19
February
Embracing Reality: The Land’s Religion
Farming is a lot about paying attention.
Before I became a farmer, I was another urban dweller. I would drive through the countryside on the interstate, and sometimes I would see farmers in the fields, unmoving so it seemed, as if they were put there, a prop in some pre-constructed rural scene. I did get the unmoving part right, if I misunderstood why. The farmer doesn’t move because the farmer brings the whole scene into her experience: weeds germinating, crops flowering, insects consuming. 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, as I had once so misunderstood.
She is taking her land into herself, loving all of it. She is embracing reality.
You see things happen when you stand still long enough; reality operates on different timescales, and the deep things on the world emerge on the longer stretches. Farms look bucolic from the road, but things get more complicated when you stand quietly 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, about suffering generally. I once believed that suffering and struggle belonged mostly in the human world. Out in those pastoral green fields, I believed a peaceful world existed. Sure, I knew that things fought and died and ate one another, on the land. But human pain remains a major melody line marring the music of our human history. Viewing the land from the interstate, or from the pathways of a weekend hike, the land seemed resiliently pastoral, gentle.
I believed that this peaceful world could redeem the suffering of the human world. I thought it was a place of escape. I took comfort in feeling that the wider world knew the escape from suffering. In the land, I thought, I had found an ecological nirvana.
Farming gave me a thinner waist, bigger muscles, darker skin, a worsening back. I expected those changes, wanted those changes.
But farming also changed me spiritually. When I became a farmer, I joined the land. My whole family joined. We are all family now, the land and my human family. Through my relationship with the land, I came into much closer contact with the non-human world surrounding, supporting every human thing ever done. This book describes these changes, a series of discoveries in which I have learned that a complete human life needs intimacy with the land. The land shows us the meaningfulness of suffering. We must embrace reality, including the painful parts, if we are to capture the full meaning of life.
There is a lot suffering, out there on the land. The land isn’t peaceful; it’s full of pain and suffering just like the human world. I suppose I knew that at some level. I studied ecology; I knew about food webs and predator-prey cycles. But what I had in those days was conceptual knowledge. I had an abstracted understanding of the land’s drama.
But this conceptual knowledge can’t deliver a full understanding of the land. The land is a whole, yes, and included in that whole are desires, hopes and loves These terms point to experiences of joy, sorrow, pain, suffering, and fulfillment. The land includes a spiritual aspect, too, because the presence of joys and sorrows points to the question of the meaning of an experience. The tomato joyfully flowers in the hot July weather; what is the meaning of such a sensation? The lettuce struggles, wilts, and finally succumbs in the same hot July weather; what is the meaning of the suffering?
Thermodynamic cycles and predator-prey relationships can’t answer those kinds of questions. But the land generates these facts of emotion. It is the job of spirituality to seek some meaning for these emotional truths.
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 secured my realization that failure happens all the time on the land. I couldn’t maintain my old, urbanized habit of looking to the land as a way of transcending suffering. The spiritual work of finding the meaning in suffering could not take the form of believing that suffering is escapable. Instead, the spiritual challenge of finding meaning in suffering got even harder for me, on the land.
Farming in those first years was difficult; I wasn’t good at it, and we didn’t have much money. So I suffered, too. When a 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 full comprehension of ‘joining the land’ 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 pain and failures into the land.
I realized that there was no place excluding pain and loss. I realized that the beauty and splendor of the land, which had drawn me from my urban life, was built as much upon failure and hurt as it was upon success and joy. The spiritual journey couldn’t be a journey to a place without suffering, physical or psychological. Farming showed 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. 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
When I say that the land displays a way of meaning, when I say further that the sufferings of the creatures contributes to that meaning, I am pointing to an order of life that now requires some description. How does the land display a way of meaning? How does suffering contribute toward it?
What answers I have to offer, result not from some removed perspective, but instead arise from a selfhood so steeped in the land that the land lives within me and I within it.
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. 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 constant, perpetual revelation. Beauty, meaning, a reason for living – answers are there, in the land.
Another witness to the land, the great Aldo Leopold, saw exactly how the land creates meaning. He calls for “reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free” (foreward). The land creates meaning because the land is wild. Wildness expresses the community character of the land. Wildness is what I mean when I say ‘the land.’ Wildness makes all life meaningful, including human life.
Aldo Leopold writes 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, biotic community, ecosystem, community ecology, leave me flat. The concepts behind these terms do explain things that I see on the land, but these concepts miss the full reality of the land. Like many scientific concepts, they capture best the mechanical elements of a system. The land is a mechanical system, too, in part. But in full, any description of the land must include the psychic, the emotional experiences of the living things which together weave the land’s full nature. What are the feelings? How does the land feel?
Witnesses answer such questions. Witnesses answer such questions because you cannot observe feelings to know them. Instead, you must participate in the feelings of others, if you wish to know the feelings of others. Empathy replaces observation. Witnesses do not observe; they take the situation into themselves. They embrace the reality. They love.
Religious Teachings of the Land
It feels wild, it feels poignant, to live with the land. And the land itself, to me, feels ecstatic, enthused, ruthless. The land does not exist to endorse human effort. I am a farmer. I have experienced how the land responds to human effort. It disciplines that effort, demands of that effort a care for other living things.
Just recently, we had a frost in late May. We always do, during the time when the strawberries blossom. Frost is capricious. 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 were not enough weeds in my strawberries that 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 after all.
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.
I know the land as one who lives within it; what I have is intimate knowledge. I understand the delicacy of the strawberry blossom, I know the toughness of the plant itself. I sense the topography of the field, and how the frost will settle. I respect the frost and the weather system supporting it. With this comprehension, I have sought to husband my strawberries, to support their efforts to live so that I might live, too.
Success upon the land demands intimacy with the land. I love farming so much, and one reason why is the way the land pushes me, over and over again, to build whatever success I may have upon my doing the work of intimacy. For a living, I am called by this vast and beautiful living system to love better and better, to care more and more, to embrace the full reality ever more deeply. So when the late May frost comes each year, I grumble down the hill to pull the plantain and install the irrigation, but I grumble as does a child called to Mass, to receive the message that I must love more broadly, more deeply.
There is a religion out there, in the strawberries blossoms. It is there in the spring tilled soil, and the rows of blue-green broccoli, and in the drifts of winter snow.[J1] We are called by the land to take up the work of love. Whatever success we will enjoy as a species upon the Earth, the measure of our love toward the land will be the measure of our success.
This work of love, the land tells the farmer what it is. It is intimacy. It is to take the character of the world around us, and to bring it into ourselves and to make it live, too, inside of who we are. To live upon the land, the land must live within us. The land calls us to embrace reality, all of it.
When I say ‘reality,’ I include the land, but also the whole of the Earth, the stars and galaxies. The term encompasses that vast portion of existence neither controlled nor particularly influenced by human interests. This cosmic portion can feel remote. As a farmer, I have rarely consulted the stars to decide how lovingly to grow food. For most practical purposes, to speak of ‘reality’ is to speak of the land. The land is its own thing. Every human being should spend regular time upon the land, to remember that ‘humanity’ is only a part, a dependent part, of a vast and living community moved by its own purposes.
My strawberry story teaches that the land calls us to respond to the world in love. When we love, we achieve intimacy, and our loving intentions acquire the skill needed to achieve those intentions effectively. But the land also brings this note of vastness with it. The night I watered the strawberries, the sky was clear, and I saw the stars clearly. However remote the stars may be to my farming purposes, they are not remote to the land. The darkened landscape spread beneath them; the stars became jewels set into a blanket of velvet, and within this blanket slept Earth itself. She lay down with the stars. I sat in those blossoms, the sprinklers clanging softly, and I saw Earth and stars together. I thought of Actaeon, worryingly.
The image of Actaeon returns this essay to the topic of suffering. When I stood dripping wet among my fragile strawberry blossoms, watching the land and stars connect, I had no doubt that meaning exists in the world. The world fills itself with an overabundance of meaning: the meaning of my crop, the meaning of the water dripping, the meaning of land and stars. A walk through a summer night’s farm field will cure nihilism.
But the abundance of meanings, the din of purposes in heaven and on earth, warn me that the work of meaning is a painful work. The abundance of purposes means conflict of purposes. Where there is so much hope, so much desire, there must also be so much failure and pain. The land offers no escape from suffering.
The great Buddha identified suffering as the single religious problem. He offered nirvana as an escape from suffering, an escape achieved through attachment-free loving. Jesus recognized the spiritual challenge suffering presented, too, and he offered the reward of heaven for those who suffered in love upon the earth. The land also teaches love, as the strawberries taught me. The land also teaches a spiritual message about suffering, but one in sharp contrast to the traditions of the East and West, broadly speaking.
The land calls us to love by seeking intimacy with everything we encounter. Given the multitude of desires moving restlessly upon the land, the skill of intimacy is neither a path to transcendence nor a process orchestrating harmony on earth. The wildness of the land throws out heaven and utopia.
Instead, the land embraces suffering, too, and makes meaning out of the presence of suffering rather than the absence of it. 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. We humans must earn this meaning, yes, but we earn it by paying attention and finding it. The land creates meaning, and we humans find it.
Farmers witness the creation of this meaning. For farmers, the meaning is perhaps easier to find. I don’t get the benefits of the standard ‘career track’: promotions, security, status, wealth. But I do get the perpetual revelation of religious truth, right outside my front door. I do believe that religious truth exists everywhere, including giant office spaces. But on the farm, the perpetual disclosure of spiritual knowledge is obvious. Almost every morning in June begins with dew, and the hot morning sunlight shatters itself within each dewdrop, so that the land glows like a golden mist. I can see the young spiders eating their prey, silhouetted against the warm gold. There is life, there is death, woven together in the wild beauty of the land.
To see how the land gathers the sufferings of life into its meaning, you must witness a year upon the land at least. The land moves in time as well as in space. My home ecosystem is the old savanna prairie of the southern watershed of the Wisconsin River. The cycle of the seasons in this ecosystem includes cold winters. To understand the land’s religious message, a witness to the land must experience the way winter configures the meaning of life and growth.
There is always the first cold day, the warning day, the day reminding the tomatoes, 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, 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 signaling summer’s hospitality. I discover how much the chalky blue sky of a hot summer day conditions the summer’s greenness. On this first cold day, when scuddy clouds filled the sky, all blues and greys and whites, I couldn’t find that summer green. The wonderful tang of tomato scent smelled wrong, seemed past. The land warned me, too, of the death to come.
[J2] Watching the low, grey mass of clouds move swiftly overhead, I felt a beauty emerge from the whole scene. The tomatoes rattled in the wind, disturbed. In the distance I saw 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 pierced the ragged clouds and alighted upon my fall broccoli, as if to investigate. The broccoli glowed suddenly, all green and blue in mostly straight lines. Broccoli loves this kind of weather; it was glad for the end of the heat stress of summer. Behind my view of the broccoli, in the far distance, other light shafts danced in the pasture grass, and the wind rolled atop the grass unevenly. The summertime was gone from the land, and a more wintery beauty had taken its place, a beauty less about life and growth and more about topography, light and sky.
There was energy in this cold landscape, life and feelings. There was purpose, 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. The energy of winter seems alien to me. 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.
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 community 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.
So on these first cold days, I confront the conflict of purposes. Desire fills the Earth, in space and in time. This erotic energy works less like an orchestra, planned and harmonized, and much more like a raucous, squawking flock of farm chickens with a raccoon added for good measure. There is a lot of freedom, and not a lot of order. The coming of winter shows that the conflict of purposes is built into the nature of things. Existence and suffering go together. To make the point more philosophically clear, suffering is a necessary predicate of existence.
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.
The relative hospitableness of summer can seduce a farmer. She may conclude that her clever efforts secured the season’s bounty.
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 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. What I have seen is not merely ‘ecological processes,’ but the revelation of religious truth. Suffering is inescapable, suffering is meaningful, suffering creates beauty.
When winter comes and kills off every green thing, the whole story of a summer’s efforts – my efforts, the tomatoes’ efforts, the efforts of every living thing – ends. Winter terminates the summer season with a relentless efficiency and imposes upon the dying summer landscape her own yearnings. The snow covers the story and, in the spring, that story is long gone. Each March the snow melts around the 20th, and I walk my muddy pathways to visit the brittled skeletons of the last broccoli crop, the last kale crop. Destroyed winter squash fruit appear from the decayed vines. Ah, that I had missed that larger butternut, hidden under the dark green leaves! Oh, that it froze and died, unnoticed!
There is beauty here; everything is dead, but nothing forgotten. Remembering on the farmer’s part becomes an act of love, a gathering of the winter death into a meaningful story about growth and harvest. Later, the dead crop remains will compost and re-join the soil. Decomposition is an act of love, too, a gathering of the winter death into new life. Suffering and death adds to the beauty. It is not right, the land says, to escape suffering. We are called by the cycle of winter and summer to embrace the full reality of both. The meaning of things is the contribution they make to the splendor of the land. The sufferings which winter brings, adds as much of a contribution to the land’s beauty, as does the joyful re-awaking of life in the strengthening sun of April.
Do not think that the play of joy and suffering neatly corresponds to the cycle of the seasons. When I as a farmer speak of the perpetual revelation of religious truth within the land, I mean perpetual in space and time. A glorious summer day can remind a farmer of this lesson, if she did not quite get it during the snow season. There is no escape from spiritual work, upon the land. The farmer remains an acolyte always.
We are all acolytes. Religion is not an answer, anymore than physics is an answer, or anthropology is an answer. Like the other arts and sciences, religion is a question. It is spiritual science, framing hypotheses, searching for results. It is movement in space and time, “with wand’ring steps, and slow.” The land moves always, filled with many desires, and we humans move with it, with our human desires. The farmer bears witness to these many movements. What is the emotional tone of our distinctive human journey within the land, the spiritual journey, the desire for meaning?
STOP HERE
Once on a glorious day in June, hard rain fell in the afternoon. 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.’ The soil had been so compacted by the hard rain that it almost reflected the light. The shine of the compaction gave the soil a glowing quality, highlighting the sense of its living nature. The compaction is very bad; I lost all of my newly seeded carrots. But it was beautiful.
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 return to a term I introduced at the beginning of this essay: 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. I introduced the term before, I offered the concept of it, but now I can tell you how wildness feels.
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.
Where there is so much life, so much desire, there must also be great incompatibility of purposes. My tomato crop produces billions of seeds, literally, and my customers and I eat every one. For the tomatoes, it is a reproductive failure of massive proportions. The land is filled with purposes; many conflict with the goals of my farming. I fail, I suffer. Failure and suffering are built into the nature of things. Wildness expresses the spontaneous expression of joy and suffering upon the land; wildness is the reality of the land.
Wildness brings a religious message. How could it not? We do religious work when we ask about the meaning of things. It is a fact that the rain once destroyed a portion of my pepper crop; what is the meaning of this destruction? What I wanted so much, the day my family and I sat there and watched our pepper seedlings wash away in a great rainstorm, was to know that our efforts, the pepper’s efforts, were not wasted, not lost, not reduced to nothingness. I wanted to know that the life and hopes we all poured into that field, contributed somehow to something. When, later in the season, lovely yellow mustard flowers blossomed in the rotting heap of the long-dead pepper seedlings, the land told me that our failures had contributed to the beauty of the land itself.
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] .
There is a poignancy to the land because it gathers up the suffering and the joy together. This is wildness. I said I would tell, what is the feeling of wildness? It is poignancy.
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. In this feeling of poignancy, I also experience security in the worth of my actions. The wild land redeems me.
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 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.
Leopold’s magnificent Sand County Almanac expresses the effort of one witness of the land to describe this ‘psychic, emotional’ aspect of the land. He labels this aspect ‘wildness,’ as do I. Unless we humans acknowledge it, the land becomes a machine for human civilization to manipulate. We now manipulate it rather poorly; we could manipulate it better. But I stand as a witness and say, we must not manipulate it at all.
We must return to it, rejoin it. We must immerse ourselves, in the land. It is our home. It is not right to imagine human civilization encompassing the land, and preserving ‘wilderness’ areas. Wildness is not a term bounded by the best ideals of human civilization. Wildness is the character of reality, from which human civilization takes inspiration. Here on the Earth, the land must encompass human civilization, giving humanity meaning and discipline.
We are called to embrace reality. We must allow it to express itself, on the land, on our home planet. The land is a message from the cosmos, reminding humanity of the boundlessness of things.