A Religion of the Land
Farming is a lot about watching. Before I became a farmer, I was another urban person, and I would drive through the countryside on the interstate, and in a flash of a moment I would see farmers in the fields, unmoving, as if they were put there, another prop in a pre-constructed rural scene. And I did get the unmoving part right, if I misunderstood why. The farmer isn’t moving because the farmer is watching, watching for weeds, watching for flowering, watching for fruiting, watching for animals and insects. She stands Buddha-like, paying attention to the fullness of the moment in her fields. The flash of experience granted to interstate drivers can only misunderstand the profundity of the farmer’s stillness. She is taking in her land into herself, loving all of it. She is the ecological self.
You see things happen when you stand still for a bit. Farms look bucolic from the road, but things get more complicated among the vegetable rows. There’s a lot of struggle, a lot of death, a lot of suffering, on a farm. The community of life on the land isn’t a very peaceful one.
It makes me think, as a farmer. It makes me think about my suffering, human suffering. I have come to realize, after years of watching in the fields, unmoving, that I once believed that suffering and struggle were the specialty of the human world. Out there, out in those pastoral green fields, I believed there was a peaceful world. I believed once that this peaceful world somehow could redeem the suffering of the human world. Maybe I thought it was a place of escape. Maybe I took comfort in feeling that the wider world somehow knew the escape from suffering. In the land, I once thought, was a kind of natural nirvana.
When I became a farmer, I stopped being a spectator of the land. I joined the land. My whole family joined. We are all family now, the land and my human family. Farming gave me a thinner waist, bigger muscles, darker skin, and a worsening back. I expected those changes, wanted those changes. But farming also changed me spiritually. I came into much closer contact with the wider world, the natural world, the non-human world that surrounds and supports every human thing ever done.
And there is a lot suffering in that natural world, out there in the land. The land isn’t peaceful; it’s full of pain and suffering just like the human world. I suppose I knew that. I studied ecology; I knew about food webs and predator-prey cycles. But I didn’t feel it. I didn’t get the spiritual implications. But cultivating broccoli and killing thousands of weeds, seeing my farm dog kill and consume entire families of rabbits, watching my entire cabbage crop die slowly in cold, windy weather, I realized that my spiritual habits needed to change. I couldn’t feel at peace in the belief that out there, in the beauty of nature, there’s a place without suffering.
Farming in those first years was hard; I wasn’t good at it, and we didn’t have much money. So I suffered, too. When that cold late April wind killed my cabbage, I learned for the first time that my suffering and the suffering I saw on the land were entwined. Becoming a farmer, I had exposed myself to the vagaries of the land’s ecosystem. Again, at some level I’m sure I ‘knew’ this, but the feeling didn’t take until the cabbage died. Standing there with the dead cabbages – once so green and lively! – I realized, too, that I had brought my suffering into the land.
I suffered, and while watching my fields, I also realized that there was no place to hope for, that excluded suffering. I realized that the beauty and splendor of the land, which had drawn me from my urban life, was built upon suffering. I realized that the spiritual journey couldn’t be a journey to a place without suffering, physical or psychological. Farming taught me that I had two choices, nihilism or meaning-with-suffering.
I chose meaning-with-suffering. The rest of this essay explains why I made that choice. I’m not offering some kind of philosophical argument. I’m not trying to show how irrational nihilism is, or how sensible it is to view life as a meaningful pursuit. I know some very reasonable nihilists. The issue isn’t about reasoning, understood as some process of thinking. The issue is about feeling; how life feels to each of us. Life feels meaningful to me because of the land. But I had to stop believing that meaning begins when suffering ends, that meaning somehow means relief from suffering. It doesn’t: not on the land, anyway. On the land suffering is a part of the meaning; without the suffering, the land isn’t as ecologically rich, isn’t as beautiful, isn’t as meaningful.
Bearing Witness
The land has its own character, its own order. Scientists will name this order; it is the ‘ecosystem.’ Sometimes, to emphasize other aspects of the land, ecologists will say ‘community ecology.’ Aldo Leopold uses the phrase ‘biotic community,’ and he is clear that we humans must change our ways and become ‘plain members and citizens’ of the biotic community.
As an organic vegetable farmer, I strive to be a ‘plain member and citizen’ of the biotic community. But I find that all of these terms – ecosystem, community ecology – they all leave me flat. The concepts behind these terms do explain things that I see on the land, but these concepts do not point toward the feeling of living within the land. What are the feelings? What does the land feel like? What does it feel like, to live with the land?
It feels wild, it feels poignant, to live with the land. And the land itself, to me, feels ecstatic, enthused. The land is a community, of course, but a community of what? To say ‘of life’ is both to state the obvious and to beg the difficult question here. What is life? Why do living things make ‘communities’? I can gather stones, and put them together, and I do not have a community. But if I gather plants together, the insects come, and I do have a community. If I add my gathered stones, they become a part of that community.
A farmer ‘grows food,’ sure, but not really. You can grow food in a factory, you can grow food in a concrete paved greenhouse. If we are going to connect the term ‘farmer’ with the ancient practice of agriculture, we cannot really call the production of factory raised food, and monoculture food, ‘farming.’ Farming means growing food on the land, with the land. For the farmer, ‘growing food’ means weaving her life into a great tapestry of soil and rock and seed and cloud and insect. That simple phrase, ‘growing food,’ points to intimacy between the farmer and the land. There is a wildness to her work, because she grows her food with the land. She encounters each day what is ecstatic, as she makes her livelihood. There is no escaping it, out there in the wind and thunder and greening and blossomings, this wildness, this ecstacy.
The farmer bears witness to the land, as she grows food with and within it. Just recently, we had a frost in late May. We always do, during the time when the strawberries blossom. Frost is caprious. The physics will say that the cold air sinks, and so the frost will settle in low spots. My experience with frost says that there is more to the story, that the soil and the presence of weeds will also matter. Unfortunately, there are not enough weeds in my strawberries this year.
Because the blossoms will die in the frost, I must go out and install special irrigation equipment to water my strawberry patch throughout the night. The heat released from the freezing of the irrigation water, will warm and protect the strawberry blossoms. I am always angry – cold, wet, with the white and sticky juice of plantain weed smeared on my hands – because each year the land tries to kill my strawberries, tries to take away a part of my livelihood .
It is a strange thing, to see the strawberry patch the next morning. There is always brilliant sun the next morning, and the whole patch, now encased in ice, glitters and sparkles like a field of diamonds. Blossoms have sagged to the ground under the weight, but inside the ice, they live. They have survived the frost; my customers will have strawberries. I always feel like the clever human, the technological species. I am not angry now. I feel validated; I have earned my right to be here, to walk within this sun-drenched scene. I belong, I am a part of the scene, a part of the movements of life which must survive frost or die. And I have survived because I have the signature virtue of survival; I know the land.
And as I walk back up to the house, my breath now visible in the strengthening morning light, I also realize that my knowing of the land is not the knowing of an outside observer. The land is not an object to me; I do not have so-called ‘objective’ knowledge. I know the land as one who lives within it; what I have is intimate knowledge.
So I bear witness to the land. Carl Sagan once wrote, “we are the cosmos knowing itself.” So it is with the land. When I speak about the land, I am the land speaking itself. I am no observer, but a participant, an ecological element, and I cannot so much as report upon what I experience as I can advocate for what the land is, for what I am. There is no neutrality.
Christians speak of the initial followers of Jesus, those who lived with him, as bearing witness. They were not observers, either, but participants in the life of Jesus. I bear witness to the land as they bore witness to the ministry of Jesus. My voice advocates for the land, because the land is a revelation. It is a constant, perpetual revelation. Beauty, meaning, a reason for living – answers are there, in the land.
I don’t know if these answers are for everybody. If you doubt the presence of meaning in life, or believe that we humans must create meaning rather than find it in the world, then the answers I hear in the land probably won’t work for you. The land displays a wide beauty, and this beauty is the gathering of all that we do, we humans and all living things. We humans must earn this meaning, yes, but we earn it by paying attention and thus by finding it. The land creates meaning, and we humans find it.
And if you believe that meaning is found in some place where suffering ends, the land is no answer for you. The land gathers the suffering of life, and the joys, and weaves its beauty out of both. The land teaches me that without suffering, there is no meaning.
Wildness and Suffering
There is always the first cold day, the warning day, the day that reminds the tomatoes and the melons and the farmer that summer will end. For the tomatoes and melons, it is the death warning. Sometimes I imagine, while I walk among the tall tomatoes in September and that first cool northerly wind blows, that I can hear the vines whisper anxiously among themselves, “the insects speak of this time called winter, when the rain will freeze, and we will die.”
On the first cold day last year, I had to harvest tomatoes. Tomato vines make a vigorous crop, growing high and wide to create walls of green, dotted with reddening fruit. They are the signature vegetable crop of summer. But on these first cold days they always lose that cheerful green which signals summer’s hospitality. I realize how much the chalky blue sky of a hot summer day conditions the green of summer. Today, when scuddy clouds filled with blues and greys and whites fill the sky, I can’t find that summer green, and the wonderful tang of tomato scent smells wrong, seems past. The land warns me, too, of the death to come.
Watching the low, grey mass of clouds move swiftly overhead, I feel a beauty emerge from the whole scene. The tomatoes rattle in the wind, seemingly disturbed. In the distance lie my apple trees, laden with fruit and bent with the breeze, seemingly in acceptance of the end time to come. With a little luck, they will see the new spring of the next year. A shaft of light pierces the ragged clouds and alights upon my fall broccoli, as if to investigate. The broccoli lights up suddenly, all green and blue in mostly straight lines. Broccoli loves this kind of weather; it is glad for the end of the heat stress of summer. Behind my view of the broccoli, in the far distance, other light shafts dance in the pasture grass, and the wind pushes and presses it unevenly, rolling unevenly atop the grass. The summertime is gone from the land, and a more alien kind of beauty has taken its place, a beauty less about life and growth and more about light and sky and the moving shape of the land.
There is energy in this autumnal landscape, life and feelings. There is purpose, and there are hopes. But I do not understand it. I am a farmer, and I understand the landscape of spring and summer, the time of warmth and growth and fruition. On this first cold day, I contact the wintertime, and what it intends and wants is alien to my purposes. All I understand is that wintertime will kill every plant I have husbanded. All I understand is that winter will kill me, too, if I do not return regularly to my box of heat and stored food. Whatever winter wants, it does not care about, or even notice, my interests.
So on these first cold days, I confront the alien nature of the land[J2] . I am with the land in the spring and the summer, and the land is familiar to me then, full of rain and sun and heat and green. Certainly there is capriciousness – it might hail, it will frost – but in the spring and summer there is a familiarity, a hospitableness to the land that lets me know that I belong, that my purposes express what the land more broadly wants to do.
This feeling of hospitableness to my purposes, this feeling of belonging with the land in the spring and summer, serve to make contact with my early observations about suffering. Suffering is pain, suffering is loss – at least among humans and the sharper-witted animals, pain and loss is how we experience suffering. But when I take a more philosophical slant, as I often do on that first cold day, I search for a meaning that embraces every member of the land. I want to make sense of the onion plants destroyed by hail. What of the worms tilled by my tractor, of the blight ridden tomato plant, of the cucumber blackened by frost?
I conclude that suffering is the failure of purpose. The land is full of purposes: insects, soil microbes and worms, crops, weeds, chickens, the dog, even the hot compost pile by the barn, all express relentless purpose. Ecologists look at the movement of energy in the land, they look at the dynamics of species populations in the land, but as a farmer I often wonder if the best definition of an ‘ecosystem’ is ‘the order of purposes.’ A June farm landscape is a welter of purposes, purposes ruthlessly wanted, purposes achieved, purposes frustrated. If joy is the success of purpose, and suffering is the failure of it, then the land is a cacophony of joy and suffering together.
The relative hospitableness of summer can seduce a farmer. She may conclude that her clever efforts secured the season’s bounty. Worse, she may conclude that the goddess presence haunting the land, favors her. A cold September day reminds the farmer of the suffering inherent in the land’s way of being. It is an existential message – the meaning of life is not found in the success of your annual ambitions – and a religious challenge, too. Because hail and frost may dim summer’s gentle complexion, because winter will come and kill everything, the farmer confronts her suffering and the suffering of her fellow citizens of the land. What is the worth of this suffering? What is the point of it?
As a farmer, I must bear witness to this answer. The point of the suffering is to help make the beauty of the land. I say ‘bear witness’ because I see the land gather up the suffering into its beauty all the time. I am not making an abstract point in the philosophy of beauty, or at least, I am not intending to do so. I am witnessing. What I have seen is not merely ‘ecological processes,’ but the revelation of religious truth. Suffering is inescapable, suffering is meaningful, suffering creates beauty.
Once on a day in June we had some hard rain. Almost three inches fell in less than hour, with hail and 60 mph winds. Such rates of rainfall will cause the rain itself to bruise plants, as well as pulverize the top of the soil and create a brittle crust making seed germination difficult. The hail shredded lettuce and spinach, and pitted my young apple fruits. Afterwards, the sky cleared enough for the sun, low in northwestern sky, to appear through the storm clouds. At once, warm and golden light flowed over my fields, the wet soil now black with a rich glow which I can only describe as ‘life.’ But quite frankly, this black hue, this tone of life – the soil had been so compacted by the hard rain that it almost reflected the light. The compaction is very bad; I lost all of my newly seeded carrots. But ah, my friends!, it gives a lovely light.
What is the feeling of this way of the land to gather the pain and create a greater beauty with it? I bear witness to it, as a farmer, and I find a word for this feeling: wildness. Earth, the land, reality itself, these are wild things. They are wild because they make their beauty out of pain and joy together. [J3] That is what wildness means. The feeling of wildness is the feeling of confronting a way of things in which we belong, a way of things which, despite our belonging, offers our hopes no special concern, a way of things which yet gathers our joys and our sufferings with the joys and sufferings of everything and weaves this harvest of reality into the beauty of the land.
Glory be to God for dappled things….
My farm is a perpetual revelation of the meaningfulness of suffering. My beautiful fields look beautiful because I have killed weeds, literally millions of them[J4] . Once I lost a succession of early maturing broccoli to heat; the lovely yellow flowers charmed the landscape, and added to insect diversity, far more than broccoli could have done. Another time, I tilled the land for peppers right before a big rainstorm. I knew the storm was coming. I should not have tilled the land then, and the rains came and washed the soil, and I lost soil and peppers in an ugly mess of mud and rivets. A month later, the pile of mud that had once been my soil, sprouted glorious yellow mustard flowers. I did not mow them down.
There is a poignancy to the land because it gathers up the suffering and the joy together. This is wildness. The feeling of wildness is like the feeling of a good family. [J5] A good family gathers up the sufferings, and does not separate the sorrows of life from the joys. Families share both, in whatever measures life demands. There is a seamlessness between the land and a farm family. The farm family brings the land into its home, and the farmhouse sits upon the land, as a part of its ecology. It is art when we capture the image of a clean farmhouse upon the green fields of summer, and it is art when we capture the image of an abandoned farmhouse, the wood siding partially rotted, and bleached in the autumn light.
The land’s wildness gives me assurance that my failures are not meaningless, are not merely wreckage. There is my wreckage, yes, but the land gathers what is wreckage, and builds anew. And, so, upon my long dead pepper transplants bloom the yellow mustards. My failures become threads in the ecological tapestry that make the beauty of the land. In the land, I find the meaning of what I have done, for good or for ill. The land redeems.
When I embrace this ecological redemption, I become fearless. I do not fear the ugliness of failure. I do not fear loss. Of course I still feel fear. If a tornado threatens, I still shelter what things I can, I still get the family in the basement. I do not want the losses a tornado can bring: the destruction, the death. But I do not fear those losses, should they come. The last tornado that missed my farm destroyed a small barn a few miles away. It was a sad and beautiful thing, to see the family re-build, determined, somber. The land makes beauty out of the destruction, and the pain and the loss are not meaningless.
The land teaches me that the pain we feel when we lose what we love, is a good and a beautiful thing to feel. We must embrace that pain, for at times in our life with the land the way we are given to contribute is to contribute the painful part. It is not less beautiful, it is not less of a gift to the universe, that it is the painful part.
There is a religion out there, in the spring tilled soil, and the rows of blue-green broccoli, and the drifts of winter snow.[J6] We are called to embrace reality, all of it, and we are called to embrace what is wild and free and unpredictable and dangerous.
There is harmony, there is perfection. I’ve seen days in May on the farm, when we get everything planted, and then it rains a gentle half-inch. That’s perfect. I’ve seen family days that left us all filled with real pleasure at one another’s company. It happens, this perfection. But it doesn’t last. Perfections rise up like snowdrops, they bloom for their time, and then they die. The world is always making perfections, and then destroying them. I don’t think life gets any better than that.
When I say that we are called by the land and the world around us to embrace reality, to embrace it all, it is this creating and destroying of perfections that we must embrace. We must embrace joys and sorrows. We must become wild like the land is wild.