“Hungry For Dirt”

OPENING WORDS

Fifteen miles west of Boston the Food Project’s summer corps, 60 urban and suburban teens, gather with their families to celebrate their season’s work. They have set a record with this summer’s harvest, which goes to Boston area food banks and homeless shelters: 73,000 pounds from 21 acres of conservation land in Lincoln, Massachusetts plus 6,000 pounds from two previously hardscrabble acres in inner-city Dorchester. The farmers, aged 14 to 19, say they, too, have had a growing season. This is a poem written by Michael Halloway, 18, after his first month with the Food Project.

I am a hard worker with blackened hands.

Hands that are filled with the opportunity to create life.

I use tools to help create and to make a small world.

Sometimes there are people helping me.

Some younger, others older than I, but all with blackened hands.

Water drips from their faces as well as mine because of the

sun’s rays beaming on us intensely.

At first I’d look across an empty field filled with rocks, weeds,

and dirt, but as the summer continues on,

the beauty of growing crops that I worked so hard for fills the field.

Some people say why would I waste my time doing what I do?

I just say I like the results and I am the soil man.

SERMON: “Hungry For Dirt”

Good Morning. I am Margie Allen, your former intern minister. Yes, last Thursday evening, the gracious Internship Committee with which I have been working these nine months reviewed with me their final evaluation of my work. Today, the Sunday after the Summer Solstice, I mark the beginning of my summer ministry. So I celebrate the solstice this morning by offering you as your Summer Minister this, the first of eight summer services. Fred has kindly offered to take my vacation for me.

Today I am going to talk about dirt and gardening. Now I know that some of you farmed in the mud of the confluence of the Severn River and Weems Creek on Friday, settling the grasses we have been growing for months here into their new home under the water. A perfect task for the weekend the sun comes closest to the earth in our cycling together: touching sun, wind, water, earth in an act of hope and responsibility. I hope you also were touched, grounded in your soul, by that work, that you felt yourself a part of the workings of the fantastic living organism Earth is. I have taken part in many solstice and other seasonal pagan gatherings in which our “grounding” was encumbered by layers and layers of stuff that separates us from the earth herself—carpets, floor, subfloor, enclosed air, concrete, disturbed dirt and rubble. In our grounding meditations we often had to imagine our “roots” traveling quite a distance to reach anything resembling soil.

More and more I have found myself distanced from the ground, from direct and unmediated experiences of earth in her many manifestations. Pavement, shoes, vehicles lift me off the ground over which I move. Yards and yards of glass divert the wind from my face and the smells from my rabbit nose, distort the images of life beyond. Cellophane, cardboard, food wax, bags—paper and plastic—come between me and my food, hiding the scars of long travel and the signs of age. Artificial light habituates me to unnatural cycles of working, eating, and sleeping. Chronic busy-ness, chronic levels of distraction with doing and buying and coming and going alienate me from the mutually sustaining relationship with the earth which defines the whole and healthy life.

Since I started school in Chicago in 1999 I had somehow forgotten something I once knew: how much I love, and need, to work and play in the dirt. Once upon a time, more than ten years ago now, I lived in an extraordinarily beautiful place on the earth. I lived in partnership with the land in a way I had never before been privileged to experience. I worked a 25 x 25 foot organic garden and compost system. I prepared the raised beds, ordered seeds, designed planting patterns, and devotedly tended lush and vibrant beds of vegetables and herbs and cutting flowers, loads of them, enough to feed us, my parents, my friends at work and the neighbors too.

I nurtured a sturdy and prolific patch of rhubarb which came from a family homestead in way north New York State, and a strong stand of asparagus I dug the deep, long ditches for, dug like a hero. I used the herbs I grew in the kitchen and I also made my own simple medicinals. I had beautiful kitchen and garden tools which I cared for reverently. I served up good, fresh seasonal vegetarian meals from the garden. I even grew wheat one year, ground flour from the winnowed berries and made loaves of bread I knew for sure came up out of the very earth I worked. Wineberry canes, with their little jewel-red raspberry-like fruit, grew all around. I collected and froze them (and blueberries and strawberries in their seasons), made pies and smoothies, buckles, sauces and jams. Stayman-Winesap apples off a pair of ancient trees in the yard made the most delicious cider you would ever want to taste.

The horses that shared the land contributed their manure to the ever more perfect soil of the garden. I layered it into my double compost bins with kitchen scraps and bonemeal and greensand and kelp powder and ash from the wood stove and alfalfa and grass clippings and garden debris. I made it like an earth cake. And on frosty mornings in the fall I’d look out the kitchen window and see the compost steaming. How I loved the work of turning that gift of sweet-smelling rich black compost, first into itself from bin to bin and finally back into the hungry soil of my garden! How I loved to see, year after year, the garden’s thanks for my work in the abundance, the variety, the health, the beauty, and the earthy goodness of my harvest.

How could a person forget a lesson like that, you might wonder? What contrivance of technology or neurosis could keep me from that way of life once I had found and experienced it? Oh it is very easy, too easy to forget. In the city, it is especially easy to forget. I have been reading a new collection of Wendell Berry’s agrarian essays. In his introduction the editor, Norman Wirzba, comments:

Among the damaging effects of urban life is the loss of the practical sense of ourselves as embodied beings, as people who live under the necessary and practical constraints of biological life. Writing of the post-World War II era, an era marked by the mass migration of farmers to the city, Berry observed in The Hidden Wound: People had begun to live lives of a purely theoretical reality, daydreams based on the economics of success. It was as if they had risen off the earth into the purely hypothetical air of their ambition and greed. They were rushing around in the clouds, “getting somewhere,” while their native ground, the only meaningful destination, if not the only possible one, lay far below them, abandoned and forgotten, colonized by machines.”

[The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, Norman Wirzba, ed. (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002), xii.]

I have been “rushing around in the clouds.” Do any of you know what that feels like?

But just lately I have been rescued by my learning process here in this internship, brought down out of the clouds into the good earth once again by a learning goal I wrote which says I must “attend in a regular and deliberate fashion to my spiritual and physical health.” After a little searching I discovered a Community Supported Agriculture project called From the Ground Up which operates a farm on Chesapeake Bay Foundation land in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. I am now working four hours a week in the dirt on Clagett Farm. I am fed at least twice for each stint of work. My hunger for dirt is assuaged by my satisfyingly unclean field work, and when I leave I take away a share of freshly harvested organically-grown vegetables which taste like the rain and sunlight that fell on them that week.

My first 8AM on the job I was simply stunned by the incredible beauty of the land: the misty field of hay, down and baled by the next week; the bluebird feet away on a fence post, singing its little heart out; the dew still sparkling on heading lettuce of all colors and configurations; the prim white farmhouses; the smell of damp earth in the fresh morning breeze. In that moment I could not imagine how I have lived without touching this place inside me that is all those things—the bird and the grass and the dew and home and wet dirt.

These past few weeks I have harvested kale and collards and broccoli. I have picked spicy greens for the salad mix. I have mulched long rows of potatoes with hay (they are blooming now!), removed the flower heads from the garlic plants, weeded the lettuce, cut the perpetual spinach down to its heart, thinned the carrot bed and washed the baby carrots for the shares. I weeded beside young women practicing their Spanish with one another. I learned the names of the local weeds in English. I remembered that spring broccoli doesn’t make a central head, just little shoots that we cut as they come. Last week I worked in the spinach with Kim. She is twenty-five, a native of the county, lives with her Dad. She has just returned from a purposeful stay with her alcoholic grandfather in Virginia. She is the only one he will listen to. She got him into the meals-on-wheels program. Nobody, including her grandfather, understands why she wants to work on a farm. “Why would you do that?” they say “That’s work for somebody else, ain’t no money in it.” And she tells me: “I am taking a master gardener course through the county. I can’t believe all the stuff that goes on down here in the dirt. I tell them, it’s a miracle what all is happening all around us that we can’t see. I want to do this. That’s all I know. I want to do this.” She is the “soil woman!”

Do you know that the word humus or earth and the word human are related in both their Semitic and their Indo-European roots? The word “humility” is in that family too. I see this as a linguistic confirmation of an ancient understanding that we are the earth. Wendell Berry captures this understanding in his essay “A Native Hill,” about his return to Kentucky from New York City:

[N]ow I began to see the real abundance and richness of [this place]. It is, I saw, inexhaustible in its history, in the details of its life, in its possibilities. I walked over it, looking, listening, smelling, touching, alive to it as never before. I listened to the talk of my kinsmen and neighbors as I never had done, alert to their knowledge of the place, and to the qualities and energies of their speech. I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things—the wild plants and animals, the natural processes, the local places—and to articulate my observations and memories. My language increased and strengthened, and sent my mind into the place like a live root system. And so what has become the usual order of things reversed itself with me; my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation. I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherances and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.

[The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, Norman Wirzba, ed. (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002), 7.]

Standing on the land at Clagett Farm, I get this, what he is saying. I get what it means to feel grounded, rooted in a place, even if it is not my native place, knowing that the soil is substrate for a continuous tapestry of life that links all places and all people and all times. I feel my body there. Its willingness to work and its longing for purpose. The muscles, their delight and their complaint. My senses, as I draw the carrot from the moist earth, see its bright orange body, smell its oneness with its earth home, taste the explosion of its flavor in my mouth. When you are on you knees in the dirt and in your body, knowing this place, connecting with others in the same state of grace, how like a prayer it is! For renewal, as Ableman says, for “wakenin’ the garden.” A prayer by Nanao Sakaki in Earth Prayers goes like this:

Soil for legs

Ax for hands

Flower for eyes

Bird for ears

Mushroom for nose

Smile for mouth

Songs for lungs

Sweat for skin

Wind for mind

Just enough.

Yeah. So groundedness is one gift of the spiritual practice of being with dirt. Another gift is the gift of understanding our interconnectedness with natural systems and our dependence, part on part, within this system. Berry says in “The Unsettling of America,” “There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only the distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.” I am reminded of an urban environmentalism project I heard about in Chicago in which teenaged boys manage sets of worm composting systems, sell the bagged compost to urban gardeners, then feed the extra worms to trout they raise to sell to the local fishmongers. I remember hearing about how excited they were about their work, their income, their future. The excitement comes from seeing how each system is dependent upon the others and from a sense of being reconnected to the source of their humanity in caring for themselves, their community, and the earth.

A third gift of the spiritual practice of being with dirt is born of the first two—one, the experience of groundedness and two, the sense of interconnectedness. The third gift is the possibility of being able to see the future more clearly, to think more critically and more creatively about how we can be “brought down out of the clouds” into a sustainable life on the earth. Michael Pollan observes in his book Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education that Americans have a different attitude toward gardening than Europeans. This difference is indicated by the American romance with compost. We are more dedicated to reciprocity in horticulture. There is a moral dimension to our gardening, which “might explain why,” he writes, “this country has produced so many more great naturalists than great gardeners. We evidently feel more comfortable taking moral instruction in bean fields and at the foot of trees than arranging plants into pleasing compositions (Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, New York: Dell Publishing, 1991, 87-88).” One of the indices used by the city of Seattle to assess the sustainability of a community is the percentage of people in the community who vote in primary elections and keep a garden. Gardening is associated with stability, investment in community, and thoughtful citizenship.

Do we all have to be gardeners? No, there are many ways to touch the earth, to live in partnership with the land, to find sources of fresh food, to come to know the place on earth in which you are planted. Terry Hershey in Soul Gardening offers a more inclusive definition of gardeners. “People who love this world, people who pay attention, are gardeners,” the author says. “People who are invested, people who are aware. They are gardeners regardless of whether or not they have ever picked up a trowel. Because gardening is not just about digging. Or planting, for that matter. Gardening is about cherishing.

People and the earth are healed by processes associated with sustainable agriculture. There are incredible stories out there about people dreaming big about land and food and our future…. Say, what if this church should ever happen to acquire some more land, even a few acres, say four or four and a half acres? And what if we really do learn to car pool so we don’t need to pave the earth for more parking places? What if we were to use that land to create a sustainable urban agriculture project like Michael Ableman’s, or like the Boston area Food Project, which could teach us and feed people and help us walk the talk of our seventh principle, our interconnectedness in the web of all existence? Imagine the magic of a Secret Garden off of Bestgate Road in Annapolis, Maryland!

AMEN!

Reading #1

“Hungry For Dirt”

Sunday Service @ 10:00AM, June 22, 2003

Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis

[An Excerpt from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)]

When her parents died in a cholera epidemic in India, Mary Lennox came to the Yorkshire estate of her guardian Archibald Craven. Craven’s beloved wife had died in an accident and their baby son, Colin, now ten, had grown up isolated from the world beyond his picture books, believing that he was a gruesome cripple doomed to an early death. The elder Craven was depressed and aimless, too lost in his grief, even after all those years, to care much for either his son or his new charge. Mistress Mary herself was not in much better shape. She was sickly, thin and cross, spoiled rotten and imperious, “quite contrary,” as they say. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story, The Secret Garden, tells of the salvation wrought by the renewal of relationship with the earth. Mary discovers Colin’s mother’s garden, locked and seemingly forgotten after her death. With Dickon, a young boy of the moors, Mary breaks the pattern of despair and secrecy. Eventually all who are wounded choose to heal and the earth of the little garden is the medium of their recovery from living death. This excerpt takes up where Mary first shows Dickon the secret garden she has found on the grounds of the estate.

For two or three minutes he stood looking round him, while Mary watched him, and then he began to walk about softly, even more lightly than Mary had walked the first time she had found herself inside the four walls. His eyes seemed to be taking in everything—the gray trees with the gray creepers climbing over them and hanging from their branches, the tangle on the walls and among the grass, the evergreen alcoves with the stone seats and tall flower urns standing in them.

“I never thought I’d see this place,” he said at last, in a whisper.

“Did you know about it?” asked Mary….

Dickon nodded.

“Martha told me there was one as no one ever went inside,” he answered. “Us used to wonder what it was like.”

He stopped and looked around at the lovely gray tangle about him, and his round eyes looked queerly happy.

“Eh! The nests as’ll be here come springtime,” he said. “It’d be th’ safest nestin’ place in England. No one never comin’ near an’ tangles o’ trees an’ roses to build in. I wonder all th’ birds on the moor don’t build here.”

Mistress Mary put her hand on his arm again without knowing it.

“Will there be roses?” she whispered. “Can you tell? I thought perhaps they were all dead.”

“Eh! No! Not them—not all of ‘em!” he answered. “Look here!”….

“That one?” she said. “Is that one quite alive—quite?”

Dickon curved his wide smiling mouth.

“It’s as wick as you or me,” he said; and Mary remembered that Martha had told her that “wick” meant “alive” or “lively.”

“I’m glad it’s wick!” she cried out in her whisper. “I want them all to be wick. Let us go round the garden and count how many wick ones there are.”

She quite panted with eagerness, and Dickon was as eager as she was. They went from tree to tree and from bush to bush. Dickon carried his knife in his hand and showed her things which she thought wonderful.

“They’ve run wild,” he said, “but th’ strongest ones has fair thrived on it. The delicatest ones has died out, but th’ others has growed and growed, an’ spread, till they’s a wonder. See here! And he pulled down a thick gray, dry-looking branch. “A body might think this was dead wood, but I don’t believe it is—down to th’ root. I’ll cut it low down an’ see.”

He knelt and with his knife cut the lifeless-looking branch through, not far above the earth.

“There!” he said exultantly. “I told thee so. There’s green in that wood yet. Look at it.”

Mary was down on her knees before he spoke, gazing with all her might….

They were working industriously round one of the biggest standard roses when he caught sight of something which made him utter an exclamation of surprise.

“Why!” he cried, pointing down to the grass a few feet away, “Who did that there?”

It was one of Mary’s own little clearings round the pale green points.

“I did it,” said Mary.

“Why, I thought tha’ didn’t know nothin’ about gardenin’,” he exclaimed.

“I don’t,” she answered, “but they were so little, and the grass was so thick and strong, and they looked as if they had no room to breathe. So I made a place for them. I don’t even know what they are.”

Dickon went and knelt down by them.

“Tha’ was right,” he said. “A gardener couldn’t have told thee better. They’ll grow now like jack’s bean-stalk. They’re crocuses an’ snowdrops, an’ these here is narcissuses, an’ here’s daffydowndillys. Eh! They will be a sight.”

He ran from one clearing to another.

“Tha’ has done a lot o’ work for such a little wench,” he said, looking her over.

“I’m growing fatter,” said Mary, “and I’m growing stronger. I used always to be tired. When I dig I’m not tired at all. I like to smell the earth when it is turned up.”

“It’s rare good for thee,” he said, nodding his head wisely. “There’s naught as nice as th’ smell o’ good clean earth, except th’ smell o’ fresh growin’ things when th’ rain falls on ‘em. I get out on th’ moor many a day when it’s rainin’ an’ I lie under a bush an’ listen to th’ soft swish o’ drops on th’ heather an’ I just sniff an’ sniff. My nose end fair quivers like a rabbit’s, mother says….”

“There’s a lot of work to do here!” he said…, looking about…..

“Will you come again and help me to do it?” Mary begged. “I’m sure I can help, too. I can dig and pull up weeds, and do whatever you tell me. Oh! Do come, Dickon!”

“I’ll come every day if tha’ wants me, rain or shine,” he answered stoutly. “It’s th’ best fun I ever had in my life—shut in here an’ wakenin’ up a garden.”

Reading #2

Excerpt from:

Arnie Cooper, “Earthly Delights, Cultivating a New American Revolution: An Interview with Michael Ableman,” The Sun, June 2003. “As executive director of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens in Goleta, California, [Michael] Ableman is an expert at extolling the benefits of small-scale community farms and gardens.” [end quote from the introduction].

Cooper: You say we’ve become disconnected from the procuring and consuming of food. How did we let this happen?

Ableman: You really don’t have to look back very far in this country—just a couple of generations—to see that we were once a society based on agrarian principles. Thomas Jefferson put forth the idea that the health of a democracy was inextricably connected to the health of its agriculture. The society that he envisioned was one in which every family had its own agricultural holding. That has all but disappeared, and the reasons for it are both simple and complex.

We came out of World Wars I and II with some new technologies that became the basis for the industrial agricultural machine. The “green revolution,” which proposed to solve the problem of world hunger through the use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, was probably based on good intentions, but the means its founders chose to achieve their goal had serious flaws. After the Second World War, nitrate factories that had been set up to build bombs were converted to fertilizer production; hybrid seeds were introduced, tripling yields; and new tractor technology was brought forth. At first all the changes appeared miraculous, but the ultimate result of this industrialization was that people were no longer necessary to do the work of food production. They were freed from what was seen as a form of drudgery.

Cooper: So what is wrong with the industrialization of agriculture? Most people do see farm work as drudgery.

Ableman: Industrialization resulted in reduced quality and safety of food, degradation and depletion of soil and water, and a whole range of cultural and social ills tied to our disconnection from the land and from nature. I am not suggesting that somehow, before the industrialization of our food system, everything was wonderful. But it wasn’t all drudgery, either. What many of us are now doing on small organic farms is incorporating innovative techniques and ideas and creating a sense that farming is not a lowly job but an honorable profession, an art, a craft…..

Cooper: Why didn’t people question the industrialization of agriculture at the time?

Ableman: …What interests me is not so much why this happened, but rather the backlash and the response that some of us have had. What we are doing here at Fairview Gardens is trying to bring back a local food mentality. None of what we’re doing is new, but the way we’re going about it is certainly different. Today, for example, I spoke with forty or fifty government officials and corporate representatives from Malaysia who came here to learn how to modernize their agricultural systems and introduce their products to the American market. I said to them, “I went to your part of the world to rediscover traditional systems of agriculture. I wanted to find out what had made it possible to farm the same piece of land for four or five thousand years, because that could show us a way out of the problems of our modern industrial food-production system.”…

Cooper: Did the Malaysian group show much interest in these ideas?

Ableman: Well, at first there was uncertainty, like “Who is this guy?” But when they started to walk around and see what was happening, their interest grew. They wanted to know how we could possibly provide food for five hundred families on just twelve and a half acres. They came away with some sense that this small-scale system, using an intensive approach based on sound soil-building principles, is considerably more productive than the large-scale alternative…. Here we see a farm not as a factory but as a living organism, and we work with it that way. We see our fields and orchards not as battlegrounds where farmers are pitted against a host of alien forces, but as a part of a system that can be symbiotic and cooperative.

Cooper: …[W]hy [do you think] so many people in our country seem satisfied with such poor quality, tasteless produce?

Ableman: Oh, I don’t think they are satisfied with it. They just haven’t had the opportunity to experience anything else. About eight years ago, I had a group of fatherless boys here from an organization called Rites of Passage. The first thing we did was give them a “grazing tour.” We let them loose among the cherry tomato vines. We split watermelons in the field and let them eat the hearts of them. I watched as they tasted fresh food for the first time in their lives, their brain cells exploding with new information. I didn’t need to tell them anything about the principles behind what we’re doing. I didn’t need to say anything.

When a person comes to our produce stand or to our booth at the farmers’ market and we hand them a tree-ripened peach or a carrot that was dug only hours before, it’s a profound experience…. I’ll always remember the woman who started weeping after she’d tasted a mulberry I had given her. When I asked her if she was OK, she told me that tasting that fruit had taken her back to a mulberry tree in a Czechoslovakian village that she had not been to in twenty-two years.

Cooper: You make it sound like a religious experience.

Ableman: Well, in a way it is. I’ve planted a lot of seeds over the years. But each time I plant a seed and watch it emerge, I cannot help but feel renewed. I’m experiencing one of the great mysteries of life. And that’s why I farm.

June 22, 2003

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