Staying Put
This weekend, I dug out the last blades of grass from our front yard in Seattle and sowed a cover crop in the vegetable beds that replaced the lawn. Over the last two months of turning our front yard into a sort of urban farm, I've been thinking about Rebecca Kneale Gould's book, At Home in Nature, a study of Americans who leave the dominant culture behind. City, corporate work, and in most cases, Church, are traded for cultivation of an alternative version of the good life, in a rural location. With dirt on my hands, a hymn in my head, and a work week ahead of me, I consider staying put.
Gould's book found me by surprise in an independent bookstore in a coastal North Carolina town where Bo and I were vacationing with my family this summer. The book's tagline: "Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America" promised a unique synthesis of several ideas I'd been exploring, especially since Bo and I recently bought a small cabin with farming potential in the San Juan Islands. Reading on a beach in the Carolinas, I almost felt like we too, could drop out of society, move to our little farm and try to eek out an existence. No more work-stress, and lots of time to spend outside. Perhaps the fall weather brought me back to my senses, or maybe, as much as I find fault in our dominant American culture, I've always had more success, and found more joy, working for change from the inside.
The homesteaders Gould profiles, find vigor and meaning by leaving the city and their corporate jobs to farm for their own physical and spiritual subsistence. They create communities in rural landscapes and enjoy, literally, the fruits of their own labor. The American homesteading life is dedicated to living and working in a specific place. Gould paraphrases Wendell Berry, a famous America Catholic essayist and homesteader:
"The recipe Berry offers for the preservation of meaning in the industrial age is to foster a deep practical and spiritual relationship to a particular place. By living and working in place, Berry argues, we become aware of the interdependencies that industrial culture seeks to have us forget, deny or destroy. Being in place is practiced by eating locally , caring for the land, taking responsibility and developing affection for one's home, animals and natural surround. "
I've been practicing "being in place" in the urban environment of Seattle. I try to eat locally from farmers markets here in the city, and if I'm really ambitious, will tend the new vegetable beds that replaced our lawn to grow some of our own food front-yard-locally. I've nurtured affection for my home, animals and natural surround, by planting native plants in our yard and volunteering to restore habitat in city parks. Why wouldn't Seattle's sense of place inspire stewardship and community? I can't help think that perhaps these homesteaders were leaving lesser cities than Seattle.
This summer, during our weekends at our cabin in the San Juans, I didn't miss the city too much, because we spent our weeks in Seattle, but I really missed mass at St. James. Our rural island has no churches. My friend Erin, assuaged my guilt: saying I was OK, because I was in nature's church. Erin is great at making me feel good and her sentiment is shared by many homesteaders, but although I feel God in creation, I need the Cathedral.
Gould states that many homesteaders eschew organized religion and instead ritualize their daily life. They embed their actions on the farm with symbolic meaning; cutting firewood from trees on-site is as symbolically important as heating the house is practically important. The homesteaders could live their lives in an "easier" way, but choose to do it the hard way because their daily rituals compose a life richer in meaning. Many of these homesteaders (not Berry), have never found that sense of meaning from an institutional or organized religion. Moreover, some homesteader fault organized religion as the source of the environmental degradation and corporate excess that homesteading protests.
There are many legitimate reasons to leave organized religion. We all have them. But sitting in mass on Sunday, listening to the choir, surrounded by a community of people aspiring to a shared sense of something more, I feel more than I think. It's akin to standing in the forest and feeling the presence of nature, rather than thinking about the science of photosynthesis and ecosystems. The rituals of mass are different rituals than chopping wood or pulling water from a well, but they bind me to a place and a community that feels like home. I am called to live within these rituals, and to seek a right relationship with the Church, in much the same way that I seek a right relationship with God's creation. After all, it is not "man and the environment" or "man and creation," but instead man in the environment and man in creation.
Perhaps the most appealing lure of homesteading relates to work. It's hard to wax poetic about nature and meaning from a cubicle. From a practical point of view, I have to work in a corporate job to afford the urban farm or the San Juan Island cabin. I'm lucky to make a living that can (barely) afford these "places." I admire the homesteaders who took a chance and left the financial security of office jobs to risk it in the country. Would I have the courage to make that move? But then I remember the origin of the word "corporate" which is corporeal or "body." I think of the challenges I face every day at work, the problems I get to solve, the satisfaction of being on the team. It may sound strange, but I doubt that I would enjoy the isolation of the (real) farm life, the nature of that agrarian work, if given that choice. If that is what Bo and I truly wanted, we would choose it. I think back to another high-stakes choice many years earlier when I had a stable job, but left it for the unknown: to move to Seattle.
Although grateful for the efforts of these modern homesteaders living a protest against elements of American culture that damage the environment and our spirit, I choose to stay put in Seattle and in that culture, working within for change through the small gestures of replacing a yard with vegetables, or starting an eco justice group in a Catholic church, or another group at the office looking at environmental options for my company. If these crops won't grow in the city, I always know where to find a quieter, wilder space.
For organizations that are practicing "being in place" in Seattle, check out neighborhood sustainability groups: Sustainable Ballard and Sustainable West Seattle.
Gould's book found me by surprise in an independent bookstore in a coastal North Carolina town where Bo and I were vacationing with my family this summer. The book's tagline: "Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America" promised a unique synthesis of several ideas I'd been exploring, especially since Bo and I recently bought a small cabin with farming potential in the San Juan Islands. Reading on a beach in the Carolinas, I almost felt like we too, could drop out of society, move to our little farm and try to eek out an existence. No more work-stress, and lots of time to spend outside. Perhaps the fall weather brought me back to my senses, or maybe, as much as I find fault in our dominant American culture, I've always had more success, and found more joy, working for change from the inside.
The homesteaders Gould profiles, find vigor and meaning by leaving the city and their corporate jobs to farm for their own physical and spiritual subsistence. They create communities in rural landscapes and enjoy, literally, the fruits of their own labor. The American homesteading life is dedicated to living and working in a specific place. Gould paraphrases Wendell Berry, a famous America Catholic essayist and homesteader:
"The recipe Berry offers for the preservation of meaning in the industrial age is to foster a deep practical and spiritual relationship to a particular place. By living and working in place, Berry argues, we become aware of the interdependencies that industrial culture seeks to have us forget, deny or destroy. Being in place is practiced by eating locally , caring for the land, taking responsibility and developing affection for one's home, animals and natural surround. "
I've been practicing "being in place" in the urban environment of Seattle. I try to eat locally from farmers markets here in the city, and if I'm really ambitious, will tend the new vegetable beds that replaced our lawn to grow some of our own food front-yard-locally. I've nurtured affection for my home, animals and natural surround, by planting native plants in our yard and volunteering to restore habitat in city parks. Why wouldn't Seattle's sense of place inspire stewardship and community? I can't help think that perhaps these homesteaders were leaving lesser cities than Seattle.
This summer, during our weekends at our cabin in the San Juans, I didn't miss the city too much, because we spent our weeks in Seattle, but I really missed mass at St. James. Our rural island has no churches. My friend Erin, assuaged my guilt: saying I was OK, because I was in nature's church. Erin is great at making me feel good and her sentiment is shared by many homesteaders, but although I feel God in creation, I need the Cathedral.
Gould states that many homesteaders eschew organized religion and instead ritualize their daily life. They embed their actions on the farm with symbolic meaning; cutting firewood from trees on-site is as symbolically important as heating the house is practically important. The homesteaders could live their lives in an "easier" way, but choose to do it the hard way because their daily rituals compose a life richer in meaning. Many of these homesteaders (not Berry), have never found that sense of meaning from an institutional or organized religion. Moreover, some homesteader fault organized religion as the source of the environmental degradation and corporate excess that homesteading protests.
There are many legitimate reasons to leave organized religion. We all have them. But sitting in mass on Sunday, listening to the choir, surrounded by a community of people aspiring to a shared sense of something more, I feel more than I think. It's akin to standing in the forest and feeling the presence of nature, rather than thinking about the science of photosynthesis and ecosystems. The rituals of mass are different rituals than chopping wood or pulling water from a well, but they bind me to a place and a community that feels like home. I am called to live within these rituals, and to seek a right relationship with the Church, in much the same way that I seek a right relationship with God's creation. After all, it is not "man and the environment" or "man and creation," but instead man in the environment and man in creation.
Perhaps the most appealing lure of homesteading relates to work. It's hard to wax poetic about nature and meaning from a cubicle. From a practical point of view, I have to work in a corporate job to afford the urban farm or the San Juan Island cabin. I'm lucky to make a living that can (barely) afford these "places." I admire the homesteaders who took a chance and left the financial security of office jobs to risk it in the country. Would I have the courage to make that move? But then I remember the origin of the word "corporate" which is corporeal or "body." I think of the challenges I face every day at work, the problems I get to solve, the satisfaction of being on the team. It may sound strange, but I doubt that I would enjoy the isolation of the (real) farm life, the nature of that agrarian work, if given that choice. If that is what Bo and I truly wanted, we would choose it. I think back to another high-stakes choice many years earlier when I had a stable job, but left it for the unknown: to move to Seattle.
Although grateful for the efforts of these modern homesteaders living a protest against elements of American culture that damage the environment and our spirit, I choose to stay put in Seattle and in that culture, working within for change through the small gestures of replacing a yard with vegetables, or starting an eco justice group in a Catholic church, or another group at the office looking at environmental options for my company. If these crops won't grow in the city, I always know where to find a quieter, wilder space.
For organizations that are practicing "being in place" in Seattle, check out neighborhood sustainability groups: Sustainable Ballard and Sustainable West Seattle.
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