CSA Week 7

~ Week A Half Share members + Full Share members ~

Jul 23, 2024

My first season farming, the crew of us read The Unsettling of America together, a long-form essay (or letter) written by Wendell Berry. For as long as I can recall, a great sense of solitude & despair & confusion has moved through my bones. But I have never identified as a hopeless person, rather a person who desires good reason & admires critique. Because I believe that to question cultivates creativity & connection, an upstream effect of sorts. Growing food has not relieved life of hardship, pain, financial instability, imbalance. In fact, there are much more simple ways to go about living nowawdays. But I read these words of intertwinement, the arguments of farming as cultural significance years ago & it remains worthwhile.

Today, I do not necessarily believe all that Berry believes, but I sit in the roots of his words when I am challenged by this business. I know that our system is not meant to care for the farmer. Or for the people. I do now know that we are on this earth to care for one another; and by one another I also mean the unseen acquifers, the ancient springs, the birds that seek a sunflower seed, the roots of the trees that hold stories bigger than me, histories of those oppressed by colonization & greed, microbes of the soil & molecules of the aggregate that hold my home.

All that is to say, here is a classic old Wendell poem that has meaning to me……

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

    Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
    vacation with pay. Want more
    of everything ready-made. Be afraid
    to know your neighbors and to die.
    And you will have a window in your head.
    Not even your future will be a mystery
    any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
    and shut away in a little drawer.
    When they want you to buy something
    they will call you. When they want you
    to die for profit they will let you know.

    So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.
    Denounce the government and embrace
    the flag. Hope to live in that free
    republic for which it stands.
    Give your approval to all you cannot
    understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
    has not encountered he has not destroyed.

    Ask the questions that have no answers.
    Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
    Say that your main crop is the forest
    that you did not plant,
    that you will not live to harvest.
    Say that the leaves are harvested
    when they have rotted into the mold.
    Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

    Put your faith in the two inches of humus
    that will build under the trees
    every thousand years.
    Listen to carrion – put your ear
    close, and hear the faint chattering
    of the songs that are to come.
    Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
    Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
    though you have considered all the facts.
    So long as women do not go cheap
    for power, please women more than men.
    Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
    a woman satisfied to bear a child?
    Will this disturb the sleep
    of a woman near to giving birth?

    Go with your love to the fields.
    Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
    in her lap. Swear allegiance
    to what is nighest your thoughts.
    As soon as the generals and the politicos
    can predict the motions of your mind,
    lose it. Leave it as a sign
    to mark the false trail, the way
    you didn’t go. Be like the fox
    who makes more tracks than necessary,
    some in the wrong direction.
    Practice resurrection.