Celebrating a decade!

I just came outside and am sitting on our front porch while Kali and Alida decorate the walk with colored chalk. The evening air is cool, the birds are singing and the bugs are making their various evening sounds.  The sky is clear, the mountain beautiful, the sunflowers making a splash of color on the landscape.  We do live in a beautiful place!

We were happy to have many join with us this past Sunday to celebrate all that the last ten years have held for our family here on Fruit Farm Lane, as well as to celebrate the gifts of land, home, and community (which can be found in many ways and in many places).

On this post you will find the reflection that Jason and I pulled together to share at the morning service.  The process of pulling together pictures and thoughts was a good one - and one we would not have engaged in had their not been an event to prepare for.  So we were grateful for a chance to set aside time for reflection, rather that have August fly by in the made rush to fill jars, dehydrators, freezers, and bellies.

Here's to the next ten years!!

Sharing for service August 16, 2015

Janelle: As Jason and I talked about what we might like to share with this gathering of people regarding the last decade spent here on Fruit Farm Lane, it became apparent to us almost immediately that any attempt to be comprehensive or offer a succinct sermon with wisdom embedded throughout was going to be nothing short of impossible.  If we’ve learned anything from this last decade it is that life is full of paradox: successes and failures, joys and sorrows, times of challenge and times of relative ease; lessons learned and re-learned and un-learned; seasons of discontent and times of deep peace; hard work and pure bliss; agonizing grief and celebrations in abundance; moments of questioning what in the world we are doing here and then in contrast feelings of being exactly where we need to be in the world, doing exactly what we need to be doing for our greatest joy to meet the world’s greatest need. So instead of trying to preach or summarize, we will give you a few brief glimpses into and a feel for some of what we’ve been up to this past ten years through the sharing of a handful of written memories interspersed with some of Jason’s poetry. We’ll start with a poem Jason wrote about 3 years before we moved here.

Homeland

Breaking open the soil

I know I will cry my tears into it

I know I will think often

      of  hurting, forgotten people

     

      of the gaping mouth of pain

      of horror and suffering.

As on my knees I plunge my hands into it

      grasp the root of a weed

      --the moist and living gritty flesh—

                                          my heart will know

of the many things that cannot be uprooted

      before being felt

                  and understood by caring hands.       

And when I stick a spade in deep

      and strike a deep shoulder of rock

      hear it ring in my spirit

      an echo from the center of the earth

I’ll understand that though I searched to find this land,

      it is I who have been found.

Janelle: The restlessness that especially Jason felt during our two years on East Wolfe street compelled us to keep looking for a place in the country, and very importantly one that allowed chickens!  The actual process of procuring this piece of property is like no other real estate transaction I’ve heard of. Jason worked next door for Samuel and Margaret Johnson at the time and we got wind that maybe the owner would be open to selling, as she had been managing it as a rental for a dozen plus years from out of state.  We wrote her, but then after a while gave up hope of hearing anything. About that time we got word that she had interest in selling and wanted to meet and talk with us.  The renters at the time, now good friends Rachel and Mike Herr, had been given first option to buy and decided it was too much work.  How right they were!  I came to look at the house for the first time with Jason and my parents.  After walking around and through the house, I sat down in the then dining room and cried.  I cried because I knew we were going to buy it and it was so ugly and there were few places in sight that didn’t need work.  But we hadn’t found anything else in the country even close to our price range.  This was right next door to wonderful friends and Jason was already talking about the vast potential of the place.  What stands out most to me, though, was sitting with Pam (the owner and builder) and talking about what we could afford to pay for the place and what she needed to get for it and then, with tears added to the mix, deciding that we would take the plunge and she would entrust this precious piece of land to us.

A Mirror in the Woods

I have stepped out the back

door and am about to breathe

the autumn air

                  when I hear it:  Dink,

dink,  dink,  Cheep!,  dink,  (flutter)  dink,  etc.

There is a mirror leaning

against the wood pile, and

the cardinal is there, once again, attacking

his persistent opponent.

                                This pains me.  Oh,

the futility!  Oh, the piteous bravado!  My

air is spoiled.  I move on to my next task

and sigh as I go, for

it is I who have placed the mirror there!

I could remove it, but

then we would just have

cardinal poop streaks all down the

car door again.

Janelle:  Jason noted the following in reflecting on that poem. “Part of the reason some of us choose to live close to wild things is to in some way escape the reality of constantly being reminded of ourselves…it’s refreshing to also be reminded of what lies beyond the realm of human activity.  But one of the ironies of this lifestyle is that you can’t live in a wild place without making it less wild, or at least without introducing human disturbance to the rhythms of the place.  The effects this has on me are multiple:  disappointment, angst, alarm, claustrophobia, wonder, comfort, anger, acceptance, and lots of amusement.”

One of the important and difficult lessons I am continually faced with in our life here is the need to get in touch with my impact on the world around me.  For me, the little girl who stubbornly said she would never eat meat again when her father and sister were boiling crabs on a beach trip, this happens most keenly in my interactions with wild and domesticated animals.  I won’t quickly forget the day I was hauling wheelbarrow loads of old composted chicken litter to spread around when I came across a nest of baby mice. I had accidently destroyed their home with my shovel and the squirming helpless little pink things were strewn about waiting for the next predator to come along.  I struggled with what to do and eventually made the hard decision to feed them to the chickens (rather than leave them to die on their own or wait for whatever animal would come along and consume them).  And then there’s butchering days.  We raise ducks and chickens. We can’t possibly keep all that hatch – there’s already plenty of crowing around here.  We enjoy eating them and consider them a good source of nutrition for our family.  For me it feels important to be part of the process of raising and butchering animals if I’m going to have any sense of integrity within myself in eating them. But I wonder if I will ever become comfortable with the power we have to choose when an animal’s last meal of fresh grass will be.  I kind of hope not.

­Brush

The old stone pile (which has

outlived by far the farmers who 

--sweating, sweating--

heaved the noxious cherty chunks into

a heap to be rid of them) was hard

to get to.

Requiring stones, I got my tools and wheeled them

down, down the slope and through the

[trees grass rabbits soil wire birds ants vegetables berries rock water] we

call our land.

This is me now moving brisk among the trees, this is me now

staring for a moment, once deciding, next destroying

limb after limb, and

branch upon branch

the pile grows:

space after space

the way opens.

As evening falls I lift with aching arms

the tools, return them

to their places

on the wall.

So here’s the honor granted me today:  Though I am not, all told,

the artist, for this time I was privileged

to handle the brush; marks

by each of us (farmers family cardinal body trees)

may be found here, all our pulls and pushes, dents and bulges making us

a space

the land remembers ever fainter, the form (color texture shape)

ever changing, never forgetting.

This to me is love, and this is peace: to know

this stretch of earth, my home; to feel

my family’s needs compel me; to find

a cardinal’s nest and leave it be; to move

my body there, now here; to make

a difference to this place—a work of

art.

Janelle: The summer after our daughter Nora died, we began constructing our parking space.  The brush clearing Jason refers to was required to make the old stone pile in the woods accessible by car and trailer for this project.  This was both a community and family project, as initially we had some help with the large rock hauling, for which we were grateful.  But the times that stick out in my mind were the many evenings we deemed Family Work Nights where we hauled load after load of stones from the woods to the future parking space site.  Sometimes we talked, sometimes we were silent.  For me it was about the best grief work I could do – being with those closest to me who experienced the same loss, working outside on a project that was more or less straightforward and predictable, and, well, it felt really good to throw some rocks around! As a continuation of our “grief work”, the following poem describes the preparation of the garden we created in memory of Nora.

Reiterations

A father’s love ignores the border
death presents. I worked for you in every way I knew, now
what to do with this: my aimless drive to help, my hoeing the abyss?
There’s nothing you could need from me; I’ll turn my hoe toward earth
and let the rocks and soil absorb my effort, and I'll wait for birth among the
blooming celebrations. I can work on these reiterations.

And so we put together what we can: we scrape
the weeds aside and mark a place where, when it needs to huddle
with the memories, a heart may hide. We’ve caught a hold on changes
in the calendar and seasons, have made spaces full of time: ad hoc
creations. We’ve established these reiterations.

I think it helps a little. Do I need to see reflections of my baby
girl out there exposed to wild, swirling air to keep me from forgetting? Maybe not, but there is satisfaction in the knowledge that in moments when I need to whittle down into the quick of loss, or glory in parental, proud elation, I can turn to these reiterations.

Thank you, child! You never read the clock to know the shame
of dallying too long. Your fingers never curled around a cent. When it was time
for you to go, you didn’t worry, you just went. Your heart and mind and palms were full of room; your presence was a balm for wounds we couldn’t feel. How many repetitions of your memory will be required for me to heal? What is my hurry? If I sit awhile in a place, perhaps an insect sipping from a bloom will show the way to freedom from the hectic expectations. I’ll depend on these reiterations.

I didn’t know I feared a fading of your presence, but I found that when I cleared
the soil space I knew relief, anticipating sprouting seeds. Your memory’s alive, and here is how I know: I’ve seen it grow! How can this be: while thinking of the years ahead, a smile? I’m eager to be watching all you were to us becoming what it is, what it will be, and relishing your place within our family. Our love is strong, so time will find us living out a leafy incarnation, still repeating these reiterations.

Janelle: As the first anniversary of Nora’s death was approaching, Jason and I wanted to invite family and friends to join us in the creation of Nora’s garden (which I’m standing by here), since so many people had been part of supporting and sustaining us during Nora’s life and following her death.  Many brought divisions of plants from their own garden beds and together we created something beautiful.  It was the kind of evening that is so fulfilling for me.  We, a community gathered of all ages, worked together, remembered together, ate together, and played together.  The aspects of that evening are the very things that have defined many of the highlights of the last ten years for me.  We’ve enjoyed hosting house concerts, neighborhood potlucks, Tangly Woods community meals, baby showers, butchering days, work days and digging parties and demolition weekends, work events, food processing parties and, as of today, a church service!  All of these events, and more, contribute towards making our home feel like the kind of gathering space we dream of it being.  And now, referring back to paradox, the next poem, which is the last poem for the morning, represents a change of tone:

Animated Me

If someone had been watching me

this evening, seen me tracking down

the slope to shut the chickens in, they

might have also seen the tawny form dividing

weedstalks, nearing me.

They might have seen akimbo me—my chore

accomplished—in the dimness turn my head

to face the sound of gentle hoofsteps.  They might have

seen, through pulsing galaxies of firefly swoops, the velvet

buck along the treeline edge, pacing up the slope towards the

garden.

They might have seen me lift a foot, have seen him turn

to stare at me and then, deducing my ignorability,

move on.  They might have seen me smile, stoop and

stalk him.

They might have seen him take deliberate steps up to

the brick walk, might have seen him turn and move

between the house and me.  They would have seen

the furtive me

bolt into motion, giving chase to the extent my silly

slip-on rubber garden shoes allowed; the wheezing

snorts, the thudding hooves, the flying leaps could not

have been ignored.  Would they have seen the few surprising

others, haired and breathing, which joined him in pounding up the

hill?  The woods that rang their fading snorts was dark:

it’s doubtful.

But if they peer into this lighted kitchen now, they

will have seen me enter, stop, and speak. 

They will have seen my child’s eyes

go wide, her smile wider.  They will have seen my grinning

lover at the sink, her glancing at our faces.  They will have seen

an animated me, my flailing arms, my leaps, my pointing

finger.  They will have heard reverberating waves

of laughter.

Janelle:  Not only has our home here provided us with ample hard work and good exercise, it has been the source of many humorous moments. In a conversation Jason had with a friend, it came up that we don’t have a TV or a personal computer. In a state of trying to absorb this information, the friend asked what we do for entertainment.  Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by the amount of entertainment available to us on this mere 6 acres of land.  We work here, we play here, we eat and sleep here, we love here and grieve here, we take part in the rhythms of the year and the natural cycles of birth, life and death. Over the past few years when we have gotten to the end of the year, I’ve had this amazing realization that we get to do this all over again!  Of course eating the last sweet potato of the year comes with some measure of sadness. But it is hard to stay sad when the next thing is coming ripe and we get to look forward to the first sweet potato harvested just months down the road. We are so grateful for the gift this land has been to us, providing us with a space that feels real and in which we feel so alive and connected to life processes and forces much bigger than us alone. As we look to the next decade, we hope to continue to explore ways of more fully and deeply engaging the broader community in which we find ourselves.  The thrill of what we are doing quickly feels hollow if it is done in isolation from those around us, so we welcome your engagement with us as we seek to live authentically in this time and place.