Greetings Neighbors,
This will be the first Sunday in a long while without a community event at the Farm. Instead, we will gather at the Farm Tuesday afternoon 9/24 from 4:00-6:00pm for our first Tomato Distribution and vegetable preserving party. Projects will include:
Harvesting and sending home bushels of tomatoes.
Processing veggies and herbs for freezing and drying for the Farm’s winter Soup efforts.
Stay for a simple dinner at 6:30—soup and salad from the Farm plus anything you bring to share.
On Sunday, rather than hosting a Farm Frolic, I will be gathering in Burlington, VT to hold up the work of one of my mentors, Dougald Hine, whose book, At Work in the Ruins, has just been released in paperback. There are still a few spots left at the event, for which you can find details here:
The event has not ticket charge. But it isn’t free. The artist collective providing the room has bills to pay, including a monthly rent to the landlord. Honoring the Farm’s commitment that money will never serve as a barrier to access, we will try something for the first time. At the start of the event, we will go invite people to pledge different amounts of money until the $200 budget request has been covered. Pledging zero will be encouraged as wholeheartedly as pledging $200. Here’s the story that inspired the experiment:
In 1986, a group of three biodynamic farmers in New Hampshire began a remarkable conversation with their neighbors. Suburban expansion and relatedly rising land prices had all but extinguished the possibility of economically viable farming in the area. These farmers asked their neighbors to help them gain access to land and then invited them to gather in a circle to consider a detailed budget for a trial season. With prodding from the farmers, the prospective members went around the circle pledging different amounts of money until the budget was covered. They weren’t starting a commune or an intentional community. They were simply attempting to open up a space between the land’s natural abundance and the market’s required barrier to access. Those neighbors are still sharing food with one another forty years later.
Last winter I contacted the two surviving founders of Temple Wilton Community Farm to ask them about those early days. The following story might break your heart, as it did mine.
A few years in, a woman approached one of the farmers and said, “My husband and I have both lost our jobs. Our family will have to drop out of the Farm this season.” The farmer replied, “I think you could do the farmers, and the membership as a whole, a real favor if you came to the annual meeting and pledged zero.” By golly, she found the courage to do just that. There wasn’t a dry eye in the circle. On that day, a group of middle class, European-American people wept together in a way that would have been downright embarrassing in public.
What happened in that teary circle? Those neighbors had a rare opportunity to see themselves as people capable of holding one another up. A few months later the couple found jobs and put in money. But for a few precious weeks their neighbors inhabited a world in which there might be others to hold them up on the day they needed to pledge zero.
As I prepare for the event on Sunday, I’ve been thinking: “How boring the world would be if money was the only gift anyone had to offer to the collective project of building thriving neighborhoods and communities.” I will be pledging zero on Sunday. We’ll see what happens!
Thanks for reading,
Adam
Yesterday my neighbor came with a small tractor, wood splitter and chainsaw. Together we began bucking up logs we had retrieved up the road last summer just after a devastating fire nearly burnt our little (population 600) town. [The forest service had initially cut scorched trees and stacked them in huge logging decks for the community to use. I was lucky because I got my permits and we went up the road with my friend’s tractor and trailer and got a load of logs. The very next day, the Forest Service decided they were no longer going to give the community access to the wood, and instead decided to sell it for profit.] The little house I rent was built in the 1940’s and only has a wood stove for heat, so the wood I was able to get is a huge blessing after the evacuation last summer and the scare of the fire. The logs sat outside and dried well until yesterday when we started bucking and splitting. I was sad for so many of my neighbors who missed out on the wood (Del Norte County is a rural and economically challenged area.) I cried yesterday after my neighbor and I had been working for a couple hours and he told me to take a break and drink some water as he worked on. This was after he had given me a bowl full of a salmon (he’d caught) rice dish he had made the night before for my supper. (BTW, he’s 61 & I’m 60.) The joy I felt yesterday exceeded the soreness in my muscles- the feeling of being helped and held by others in simply getting the job of living done is priceless. Difficult to comment through the tears of this morning’s reading. I’ll be sitting beside you in spirit on Sunday Adam, cheering you on in your zero pledge.
Welcome Maizey Corn Dog!!!!