Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (26 page)

Back in the hunter-gatherer days, being ostracized was tantamount to being executed. We needed one another to survive. We still do, but the fact is hidden behind that
Wizard of Oz
screen of self-sufficiency. We wouldn't last much more than a week without our farmers, whatever the scale of their operations, yet we eat almost as if going to the industrial outlet called “the market” magically produces food!

Is this a victory or a loss? Just because humans once needed their tribes to survive in the hunter-gatherer days doesn't mean that eating together makes us human. Or does it? Are we by nature convivial—social creatures who flourish by sharing the vicissitudes of living? I wanted to come back to the tribe before the 10-mile diet was done. I wanted to welcome people into my 10-mile culture, to affirm the sufficiency and deliciousness of my food by feeding another. And who better than Tricia!

The Last Supper?

I was a rusty hostess—my meals and home arranged around solitude—but it was time to reciprocate my feeder's generosity by feeding her. For more than a month Tricia had filled both my heart and my belly. I wanted my last official 10-mile supper to be with her and her husband, Kent, and I knew just what to serve. One of Tobey's 10-mile twenty-five-dollar chickens.

On September 30 I scrubbed, swept, and vacuumed to a higher standard than I hold for just myself, and filled the house with the perfume of home cooking.

Tricia and Kent showed up all smiles and with a few extra vegetables since we'd developed such a momma-and-baby-bird relationship. Kent has a round face that lights up when he smiles, and had always seemed to me a man with enthusiasm to spare. Whenever we'd been at a meeting together he'd nearly bounced up out of his chair to offer at least two or three inventive solutions to any problem we encountered. When I first met Tricia in the choir, there had been no Kent on the horizon. Now they were work as well as life partners, Tricia the gardener, Kent—by day a teacher—the builder of fences and sheds and greenhouses.

Soon we were at the table for the meal. I'd roasted the chicken with Tricia's garlic and rosemary inserted under the skin and inside the cavity for flavor. I'd also roasted some of Tricia's vegetables: onions, potatoes, turnips (aah, how I love them now), and carrots. For the salad (Tricia's greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers) I made a dressing of crushed garlic, fresh chopped basil and oregano, and those precious exotics, oil and lime juice. For dessert I'd cored some of Tricia's apples, drizzled Island Apiaries' honey in the wells, and baked them. I put out a pitcher of Belinda's cream for the apples and the coffee and tea.

We carved the chicken as though it were a Thanksgiving turkey, slicing the breast meat rather than just serving a whole breast to one person, a leg and thigh to another. Maybe it was the slow, rich, ambling conversation, maybe as food producers we were all viscerally aware of what it took to put that meal on the table, maybe the meat itself was more filling and tasty because the bird had had a happy life out in the grass, pecking at grubs and organic feed. Whatever, there were actually leftovers that I portioned out over days, making the price per meal equal to wolfing down a miserable, grown-in-the-dark, beak-clipped, factory-farmed bird in two sittings. Alone.

Our conversation delved below the level of food and farming to how Tricia and Kent met, fell in love, and married, and then deeper to our spiritual beliefs and experiences. It was then that I learned of Kent's mystical bent and his study of Rudolf Steiner—biodynamic farming and a whole body of work on the integration of nature, spirit, and daily life. I'd never had a chance to learn firsthand about Steiner's thoughts and we talked long into the night.

All the while a warmth spread in my belly that was the opposite of hunger. It was the fullness of giving.

In India they say, “The guest is God.” By feeding Tricia and Kent I was paying forward all the cups of warm beverages and little empañadas and cheeses and fruit and even Coca-Colas I'd received in homes across this world. I returned to the tribe—if only for an evening. I realized how I need people just as much as I need crunch or chocolate or calories. Local is a place in the heart as well as one way to fill my stomach. Like that moment in my backyard when food became where I belonged, not just what I bought, this dinner reminded me that feeding and being fed makes us belong to one another, makes us a people.

I went to bed so very satisfied, body and soul.

I slept. I woke. And it was . . .

October 1

Toast!
It was such an event, I wrote it large in my journal. Followed by:

Crunch!

I topped the toast with almond butter and sat down to eat it with my standard tea, honey, and milk, cat on my lap, journal on the arm of the chair, feet up, eyes gazing at the beautiful line of fir trees to the east of my house and Mt. Baker to the north.

I made it. Yet it made me too. Or remade me. Besides having lost six pounds, something different was simmering in my soul. My friend, author, and global activist Lynne Twist, said once, “We don't do our projects. We enter them and they transform us.”

What had changed within me? I asked and waited for answers to come, jotting them in my journal.

Homecoming

The first thought that came was this: Now I know I live somewhere.

I've lived in houses in towns and cities, yes, but I'd never cast my lot so fully with a place and a people, with the local farmers, farms, fields, forest, and friends who live here too. In Rhinelander I'd learned to grow a garden, butcher animals, and process food, but we were isolated from town, and we relied less on our garden than on our burlap bags of rice, beans, and potatoes. While I wasn't sure “we”—as in all of us here on the island—could live “here” as religiously as I had this month, I knew that my effort to do so had knitted me into the community at a most profound level. A real community of place where people with differences live together and find common ground.

Where had I been living before September, anyway?

With perfect postmodern irony I thought, I live in my mind. A skin-encapsulated, life-process animated bundle of thoughts. A child of Descartes' “I think, therefore I am.” The “I-that-thinks” has actually been the only consistent address for what I call me. Born in Oklahoma, I lived sixteen years on Long Island before I was off and running. Rhode Island, Madrid, and Brooklyn formed a six-year runway to taking off for parts unknown. I then spent fifteen years “on the road”—on and off living in a motor home punctuated by stints in driveways and rental homes for projects in Mexico, Arizona, Wisconsin, California, Colorado, Washington, Texas, and Canada. The circle of friends was fairly constant but the place called “home” kept changing. Then eighteen years in a shared house in Seattle, but lots of the time in hotels and on airplanes as I traveled the world to speak about frugality. Then cancer uprooted me from everything, planting me like a seed in that rental on Whidbey. Everywhere I lived until this diet—even Seattle for so many years—felt more like a stage set than settled. That old Willie Nelson song “On the Road Again” used to be my theme song.

Another place I'd claimed as home was “the planet.” I was a global citizen. I was part of a highly mobile global community of sustainability pioneers. We met in hotels and at conferences like lovers meet for trysts, sustaining a conversation about “narratives” and “paradigms” and “policy frameworks” and processes and philosophies and levers and systems and who was funding what. We ate at buffets and banquets and in restaurants, and I always came home a few pounds heavier—wherever home was.

It was like I'd hovered over life, one of the privileged few who did not need to land somewhere—or apparently anywhere—to make a go of it. When I was a highflyer, so to speak, I tended to look down on people who stayed put. The term “local yokels” probably went through my mind more than once. “A rolling stone gathers no moss” used to seem an instruction to keep moving. Now it seemed like a formula for never belonging to a place or a people.

With the 10-mile diet I'd landed, and I suspected it wasn't just for a month. I began to understand what being a part of place and community could mean in a different way. Shopping, dancing, walking the trails, strolling in town, I saw Belinda and Koren, Britt and Eric, Sandra and Nina, Tricia, Kent, Pam, and other farmers I knew, like Georgie, Molly and Anna and John Peterson, and Loren and Patty Imes, and on and on. Not only were they becoming part of my life, I was becoming part of theirs.

John Young, a teacher of traditional ways, talks about becoming native to a place. When I'd met him fifteen years earlier he was giving every student an entry-level assignment: Find a “secret spot”—a place in nature near your home that calls you. Visit it daily, rain or shine, chilly or warm, for a year. Notice the life in this small patch—the cycles of the plants, the animal tracks, the changing arc of the sun, the shifting winds. Only then are you ready for the next assignment. He had an “alien test,” now called a “tourist test,” that asked questions about where you live—about native vegetation, waterways, which direction the storms come from, poisonous plants, and animal tracks. Almost everyone flunked. Almost none of us really lives where we live.

My 10-mile diet was like a secret spot—a place I was, by choice, tethered to. Surprisingly, after so many years of spreading my wings, I found spreading my roots liberating.

The Freedom of Limits

The second thought that came was this: The constraints of this diet had actually freed me from my fierce independence, a brittle shield that did nothing to really allay my fears. I'd bumped into this shield in those six months of contemplation when I had cancer. I'd felt it like a mime feels a wall—invisible but made vivid when contact happens. I was old and wise enough to not try to rip it down or dismiss it as fantasy. I let my life still, let that fluttering self settle down. Now, thanks to the diet, I had settled in. Rather than feeling trapped, I felt held. The ground under me seemed solid. I didn't need to fabricate safety every day by my actions. I just needed to participate.

For years I'd thought, written, and lectured about “liberating limits.” How a canvas can free an artist's imagination. How well-made structures (bridges, marriages, cities) actually give people the freedom to move. How values are the chosen limits that allow our lives to deepen rather than dissipate.

My 10-mile diet, with all its constraints, was a perfect case in point. This rootedness was actually freeing me from that background fear. As I looked back over the month from the happy land of toast and almond butter, of chocolate and popcorn, I was able to see how many of what I called problems turned out to be portals into new freedoms. Like all limits, the obstacles interrupted my patterns. To find my way to happiness again, I couldn't go back to blissful ignorance. I went forward, sometimes through thickets of assumptions, to find a truer place to stand and a softer, sweeter sense of freedom.

I reflected on these liberating limits I'd encountered over the past four weeks:

There were unpleasant constraints that turned out to be doorways into a greater love. My flair for drama made me think of myself as a Russian peasant as I packed for that trip to Bellingham. Honest fidelity to my word, though, set me up for an honest realization: love trumps rules. The love poured into purchasing and preparing the food at that conference was a higher value than my strict adherence to a limit I'd set. Only by keeping your word does breaking it in service to a higher truth have any meaning. A more nuanced “rule”—“local everywhere”—came from that surrender. Local isn't consigning oneself to a narrow existence. Rather, “local” is honoring, respecting and supporting the life of the place you are, wherever that is. Without the disrupting limit to my everywhere-eating, I would not have learned these lessons.

There were creative solutions when I couldn't just “go to the store.” Missing ingredients snapped me out of my routines and forced me to actually address what I did have with new respect and even gratitude. What I lacked in range I made up for in imagination. Lowly potatoes rose in status in the absence of rice or pasta. I really saw all the possibilities in all the vegetables that grew here. Honey, my only sweetener, became the nectar of the gods, not just an expensive way to widen my girth. Using the ingredients at hand, I figured out how to create a full-spectrum sense of satisfaction—even substitute crunch.

The day I woke up famished and had to make a creamed soup from scratch showed me how little I'd valued the time I'd invested in food preparation. I'd considered it a chore, and discovered it could be self-expression. I'd thought it was a time-suck, but could see it now as self-care. What is more important, really, than conscious cooking and eating? Except for sex, eating is the only time we consciously open ourselves to receive the “not us”—that we allow something from out there into our bodies.

Sure, I could have planned better so that I would have had soup already prepared for my postnap snack, but planning is not my strong suit. I'm inventive to make up for being forgetful and distractible. The restrictions of this diet allowed my inner culinary artist to flourish.

There was a more honest, humble attitude toward the value of my time, with food taking a rightful amount of my attention. The 10-mile diet reduced the importance I give to my persona in the world—writing, speaking, leading. I am not so busy that I can't attend, like everyone else, to the daily acts of harvesting and preparing food. The products of my mind are not more valuable than the products of the earth. I didn't become an obsessive foodie, shucking my other activities. I included relational eating as part of my life.

I matured as an eater from being on the teat of the industrial system to being aware of what it takes to feed me—and all of us. The sticker shock over the five-dollars-a-pound chicken was a blessing—it startled me into respect. My habit of hyperfrugality, ingrained over years, may never change, but now I can see through the plastic on the store-chicken carcass into the life of that bird or one like it. I can see the large industrial chicken houses and compare them to the spacious chicken coop up the hill. Once aware, you can't be fully asleep again. The hidden costs of industrial food are now clear to me, influencing my shopping, cooking, and eating as well as my writing, speaking, and projects.