But life happens, and that trip didn’t. So I’ve asked a
friend who’s attending to post here next week with his own highlights and
reflections.
In the meantime, I spend my days trying to imagine wholeness.
Have you ever seen a gardener, standing still at the edge of
a garden, eyes slightly closed, head slightly tilted, just looking, listening,
not moving at all?
It’s that moment of imaging: seeing what’s there, picturing
what’s not. Wondering how to get there.
My back yard is the test plot on this: manageably small
(exactly half an acre), wonderfully quiet. At the moment, lush and green. I
wander through my stepping stone path, linger on my mossy trail, enjoying what’s
there, imaging the next step toward the vision in my mind.
When we moved here 16 years ago, the squirrels ran around
the edge of the yard on the old rail fence rather than walk through the toxic
grass. The previous owners had been so intent on growing lawn in places it
didn’t want to grow, they had doused the ground with chemicals. It took years to
get the birds to move back in.
But I’ve imagined a place where birds would want to live,
and here they are: house wrens, chipping sparrows, nuthatch, chickadees. This
summer a flicker family drilled a hole in a locust. A pair of downies flits
back and forth from suet to trees, and back again. An archway path festooned
with honeysuckle has brought hummingbirds, regularly, whirring near my head.
Even so the world intrudes. A natural gas pipeline through
the center of the yard reminds me: I live in Pennsylvania , tied to a grid that leads in
every direction. That line ties to a larger line. In one direction are the
fracking wells of shale country, not far away. In the other, refineries, gray
fog rising over them most hours of the day. My imagination knows they’re there.
But wholeness? I can’t quite see it.
A larger canvas for my imagination: a place called Exton Park New
York ironweed.
Last Saturday I took part in Make a Difference Day: a
morning of work grubbing vines and roots from the side of a berm, then helping
organize volunteers to plant native grasses, reeds and forbs. It was my kind of
morning: teen boys from nearby Church
Farm School
By the next morning I had poison ivy on both arms, and my
face was starting to puff. Apparently, I’m part of the 30 to 35% of the
population that’s “highly sensitive” to our industrious native vine. So I spent
the morning in a nearby Minute Clinic, and I’ve spent the week itching,
fighting the side-effects of prednisone, and reminding myself how much I love
envisioning Exton
Park
But the call to imagine goes far beyond my yard or local
park.
For the last year and a half I’ve been involved in promoting
and taking part in a national study on food and farming. I opened my mouth at a
League of Women Voter’s planning meeting, and found myself leading a committee, then a caucus at a national convention, now serving on a national committee that sends me reeling down rabbit
holes to ferret out information about corn subsidies, neonicotinoids ,
pesticide overload, industry-driven public policy.
This past week I had two deadlines: a third draft on genetic engineering, a first draft on
factory farming. Do you want to know what’s in animal feed? The financial
pressures forcing small farms off the planet? The abuse of workers, farmers,
animals, water, land that are part of our quest for ever cheaper, more
convenient food?
Ah. Maybe not.
I don’t want to know either.
Yet, knowing is the first step toward grieving.
And grieving, according to Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament
scholar and student of the prophets, is the first step toward imagining the
new.
As my son wrote in a guet post last week, this world around us is a
reflection of who we are, the choices we’ve made. The values we’ve held dear.
What I see gives me pause, and leads me toward repentence.
So I dig deeper into the studies, the reports. The testimony
of small farmers to the Department of Justice, about coercive contracts,
disappearing markets, tightening consolidation. The carefully worded scientific
conclusions about what happens to bees, soil, rats, hogs, people, when we play
with things we don’t quite understand.
And I grieve.
Yesterday I walked into a local food store – a place I go
often – and found myself staring at the shelves and shelves of food. Mostly bad
food. Full of corn syrup, carrageenan, other things I no longer want to eat.
Over-processed, over-packaged, dusty boxes. To me, they looked like death.
So I grieve. Repent of my own collusion in fast, cheap, easy
imitation food.
And imagine wholeness.
Here’s what it looks like, to me, today:
 |
| SpringWood solar chicken house |
The beautiful, green, inviting pasture.
He showed slides of his chickens and their chicken tractors:
little hoop houses on wheels he moves from field to field.
It wasn’t that long ago – forty years? maybe fify? – that
almost all our food came from lovely places like SpringWood Farm.
Real food – brightly colored peppers, iron-rich dark greens,
eggs with yolks so yellow they looked like melted gold.
I came home from that conference last winter with my head
spinning. I’d heard a discussion about “complex, chronic environmental
exposures,” and the invisible nanomaterials already in our food supply.
I’d sat through sessions about new food safety regulations –
and how they cater to the industry model, burden the small scale farmer, and
leave our food no safer.
And I wondered: how far away is SpringWood Farm?
One of my daughters had been challenging me to join a local
CSA – a Community Supported Agriculture program. The one she had in mind:
Wimer’s Organics. A Lancaster
farm that delivers in our county.
I checked, and found they also deliver eggs: farm fresh
eggs. From SpringWood Farm.
So, yes, we joined Wilmer’s Organics CSA.
And ordered a weekly dozen eggs.
Every week I show up to a porch in the next town over, leave
last week’s empty box, pick up this week’s box of lovely color. And my carton of beautiful eggs from SpringWood Farm.
Yes. It does.
More than a big Mac. Or a box of mac and cheese.
More than a Coke. Or an order of fries.
But every penny goes to the farmer, supporting his vision of
a healthy, wholesome food supply.
Unlike the dollars I spend at the store down the street,
where only pennies on the dollar go to a farmer, pennies go to underpaid farm
workers, and the larger share goes to advertising, packaging, transportation,
and the corporate powers that propel us toward an ever-more abusive global food
system.
I’m still learning what I can about how to advocate for
wholeness. How to stand up for local farmers, how to speak back to the ideathat industrial farming is inevitable, the only way to feed a hungry world.
In the meantime, I’m pulling weeds, planting reeds, sauteing
and grilling vegetables I still can’t name.
And imaging a world where beauty, health, wisdom, wholeness are more than ideas we see with our eyes closed, but part of the daily fabric of our lives.
As always, your thoughts, comments, questions are welcome.
This post is part
of an ongoing series on God's Green Equity.
Earlier posts on the same
topic:
As always, your thoughts, comments, questions are welcome.
