Saturday, Day 35: Fox

In his "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," Wendell Berry opens with stanzas condemning consumerism and capitalism, then writes:

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.

Do the nonsensical, the radically compassionate, he says. Live in a way totally outside the structures we've created that limit our ability to be open to others, to love.

When my daughter and I wrote the very first plan for Healing Ranch--which has now become Petalouda House--our intention was to create a place of healing that existed outside the structures of the ordinary world. I showed it to my partner, who thought it was beautiful, doable--this, among other things, made me sure we could make a life together. We wanted to build a place of radical hospitality, where people could come and cook and eat supper with us whenever they wanted, bring grief or fear or the deepest trauma, say it out loud, draw, write, sing it. 

We wanted, eventually, to create a place that existed outside the structures that so frequently cause trauma, grief, and fear. We wanted to create in-home businesses that would sustain us: to run a kennel that would also serve as a home for abandoned animals, to grow and cook with locally, sustainably grown foods, to sell whatever was left over in order to purchase whatever else we needed but couldn’t make ourselves. That way, no one who lived with us would have to make choices about where they would work; we would provide meaningful work and a place to live. We would have time, then, to volunteer and raise resources for the causes that mattered to us, rather than slaving away at jobs that didn’t reflect a justice mindset.

Of course, I knew from the beginning that this couldn’t happen right away. For one thing, we ended up with a property in the center of town, not in the middle of nowhere—it was the property that was available, a good place to get started. Also, I couldn’t just quit my job. We now have a mortgage—actually, two—to deal with.

Perhaps most importantly, eventually, those who came to live here would want to go back out into the world. They would leave, we hoped, with new skills and a new mindset—but they would have to deal with the reality of returning to difficult choices about where to work, what to buy, what to support, how to live justly in a society that actively works against justice all the time.

But Berry reminds us that living these questions, understanding how small our efforts are in the larger picture, is part of the journey:

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 two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

The two inches of humus every two thousand years—yes, that. Even as we’re wondering about which coffee to buy, whether or not we should write a letter of support for a student applying for a  job at a company that creates havoc on the environment, how to talk to our children about the “more” they want, whatever that is—even then, we can think about the humus, the two thousand years. Not to put us off the hook, but to allow us to laugh a little at ourselves:

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.

Yes—joy, despite all the facts: a planet it peril, a nation so rooted in consumerism that it can’t see beyond that structure, a world at war. How often do we remind ourselves to be joyful, even in the midst of the deepest suffering?

What are we doing? I asked my spouse recently. We wanted to build a truly healing space, but instead we end up spending more time getting our residents to their jobs at fast food joints that are truly evil in practice, places we would never eat ourselves, or fighting with kids about the homework they ought to do, even if it’s meaningless at best. 

“We’re just teaching them to be a part of a culture we don’t even believe in,” I said, hopelessly. “How can we possibly get out of that framework, really instill a sense of justice and living outside the constructs that force us to choose destruction?”

I was feeling especially hopeless because I was working on my office’s annual report, which I had been told I didn’t need to include so much detail about how I planned to improve my practices next year. Instead, I was supposed to simply brag about how impactful my work had been.

And then, one of our residents was promoted to manager at the fast food joint I have been boycotting most of my life. She was ecstatic. And my heart soared with the same joy—she had been homeless, hopeless, and now she was doing something that she enjoyed, making her own money and her own decisions. She had been promoted, quickly, from a first job to manager.

“How do you know that what they’re learning now won’t be applicable in some change-making way in the future?” my spouse asked.

And, she is right. This resident is gaining skills that she could later apply to do good in the world. Our job is to never take that off the table. Not to tell her she’s contributing to a company mission that is disgusting—but instead, to focus on what she’s learning, and what she’ll do with her newfound work ethic, sense of responsibility.

“You’re right.” I said. We had done this framing with younger residents. I remembered the night we stayed up late, drawing and writing and weeping our trauma, then burning it. I remembered how, even though we had to let them go, we held those girls through screaming fits, weeping fits, deepest anger. How, when they didn’t want to do their homework, we reminded them of the good they could do later, how much better they could make the world they would be living in, if they worked hard now.

“It’s all about the framing,” one of my writer-teachers used to say, and she meant the framing of the poem, title, first line, last line--but she meant how we frame our experiences, how we choose to see and make sense of them.

Sometimes we have to walk in the wrong direction—take a job for a company that isn’t that great, write a report that feels a little ridiculous, encourage a kid to do the algebra homework even if she thinks the gift she has to give the world is music—in order to find our way.

Sometimes we are the walkers, and other times, the guides, walking beside those who are lost, saying this way, this way. Or saying, I don’t know the way. Only the next step, and the next.

Berry closes his magnificent poem with the following lines:

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.