Putting Down Roots

It’s a dreary day: still, the grays and browns of winter dominate our Midwest landscape. It’s nearly time to plant cool-season vegetables, and I’m scheming at how best to make use of the bits of soil we have at our house. The goal this year is to use what we have here at the house and take really good care of it; granted last year’s experience, I don’t think that, as much as my housemates travel, it’s reasonable to expect to take really good care of two gardens.

In addition to plotting (and re-plotting, and re-plotting again) our garden, I’m amping up for the growing season by tackling another tome of Wendell Berry’s essays. This time it’s Home Economics I’m keeping tucked in my bag at all times. Again, I’m finding it uncanny how the writings of this man manage to tack down so many of the discontents that swim in my heart about our culture, and yet put them in a greater perspective than I myself can muster, being just a young pup compared to this prophetic grandpa to all of us budding conservationist agriculturists.

“Property, Patriotism, and National Defense” caught me off guard. It’s mostly a well-reasoned rant against nuclear war. Like a lot of people in our generation, I’m ignorant about this issue and don’t know its ins and outs. Berry, ever able to see through the flimsy reasoning of our society, hacks at the cause of nukes like it’s a shoddily-constructed piñata. I read with a bit of a grimace and a hint of nausea as disillusionment with our culture comes and knocks at my door.

On the other hand, he also presents his own ideal of national defense. Come to find out, Mr. Berry is strongly for certain things even more than he is against nuclear weapons. I respect that. Doesn’t this sound good?

“…Widespread, settled, thriving local communities, each having a proper degree of independence, living so far as possible from local sources, and using its local sources with a stewardly care that would sustain its life indefinitely, even through times of adversity.”

He’s constantly asking questions that make the reader think about locality: do we know the place we live in? Do we know its physical landscape, its cultural heritage? Do we care for the land, culture and community of our home? Are we staying for a lifetime, for a committed season, or are we just stopping in? Clearly he’s a man in favor of staying put, not just passively hanging out in a place, but actively working towards its maintenance, health, and betterment.

The benefits of staying put and cultivating relationship where one lives are many. Indeed, how can we relate with others without enjoying common history, common life, common space?* Without the practical ways of caring for one another that living together necessitates, can we truly love one another?

This is the time of year when people our age plan summer trips, get accepted to grad school programs, finish school and leave the city. But for workers of the land, it’s a time to put down roots. While my friends are looking at traveling or moving, I’m looking at a few months of getting to know my back yard really intimately, shepherding a flock of vegetables, and bringing people into the process. It can feel boring in this swirl of youth culture in which travel is like a status symbol. How good to be able to have a wider perspective, thanks to a man who’s been watching the long shifts of our culture for a whole, long life. I’m grateful to Mr. Berry for the reminder that living in the land and cultivating faithfulness** does indeed lay a deep foundation for peace.

*See “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground” for more on this concept.
**Psalm 37

Death Swallowed Up

A week ago, my friend Dawn died. She was a campus minister at KU, a dear friend of two of my dear friends and a role model for years. In fact, she lived with my mentor-figure-turned-friend, Naomi, at the house that first enticed me into living in community with the beauty of their relationships.

Dawn was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a disease of the lungs that tends to take people’s lives before the age of 25. All the time I knew her, she struggled with breathing, and had to spend a good hour a day strapped into this machine that would shake loose the mucus in her lungs. But this wasn’t what defined her. Dawn was a daughter of the Lord, confident in him in spite of the many, many prayers for healing that seemingly went unheard. With broken young women, she showed deep compassion; with her friends she was frankly wise and sassy. She had the deep love of her husband, Austin, and loved him well in return.

There’s not a lot you can say or do in the face of the years in and years out suffering of a young woman; there’s even less you can say about her death. Surely, all of us who sat at her memorial service yesterday afternoon, watching a slideshow of pictures from her life, were wondering on some level how it is that a good God lets good people die. It’s the same question I asked several years back when I lost my 54-year-old mom to cancer, and a version of the deep ache I felt as I lost my three remaining grandparents the last year and a half. Death, death, death, sorrow and pain. Why death? What do we do with it?

The timing of Dawn’s passing in my life is interesting. The Boiler Room as a whole is experiencing a great move of Joy, and learning what and why that is. On a personal level, I’ve been more joyful in the last few months than maybe my whole life combined. This joy isn’t simply happiness, an ignorance or an ignoring of the difficulties of life. Instead, it’s a perspective that there is something above hardships that is and will be overcoming them, transcending them.

Often, these days, as I worship God in song, I also worship him by imagining him, Jesus, at the right hand of God, in an unimaginable heaven. He’s a man who knew suffering as well as any other man—better than most, it’d be fair to wager—and died a torturous death. But he’s free of death! He’s not bent over, as I am, sobbing his guts out, hopeless and despairing. He’s joyful, because though he sees death and the package of pain and grief that comes with it, he sees equally, below him in the stretch of eternity, life that includes no death and no tears, life as he intended it from the beginning.

As I mingled with old friends after the memorial service, someone said to me, “You know, so many people here were looking at Dawn’s beautiful life, and asking why bad things happen to good people. But Dawn answered that question with her life.” In Christ, Dawn conquered Death. She was not squelched by it; it did not take life away even though she physically stopped living.

In the book of Hosea, God says this to Israel: “I will deliver this people from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction?” Though Dawn leaves in her wake a bunch of really sad people who will be in a painful process of learning to live without her, there’s a substantial hope, tangible in the midst of this. I can feel it, different from the other deaths I’ve experienced in my life. We’re so sad she’s not with us, but we know whom she’s with. Dawn is redeemed from death, and in that, so are we.

Bread and Glitter article

I will be writing now and again for the KCBR arts journal, Bread and Glitter. It's a really wonderful exploration for our little family into the intersections between art, theology, and community. My first article for them, which is a combination and extension of several of my blogs about gardening, went up this week. It's called "Rotten Good Soil." You can read it here, and give B&G some lovin'.

That's amore? Woah.

Sometimes these days, it feels like I’ve been swept into a whirlwind. Days are swirling by, leaving a trail of debris on my heart.

There are lots of ways to say “change.” There’s the mild “modification,” mechanical “adjustment” or “remodeling,” clerical “amendment.” None of these describes what’s happening here and now in the middle of this glorious storm; what I’m marveling is not beige and nor is it of my own doing like a mark in a ledger or a shift in a schedule. This thing is forcefully mysterious, like a rip tide.

So what’s got me disheveled with a grin on my face? I’m knowing love, my friends. No, there’s not some dude I’m gaga over. I’m googly-eyed over a family and shocked to find myself in a tailor-made little spot in the middle of it all.

This is a shock because, while my natural family never withheld the expression of love, somewhere, I came to believe I was not right for anyone, not good enough, not worthy of esteem. According to my own estimation, my quiet disposition disqualified me from attention, my simple gifts were less valuable than those of others, and my fierce affection for others scared them off. And I began to say “no” to who I am.

There hasn’t been a single moment of shifting; instead it truly has been like being in the middle of a force of nature, with multiple things in flux at any given moment, nothing in its rightful place. Then, things come to rest, and I realize I know something new in the very center of me.

I know that to accept the identity God has given me means that I accept some limitations. I can’t be everything. It’s ok to not be everything. Geez, thank goodness! Something in that understanding broke a heavy burden on me, and gave me permission to receive what the Lord gave me long ago and to be who I am. I read this and think, “Well yeah, duh!” but there’s sure as hell a difference between knowing that in your head and believing it in your heart. To be able do the latter is a gift, a rare treasure.

So that’s really floaty and abstract. The way it plays out is with people. For the last four months I’ve been in consistent relationship with two groups of people: one, a group of learning leaders we refer to as the Collaborative. The other is my house church, primarily made up of artists and art students. In both of these groups, I’ve been challenged to expose myself, to risk loving other people in words and deeds. I sincerely thought, in my inmost being, that I would be ignored, rejected, or found a failure. How can it be that for years I have lived under that assumption?

The actual reaction has been the opposite.

Heroes have hugged me tight. Beautiful men of amazing character have told me they love me. Culinary geniuses have fed me with love. Busy pastors have listened to me and prayed for me. Brilliant artists have treasured my likeness with their pencils. It’s baffling, undoing, and altogether good. Because I do the same, with all joy.

It’s a marvelous exchange, a righteous reciprocation the likes of which I never dreamed. And yet, here I am, upside down in the middle of it.

Oh, just a sappy garden recap...

It’s a crispy-cold Friday morning, clear and sunny, and I am sitting here in my room staring out my window. Just recently, the trees out there were full of brilliant green leaves, their heavy branches ceremoniously waving in the wind. Now, lots of the leaves are gone, while others are faded greens or golds, or the color of rust. Again, the apartment building down the street is visible, reminding me of my placement right in urban Kansas City.

I’m wearing my coat and drinking a hot cup of coffee, because we can’t get our heat to turn on. It’s a strange reminder of the shifting season as I reflect with the Lord who has been with me this last 8 months, who has stirred my imagination, pricked my conscience, and developed friendships in the arena of gardening. Any day now, we’ll have a hard frost, and the garden will be officially over for the season. I feel a funny sort of grief about that, not too dramatic, but noticeable nonetheless. At the same time, I anticipate the “OVER;” I am longing to turn the page, to declare it “GOOD,” as the Lord did his work on the first day, before moving onto something even more fruitful.

Can we flip back through the pages first, though?

There was a dream in my heart to have a garden. I suppose it goes back to some dreary afternoon when I was little (and again, last year, when I was big), as I read stories like the Secret Garden, which painted gardens as hidden places of wonder and life and uncanny communion with beasts.

In late winter of this year, then, I asked our landlords if I could till up some of their spacious and then uncared-for yard. Since we already had a modest garden plot in our own backyard, my intention was simply to learn and to make use of something that had no function. I didn’t really expect they would say yes, but they did, and offered a sizable chunk of their space for our use, and granted us access to their home—and therefore their two surly adolescent boys, four darling little girls, an anxious German shepherd, and a formidable but dopey mastiff.

Come March, we started working the soil…which we discovered was healthy but littered with stones and bricks and other more interesting objects from a 16-plex which had been razed there years ago. In spite of the fact that I spent hours and hours digging stuff out, I was energized and happy, even drawing a sunshine with a happy face in my journal to illustrate my joie de vivre. The most beautiful thing about this phase was that, as I worked (sometimes with my roommate Dana, sometimes with other good friends who came along for the ride), I talked with God, and he spoke. There were sweet moments of hearing his sorrow and hopes over the neighborhood in which the garden is situated, and the people that walk by, or watch from the run-down apartments next door with lots of windows knocked out. My friend the Holy Spirit and me started to dream together about teaching people how to grow food on unused land, how to cook it, eat well, and enjoy others in the process.

Fencing was donated and put into place, seeds were bought, a hose was extended out to the plot, and then it was time to plant. What simplicity! At the right time and when the soil was not too wet, I planted flowers, beans, squash, and melons. You poke a couple of holes in the soil, you put a seed inside and cover it up, you water it gently for a while, and—bada boom!—you’ve got yourself some seedlings! It was a process so simple it made me uncomfortable. Would anything really grow? With each planting, I blessed the seeds like children, “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may he make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.” Yet, at the same time, I told God it would be ok if nothing really grew, that the experience in itself would be fruit enough.

But to my joy, some plants poked their heads out of the ground; most survived and grew. There was a period of waiting, and of faithful tending—weeding, mulching, watering, thinning. In spite of two incredibly needy dogs, both of whom could kill me if they wanted, the times in the garden were mostly lovely and enchanting. I loved discovering what shapes the leaves took as they formed, how fuzzy the vines were on the squash plants, and the way the female melon flowers swelled into fruit like pregnant bellies.

Then there was fruit! Flowers! Vegetables! Beautiful beans, vibrant muskmelon, scary giant zucchini, and lovely summer squash. The zinnias blazed in color against the back stone wall. I came to understand that there’s nothing like picking something you grew, bringing it back to your kitchen, and enjoying it right away. As I’m not yet a parent, it might be one of the more fulfilling experiences I’ve had. If that sounds silly to you, grow a few things next year and you might change your mind.

I’m sad to say that the early summer was the apex of the experience and that things went gradually downhill from there. My zucchini, poor things, were brutally attacked by bugs. First it was teeny tiny aphids, and then some big old beetles. I let them conquer the plants, first one and then the other. Then they went after the summer squash, a truly beautiful delight of a plant that I was sad to see go down. I mysteriously lost a couple of muskmelon plants, while in the meantime, the watermelon grew slowly, and then ripened without me realizing it and were inedible. I only got two good ones off that plant, both in October!

My visits have become scarcer since summer closed. I’m largely deterred by the dogs, who, hungry for attention, swarm about forcefully and grasp at my attention in scary ways. They’ve made the little garden patch their domain, and I’ve resigned myself to it, resolving that if I have a plot there next year, there will be adequate fencing, in spite of possible cost. Luckily, what I have planted pretty well takes care of itself. There are turnips and rutabaga and cabbages growing still, while the butternut squash whose mother vines have not perished are still ripening until we get a hard freeze. Some of them are fighting hard against pests, but I don’t think that can be helped, as the rest of the vegetation in the yard was poisoned off in late summer and they have nowhere else to go.

And so it winds down, and my little plot and me prepare ourselves for the repose of winter. Though I used to hate this gray, barren season, I may indeed relish the chance to recoup, to reformulate my process and gather materials.

What I know right now is that it has been a good beginning. A foundation has been laid. Next year’s gardens(s?) will certainly not look the same, but I have no shame, no fear. I’m deeply grateful for the wonderful gift that was my secret garden.

Captivated by Rot

Last summer I was thinking about the parable of the 4 soils, found in Matthew 13. It makes clear that God’s word is not readily acceptable to everyone all the time, but instead can only be received by those with the right “soil.” Understanding, then, that I could receive God’s word only if my heart were of the right conditions, I began to pray that it would be so.

A year later, I had become a gardener. I had spent months learning the pillars of wisdom for caring for plants and putting them into practice. One of these pillars—perhaps the most important, in fact—is the soil. The state of the soil will determine the ability of seeds to sprout, the depth to which their roots can grow, and the amount of nutrients available to help them grow strong. Healthy soil should be dark, meaning it is nutrient-rich; it should be loose but not sandy so as to let the right amount of water pass through.

One of the things that surprised me as I learned about soil is that it can be improved, changed, built. It’s not something that happens instantaneously, but it can be done. Where there are rocks and weeds, they can be removed with some labor. Harder to change is what is called the structure of the soil. This is, essentially, like it sounds; it refers to what makes up the soil and how much space is between its parts. The trick to obtaining healthy soil structure is to add organic matter. That’s fancy-speak for dead stuff: dead leaves, dead grass, manures, and rotted-down plants or food all will do the trick. A letter-writer named W.C. quoted in Wendell Berry’s book The Unsettling of America sums it up nicely: “Yes, rot is the word. Rot means death, and without death and rot there can be no new life.”

Somehow, in the context of nature—gardens, forests, oceans—the idea of death turning to life makes good sense. Nothing is wasted that is in the cycle of nature, because death really does feed life. The rind of my butternut squash and the cores of the boxful of apples will rot all year in a pile. They’ll begin as nice, everyday versions of scraps, but soon turn into slimy, smelly versions of themselves. From there they will rot until they’re no longer recognizable, but have all broken down into a bunch of near-black bits. And then, they’ll be turned into the soil of the garden and make food and space for the broccoli or tomatoes that will grow there, which will eventually feed me, my roommates, our friends, and strangers.

A few nights ago I was lying in bed, lights out, having just read a journal entry from a few months after my mom had passed away four years ago. I think I was thanking God for the ways that he has used that grief and hardship in the years since. Then, in a moment, something clicked into place, and I understood that the truth of good soil in the physical is truth in the heart, too. I began to remember different kinds of death that have, in their way, rotted and stunk, and slowly disintegrated into the substance of my past. Those things have made my character what it is now.

And I laughed out loud, lying in bed in the dark, because I realized that the decisions that are so difficult today, and the ways that I am laying down things that I want because God is asking me to, are building really good soil in my heart. As the years go by, as I continue to make sacrifices, I will become of rich and meaty character like the best of soils, and the things that God speaks to me will grow strong and mighty because I receive them. There is no need to worry, then, because what he plants is good.

Putting a trend to the test

To those who are in tune with current trends in our culture, it’s not much of a surprise to hear that we are interested in local and organic food, in making things from scratch, and in all manner of time-sucking interests and practices that were, for the most part, not taught to us when we were children. Examples are many and readily available: the surge of interest in “artisanal” ice cream, the addition of the nearly meaningless term “natural” on food containers, and the commonality of the reusable shopping bag.

Although I’ve been distinctly inclined to the from-scratch mentality since I started shopping for my own groceries as a sophomore in college, part of me has hesitated to fully throw myself into my relatively new interest in gardening because I fear that I am being unduly influenced by a trend. Let’s face it: I have enough trouble embracing fashion fads, which are of relatively low cost in money or time. So putting oodles of time and money and heart into something that’s going to pass soon, which I’ll look back on with pity for my impressionability, is not something I want to do.

Nonetheless, at each new step of involvement in this vein of things, I discover in myself new passion, the kind of which I had nearly thought myself incapable. Yet, I am finding that I hold convictions of absolute good and bad, beneficial and harmful, when it comes to the mainstream modern lifestyle, especially as it pertains to food and land production. I’m not usually a super-opinionated person, so this has been interesting. But then, everything about this complex of living holistically (gardening for food, food from scratch, community and physical health in it all) keeps on making sense.

About a month ago, I decided to resign myself to the fact that I really care about this stuff and start truly learning about it—not just in the current, trendy practices, but also in its history and deeper ramifications on our society. To begin my education, I turned to Wendell Berry, a fellow completely unknown to me just months ago. I discovered him not in the form of his many zealous essays, but in a thin tome of poetry called Sabbaths, which are the reflections of Mr. Berry as a farmer, thinker, and writer, on Sabbath days over the course of several years. I was captivated by these poems because they reflected the things that I love about nature, wild and tamed.

Poems are a bit ethereal, though, and so after finishing the volume, I ordered the first book of essays Mr. Berry wrote about agriculture, entitled The Unsettling of America. Thus far (I’m about half-way through it), the book focuses largely on the shifts in agricultural practices and policies in the first three quarters of the twentieth century (it was published in 1977). Reading this book has been a bit uncanny; it’s one of those rare scenarios where you read something and you find that it at once articulates beliefs you hold but have never expressed, and fills in the gaps of your own knowledge of the causes and effects of these beliefs.

Some friends and me have been learning, over the summer, about the power of questions. “Questions,” said my friend Linnea, “are creative.” We find that, as we learn to look carefully at our lives and our culture, we can ask how and why things are as they are. Why did we grow up in suburban homes, eating (in my case) meals out of boxes and bags? How did farming become so big-business? What are the effects of that on our everyday lives, the way we live, our health? Have these things been beneficial to us?

It’s a scary thing to question, to make a habit of questioning. I’m only beginning to learn. And yet it has beautiful gifts to offer. When I question, I find out what I believe, what I know, and what I don’t know. Laying down the prideful assumption that I know it all or even can discover all, I learn to see things that before were invisible to me. I also become more comfortable with mystery. Guided by questions, life can be more intentional, and hence more impacting, because as questions are raised, and answers are found or attempted, new paths can be forged into uncharted territory.

So it is that I’m beginning to ask questions about land, food, health, and communities. Maybe it’s the asking of the questions that can distinguish a fad-follower from a true believer.