Creating Habits of Community

“God comes to us in the midst of human need, and the most pressing needs of our time demand community in response. How can I participate in a fairer distribution of resources unless I live in a community, which makes it possible to consume less? How can I learn accountability unless I live in a community where my acts and their consequences are visible to all? How can I learn to share power unless I live in a community where hierarchy is unnatural? How can I take the risks which right action demands, unless I belong to a community which gives support? How can I learn the sanctity of each life unless I live in a community where we can be persons not roles to one another?

(Parker Palmer, 1977; as quoted in Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through The Quaker Tradition)

I was in Lansing last spring waiting for a workshop on structural inequality to begin. Several people were running late and so those of us that were there sat in the circle waiting. I turned to the lady next to me and said ‘hi’ and we began chatting. I had just had a conversation on facebook with another friend that is working in Kenya. That morning she had invited me to come and join her in her work. I was very pleased and excited about that and it had been on my mind for the last couple of hours. As I continued talking with the lady in the circle next to me, I was pleasantly and curiously surprised that she was from Kenya and had been living here for 10 years. I am very intrigued with different cultures and especially about how “community” looks in different countries. So I asked her what she sees as the differences in cultures between America and Kenya. She said, “Oh”... and then sat there shaking her head, trying to find the words to answer that question. Finally, she turned to me and said in her strong and beautiful Kenyan accent something that sounded to me like, “da wawd aye”. I was on the edge of my seat by that time, listening with all my heart. With a puzzled look, I asked her to repeat it. As I listened more intently, I heard it. “The word ‘I’”. THAT is the difference. In America, everything is about “I”, “me”, and “mine”. In Kenya, nothing is about that, it is about “we”, “us”, and “ours”. Suddenly, she went silent again, running out of words to continue to express this way of life. Then she looked at me and said, “You HAVE to visit. That is the only way you will understand… Well, you don’t HAVE to, but if you don’t, you’ll miss it!”

I have long been intrigue by community and frustrated with the lack of community that exists in my life and work. When I worked in the school systems, I used to ask special education students and at risk students this question: If your house was burning down and you were in your front yard with a cell phone, who would you call? So many of them had no answer. The list of allies, people that have their back through the thick and thin was a very short list. Then I started noticing the number of those very same students that were disappearing from the school system. Between the 9th grade and the 12th grade, more than half of them were gone. These were very important people to me… and they were just gone! When I began studying the research on this, I found that the main reason, according to the dropouts themselves, was that they had no one to turn to when they were in a bind or failing their classes.

Later in my career, I began working at Hope Network and noticed that there were hundreds of adults with disabilities that were living it segregated homes and attending segregated day programs. I was struck with the level of loneliness so many experience on a daily basis. We also worked with prisoner re-entry. The research I found on recidivism (returning to prison) stated that one of the top reasons they ended up back in prison was that, when their back was against a wall and temptation was high to break the law; they had no one to turn to.

I have been pondering these things for many years. I have experienced “hitting the ground” and ending up in a Dark Night of the Soul without anyone else even knowing about it. What would a “we” society look like, feel like, be like? I can’t imagine. What would it feel like to know that when I hit the ground again, barely able to stand back up, there would be people already there, helping me up? Not people that I see once or twice a month, but people that are involved with each other daily. I can’t imagine. Then I realized that for us to sustain the good things in our lives, there must be intention, there must be actions, and the actions that are most meaningful must become habits. What are the “habits of community” that exist in places that really are connected, like Roseto, the village in the link at the bottom, or Kenya? Someday, I plan to see this and write more about it.

But why do I need to go somewhere else to begin experiencing this in my life? I have the exciting opportunity to be a partner in expanding Sandhill Farms CSA; to create intentional community and to use our gifts and talents to impact a greater community. How can we join our community in Hastings MI and beyond, to strengthen it?

There are myriad problems in each and every community, organization, family, etc. Interestingly, wherever people are (and they are everywhere), there are problems that need to be solved. The mistake that is often made is that we don’t come together as a community to solve those problems first. We hand them over the “professionals” (systems, governments, organizations) to take charge and take over; washing our hands of getting involved in what might be messy; washing our hands or our family member, our neighbor, our colleague.

In the book, Abundant Community by John McKnight and Peter Block, there are three questions that must be asked and answered in this same order if we want thriving, connected, and abundant communities:

1. What can ‘we the people’ do (what are our assets within our community)?

2. What can we do with a little help from professionals (and systems)?

3. What do professionals have to do?

If we can learn to solve our problems by working through these questions together, finding and creating the best possible roles as citizens and professionals, we may be surprised at the possibilities!!!

Learn more by linking to these articles from Living with Open Hands by Ron Irvine

Community — a Matter of Life and Death

“There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.” (Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, p. 7)

Communities of Isolation — the biology of loneliness and community

“Loneliness is lethal not only to the human spirit and emotions but also to the human body and brain… Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you.”

”'I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again.’ I still believe this. I still believe that if we turn to one another, if we begin talking with each other – especially with those we call stranger or enemy – then this world can reverse its darkening direction and change for the good.” (Margaret Wheatley)

”Since our earliest ancestors gathered in circles around the warmth of a fire, conversation has been our primary means for discovering what we care about, sharing knowledge, imagining the future, and acting together to both survive and thrive.” (Juanita Brown, The World Cafe)

Winter "events" and getting the farming done

I lost time over the weekend working in the calving barn. I worked 12 hour shifts over the past four days, and today Jenn and I got caught up. During our time together, she indicated that we had received between 18 and 22 inches of snow over the weekend. I knew we had received a lot of snow, but I had no idea we experienced a three-foot dump. After getting my truck wedged into a drift across a local road, I suppose I should have known, but when you are preoccupied with working at getting a dairy farm through a snow storm, you often don’t realize the full extent of the events that occurring in all around you.

I was staying pretty busy at the farm, and between calvings, assisting in the milkhouse, constant fixes to the truck, and treating a load of ill cows over the past four days, my time was also filled with a steady moving of snow from one place to another, I never bothered to add up the number of times that I cleared five inches of snow from this place or that. I also didn’t have time to read or listen to weather reports while breaking through at least three inches of ice in some of the water troughs or de-icing DeLaval parts in the unheated barn. In fact, the necessity of getting things done and keeping things going on the farm and the surrounding roads meant that the folks working on the farm had very little time to talk about the weather. Of course, if anyone asked me, I simply said it was the “best day ever” – my stock answer for most any inquiry about the nature of my day.

Yet, after working through a weekend like that, then finding out that you bested three feet of snow, I considered the nuances of the past days and how it seemed like less than a nuisance to navigate the various obstacles presented by working outdoors in sometimes sub-zero temps. I have concluded the following:

Working on a farm often means working at or pretty close to home. That means a hot meal with family in the middle of each day.

The pleasure of the celebratory nature of family meals when work is done for the day. Our family mealtime is often filled with laughter as well as good food that we have grown ourselves. There is a satisfaction to enjoying the fruits of one’s labor so directly.

Employers that value your work and that don’t micro-manage.

The satisfaction of laboring for an hour to pull a backwards and upside down calf, and finding it alive and well, followed by a twin that birthed easily and is just as healthy as the first.

Doing the job right.

Just one of the many reasons that the hardest day on a farm is better than the easiest day at the office.

Just a few more thoughts on this season’s weather. This winter, and much of last winter, are reminiscent of the winters of the 1970’s that set the standard for my winter experiences. I was a between the ages of 3 and 13 during that decade, and Michigan experienced its share of blizzards, cold temps, and multiple snow days. Also, that decade was filled with hockey in the street, driveway basketball that required chipping the ice of the cement an inch at a time, and dreams of baseball season marking the official end of Michigan winter, even when opening day was snowed out one or two years. During the seventies, Michigan had four distinct seasons. I wonder if we might return to that weather pattern for a few years. A strong winter makes the Tigers’ home opener that much sweeter.

This ain't farmin'... Is it?

Though we haven’t began the farming season yet, the farm related tasks are building up and I am expending some energy, as well as having some fun and generating some excitement, getting things done. An old friend, Melanie Ragsdale, has just provided a new logo for the farm. I met Melanie when I first moved to West Michigan with Jenn. We met each other through the practices of a garage band that practiced in the basement of her Rockford home. We lost contact for a few months, and then I met her again working through a small newspaper that I was hired to write for. She put the whole paper together.

Through the wonders of Facebook, we caught up with each other, and now our families are in-touch, and, working together. Sandhill has sought out Mel’s talents as a design professional and is looking to her to provide us with business cards and promotional materials. She has provided the farm with its first “official” logo. We look forward to doing more with her. Go to our facebook link to look up her business info.

Other things are going on. Updating a website is something I never thought of as farming related, nor did I anticipate having to look high and low for a few folks to manage the vegetable shares. Of course, a move from one home to another is in the works, and yesterday we met with Ron to talk about some mundane things like whose furniture we will be using, and how we will keep up with all of the social media work. I never imagined farming would include so much computer work, but in fact, human relationships are being forged in very new and different ways these days, and computers will not only have a lot more to do with agriculture, but the relationships between food producers and consumers as well.

I hope to offer more info about shares in the next post. We are selling shares and taking individual poultry orders now, and that will become the primary work of February.

We're buying the farm!

Writing has never really facilitated cathartic activity in my soul. Many events in my life have taken apocalyptic shape or had supernatural aspects that have convince me – informed aneed to change perspective or to rededicate my faith in new ways. It is after the catharsis, or, as Quakers often say – convincement - that I might write. Quite often, the writing is about violence and the role of violence in our world. But today, I sit ready to update the regularly avoided farm blog.

We are purchasing a farm, not of our own or on our own, and ready to put our dreams into action. Farming is an action, and a creative one at that, yet the incredible amount of activity that surrounds the farmer is often betrayed by the pace of that activity. My favorite kind of farmer is the cattleman who saw that his steers had gone beyond the boundaries of his fencing. He noted with some smugness that the cows did not realize they were free to roam because, in fact, they were quite satisfied in the corn field that they had broken into. The farmer never bothered to lure them to safety behind fencing – the beef just stood, ever active in their feeding, but ever pastoral in the way they went about it.

When one purchases a farm and commits the self to full-time creativity, there is an understanding that the passive activity of day-to-day farm chores is simply 40 days away from the next crisis. I can tell you exactly when 300 lb. hogs will escape. It will be at dinnertime with guests over, and the hogs will simply trot by the dining room window on their way to the neighbors’. I can also tell you exactly when there will be a massive poultry catastrophe. It will occur when I am too tired to check up on the kids chores and realize turkeys have been fed pig mash for four days…

Yet other activity goes beyond simply startling the observer and seamlessly helps make the narratives of life ever true. On Easter two years ago, after a difficult loss of two lambs and a ewe in birth, an unexpected lamb was born while all were at an Easter dinner. And, everyone saw the birth through the dinning room window. Regardless of the stories that shape your life, an unexpected lamb born in spring is exactly what makes the stories of one’s life true. Life keeps truth credible. I think I have told the story of the resurrected chicks a few times too many, but the fact of 70 chicks being “resurrected “ from a catatonic condition through the use of a dollar store blow dryer is one that will stick with our family for quite some time. The story if 75 chilled to the bone chicks slowly warming back into an animated state exhibits the importance, if not unmitigated truth of hope.

The hope for us now has evolved from a hope that we will find a stable place to farm and raise our family to a hope that we can make an positive impact in the community that we are soon to be a part of. One of my critiques of my dear Quaker friends is that one will often say they are seeking community. The fact is, we are already in community, wherever we are, and do not feel like we belong, or that we want to belong. The first reality is difficult to navigate, but the second difficulty might be considered latent self-righteousness. I am a city boy by birth and standing, but have learned that, to love your neighbors, you have to be in relationship with them beyond the scope of talking about baseball and the weather. Indeed, you must respect and love your neighbor even when they talk about keeping their guns, tree-huggers, Jesus as the only way, and their distrust of creeping leftist threats against the best of the amendments and commandments. We live in Michigan folks, and you can only move so far in any direction before you sink or swim in a very big lake, or a very stinky state. You see, we are all already in community, yet some of us a marginalized or self-marginalizing. Worse, many of us simply marginalize others because we disagree with them. All of this seems contrary to the aspects of community we insist we are seeking for ourselves.

There is nothing to bring community together like meal-sharing and the provision of food. Many relationships have been cemented when a plowing favor is returned with a turkey or so many pounds of beef. A dozen eggs go a long way when a neighbor is hurt on the job, and pre-cooked meals from the farm a great as house warming gifts or baby-welcoming gestures. And, when the farm is supported by a community that love to eat the produce, the farm is a community-building enterprise. It is not creation ex nihlo,  however, but  building upon a foundation that has all of the pieces necessary to reflect the best of who we can be despite differences. Such a community should be a church, but over time, I have more faith that it can come through farming. Wish us luck, and buy lots of shares. We move over the month of February until we spend the night when the calendar turns to march. A new spring beginning.