an adjective. “Our stories should true us, the way a mechanic trues a bicycle wheel, aligning its spokes so that the disc can spin around its axel with no wobble. A fictional story can be true if it helps us to see something that is true, something that we otherwise might miss,” he said.

At first, I wondered if Old Sally’s neighbors had actually just recorded all the work they did on her farm in their account books. Maybe there was no money exchanged when they did her chores while her leg healed simply because nobody had any money to exchange, not because the work was really a gift.

Then I came to understand. Stories are alive. The Old Sally story was a fairy-tale blend of events that did happen, many times over. Since the story was never strictly factual anyway, I was free to adapt it to other purposes that are of service. I expanded this two-sentence story into a six-minute song called The Ballad of Old Sally, inventing the details as I imagined them.

Now the story is doing even more work in the world. Crusty punks in sweaty basements yell, “That’s what the neighborhood is for! What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is fucking yours!” They get it.

My position in the team of wonderful companions bringing this book into the world still consists mostly of pointing out when a claim Adam makes does not hold up close to the light of academic knowledge. I pore over the text pretending I’m not already persuaded by the work of Sand River Community Farm and the ideas that underlie it. I jump on every possible logical inconsistency, question every claim that isn’t fiercely defended.

I think that is worthwhile. I would not want any smart person to cast aside the book because of intellectual sloppiness, or playing fast and loose with facts. If the ideas contained within This Food is a Gift cause one discomfort, I want them to stick with it. Cleverly identifying a passage that lacks rigor and using it to discredit the entire project is a move with which some highly educated individual might let himself off the hook. I have been working with Adam on these ideas for five years in part to foreclose that possibility.

But seeing beyond the “truth” of facts and data has changed my own perspective on what is worth believing in, too.

Back in the 1800s some Southerners, accustomed to their famous norms of hospitality, thought that Northerners’ careful record-keeping demonstrated distrust of their neighbors. But Jack Larkin, the author of the book from which I learned of these account books, suggested that the practice may have arisen simply because rural New Englanders were likely to have learned arithmetic in school, unlike their counterparts in Dixie.

In fact, it is likely that neighbors did each other favors and gifted each other food without writing it down in their account books all the time. There is much less evidence of these untracked transfers and services for the very reason that they were not recorded!

But we do know that some exchange operated outside of the account books. Neighbors in the 1800s would often take turns slaughtering animals and split the resultant meat among households, since a family could only reasonably eat around a quarter beef or half mutton before it spoiled.

Neighbors also regularly came together for tasks of mutual assistance, called “bees” or “frolics,” which they did not charge on their account books. Barn raisings and quilting bees are the classic examples, but communities also gathered to husk corn, spread manure, pick rocks from fields, or even harvest a crop belonging to someone who was sick or short on hands—or someone who had broken their leg, like Old Sally. Questions like whether bee participants could expect help in return at a later date or whether they were merely compensated with a meal were resolved according to unwritten, flexible, context-specific rules that everyone involved understood.[ii]

Northeasterners of yore were clearly not coldly calculating with each other in all contexts. European American settlers probably tracked exchange in monetary terms, even with little money around, at least in part because they had immigrated from places where the economy was already quite commercial. The norms of the market were what they knew.

There’s no evidence, to my knowledge, that the indigenous inhabitants of this land were ever in the habit of buying and selling prior to colonization. Natives of what is now northern New England sent furs southward to where furbearing creatures were less abundant, and in return received corn and beans, since the growing season was longer down there. But these exchanges were articulated entirely in the language of gifts, not trade.[iii]

Maybe I can resuscitate the thesis that gift economy is the typical human default that must be forcibly extinguished before a market economy can truly take hold. The case for experimenting with agricultural gift economics in this age and place does not hinge on any rhetorical claim about its “naturalness” or logic-based argument about its “goodness,” though.

Rather, it is a tingling that you feel when you read stories of reckless generosity. It is a fullness in my heart when a sheep forgives me immediately for killing her brother in front of her, a radical forgiveness I cannot imagine imitating. It is the tears that I cannot blink back when my homeless friend Gina tells me how much she loves me, and shows me, too, by giving her own labor to the daily lunch project that runs out of the house I live at.

I practice this stuff, too. It’s hard to put into words. I am in awe of the book that Adam is finally close to finalizing. I first read it when it was a jumble of good stories, bad metaphors, and overly abstract ideas. I thought it was in fine shape then. Others saw its potential to mature into a properly gorgeous ode to trying to be a good neighbor to the humans and nonhumans one shares the landscape with.

I am grateful to get to share these words with you, grateful for your attention. Especially if you’re reading on a device designed to distract you, to shorten your attention span. Most of all, I am honored to take part in the team of doulas overseeing this book’s entrance into the realm of the living.

With love, Sam

[i] Larkin, Jack. 1989. The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840. Harper Perennial.

[ii] Wilson, Catharine Anne. 2022. Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

[iii] Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang.

Before I get into this week’s update on the book, I’d like to let you know that the project has a number of patron saints, some of whom are still alive. One in particular, Dougald Hine, had a hand in connecting me with , the book’s first-round editor, who you’ll hear from today. Dougald will be sharing some of the glossy gems he’s collected along the generous road of his days in the form of a five-week teaching and web-weaving space he calls A School Called HOME, starting in two days’ time. I met Dougald and Anna as a participant in one of their early online offerings; I couldn’t be more grateful that I took the risk.

A School Called HOME

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The difficulty of writing a sentence in modern English without possessive pronouns shines a bright light on the underlying social conditions within which I’ve written This Food is a Gift, a book-length telling of my early adventures in food-gifting. Two weeks back, I wrote to let you know that the manuscript has found a remarkable group of midwives and mid-husbands. With an ambitious plan for a year-end publication date, each member of the book’s birthing team has been tending and tinkering, pushing and pulling, in their respective zones of responsibility. Some of them have taken up my invitation to make a personal stipend request–to dip their toes into this vulnerable and transparent money work.

In the book, I ask the question: How will culture workers be sustained within a society that tells them to go get a real job? Which begs a second question: How is culture work distinct from other labors within the marketplace of our time? I offer a response to those questions in the second-to-last chapter in the book. For now, I’ll share one little anecdote before passing the talking stick to the book’s first-round editor, from .

It would be easy to see the author as the culture worker and the publishing house as the unfortunate but unavoidable capitalistic arm of the operation. But this pattern of dismembering a social body and then trying to keep the less savory bits in the shadows appears to be quite hard on everyone, as Ellie eloquently addresses in her note below. On a call with Ellie, Meg, Myles, and Charles, I asked them to imagine a scene in which everyone who had read one of the books they’d had a hand in publishing was walking around the world with so much residual gratitude that they couldn’t help but leave freshly baked pies on the front steps of the office, or write to ask if the bills are well covered, or offer to organize an on-the-ground promotional event. Buying books conveniently relieves readers of the culture-making work of relational maintenance. I told the team that I was going to do everything I could to expand the circle of goodwill that has gathered around this project so that they might wake up one day and find themselves on the receiving end of something like what I’ve just described.

Currently, readers of this newsletter send in fifteen thousand dollar-gifts. I think of them as at-a-digital-distance versions of those front-step-pies. The fact that I have figured out how to live mostly from non-monetary gifts leaves me with the immense responsibility of deciding how to disperse the extras. So, I am thrilled to make that responsibility transparent by letting you know that I have transferred a thousand of your goodwill gestures onto Ellie’s front step, which you can find by clicking the link below. When I went to drop off your digital pies just now I noticed that two others had already found their way to Ellie’s front step. You can find your way there by clicking on the button below. What follows is a note from Ellie about her work on the manuscript and a direct request for sustenance.

Stipend Request

“Hello, my name is Ellie Robins.”

Every morning I wake up around six, make a cup of tea, and go gently insane in my little garden. By “go gently insane”, I mean “write a poem”, an odd form of psychedelic experience that involves trying to attune to the infinite mystery that lives beneath words, then find fresh words to praise and draw forth hidden aspects of that mystery.

In those moments, I’m trying to set up my residence for the day in the most important place in the world: that border space where the indeterminate is becoming determinate. Where the imaginal realm is getting bodied forth into arms and legs and ladybugs and tongue-shaped leaves and hopes and sorrows and gusts of wind.

I try to spend my life at this border place before and beyond words, because I believe it’s the most important place in the world. In ages of meaning collapse like ours, when old ways of living and knowing are crumbling, sometimes violently, one thing that’s essential is dedicated work with words. Words are how we call the world into its shape, and what’s needed now is to find, once more, a shape of the world that we can all live in. And that can only happen at the border place.

So these morning poems are a meditative exercise to set me up for the rest of the day’s word work. That work includes writing my own essays here on Substack, about imagination and how art and language shape the world. This is my way of trying to pull the world into a shape we can all live in. People voluntarily send me about $500 a month on Substack for this work—a generosity and encouragement for which I am tremendously grateful.

I can’t live on $500 a month, so I also do what I’ve been doing my whole adult life: I edit other people’s words. I go to that border place with and for others, and I help them to birth the ideas that are trying to come through them as effectively as possible.

I’ve been doing this for twenty years, since my first job in publishing, at a tiny indie press in London. After that, I was hired by a press in New York, before going freelance around thirteen years ago. But I never talk about this work in public. When someone asks me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer, though most of my time and money are wrapped up in this other activity.

Why do I hide the part of my life that actually sustains me? I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I started working with Adam, and I think it comes down to this: I’m ashamed.

I’m ashamed because in my mind, I long ago separated my working life into “creative or world-building work” and “work I do for money”, which I’m coming to realise is another way of saying “my ideas” and “other people’s ideas”. Since beginning to work with Adam, I’m starting to see that this unconscious division gets in the way of serving the ideas themselves. If I’ve separated the work into “mine” and “yours”, the emphasis has shifted from the ideas to their ownership, which really means, from the mystery to the human marketplace.

In an early conversation about our work together, Adam told me he thinks it’s nonsense that only his name will appear on the cover of this book, as the author. “Oral stories didn’t have authors, right?” he said. “The author was the land and the human culture she had dreamed up.”

I knew this, but somewhere in my twenty years of being paid to edit words I didn’t write, in a proprietorial creative culture that wants us all to be forever building our brands, I had forgotten. And in that forgetting, in crept the shame—shame about working on ideas that aren’t “my own”.

I’ve been working on Adam’s manuscript for a few weeks now, and I couldn’t be less ashamed—more proud or excited. I don’t need to tell you how gorgeous his book is. How much the world needs it. What’s surprised me is how much I need it. How much it’s changing me.

It’s prompting me to ask: What if I stopped being ashamed? What if I remembered why I started doing this work?—Because for whatever reason, I seem to enjoy and have some skill at sitting in the border place with others, seeing the various shapes of what’s trying to come through them, and helping them to birth the most effective version.

What if I remembered that this is valuable work—and what if, in the process of this remembering, I began to believe that I am worthy of being sustained in the work of midwifing ideas that are building a world we can all live in, minus the possessive pronouns?

What if that sense of worthiness helped me to show up in a more whole way for all of my work?

In this first pass of editing Adam’s manuscript, I’ve had long chats with him about his work, his loves, his motivations, the way he lives, and how all that wants to world itself in his words. I’m helping him thread his beautiful book along a clear spine of story. I’m encouraging him to unpack ideas that run in his blood, but which for the rest of us are buried somewhere deeper and more dormant, and need slowed-down sense-making in order to reawaken in the way they long to. I’m sitting with every line and phrase, to make sure it rings with Adam’s own voice and the voices of all the others, human and nonhuman, who speak through him. I’m reading his rewrites, and making sure the book’s flow can carry the power of his ideas. I’m trying to sit with him at the border space where a more beautiful world is being born through him, and I’m trying to midwife that process.

I’ve been working on Adam’s book for several weeks now, and this first pass will take several weeks more. For this first pass, I am asking for $4,000 to cover personal living expenses. This will allow me to spend deep time in Adam’s words, to communicate regularly with Adam as he makes changes. It will also enable me to keep writing the work I publish under my own name, but which is full of the life-force of so many others, human and nonhuman—including, now, Adam.

In other words, it will sustain all the idea work I do, minus the possessive pronouns.

Sustain Ellie

With love and gratitude,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

The fallow, half-feral garden beside my house is full of surprises. Basswood, felled to reduce unwanted shade, sends a volley of stump-sprouts skyward. The first leaves, tender and sweet, delight the winter-weary palate. Dandelion greens and wild winter cress have been steady companions for weeks now—blessed bitter tonics. Violets entered the garden scene a few years back; they adorn the joint of their own accord. Who doesn’t like a salad topped with cheerful purple and yellow flowers? Chervil self-seeded, offering a mild licorice green for the filling bowl. Perennial scallions, lovage and tender tips of winter savory add a bit of bite. At a time of year that could seem short on fresh food, a close look around reveals a landscape grinning with greenery. Nettles have taken over the whole west side of the garden, lending their deep spring green to soups and teas. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have them as neighbors.

Yesterday we hosted the first public Farm Frolic of the season. After a morning of steady showers, afternoon Sun brought a grinning group to the Farm, including a couple of courageous kids. While Colleen and I filled the feral salad bowl and slid skillets of bubbling cornbread batter into the oven, the big group pushed and pulled in the corn patch where next week we’ll press those yellow-red-orange gems into the freshly-forked rows. Growing food without machines is shockingly joyful. If you squinted your eyes yesterday, you might have seen a group of Mexican peasants out there. The dinner table was a songful affair.

Best of all for me was our special guest project leader. My mother spent Mother’s Day at the Farm with us. She requested her buddy Brandon as her Frolic sidekick. Together, they leaned into the task of weeding the perennial flower beds she’s created over the past three years. At eighty-three, she is a motherly marvel. If I’ve done anything noteworthy in my forty-six years, she’s the one who prepared the ground, planted the seeds and then showered this seedling with relentless applications of love. I don’t think I would dare to write and speak about belonging unless I’d been on the receiving end of that strong medicine.

Forming a book team over the past month has meant crafting intimate and consequential relations with strangers—the folks I listed in last week’s newsletter:

I’ve asked each member of the team to pen a few words of introduction. That roll-out will begin next week with the remarkable of How to Go Home. Ellie has signed on as the manuscript’s primary editor. In the meantime, you might be deepened by a look at her careful word-craft:

I tend to drop the L-bomb fairly early in new relationships, and the kind folks on the book team have graciously received my emails signed “With love, Adam.” But I’m not employing the L-word to describe a warm, fuzzy feeling. I use it as a statement of relational rigor. As in, “When I say I love you, what I really mean is that there’s nothing you could do to make you unlovable to me.” My friend and collaborator Sam surprised me last winter by rolling out a singalong version of that line, which, apparently, he’s been carrying around since I said to him some years back. He fit the words to the tune of Old Smokey, which I’ll sing for you on the recording of this newsletter.

When I say “I love you,” I am not describing a fantasy land in which your behavior won’t disappoint or befuddle me. I’m not turning my back on the essential signpost we call anger. I am saying that I’m here to learn, which might include creating boundaries or even asking for distance between us when things get rough. But I’ve seen the heart-constricting condition called “unlovable.” I’ve seen the way it’s a lot easier to turn you into a monster than allow myself to be changed by the absolutely unpalatable medicine you are placing before me. I’ve seen the way resentment can hollow out a human being. I’ve seen the ease with which I self-apply a story of victimhood, pull it over my shoulders like a coat of armor.

About eight years ago, at just such a moment, a remarkable book landed in my hands. I recommend Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse to everyone involved in any sort of collaborative work, a category overlapping strongly with another one called ‘learning how to become a human being.’ Here’s one of Schulman’s gems for you, which appears as a quote in my manuscript chapter titled: From Victimhood to Reparations:

Nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening. Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means we are alive.

I love those final two sentences. In fact, they morphed into a sort of mantra in the book manuscript as a way of describing the work I’ve been involved with over the past eight years. The fact that I could die at any moment doesn’t mean that I am in danger. It means that I am alive. Lest I forget how utterly unlikely and insanely precious this is. This moment in which we get to learn alongside loves.

To all of the mothers out there, I bend my head. By your labors you have renewed this Life.

With abiding gratitude and a committed sort of love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Take a walk with me for a few minutes, if you will. I point to a string of red blazes sprayed onto the furled bark of green-leafed ancients. On the ground below those blazes lies an invisible line. The line is real insofar as the act of its drawing unleashed immense consequence upon the inhabitants so circumscribed, and those who purchased their felled, milled, milked, mowed, dried, and baled bodies. But the line is also imaginary insofar as it shapes and informs the human imagination. Contorts is another word we could choose. Constrains, curtails, even curdles.

If there’s one thing I learned last week during a stretch of five speaking events in five days: words are miraculous creatures. Parcel, property, price tag. House and home. Neighbor and stranger. It’s mine. I earned it. The normalization of non-sharing. Words live by employing the tongues of the miraculous creatures we call human beings. Perhaps something similar could be said for those green-leafed ancients and their many-species neighbors: they live by employing the human heart.

I can’t wait to share the book I’ve written with you. It tells a story about drawing an imaginary line around a small patch of land. Nothing from that place would be for sale. All would be shared as a gift with anyone who was hungry for any reason. There wasn’t a plan back then. There still isn’t now. Relationships are emergent, surprising, and often quite contrary to one’s personal preferences. How will the electric bill get paid? Maybe we could we figure that out together, in conversation.

Early on, a thought came: if the plants and animals I lived and worked alongside and then ate for supper weren’t for sale, maybe I wasn’t either. What would that mean for my relationships, for my capacity to make requests—for my capacity to make home? Eight years in, it does appear that not being allowed to pay for the gift of Life begets a process of relational tethering—to people and to place. Tethers have a way of tugging on the human heart.

Gratitude doesn’t live in the future. You simply won’t find any there. Gratitude lives in the human capacity for memory. But not all memories are comfortable or affirming. Some memories feel like they might swallow us whole, especially if we turn around and face them alone. As a European American man, I can vouch for this fear. But how did we get to the point of thinking that we were supposed to do any of this alone?

Of the many potent questions people asked during those five story circles last week, one seems particularly instructive this morning: “Why do I feel guilty when I receive a gift?” The question, carried on a string of ten words, is a small miracle. Even, dare I say, a creature. It inquires into the broken heart of something that is absolutely not personal. Look, over there, the question is scurrying off, into the underbrush of our shared life. Shall we follow it together?

This Food is a Gift

Over the past month, the book project has sprouted legs and begun scurrying about. Suddenly, timelines have been scrawled onto digital whiteboards. Names have been assigned to different categories of tending. Tender new relationships have been forged.

Over the coming weeks, I will introduce you to the remarkable folks who have formed a team around the book project: Meg Mittelstedt, Myles Lamont, , , David Drury, Sam Bliss and . Together, we’ve taken up the very practices the book lays out as we engage the shared labor of moving a manuscript from its Google Doc womb onto real paper and then out into the bright light of a hurting world. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be laboring alongside such remarkable human creatures, and I will do everything I can to set the conditions for the following outcome:

1. Each person on the team gets to feel, at least once a week, like the luckiest person alive.

2. Each person feels worthy of asking to be sustained.

3. Those requests for sustenance are clearly articulated on the book’s website.

4. Money begins moving as a result of human gratitude rather than price tags.

That’s right, the book has a website, which is now live: www.thisbookisagift.org.

One of the most relieving things about working with a publishing team is that I don’t have to make all of the decisions. When Charles drafted the website, he decided to include the book’s preface. Myles and Meg thought that was a good decision. So, the first three pages of the book are now available at www.thisbookisagift.org. I’ll leave you with a little taste. More on the team and their requests next week.

Preface: This Book is a Gift—Falling Back into Practice

You hear a knock at your door. Hello, it’s me, a stranger, holding a quart of the beef and corn chili we just made here at Sand River Community Farm, a patch of Earth where nothing is for sale. I introduce myself and ask, “Would you be willing to receive this gift of food?” Again and again, I hear people say: “But surely someone needs this more than I do.” Can you imagine how different the world would be if everyone wrestled with that thought as they wandered the aisles of the grocery store, or any store for that matter?

For the past eight years, I have worked with my neighbors to grow and offer food as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. It has become abundantly clear to me that modern people are a lot more comfortable giving than receiving, which points us toward the central assertion of this book: the transactional norms of the marketplace have left our gratitude muscles badly atrophied.

The gratitude I am describing is less a spoken laundry list of the things that worked out for us today than an awareness of our deep-running relational obligations to people and place. Belonging isn’t something we find or feel. It is something we do.

If this book is to serve as a practical guide to agricultural gift economics, we’ll have to get clear on what we mean by the word practical. The Greek root praxis means exercise, or action. It means doing something, not just talking about it. The type of gratitude I am talking about moves us from noun to verb, from emotion to motion. It turns warm fuzzy feelings into cultural organizing principles.

To read the rest, you can find your way over to www.thisbookisagift.org.

With excitement,

Adam

Should you be so inclined, here is a downloadable/printable version of Annie’s remarkable flyer:

Thisfoodisagift

1.31MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Yesterday.

First light.

Song Sparrow.

Mottled brown, unassuming to the eye.

Just beyond the pane, reaching.

For these listening ears.

This beating heart.

He watches as

I wash the dishes.

Fold laundry into stacks.

He waits until I sit.

Here at the writing table,

a cup of tea in hand,

wandering the arriving day. In my mind.

Strolling the imaginary palace of

my triumphant productivity.

Then, just then,

he releases his song.

The melody undoes me.

Undresses me.

Calls me home.

I weep.

Yes, kind sir, I will join you.

I will draw breath

from this dawning air.

So elegantly embroidered with your song.

I will allow that melody to nestle

in the moist dark of my chest.

And then, only then,

will I learn, again, to speak.

I am mildly obsessed with the way bird enthusiasts formulate nonsense phrases or sentences of human language to help them remember and point out the wild sounds of the world. For example, song sparrow’s ‘handle’ goes: “Maids, maids, maids, put on your tea kettle-ettle-ettles!” The exclamation point seems essential, given the explosive exuberance of the song in question.

Every human word is a handle—a tool that allows the human imagination to isolate and gain purchase upon one small portion of a constant flood of sensory input. Yes, the word purchase had a life before the marketplace, denoting the hand-over-hand motion of tugging on a rope. The root, chase, suggests pursuit. Words allow the human imagination to lay a hand upon the often-slippery, often-miraculous, and often-overwhelming experience of being alive.

I have a hunch that the widespread adoption of buying and selling little bits of the wild world—so completely normalized today as to be nearly unquestionable—set in motion a process of linguistic withering that resulted in modern English. We might call it ‘market English’. The word ‘purchase’ might be one example.

Yeas ago, I held Song Sparrow in my hand. Out on a run one day, the wind-blast from a passing car knocked him to the ground. Frantic wing flaps on the dusty road. By the time I picked him up, he had gone limp. Standing on that dusty roadside, tears streaming down my face, a thought came to me: the project of affixing word-handles to this wild world risks fatally grounding the human imagination. The project of affixing price tags does something similar.

I’ve heard several thoughtful people describe a spectrum of the ways humans form relationships, from consent to control. On the consensual end of things, we begin with courtship. As in, “I’m going to makes some beauty over here in hopes that I catch the corner of your eye or your ear. If not, you’ll continue on your way and I’ll keep working on my capacity for beauty-making.” The next stop on the spectrum: seduction. In seduction mode, I might choose to begin my routine when you’re already backed into a corner. I picture the seducer’s tongue as a sort of serpentine, even strangulating appendage. Beyond seduction, we start heading into the terrain of taking that which you desire by force. Think about the phrase ‘purchasing power’. Yikes.

An Earth who isn’t for sale invites human beings to develop ever-more-beautiful courtship poems and songs and dances with the miraculous lungs and tongues and bodies she granted us for that very task. How would we speak if we aimed to reach out and touch a wild, feathered creature who, upon hearing us, couldn’t keep from alighting upon our outstretched finger? Can you imagine those tiny scaled feet wrapped around your pointer?

I can’t tell you if the song sparrow who released his song just feet from my house window yesterday morning was the same one who sang to me last summer, or each of the summers since I moved my tiny house to this sheltered spot. But I can tell you that I had the immense privilege of courting this place for three months ahead of moving here, all through a snowy winter. I brought small gifts with me each time I came. I always sang a song. And, however ridiculous it may have felt at the time, I asked whether I would be welcome here. Try asking the Earth permission in modern English and the linguistic withering I’m describing will come rushing into view.

I heard nothing that sounded like a ‘no’ on any of my dozens of visits to the spot where I’m sitting this morning, the spot from which I’ve written every one of these newsletters for the past four years. On moving day, on the way down the hill, my tiny-house-on-wheels sunk axle-deep in the mud, which required the visitation of an over-sized excavator. While he was here, I asked him to put in a ditch above the house site, given the now-apparent drainage issue. What a way to make a first impression: belching exhaust and deafening mechanical noise. The ditching effort resulted in a burn pile of ripped-out bushes and young trees next to the new house site. This was mid-March. Every day, upon stepping from the house, I had to look out upon that burn pile and remember the rocky start of my new relationship. No more than a month later, Song Sparrow completed his seasonal migration and found the new brush pile an absolutely perfect spot to perch and sing—fifteen feet from my front steps, where I sat, taking in the whole scene. Listening while he set about calling me home.

I’ll be on the road next week, but, with some grace, I’ll be back with you after May Day to share some exciting updates on the book project. May that the greening season and her winged singers rattle the marrow of your winter-weary bones.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Winter-hungry ticks crawl from shoe to sock, sock to pant leg, waist band to soft skin around the navel. ‘Warm mammalian skin must smell like home to a tick,’ I think to myself as I pick three off my belly just as they are preparing to take their first sip in months.

In a world gone mad, I can admit that it sounds mighty appealing to identify the bad guys and come up with a plan to stop them before they do any more of their ‘bad guy things’. Ticks seem to fit that bill. As do the tenacious, boa-constrictor-style vines called bittersweet who have taken up residence here since this old Farm was logged out and then put up for sale. Much of what was once a forest now resembles an impenetrable, chest-deep tangle. The remaining trees serve as trellises for Sun-hungry vines.

Why pass along a healthy forest to someone you don’t even know when you could turn it into money instead? After the last custodian of this land, named Henry, died more than two decades ago, his non-local heirs did what any sensible modern person would do in possession of a title to a collection of relationships that have been reduced to real estate. That’s the moral bind that comes along with living in the modern world. If everyone’s just trying to get by, pay the rent and keep their kids warm by getting a little something wherever they can, how does the Earth stand a darn chance?

I’d like to pause here to lift up two people who underwrite my work, including the increasingly likely possibility of releasing a book into the world year’s end. That’s right: the book has sprouted legs over the past few weeks.

Back in January, I introduced @Kelsey in a newsletter called Looking for the EXIT Door, in which she says to me, over lunch at the Farm, “I think I could quit capitalism for this chili.” When I stood in her shoes six years ago, I had no outstanding debt service. Kelsey found the heartbroken courage to step through the EXIT door with $1100/month in non-negotiable payments and no guarantee of how it might work out. Over the past eight weeks, she has brought a level of organization and passion to the Farm that makes it difficult to remember how this place functioned without her. I may birth a book this year as a result of her labors. Kelsey’s personal stipend request has already been half-covered by personal financial gifts from ordinary people like you who have voted ‘yes’ to her offer to learn and carry this work. Deciding that you might be worthy of receiving gifts is no small lift in our time. Attempting to make medicine by telling that story in public is what she’s signed up for. Read and vote ‘yes’ to Kelsey here:

Becoming a Mushroom

Will you sustain me while I do the unpaid work of radical neighboring?

Dear Readers…

Read more

6 months ago · 7 likes · Kelsey Rosenblum

I wouldn’t know how to serve as a mentor to Kelsey unless I had people who serve in that role for me. One of those trustworthy, inspirational human beings goes by the name . Nearly a decade ago, I stumbled across the Dark Mountain Manifesto, co-written by Dougald and . Upon reading it, I felt a huge sense of relief: I might not actually be crazy for sensing something amiss in the story of modernity. A few years later, I signed up for one of Dougald’s online course offerings. Within a year, he’d begun nudging this newsletter out into the public gaze. When we finally got to meet in person, I got to ask him if it was alright for me to describe him as a mentor. “Yes,” he replied, “but I would like to discuss ongoingly what that responsibility entails.” I may birth a book this year as a direct result of his steadfast encouragement. You can take a look at his current course offering here:

Now, back to the story of a logged-out forest overrun by blood-sucking ticks and strangling vines:

I stopped using the word ‘invasive’ several years ago, after I heard a First Nations scholar observe the ancestral trauma carried by the people who popularized the concept. Notice what changes when we describe tenacious bittersweet vines as ‘recent arrivals who haven’t yet learned the local etiquettes.’ Martin Prechtel refers to European Americans as ‘highly-efficient refugees’. My teacher Stephen Jenkinson often asks, “What befell a people to turn them away from the deeply-human work of crafting mutually-sustaining relationships?”

The healthy topsoil on this sandy hilltop Farm was turned into money as well. My first summer here, as we loaded bales into the barn, I found a handwritten ledger from three decades prior–a record of historical hay yields. On some of the Farm’s fields, the first growth had diminished by a factor of five. That’s right, the same patch of ground now carries one-fifth its former capacity to sustain Life. When you transport hay or vegetables or milk or meat or fiber or firewood away from the land and don’t return manure or bodies or songs as gifts, the ground begins to starve. This is how the deeply relational work of human provisioning becomes the one-directional siphon we call profit-making. Once we’ve been taught to view the gifts of the Earth as hard-earned possessions, how do we even stand a chance of experiencing human gratitude?

One of the problems with the good guys/bad guys distinction is that it looks upon webs of broken relationships through an individualizing lens. It attempts to fashion a cure from the contagion. I’ve heard the following phrase ascribed to farmer and culture worker Leah Penniman: demonization is colonization. If we let that one slip past our emotional defenses, it might begin to change everything.

Another problem is that good guys and bad guys seem to necessitate one another. In a world full of bad guys, there must surely be someone out there who is perfect, pure, and indelibly trustworthy–a savior, in other words. Every once in a while, I get a starry-eyed kind of look from someone who’s read a few too many of these newsletters. In such a moment, I occasionally take a risk and say, “If you put me up on a pedestal, I will surely disappoint you ten minutes later, and then I will be the one who has farther to fall.” I use the ‘ten minutes’ number because that’s the approximate frequency with which my behavior falls short of my own aspirations.

When a culture gets sick, it produces individuals rather than human beings. If so, what does a healthy human being even look like? A healthy forest? Healthy soil? Perhaps the answer is this: as each one moves in the direction of healing, the boundaries between them begin to blur. A healthy human being could be imagined as the way the Earth walks around on two feet. Gratitude, then, is the way a human being remembers—in speech, song and deed. I write about human gratitude not because I’m particularly good at it. I write about it because I’m particularly bad at distracting myself from the ache of its absence.

I write this newsletter as a way of acknowledging a hunger that may not be sated. Can you smell it too? The food cooking in the other room? Perhaps our great grandchildren will be nourished by the food that we don’t ourselves get to eat.

The spot where those ticks began to bite just below my navel itches like the dickens. I won’t soon forget them and their maddening will to live. I won’t soon forget the way they hungered after the blood temporarily coursing through this human body. A body risen from ground that longs for healed relationships.

With love to you and yours,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I’m sending this out a day early, in part because this is Easter morning. Dawn waits, pregnant and black beyond the pane. A wild wind blows from the southeast, strong enough to call the living to wakeful attention. Stay awake, friends, stay awake. On Friday I got to meet and share a meal with a remarkable West African man named Mohammed. He blessed this place with his story, and I will endeavor to pass that blessing along to you. May that these words serve as medicine for a divided, disheartened and displaced time.

Occasionally, and perhaps against my better judgement, I take a look at the comments feed on the short film with my face on its title page called Radical Neighboring. The opening line of one comment in particular caught my attention: “I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for writing this, but I’m going to do it anyway.” Are everyone’s ears pointed in this direction yet? “I identify with conservative, or right-wing politics,” the commenter continued, “and I have to say that this is the kind of liberal activism I can actually get behind.”

My first feeling was the sort of defensiveness that comes from being assigned a social category against your will. Once my indignation cooled, however, I did a mental scan through the folks pictured in the film and had to admit that most of them probably voted blue in recent elections.

Is it sacrilegious to drop out of the political binary all together? To suggest that neighboring offers a real alternative to the binary-oppositional industrial/market/state/charity/consumer/citizen complex?

I call this weekly note the Peasantry School Newsletter for a lot of real reasons. As such, I mostly steer clear of global politics. You can find that tug of war everywhere else. But a convergence of conversations this week has me tip-toeing along the edge of the socio-political crater that Ivan Illich illuminates in his 1977 book Toward a History of Needs, which I began reading a few days ago upon ’s suggestion.

Illich was born in 1926. When he was learning to speak, ‘need’ was mostly used as a verb. Popularizing the noun and adjective forms of that word, as in “I have needs” and “Who is going to help the needy?” set the stage, according to Illich, for the modernization of poverty—a progressive condition emerging from the multiplication of needs. Formal, compulsory schooling “qualified graduates to climb to ever more rarified heights and implant and cultivate there ever newer strains of hybridized needs.”

How will all of those new and novel human needs get met? By ensuring ample paid employment within a growth-reliant industrial economy so that everyone who works hard has sufficient dollars to purchase dental insurance, annual vacations and smartphones? Or through a state-sponsored model of distributive need gratification? To my ear, the commenter on the Radical Neighboring film was stretching for words to say that neighboring is stubbornly, and persistently non-partisan. Here’s more from Illich:

Used as a noun, “need” is the individual offprint of a professional pattern; it is the plastic-foam replica of the mold in which professionals cast their staple; it is the advertised shape of the brood cells out of which consumers are produced. To be ignorant or unconvinced of one’s own needs has become the unforgivable antisocial act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less for the renunciation of needs.

Illich’s writing can be a bit impenetrable. I’ll attempt to translate here. In the presence of food that is a gift, I get to witness the voluntary renunciation of the personal needs mandate again and again. Hundreds of times per year, I hear someone say aloud, “Surely someone else needs this more than I do.” The next day, when I drop a quart of soup off as a gift in the part of town where the “needy” live, I get to hear the same thing. So, what’s going on here? Who actually needs this food the most? Can’t we find a professional with a well-researched answer to that question so we can finally get to the bottom of this problem once and for all? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier to get back to thinking about our own needs?

When Illich suggests that renunciation of the consumer mandate to pursue personal need gratification is antisocial, he is pointing to the difference between a society and a culture. If societies enshrine the pursuit of personal liberation from Earthly limits, we could say that human culture emerges around a table where the total local harvest, and the people with whom it must be shared, remain in view. In such a local life-world, “Surely someone needs this more than I do” isn’t an abstract thought experiment.

Other questions might begin to make more sense: Who is still hungry? Who is in pain? Who has strength in their hands? Who will help me hoe the corn patch so that there’s something to eat next winter? Who will stay back and sing to the children? Who will repair the roof on granny Margaret’s house that was damaged by last night’s wind storm? How did we become so lucky to be surrounded by neighbors who relentlessly insist on keeping us in mind?

Some of those neighbors are humans. Many, many others are nonhumans. Illich suggests that, “beyond a certain threshold, the multiplication of commodities induces impotence, the incapacity to grow food, to sing or to build.” The Peasantry School gathers in the crater of that commodity-induced culture loss.

As I was immersing myself in Illich’s admittedly heady thinking last week, I had an opportunity to see some of these dynamics play out in real time. When I arrived at the bus station on Friday, the friend I was fetching asked me if it would be alright if Mohammed joined us at the Farm for dinner, as his south-bound bus wouldn’t arrive for three hours. I could immediately feel the pull of my own perceived need for an early bedtime, given the full schedule of Farm events over the coming weekend. I silently acknowledged my internal resistance to the spontaneous request for hospitality, let it pass, extended my hand in greeting, then opened the back door of the car.

As we drove toward the Farm, I learned a bit more about my surprise dinner guest. After making his way across the Mexican border into Texas three years ago, Mohammed has been traveling the states in search of paying work so that he can wire money back to his wife and two children. He left home a few months after his daughter was born. The smartphone in his pocket allows him to father from the road.

His first question for me was, “Would you hire me to work on your Farm?” Thus began a thought-provoking translation of this project in the presence of the world as it is.

Mohammed grew up in a post-colonial West African city, where human needs are informed by the Western example and satisfied through dollar procurement. That’s why he set out on a harrowing journey of illegal border crossings and under-the-table cash payment deals. During dinner, he actually got a call from a friend who knows someone with a gig doing electrical work on the East Coast. Suddenly, he wasn’t headed back to California.

When he saw the herd of well-grown cattle in the field above the house, he asked me, “Why don’t you sell some of them so you can get some more money?”

I tried to explain the way the Farm was given as a gift and now every bite of food rising from this land will be offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. I watched the story wash over his face, pass through the medium of his Muslim practice, and then emerge in words: “Oh, man, this place is a blessing. You are living from blessings.” His desire to contribute to the flow of blessings meant I couldn’t get him to sit at the table long enough to have a second bowl of soup. I don’t normally allow dinner guests to help wash the dishes, but Mohammed was persistent. I set him up to wash while I worked by his side rinsing and arranging the bowls on the drying rack. I don’t have running water at the house, so my dishwashing arrangement is particular.

At some point he paused to take a call, speaking in animated sentences I couldn’t understand. After he hung up, he said, “That was my mother. She was worried about me, but I described to her where I am right now. She couldn’t believe it.”

Telling you this story runs the risk of positioning me as some sort of savior. But that’s not what I heard in Mohammed’s voice. He saw through my extended hand, right back to the land and, by extension, to God as the giver of blessings. We humans get to do our part by passing those blessings along as quickly and gratefully as we can manage. As we stood in the driveway to bid our goodbyes, Mohammed said to me, “I will be asking God for you to receive continued blessings.”

“I will pray the same for you, my friend,” I replied. For your homecoming and for mine.

From here at the bottom of the crater of post-colonial culture loss, I wish you and yours a blessed Easter.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Writing a weekly note to thousands of people with whom I may never share a meal is not without its psychic consequence. If we sat together, I would see the glint of recognition in your eyes. You would see me checking to make sure the soup is warm, the cornbread finished, the floor swept. The simple acts of directing and focusing human attention would change the quality of the air between us. And, indeed, the quality of the food. Not so in the digital non-place. But here we are, for now. The best one-sentence description of modernity I’ve ever heard comes from Martin Shaw: “We’re trapped in a vast airport with very bad food, unmentionable music, and a queue to the restroom.” At least we’re headed somewhere that’s going to be better, no? At least that’s what the adverts promised.

In a few weeks’ time I’ll pack the car with a few props and the Farm pup named Maizey and point the nose South, toward the early stirrings of spring and some dear friends and conversation partners who have called in their people to gather ‘round the story fire. Together, for a couple of hours at a time, we will have a chance to craft a here that’s worth not being somewhere else for. Crafting such a here requires co-laboring. Most of the beneficiaries of that labor haven’t been born yet. They’re still in the ground, listening for what we have to say about the experience of being alive alongside other quirky human beings and a whole host of edible and useful plants and animals. If you live within range, it would be a pleasure to meet you:

Saturday April 25^th: This Food Is a Gift—Practical Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding. The Farminary at Princeton Theological Seminary, 11:00 am. There is no charge for the event. Optional potluck lunch to follow.

Monday April 27^th: This Food Is a Gift. The Hall at Camphill Village, Copake, NY. 7:00pm. There is no charge for the event.

When I host events, I like to set up the chairs in such a way that it’s hard for anyone to remain anonymous. A single-ring circle would keep us a bit too far away from one another. I prefer an extra-thick donut, a bit uncomfortably close. Each time, a few people try to lurk around the periphery. Given the airport situation, it can be hard to trust the here-making process. Here-making is meaning-making. We’ve been outsourcing that labor for some time now.

It can be hard to trust that we’ll know what to say once we’ve stopped being somewhere else. It can be hard to imagine that the spirits of the land will whisper in our ears, or grab hold of our tongues. But I’ve seen it happen, again and again. Deeply present and grateful human speech might be the reason the landscape took a risk on our kind. Human language might act like a sort of catnip for the living world. It might be the reason they haven’t given up on us. Let’s see if we can decide, together, not to give up on us. At least for an hour or two.

In the early 1930’s, a Russian man named A. R. Luria sought out remaining pockets of oral peasantry in present-day Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan. He asked them questions in an attempt to flush out their writing-free way of experiencing a life-world with which they were intimately entwined. Absent digital amplification, human speech only travels so far. Absent rail cars and trucks, human food similarly stays within a day’s walk of where it grew. Absent machinery, the labors required to dig, plant, harvest and cook would emerge as plants and animals pass through human stomachs and lend life force to human hearts and hands. Absent grocery stores, human speech might be understood as the way the nonhuman neighbors lend their specific twang to human tongues.

One day, Mr. Luria tried to see if he could coax these almost-unimaginably local human beings into verbal statements of self-reflection. What kind of person are you? What are your qualities? Your shortcomings? One of the peasants replied, “This year I sowed one pood of wheat, and we’re gradually fixing the shortcomings.” Is that the sound of the wheat speaking? Another replied, “What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.”

Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking. It calls for the isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person.1

In the local-life-world Luria visited, each individual person appeared only as a reflection of the mark they had made upon others. If you’d like to learn who I am, you can simply look all around me, at the dent in the world with my name on it.

Talking about food that is a gift can shine a bit of a harsh light on the fact that almost all of the food in the airport of modernity must be purchased. In my work, I often find myself pointing toward the painful possibility that the majority of a modern person’s unhealthy relationships are with humans and nonhumans they will never meet. The arrangement cuts us off from the here-making labor of crafting mutually sustaining relationships. We often use the phrase ‘labor-saving device’ to describe a washing machine or a wood-splitter. I am using it to describe a twenty-dollar bill and a price tag.

Unlike a consumer good, a healthy relationship isn’t a good-feeling-generating machine. It isn’t a feeling at all. It is an opportunity to make endless consequential mistakes and then weave the resulting learnings into a sort of nest. It is an opportunity to wound and repair, on repeat, forever. I don’t think I’m very good at it. I don’t think you’re very good at it either.

Relational withering may be the most under-acknowledged form of suffering among people born into a market-mediated world. Getting more dollars into people’s pockets is often proposed as the quickest way to alleviate that suffering. Trying to solve a problem with the same tools that created it may not work out that well for anyone. What we call modern freedom might be more accurately understood as an increased capacity to make wounds in the world decoupled from the deeply human labor of relational repair.

Enter the gift of food. Imagine you’re at the airport waiting for your flight, which has by now been delayed indefinitely. Someone stands up and invites everyone to turn off their phones. Someone else climbs up on a chair and dims the television set. Another person un-bolts the seats from the floor and forms them into a sort of donut shape. Everyone places everything they have in their bags into the middle of the circle. This is the here-making labor I’m talking about. The work that we already know in our bones how to do. The work that begins the moment after we decide to stop giving up on ourselves, which becomes possible the moment after we remember that the Earth and her throng of generous dead never gave up on us. The moment after we remember that we were never meant to figure this thing out on our own.

Perhaps I’ll see you in a few weeks.

With love,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Outside, the world lies beneath the hush of a spring eve snow so heavy and windless that you might find yourself overtaken by the dawn chatter falling from the swollen-twig treetops. Yesterday, a ruckus of red-winged blackbirds chortled with glee for the greening season, even as wet flakes rolled down their glossy black backs. Here in the pre-dawn house, the woodstove clucks with glee for the heating season, still upon us. The season wherein humans once lived from generous memories of stored summer sunlight: grass-fat on a cow’s back, the salt-sour of an autumn cabbage crock, flame-bright bones of forest, bucked, split and stacked to dry, now hot behind the stove glass. The sleeping puppy named Maizey puffs audibly on the warming air from the loft above my head. She must be dreaming up the perfect chipmunk chase.

I may be the only one who longs for more winter. For more darkness. For the simplicity of eating the same few foods on repeat. This winter it’s cornmeal pancakes, pan-fried hominy, white beets and purple sauerkraut, butternut-become-soup, slow-reduced tomato paste, dark green dandelion and parsley pesto. Plus beef and tallow and garlic for the pan. Rhubarb sauce on yogurt. Bread and cookies arrive as gifts now and then.

If it weren’t for winter, where would one find the time to write a book that bears the mark of a human soul? That’s what I’ve been up to for the past few months: living from corn and cabbage and cordwood and working to finish a book manuscript before those redwing blackbirds have their greening way with the weather-Gods and the whole thing explodes into sun showers and river swimming and the wild dance of provisioning for the next chance to hole up by the stove and live inside a memory-dream for a few blessed dark months.

The now-completed manuscript carries the provisional title: This Food is a Gift: Practical Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding.

But a manuscript must eventually leave the temporary home it makes inside the womb of a Google Doc and chart a course into the bright light of the marketplace. This may be where you come in, dear reader. It looks like it’s going to take a village to raise a book about the abandoned village.

A week and a half ago, the second publisher into whose open hands I’d decided to place these precious story-seeds wrote to say ‘Sorry, not now and not here.’ This Food is a Gift finally had his Old Sally moment. That’s right, the manuscript uses male pronouns. I can’t tell you why exactly, but he’s definitely not an ‘it’.

You may have heard the story of Old Sally before. She was a marvel. As were Old Hank, Bob, Gertrude and Bess. What was so remarkable about them? They knew how to take a knee each spring at the foot of Old Maple and drink from a clear, sweet stream whose forgiveness they had done nothing to deserve and would not be allowed to pay. They had to receive the gift of Life from the landscape that was their Earthly home at every single meal. And then figure out how to live.

One day, on her way out to the barn, Old Sally fell and broke her leg. By the time the ruckus of redwing blackbirds quieted for the night, Old Sally’s neighbors had already figured out how to keep her cows milked and mucked and fed without spending even one minute on the phone with her insurance agent—she didn’t have one. And Old Sally knew that the dollars stashed beneath her mattress would be staying right there for the six long weeks she would have to sit on the porch and watch her neighbors entrust her with continued life. Once her leg healed, she would have to figure out how to proceed as if they hadn’t been wrong about her. That’s the verb form of gratitude.

The remarkable thing about Old Sally and her ilk, who lived in these very parts just a few generations ago: they still remembered that it was their fundamental responsibility as an Earthling to need help and ask for help—to bear the indignity of receiving grace. Otherwise, no gratitude, no neighborhood and no village. I’m not saying that it was comfortable for them to receive, but how else would they maintain the fabric of a shared Life? Human worthiness, and the Earthly belonging to which it gives rise, appear to be going extinct in our time. That’s why I’ve written the book.

Six years ago, almost to the day, I stopped defending myself against my fellow humans in the form of price tags. Not because I was a visionary. Rather, I was experiencing a degree of heartbreak that will prematurely put you in the grave if you don’t allow it break you open. On the first day of the pandemic, I stopped selling anything. I asked the humans within earshot to sustain me rather than pay me. It wasn’t a plan. It was a plea. Old Sally and Old Maple were urging, even egging me on. They seemed resolutely unwilling to give up on me. They might be whispering something similar to you, even now, through the cracks.

If you believe the story of our time, I should be dead by now. Like a late-winter deer carcass, picked clean by a kettle of hungry vultures. But that’s not what happened. Other things happened. Miraculous things. Neighborly things. This Food is a Gift tells the story about what I learned along the way.

But how can a book about gifts be bought and sold? That dilemma gave rise to the non-market distribution proposal I’ve come up with. I have offered to create a website called thisbookisagift.org, home to a Gift Fund, a collection plate of digital tick marks voluntarily given to allow the book to move through the world in this undefended way. Each time someone requests a gift copy, the website will send an order plus the associated number of dollars to the publisher’s shipping warehouse. Any time the Gift Fund goes to zero, gift copies will become temporarily unavailable. At thisbookisagift.org, one person could request a gift copy and then put $5K into the Gift Fund. Another person could request a copy and then go check on their elderly neighbor. Another person could request a gift copy and then organize a study group with the book’s ‘gift practices’. Here’s one of those practices, from Chapter 6:

Befriend an Old Person: As a practice, this one is fairly self-explanatory. Old people can act as memory-gateways to a world that hasn’t always looked as it does today. Plus, old people invite us to slow down and listen. Once they die, they will become ancestors. We can practice listening to the stories of our ancestors by slowing down long enough to listen to the stories of the ones who haven’t quite died yet.

The book will also be available for order at Bookshop.org, Amazon and everywhere in between, but on the first page the reader will receive the following good news:

If you’ve already purchased the book through the standard market channels, don’t worry. You are still invited to the gratitude practice party, because the price you paid did not include an author payment. That’s right. I, Adam, am asking to be sustained rather than paid. I am inviting you to consider keeping me, my family, the Farm, and my neighbors in mind. At thisbookisagift.org you can learn how to go about doing that.

The marketing team at one of the publishers I courted scratched their heads as they considered my refusal to receive payment for writing the manuscript. Publishers rely heavily on their authors to help with book promotion. How would I find the motivation to say yes to yet another podcast interview or in-person event if I wasn’t getting a cut of every book sold? Perhaps Old Sally and her neighbors have something to say about that—even from the grave. Perhaps Old Maple has something to say about that—even from the hedgerow. It will feel more than a bit odd to place my name on the cover of the finished book, given their persistent and forgiving tutelage.

Two weeks ago, on his way out to the marketplace, This Food is a Gift fell and broke his leg in the form an email saying ‘Not here, not now’. I woke up the next morning expecting utter dejection. Instead, as I worked through second-draft edits on the final chapter, I began to see the book flowering before my eyes. Then it hit me: this book is meant to be a marvel in the way Old Sally was—by needing help and then summoning the culture-making courage to ask for help. Over the past two weeks, I’ve already had at least a dozen vulnerable conversations with people who would like to help usher these stories into the world. Perhaps you’re one of those people. If so, I invite you to send a note by replying to this email.

Everyone involved in the project will be invited to consider asking to be sustained. Given the way the world is, that will include money. In fact, returning dollars to a gift status is one of the central threads of the story.

Here are a few specific questions for you to consider:

1. Do you have connections in the publishing industry—especially in Europe, Canada, Australia or New Zealand?

2. Do you know a skilled editor who might be a good match with the writing style you’ve encountered here at The Peasantry School Newsletter?

3. Do you know people with technical skills to help build out an online gifting platform that might end up serving other authors/artists/publishers/readers in the future?

4. Do you have a friend with a podcast or other platform who might be interested in amplifying the project?

5. Do you have dollars that might serve as water for the germinating seed of this experiment?

One thing I noticed as I attempted to navigate the standard publishing channels was the remarkable degree of guardedness involved. It seemed like everyone was supposed to hold their cards close, including me. Which felt utterly antithetical to the manuscript in question. Transparency and trustworthiness are kissing cousins. Good-hearted gossip may have been one of the essential ingredients in the glue that held the village together.

With a nod to transparency, I can say that writing a book manuscript has proven one of the most humbling and terrifying endeavors I’ve ever undertaken. I have gained an awestruck appreciation for authors and artists of all kinds. With that said, the book project is just now approaching his moment of curtain-parting exposure. It would be a whole lot less scary to close the Google Doc and open it back up next winter, as I have for three years now.

But Old Sally and Old Maple are persistent in their gentle nudges and protestations. They need living humans with hands and tongues to write and speak on behalf of this greening Earth and the possibility that even those of us who have traveled furthest into the coal mine of modernity have what it takes—the requisite qualities of heart and mind—to turn toward one another, join hands, and then begin walking back out.

With love and appreciation,

Adam

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Have you ever checked out a library book—voluntarily agreed to be entrusted with a portion of the permanent collection—and then forgotten to return it? Have you ever, many years and several moves later, found the un-returned book sitting on your shelf? Have you ever opened to the first page and discovered a poem that speaks directly to you and the bind in which you find yourself, including the fact that the un-returned library book suddenly looks like a perfect metaphor for the state of relational poverty we call a modern life?

I’m going to share that poem from that book with you, but before I do, I’d like to say that Mr. Wendell Berry saved my life when I was a young man. He did so by speaking as if what was happening was really happening. Some people receive Wendell’s writing as a moral scold. That’s not what I get. I feel a fresh, cool breeze of honest speech entering through the open window of the burning house. I’ve just turned forty-six on the final day of February, so perhaps some looking back and giving thanks are in order—for the outrageous fortune of making it this far.

The thing I’d like you to take into reading the poem is the possibility that the two categories of men described in the first sentence, the ‘thing-ridden’ ones and the ‘set-afire’ ones, are actually the same—two faces of the modern self. Following the poem, I’ve tried to fashion some sort of honest reply, written by a man who feels both of those men inside of him every single day.

In a time that breaks

in cutting pieces all around,

when men, voiceless

against thing-ridden men,

set themselves on fire, it seems

too difficult and rare

to think of the life of a man

grown whole in the world,

at peace and in place.

But having thought of it

I am beyond the time

I might have sold my hands

or sold my voice and mind

to the arguments of power

that go blind against

what they would destroy.

All is not well out there, friends. The digital winds aren’t whispering or tickling, but scouring and screaming. A form of madness has been loosed upon the world: human desire untethered from the consequence of its fulfillment. All is not well in here, friends. Inside the relational thicket we call the self.

Perhaps we need a twelve-step program for self-aholics. Self-aholics Anonymous. Adding the word anonymous reveals a lot, for the self loves fame, loves to be known, loves the low-calorie and bargain-bin versions of belonging. But the self absolutely detests being known in the broken places and broken bodies where its consequence plays out. The sweatshop, the clearcut, the endless aisles of belching smokestacks, the lithium mines—the dent in the world made in the self’s name. That is where the first meeting of self-aholics anonymous will be held.

The second meeting will take place in the countryside laid to waste in the name of the grocery-store-good-deal. Living on the receiving end of the deal-seeking demands of others has a way of breeding resentment. Living on the taking end of the arrangement, ironically, has another way of breeding resentment.

Millions of selves turned and looked the other way as a great siphon was being constructed, over several generations, from the center toward the coast, from the small town toward the suburb, from the slum toward the second home. The modern self siphons local topsoil and local human culture in the form of more vacations, more movies, more cars, more screens and more healthcare and wonders why everyone can’t just get along. Political parties offer to distract the self by endlessly disagreeing about how kindly you’re supposed to speak while you’re siphoning—which words are within bounds, who is going to be allowed into the siphoning party and who must be kept out. The self loves to know which team it’s on and who the enemy is; thin hits of belonging serve to soothe the chronic ache. The self desperately wants to know whether it is one of the good people, but the self will not survive becoming consequential. All is not well in the relational thicket we call the self.

Relationships are exercises in the negotiation of limits. Limits arrive in the presence of consequence. And consequence arrives with proximity to the self’s sources. This isn’t a short term or mid term project. The goal of a twelve-step program isn’t to get it over with so you can get back to the same behavior. The goal is to reach out and touch the wound, with witnesses. The goal is to carry the torch of witness into dark recesses of our relational lives. The goal is to heal. To become agents of healing.

In a time that breaks in cutting pieces all around, perhaps we will allow the time to break us open.

With lovesick brokenness,

Adam

Upcoming Public Events:

Thurs March 19th: Gratitude Supper and Gift of Seeds, cohosted with Petra from Fruition Seeds. The best way I can give you a taste of this event is to send you to one of Petra’s newsletters¹, which includes her events calendar. We are so lucky to have Petra visit us here in Keeseville, where she’ll be teaching a few of her songs at the Ausable Valley Grange. 5:30 for Sand River Supper, 6:30 for the two-hour seed gifting experience. There is no charge for the event.

Saturday April 25^th: This Food Is a Gift—Practical Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding. At The Farminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, 11:00 am. There is no charge for the event. Optional potluck lunch to follow.

Monday April 27^th: This Food Is a Gift—Practical Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding. In The Hall at Camphill Village, Copake, NY. 7:00pm. There is no charge for the event.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I am excited, and admittedly a bit nervous, to invite you to gather around one of the in-person story-fires that I will be hosting in the weeks ahead. Stand-alone public speaking events out in the world are a new territory for me, but I keep hearing from folks who read this newsletter that such gatherings are not just welcome, but helpful, even needed. So, please consider coming to say hello at one of the following events:

Thurs March 19th: Gratitude Supper and Gift of Seeds, cohosted with Petra from Fruition Seeds. The best way I can give you a taste of this event is to send you to one of Petra’s newsletters1, which includes her events calendar. We are so lucky to have Petra visit us here in Keeseville, where she’ll be teaching a few of her songs at the Ausable Valley Grange. 5:30 for Sand River Supper, 6:30 for the two-hour seed gifting experience. There is no charge for the event.

Saturday April 25^th: This Food Is a Gift—Practical Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding. At The Farminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1:00 pm. There is no charge for the event.

Monday April 27^th: This Food Is a Gift—Practical Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding. In The Hall at Camphill Village, Copake, NY. 7:00pm. There is no charge for the event.

This week’s newsletter offers a taste of the story menu that will be on offer.

In Their Ancestors’ Words

I’ve spread fifty-some handwritten notes on the writing table, words scrawled in blue, black, purple and pink ink, written in response to a twenty-minute telling of the story of this Farm—a patch of Earth where nothing is for sale. The setting for the telling, a gathering called the Food Justice Summit, was decidedly system, solution, impact and scale oriented. It’s a wonder such conferences keep inviting me into their fold; the stories I carry contain none of those words. The slips of paper on the table this morning are about the shape and size of a dollar bill, or a brick. Some read vertically, others horizontally; the collage looks a bit like a brick walkway laid in herringbone.

Do you remember the scene from Mary Poppins where they link elbows and jump INTO a chalk drawing on the sidewalk? It’s quite a leap of faith, no? Apparently, Mary Poppins doesn’t subscribe to the phrase, ‘you can’t get there from here’.

We’ve got a whole host of metaphorical roads we could turn down here; rather than charge ahead, I’ll place a few of these handwritten notes into your ear.

Is it possible to protect yourself and open up at the same time? What would change if I allowed myself to dream?

And:

Do we have to ask? What if we just offered more? Does that just make asking less scary? What if we ask and no one responds; do we just fade away? It’s vulnerable to be in need but so beautiful to be held.

And:

To me, the defining factor of a gift vs. a transaction is love. We cannot give a gift without love for the recipient, and asking for a gift is asking to be loved.

Beneath the bricks on the sidewalk lies real soil, built from the decomposed bodies of everyone who came before—plant, animal, human, and otherwise. They are murmuring amongst themselves, in a language only half-audible to the living. In a carpeted room at a Food Justice Summit where we’ve asked a large crowd to gather in close, CJ and I are getting down on our hands and knees and pressing our ears to the cracks, the crumbling mortar joints of a way of living whose citizenry must remain unlovable in order to maintain business as usual. I use citizen here not to invoke politics. The word doesn’t primarily suggest national identity, but rather a root affiliation to the city, to that which is civic and civilized, to a world where inclusion requires dollars—where ‘livings’ must be earned. A root affiliation to the normalization of non-sharing.

A citizen could be understood as a member of a human group grown accustomed to traversing sidewalks rather than soil. Try walking into a neighbor’s house barefoot with mud between your toes and the unspoken etiquettes of civility will pop into view. I’m not suggesting that civility is either good or bad. I am suggesting that it’s easy to lose sight of it as something that hasn’t been a universal human constant. I am suggesting that a city-fied mind comes with a particular risk for amnesia.

It might be difficult to find takers for the fantasy we call a ‘self-reliant or self-made man or woman’ among people who walk through their days on the backs of their ancestors—human and otherwise. You could substitute ‘underwriters’ for ancestors here if it helps bring the leafed, feathered, furred and scaled ones into view. Either way, they’re all down there in the soil murmuring, mumbling, humming, even chanting. It’s some sort of love song they’re cooking up, and it’s meant for our ears. Can you hear it, even now, through the cracks?

Ancestors don’t charge for their services. They don’t have Venmo accounts down there in the soily dark. But they do ask to be kept in mind, and in ear. They ask us to tune our hearts to the goodwill coming towards us from the past. They invite us to turn around and tiptoe backwards into the future, remembering as we go. For the sake of the young and the unborn.

Last month, as I shoveled the snow from my ninety-two-year-old neighbor’s steps, he said to me, “Adam, you don’t have to do this.” I replied, “I think I do, Pat. If the teens and the twenty-somethings stop seeing the forty-somethings looking after the ninety-somethings, how will they remember to look after me when I’m your age?” Old people are simply ancestors who haven’t quite died yet. That doesn’t make them mistake-free. Which is a relief, because neither am I.

Let’s go back to the cards:

I am surprised by my own resistance to these ideas. I agree with everything you shared, but I guess I didn’t realize how conditioned I am by my sales/supply-chain background until now.

And:

This makes me think about the difference/connection between Exercise and Impact. What impact does Sand River Community Farm have? How is it measured and how do you grapple with potentially sacrificing impact for exercise.

Measurement is one of the hallmarks of the move from soil to sidewalk, from sharing to shareholding, from belonging-to-land to land-as-belonging. Robert Bly2 wrote,

It is an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature, and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how the children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.

I might substitute ‘we only rent it from them for a little while’ with ‘they have entrusted us with it for a little while’. The Food Justice Summit takes place within a landscape that only became ‘ownable’ a few hundred years ago. Ownability and sell-ability are both constructs of the human imagination in the same way living from the goodwill of one’s ancestors is a construct of the human imagination. The question is which story leads to more humanness in the people who tell it? After enough generations, the question might become, what does humanness even feel like?

The cards again:

What would it feel like to carry the weight of gratitude with my neighbors? How is the weight of gratitude different from debt?

And:

If we treated food as a gift, we might slow down. We might step away from our keyboards and screens and turn instead to our sinks and our drawers and roll up our sleeves and feel what its like to stand side-by-side with our colleagues and chop vegetables and stir pots and have entirely new conversations about what we’re going to do. What would actually change? Could it change us?

And:

I long to be disentangled from systems starved of relationship and care. I am so grateful to bear witness to this other way.

And then, just like that, the 45-minute conference session ends, our ancestors hand us our coats and wave to us, with tears in their eyes, as we turn and walk away, down the sidewalk of a carefully-counted and dollar-enabled life. But the cards are still here among us. They offer a sort of living testament. I’ll read you a few more:

To have money in the bank or an insurance policy means that we are set up not to ask our neighbors for help. I have both and I’m frightened by the thought of not having them. Am I ok with ‘slow and methodical?’ Do I crave the recognition of impact, scale, strength, glamor?

And:

We do not cooperate more because we can afford not to.

And:

Is this an experiment? I’m having a hard time organizing words; this feels so shapeless. Which seems to be the goal? I’m stirred inside, for sure.

And:

This is reminding me of what it feels like to take shrooms with your friends—all love, understanding, and a desire to help and be helped. It feels impossible to make this farm model succeed on a large scale. You sound idealistic, foolish. But I cannot disagree with you about anything.

I am immensely grateful for the courageous folks who pulled up along CJ and me, linked elbows and jumped INTO this chalk drawing with us. I won’t soon forget it.

With that foolish kind of love,

Adam

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Growing Kin with Fruition

⭐️Gratitudes for You⭐️

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6 months ago · 21 likes · 1 comment