Big O, little o, what begins with O? (Part I)

On the front cover of the most recent issue of the Canadian Organic Grower is a photograph that fascinates me: two Milking Shorthorn oxen standing in yoke. Somehow, they are the picture of both humility and of tremendous power, all in one: Their heads lowered, their shoulders massive, their horns straight ahead, obediently bearing the burden their teamster has laid on them. They could gore him with a single flick of the head; instead, they quietly work his field.

This image, and the accompanying article, speak to me of a parallel tension in the organic food movement, a tension between the way of power and the way of humility. Oxen, as the article makes clear in the first sentence, represent a radically downscaling approach: "Cattle have always been, and continue to be, the most common source of traction power on small farms throughout the world." (Read: this is how the little guys do it everywhere other than the wealthy West.)

Organics is at a crossroads. Go big or go home. There are the Gary Hirshbergs of the world - CEO of Stonyfield Farms, which sells its line of organic dairy products on the shelves of Walmart - who warn us that for meaningful decreases in pesticides, growth hormones and carbon emissions, we have to convert the big food system to organic practices. To fret about the grassroots, small-scale, local, "small o" organic movement losing its soul is to "make the perfect the enemy of the good."

You can bet Tractors to Tonka Trucks Stonyfield Farms are not tilled by oxen.

In many ways, Canadian Organic Growers has championed the Big O approach in recent years. The push for a national organic standard, the legal protection of the "o" word only for those with official certification has caused many of my "little o" organic, locally oriented farmer friends to distance themselves from COG and its associated certifying agencies. We ourselves have decided to drop our certification this year. We may re-certify in future, but for now, the paperwork and the financial cost of certification is not justified by our small-scale enterprises, and means little to the friends and family who buy from us.

So, is COG really serious about promoting oxen-scaled farming? Or are the oxen on the cover of their magazine like the little red barn on the logo of Stonyfield: a notional image, a marketing fiction designed to create a romantic association, and obscure the very destruction of this way of life which industrial upscaling entails?

Which raises another question for me: How serious am I about reading up on oxen? Is this a romantic dream for me, a pleasant diversion from "real" farm planning, or is renewing this ancient tradition, as the article concludes, a way of "closing an energy loop on the farm?" Does the climate/energy crisis reveal tractor-farming as the actually soft-headed and rosy future vision?

We have friends who farmed with water buffalo oxen in Burma all their lives. Our Karen refugee friends tell a creation story about the this animal that reveal its centrality in their economy:

Once, God summoned the water buffalo to deliver a message to the people. "Tell them that this is how often they can eat: Adults twice a day and children three times a day."

The water buffalo went to the people, but when he reached them, he told them, "This is what God says: 'Adults can eat three times a day, and children can eat as often as they like.'"

Upon the water buffalo's return, God asked him. "What did you tell them?" When the water buffalo told God what he had told the people, God became angry with the water buffalo for changing the instructions: "If you want to make big promises like that, you will have to help deliver on them. Now you must spend your life helping the people with their crops, so they can eat that often."

And that is how the water buffalo became a beast of burden.

There are many-layered teachings in this agrarian wisdom-story:

• There are sacred limits on how much one ought to eat.
• Humans and the creation are bound together in divinely ordained interdependent relationships.
• There is a tendency to tell people what they want to hear, rather than a harder truth.
• The difference a water buffalo ox makes is the difference between a life where adults eat only twice a day and children three times, and a life where adults eat three square meals and children can eat as often as they like. As our friend Naw Kay Seng says, "a simple life, but a good life."

I am reminded here of an echoed wisdom, this time by way of Wendell Berry, another farmer-sage:

"Agrarian farmers see, accept, and live within their limits. They understand and agree to the proposition that there is “this much and no more.” This is the understanding that induces thrift, family coherence, neighborliness, local economies....The agrarian sense of abundance comes from the experienced possibility of frugality and renewal within limits." (from The Agrarian Standard)

How does a culture that honors limits: the limits of soil, of animals, of workers and watersheds, help turn around a culture founded on defying limits? By getting out in front and proving we can play ball with the big boys, that we can ramp up, mechanize and standardize organic food to penetrate the mass-market?

I suspect the limits will assert themselves. I am grateful to the Big O movers and shakers, for blunting some of the damage being done by the industrial food system. But when the real limits of cheap energy, of ecological carrying capacity, soil depletion, etc. do assert themselves, any peacable future one can hope for will count on humans who have learned to imagine, then live, "a simple life, but a good life."

I imagine the farmers among those humans will be working their fields with grass-, rather than oil-eaters.

My next post will look at some of the practical considerations I'm gleaning on ox-farming, mixed with some biblical tangents.

Until then....

Big O, little o, what begins with o? Oxen on organic outposts getting off of oil, that begins with o.

Communion

March 13, 2012. Snow and ice are still everywhere, but melting fast.

I scramble down the embankment, off the gravel road and away from the cultivated field into the woody swamp that has become one of my favorite winter places here. The embankment, I have come to believe, is the long-ago western bank of the Brokenhead River. (A hundred years ago? A thousand? Ten thousand? My mind cannot fathom the lifespans of river courses, the eating away of clay here, the slow silting-settling of new soil there.) Below the embankment, an elegant forest of tall, straight black ash rises out of the low-lying little delta that stretches east toward the riverbed that has been curving away from us and leaving itself behind all these years. I am going down to mine its soil.

Long before potting soil mixes were ever made available on store shelves, gardeners got their best starter soils from the forest floor. That's what I am after. I am in a hurry. Today I can still haul a heavy tobaggan load up the little logging trail I have carved through these marshy woods. In another day or two the smooth snow trail will be gone, leaving behind a tangle of sticks and water and mud unfriendly to two-leggeds and their loads. Old Man Winter makes some work a lot lighter, truth be told. I'm a little sad to see him go so soon this year.

I find a spot under the trees with minimal grass poking through the snow. Just leaf litter and rotting branches. Under the snow, I am surprised that the frost is completely gone already. The shovel cuts out slabs of soft, rich brown soil, moist and glistening like fudge. I look up at the ash in front of me and realize I am taking something from it. And then realize that there is no bite I have ever taken that was not sacrificial. It has always cost someone something to feed me. Am I "eating unworthily," as the New Testament puts it?

Funny how these thoughts do not occur in the garden department aisle, eyeing a plastic-wrapped bale of potting soil.  These products seem to be spontaneously created, out of noplace, and their presentation casts a spell of limitless supply. Beneath this mighty ash I am thinking, how much can I take from here? How long did this soil take to build? How deep is this well? What are the needs of trees? Can I keep coming down here year after year for more?

"Eating unworthily" is the concept of a violation of a sacred meal in a sacred circle. In Corinth, early Christians ate "unworthily" the love feast of Christ by disregarding the poor among them. The sacrament of communion is a holy rite of careful, attentive sharing, borne out of a vision of community in which the needs of all are considered and no one takes more than their share. When certain members of the Corinthian "body of Christ", accustomed to richer fare, glutted themselves to the exclusion of poorer members, Paul warned "If you eat and drink without discerning the body, you eat and drink damnation upon yourselves."

I had better be careful out in these woods.

The earth-laden tobaggan glides in heavy stops and starts over softening snow. I am hot, even in a T-shirt. I realize that I have not drunk enough water today. I pull, I thirst, I pull, I thirst. Thought settles and simplifies, body works.

I come up out of the bush and up the slope of the road, past the maples I tapped two days before. I pull toward them, just to see. The effort of leaving the trail is too much. I untie myself from the tobaggan and make the last three steps, unburdened. There is a cupful of clear liquid in the bottom of one of the milk jugs hanging off the tree. About a quarter teaspoon worth of syrup. But a cup of water. I hesitate only a moment, then reach out and drain the jug. It is cool, ever so slightly sweet. It tastes like snow. The water poured out of the side of this tree enters me and becomes me, runs down my throat and through my veins.

A black-capped little friend draws near to have a look-see. "Check out the Deity," he sings.

Come All Ye Pagans

This one's from the early years on the Brokenhead. An experience and a meditation I wanted to put out into the universe several years ago, but didn't know where to launch.

I am just crossing the river, coming back from the neighbours, when a bald eagle flies close over my head, heading downstream. I can hear the air pushing through his great, dark, outspread pinions. For a moment, his nearness makes him so solid that the fact of his gliding through air seems pure sorcery; it is easier to believe that eagles are real when they are far away than when they come close. And then, in one sharp intake of my breath, he is gone again, around the bend of the river, and I am suffused with joy.

And I am struck, struck that this place of reverence is exactly where I try so hard to take people as a worship leader. I spend hours poring over songs and scriptures, crafting prayers and poetic turns of phrase to construct the road that will lead the faithful exactly here: Awe. Self-transcendance. Holiness. Joy. Here I have been waylaid by it, entirely without human contrivance or effort. I can understand why Christian priests of old were suspicious, hostile even towards pagan spiritualities that drew people out of the pew and into the woods. It's pretty hard for us to compete.

But then, why would we think it was a competition? Why would we think that the God people meet in the woods would draw people away from the God they meet in church? My friend and neighbour, Jonathan Sears, was telling me about a distinction some have drawn between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien that seems to speak to this question. Lewis, even in his fiction, never veers off message, never strays far from the the skirt hems of Mother Church. He may lead you through a magical wardrobe into another world, but the allegory always carries a Christian apologetic that is obvious and familiar. Tolkien, a friend of Lewis, also a deeply convicted Christian, leads us into a more mysterious and subtle world, much more frightening and beautiful, and more convincing than Narnia. Tolkien might not be a pagan, but he clearly is acquainted with their ways and loves the land they inhabit. The difference between Lewis and Tolkien is one of confidence. Tolkien trusts that his whole world is steeped in Christ. Those with eyes to see will see.

These are days when Christian confidence is taking a bit of a beating. Mainstream churches continue to dwindle, whether they try to water the message down or try to cement it in dogma. And although evangelicals still attract the masses for the moment, the certainty they proclaim increasingly carries the shrill ring of denial. Is this a celebration or a sales pitch? Somewhere along the line, the logic of the market took over in our sanctuaries: create a desire, provide a product.

I've read the words of an aboriginal elder criticizing his own people for commercializing and marketing their sacred rites and objects: "once you sell a sacred thing, it isn't sacred anymore." To sell, to push, is to make a desecration of the holy, and cynics of us all. It is not an invitation to faith. It is an inoculation against it. It creates an allergy to religious awe. How hard it is for us to speak to one another of wonders now, and not suspect a hidden agenda. Our souls are guarded, wary of being sold a bad bill of goods.

Perhaps this is why I could respond to that encounter with the eagle as a sacred moment. He wasn't trying to sell me anything.

And maybe that's why I love Jesus too. As far as I can tell, he isn't trying to sell me anything either. In the Gospel I read more warnings about the trouble I'll see if I sign on than boasts about the great benefit package or the eternal retirement plan. And his love is just there, free and pervasive as air, whether I sign on or not.

Unlike him, and unlike the eagle, I have a hard time freely offering up the sacred. I want something in return: Affection. Influence. Stature. Money. Hey, I've got a family and an ego to feed too, you know.

Ah yes, the altar call and the collection plate, the blessed one-two punch, be it strong-arm or survival tactic, of every priest, every shaman, every rabbi, every preacher, every imam. Perhaps that's why the poor have often been pagans. There are no collection plates in the woods. Or, at least if the shaman does pull one out, it's a lot easier to disappear into the underbrush. Jonathan pointed out to me that pagan simply means "people of the land." A pagan is someone who seeks the sacred in an encounter with the land. If you're in the business of packaging and selling sacred encounters, they make lousy customers. Kind of like selling ice to eskimos, as the saying goes. Which I suppose would be one reason why shamans hit an income ceiling a lot sooner than the figureheads of megachurches, and why pagans are still on the must-convert list for most organized religions.

We've driven them nearly to extinction by now, those people of the land. Which is perhaps why, like the Mountain Lion or the Timberwolf, they charm us now. I count as good friends some folks who would be honoured to be called pagans. Born-Again-Pagan is in in the Mother Earth-lovin', back-to-the-land movement I'm so drawn to. Christianity is the house of the overbearing and controlling parent they've finally moved out of. I can understand the urge to bolt.

But, God help me, I do want to win back the neo-pagans. Or at least, as Jesus did, to sit at table together and swap some parables. That eagle, as swift and majestic as he is, might be able to ride the wind all the way to Mount Doom to carry Sam and Frodo away from its angry fumes, but he cannot explain the foolish wisdom, the power perfected in weakness, the vulnerable love that bore them there, that pinned all the hopes of Middle Earth on these unlikely saviours.

And so, with as open a hand as I know how to extend, I make this invitation: Come, all ye pagans. Let us speak of eagles, and let us speak of Christ.

Taking Life

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot
a time to kill and a time to heal.
               (Ecclesiastes 3:1-3a)

This week, the first of David's dairy goats birthed three kids: two bucklings and one doeling. They are as adorable as such things can be: cuddly, curious, pick-upable tender young things. Soft, curly-haired, small-faced and big-eyed. Tentative-moving, wide-stanced, toddling and learning fast.

David will keep the doeling, but the young males he will turn into goat-veal, so to milk their share of their mother's milk out for the humans here.

One of the things I've noticed about rural life is the euphemisms for killing animals.

We rarely say "kill," or "die." Most commonly, folks use that most euphemisable of verbs: "do."

"We're going to do our chickens Saturday."

"When are you going to do your hogs?"

"I like rabbits because if I have less than an hour, I can still do two or three."

Other, more honest terms are "butcher" and "slaughter." Then there is "process" - more specific than "do," and nice and clean and sterile.

But we don't like to say "kill."

Why not? Is it our shyness of Death? The same motivation that makes us say, "the dearly departed," "the deceased," "those who have passed on," but never "the dead?"

Or is it the human tendency to veil our violence? Is it like the double-speak of war? "Friendly fire," "casualty," "collateral damage" -  never acknowledging the victim with a name, a face and a voice.

I suspect both these tendencies have something to do with it, but there is something else in that halt, that pause we make when we verbalize our carnivorous ways.

In that delicate transition from animal to meat, we are touching a mystery. We care for these creatures we kill. Good farmers have genuine affection, real empathy for their animals. We must care for our animals in order to do the work of husbandry justice. 

And at some point, we kill them, to make way for the young they sire, and, more essentially, so that we can eat. To farm well, we care, and we kill.

This caring-killing stretches our language, even though the ritual is ancient.

I think I am going to start saying: "taking life." For that is exactly what I do. I take the life of living things into myself, where their life becomes my life. I take the life of rabbits, of trees, of potatoes and of pigs, of carrots and of cows, and their energy becomes my energy. It is life, and I do take it. They do not choose. I choose. I take.

I take lives; thus I live.

Thankfully.

The Grace of Trees

O, let us own the grace of trees:
Postures of praise and quiet peace.
No two alike, they all are one
In their adoration of the sun
In our adoration of the Son
Make us one.

When wintry and bare, still let us raise
These empty arms which yet will praise,
Lift deadened limbs our Lord will green,
Stand unashamed of our poverty
In anticipation of the Son
And new songs sung

And when Life's Joy returns once more
And our beings flower as they adore,
Stretching and spreading out to be-
come houses of hospitality
In our transformation by the Son
Our arms wide flung

O, let us own the grace of trees:
Postures of praise and quiet peace.
No two alike, they all are one
In their adoration of the sun
In our adoration of the Son,
We are one.

Love your Neighbour? Love your Wife.

Today, on Radio Q, the CBC arts and culture show I love/hate, the Q Panel was to debate the question: "Is Monogamy an outdated institution?" Following this, an exploration of the topic: "Sex with Robots: what are the downsides?"

Happy Valentine's Day, Canada.

When host Jian Ghomeshi asks such questions with his smooth and charming voice, they sound almost reasonable. I must confess that I turned the radio off. How unsophisticated of me. But the dishes were done, the house was tidied, and what's more, Jenn and I had it to ourselves (thanks, Dad). So we forwent our education on the new choices available to us in the post-monogamous, robot-sex world, and celebrated Valentine's Day in the most traditional way humans have. That's right, girls: Mom and Dad exchanged pink and red construction paper cards and after that, we ate heart-shaped chocolates.

Consequently, I missed the rest of Q, so I cannot comment on the content of the debates. What struck me in the intro, however, was that the questioning of monogamy, and the exploration of the sexual potential and pitfalls of (literally!) robotic partners, both exist on the same continuum: that of the industrialization of our lives, to the point of absurdity.

Sex has the power both to bind and to loose. It can be the reason to stay home, or the reason one has to leave it; it can be the cause of home's unmaking. The predominant industrial economy, in which we now all live, move, and try to retain our being has been "incentivizing" the abandonment of home for a good while now. The Boom and Bust engine that drives the "global" economy requires highly mobile labour units, ready to be dispatched and displaced quickly, to wherever the market says. Who are families and communities to quibble with the free market's wisdom?

And so, we have obediently learned to define our freedom in precisely the way most convenient to the global economy: Our freedom equals our atomization, the breaking of bonds to place, to inherited identities and traditions, and to deeply rooted relationships.

I am trying to live in a place. Or, should I say, in a place that is trying to become a place. Ploughshares Community Farm, as elusive as it remains to pin down with a narrative or a meaning, is becoming a place. A place where three families are sharing land, growing food, building homes cooperatively - or at least, more cooperatively than is typical in the placeless, atomizing culture we are resisting at least a little bit, by choosing to be here, together.

This is the context in which Jenn and I practice monogamy. And I can say this much about its importance here, in community: If the bonds of marriage were not sacrosanct is this place, it would poison the waters.

I am a man. I am not immune to covetous and unfaithful thoughts. But such thoughts are easily doused when I begin to imagine the hellish jealousies, bitterness and enmity we would call upon ourselves if we were to start "fooling around" here.

Perhaps at the level of mass society, monogamy is "an outdated institution." But here, at the level of neighbourhood, fidelity to married life safeguards not only the peace and well-being of family, but of the whole community. Here no relationship is uni-functional, as they are in the industrial economy. Our connections are complex and interwoven. Business partner is friend is workmate is wife's friend is friend's wife. There is no one here with whom I could possibly have "casual" sex. Here, in this place, infidelity would blow us apart like an atom bomb. Here, I know without a doubt, that to (agape) love  my neighbour means to (eros) love my wife, and her alone.

Maybe in a world where no one belongs anyplace anymore, where careers are consuming and brief and hypermobile; where advancement begets separation and separation begets advancement; where you can have a thousand online "friends" whom you do not actually know; where you can see a girl take off her clothes for you, and you can stare at her all you like without making eye contact; where the heralds of freedom disciple us into attachment disorder; maybe in that world monogamy is irrelevant.

But I don't want to live in that world. I am trying, albeit inconsistently and hamfistedly, to free myself and my family from the most dis-integrating influences of that world. That's why I live here. That's why I stay home and teach my children at home. That's why I stay in the home I've made with Jenn.

I know there are a great many people who are not as free as I have been to pull away from a world that makes stable, life-long unions terribly difficult to sustain. Can I blame any of my friends who have split up? Can I judge divorce as the moral failure of couples, in an economy fueled by discontentment and mobilized by displacement? Can I judge the craving for touch, for warmth, addressed in brief and transitory encounters between increasingly homeless humans, or the relieving of those urges through sexual facsimiles?

I dare not judge. I know my own frailties well enough. There but for the grace of God go I.

I cannot judge, but on this day I do want to celebrate: St. Valentine.

According to one tradition, Valentine was martyred for an odd crime against Empire: performing marriage ceremonies for soldiers. The Roman military knew all about the encumbrances of monogamous unions. Marriage was forbidden for soldiers, unattached men being more efficient and single-minded in their conquest and pillaging of foreign lands. Sex robots were not yet invented, but practitioners of the world's oldest profession could be found at the frontiers to relieve men's urges without the inefficiencies brought on by home leave.

In this context, binding soldiers in the Christian sacrament of holy matrimony was not only countercultural; it was treasonous.

It turns out that what is good for mass society and mass culture is rarely good for localized relationships.

And the reverse is also true: the more rooted one becomes with a particular life-mate, in a particular neighbourhood, in a particular tradition, the more one becomes a troublesome, non-mobile, non-interchangable consumer/labour unit for the global economy. Jenn and I move less dollars through the Canadian economy now than we ever have. Sorry Stevie. Homegrown food and a stay-at-home parent works good for us, not so good for you. Maybe I should buy some shiny new machines so I'll have more incentive to get an off-farm job and be "productive."

Sex robots are but the latest, and an astonishingly bald advance in the age of the machine, in its campaign to subvert the blessed ties that would bind us uniquely to each other and support lifelong pairings, which beget families, which beget communities, which resist displacement.

The logic of sex with robots is the final and fascist logic of total mechanization: Be a unit. Engage and disengage with other units as opportunity and economy suggest. Network; plug in; swipe and withdraw your card, thank you.

No, thank you, very much.

Suffused with Light

Today is finally a classic prairie winter day: fiercely cold and blindingly bright with sun and snow. It reminded me of a day I journaled last winter. I'll post it now and go outside to cut wood, by hand - a discipline I practiced better last year, and have let slide a bit....

Dec. 1, 2010

Sometimes this time of year is characterized as a time of darkness. It is true, the sun is up so briefly now, for those who must leave their homes to work at jobs that keep them inside, people drive out in darkness and return in darkness.

But I am blessed to walk out my door in the middle of the day into a world suffused with light. O God, I'm thankful for that light. The light these days is brief, but it is total. Every surface is white with snow now, and the light reflects and reflects and reflects. It is like I have stepped into that world that fascinated me so endlessly in the bathroom mirror of my childhood home, the world where the mirrors faced each other; the world that drew me out into infinity, becoming a smaller and smaller and smaller version of myself, lost in space and light.

Except this world is too crisp and cold, its impact on my body too immediate to become lost in abstraction. I went out to cut wood. We are eating through our woodpile very quickly all of a sudden.

I have been cutting with a handsaw lengths of wood that I removed with a chainsaw from the woods in sections just short enough that I could carry. The chain saw is sitting in the wood shed now. I could use it, and in an afternoon cut up all the stove length pieces I might need for the rest of this winter. The logic of industrial efficiency would find my handsawing insane. But going outside and cutting wood in the afternoon sunshine is seems to help keep me sane these days. My body wants something to do outside. My muscles want the exercise, my brain wants the oxygen and my soul craves the light that is in this silly, industrially superfluous activity.

A while back, the girls and I were cutting wood together and we heard the "keeee, tweee, keeee, kek kek kek" of an eagle coming from the river. We put down our saws and hatchets to go investigate, and got a sight of a big immature eagle flying round the bend, calling to an adult sitting in a tree a little further down. It was one of those moments of gratitude and wonder that confirmed in us what we came here for. What if I had been using the chainsaw? The girls would have never been with me, because of the danger, and none of us would have heard any eagles, because of the noise.

I think its fair to say that we are at the tail end of the industrial age. The age of the machine brought enormous opportunity for leisure, culture and knowledge. High technology and cheap energy offered a bevy of choices and "lifestyles" unimaginable to previous generations. It also taxed the world beyond its carrying capacity. We still have a lot of choices, although who knows for how long.

I am finding meaning, and joy, and contentment in certain specific renunciations, like cutting stovewood without a chainsaw. I'd like to think that it could remain possible in future to still use a gas-powered chainsaw to fell trees. I'd like to continue to be able to use labour-saving technologies enough to still have time for writing, for visiting and enjoying friends, or for having energy and resources to give beyond myself. But I want to become discriminating about using any machine that removes from my life activities that make me work my muscles, be on the land, or cooperate with friends.