Newsletter 7/28/21

Greetings Friends and Neighbors,

Haze arrives in the night, casting the morning hills in reds and oranges. I look out through the rear window as the car speeds along the highway, a two-hour return trip from my father’s birthday dinner in the opposite corner of the state. The haze makes the normally grand landscape dream-like, eerie. My eyes scan median strip, where life seems to persist, even to thrive, in the narrow corridor between the striped lines of asphalt. By mid-afternoon, the gray stones on the banks of the cobble Brook where we’ve come to swim turn pink, like sunset come early. It is humid, yes, but this is different. This is Fire Light. The nightmarish red haze of the apocalypse. Rumored word spreads from ear to mouth to ear. Fire, indeed. The West is burning. Scorching dry heat and record Fires and prevailing-Winds-as-messengers. The alarm bell sounds in the dingy air. Something is terribly wrong. 

A short essay in response to the arrival of this smoke from the West is offered below: Singing into the Smoky Haze: A Love Song.

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We are still $1100 short of our July Budget Request with just 3 days left in the month. If you are willing make a gift to sustain our work, you can do so HERE. This is the money that pays the rents and the electric bills, purchases the Wheat and Rye and Corn for the bread, and allows these Newsletters to go out each week. A detailed budget is included below. We are incredibly honored to have been trusted with your support over these past fifteen months and would love to continue giving food away each week if it continues seems worthwhile to enough of you. Many thanks for your consideration. 

Self-Service Soup this weekend: We will have coolers full of frozen Soups out Friday, Saturday and Sunday(7/30 – 8/1), 9am-5pm. Pureed Greens and Herbs with Bone Broth and Vegetarian Winter Tomato, both for serving cold or warm. Add dairy if you like – yogurt, cream, milk, sour cream. 

Mark your calendars for Fresh Bread at Soup and Bread Gift Distribution on Friday 8/6, 4-6pm. We are baking over 350 loaves on these bake weeks and encourage you to pick up an extra loaf for the freezer. 

We would love to have you join us for our Work Day this Sunday, 1-4pm, when we tend to Gardens, Pastures and Pantry. Bring a knife and cutting board if you’d like to join the Soup Team, or a round-pointed shovel for Burdock removal. Long pants are recommended for pasture work.

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Singing into the Smoky Haze: A Love Song

Haze arrives in the night, casting the morning hills in reds and oranges. I look out through the rear window as the car speeds along the highway, a two-hour return trip from my father’s birthday dinner in the opposite corner of the state. The haze makes the normally grand landscape dream-like, eerie. My eyes scan median strip, where life seems to persist, even to thrive, in the narrow corridor between the striped lines of asphalt. By mid-afternoon, the gray stones on the banks of the cobble Brook where we’ve come to swim turn pink, like sunset come early. It is humid, yes, but this is different. This is Fire Light. The nightmarish red haze of the apocalypse. Rumored word spreads from ear to mouth to ear. Fire, indeed. The West is burning. Scorching dry heat and record Fires and prevailing-Winds-as-messengers. The alarm bell sounds in the dingy air. Something is terribly wrong. 

And yet it seems a deadly momentum grips the peoples of this burning land. Plans have been made. Interstate travels will be carried out in the smoky haze. Places less affected may enjoy increased rates of tourism, even advertise themselves as a refuge from the storm. Tourism in the time of windblown summer firestorms and Jetstream-drifting-smoke. Many a conversation about extreme weather finds its way to the failures of Governments to act. Back in the 70’s or 80’s or 90’s perhaps they could have taken this thing seriously. But they didn’t. Instead, we asked them to ensure – to usher in – our unencumbered material ascendence. That seems to have come to pass, at least for many of us reading this. But in a time of human ascendance many have been denied access at the gates. And yet, today’s ‘poor’ take several orders of magnitude more from the world than those who were considered middle-of-the-road just a generation or two ago. It’s so damn confounding. And contentious. Any conversation about who is privileged and who isn’t will quickly lead to an argument. A conversation about who is actually responsible for the mess we’re in, well…need it be said? It’s all relative, it seems. As the world burns. But relative to what? Who and where are our relatives – our relations – these days, anyway? How On Earth did it come to be this way? 

Everyone scrambles to keep up with everyone else. The initial boarding call comes in over the loud speaker and we suddenly realize we’ve missed the entrance to the moving walkway in our hustle to get to the next terminal. Or, we look up from our scrolling screen to notice that we already glide smoothly past others who huff and puff and slog across the glossy tiles. Are we going to make it onto the plane before they close the gates? Where is this next leg of the flight headed, anyway? Does it really matter as long as we make it to our final destination? Our Final Destination. What do we imagine we’ll find when we get there? Freedom from material discomfort and struggle, from ecological limitation, from encumbrance? Ascendent, eternal life? Author Martin Shaw writes, 

…by god, did we ever take that story and run with it….Scalped free from all earthy resonance, we now squat in the departure lounge of its aspiration – never quite achieving its promise but never quite getting our true, ancestral inheritance on the matter. A holding pattern of tacit depression prevails. We’re trapped in a vast airport with very bad food, unmentionable music, and a queue to the restroom.(Martin Shaw from the forward to Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson, 2015)

I’ve never read such a well-honed description of modernity. You may not agree, but I’ll ask you to bear with me for a moment longer. If modernity resembles a “vast airport,” we might be inclined to wonder where we are headed, societally speaking. Indeed, this seems to be the question of our time. Most of the smart money gathers towards it. But there is also the present to consider, the actual conditions we create and tolerate in order to set the hopeful stage for what is surely to come. The present in which the world burns and the screen-addled teens seek nourishment from therapists and antidepressants. And then there is the unfashionable question of the past. What happened to our home places such that we decided to pack our bags? To our capacity to be at home? From what are we fleeing? Who was – and continues to be – forced from their homes? Who lived here when we washed up on shore and how did our arrival change the conditions of their lives? Can you imagine if airplanes, trains and cars were built with the seats turned around – facing backwards? If we gave half as much consideration to where we’ve come from as we do to the question: Where do we want to go? If we were required to keep our sights fixed on our exhaust plume? 

I’ve written often and at some length of the glistening beauty of the World, describing this Newsletter – and the Farm itself – as a love song. And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the Dark Terror that creeps in – like the smoky haze – when it appears that there will be no turning back from the course that we have set. A love song must make room for the fading away – and the death – of what we love. By speaking, or singing, the words aloud. Just outside the window Hummingbird plies the hazy air and delicately drinks nectar from glowing orange Jewelweed flowers. Mourning Dove cries out from a high branch, surveying all that has already been lost. Remembering, mournfully. Song Sparrow replies, energetically, on behalf of this verdant day. He lands on the fence post in the yards and sings again. His whole body shakes with the staccato of his joyful song. It is a potent time to be alive. What songs will we sing as the world burns?

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Here is what you will find in this Letter:

1. FINANCIAL GIFT REQUEST – Detailed July 2021 Budget

With Great Care, 

Adam and the Brush Brook Community Farm Team

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BUDGET UPDATE: Thank you for considering the July Budget

Many heartfelt thanks to all who have responded to these invitations by sending in Financial Gifts. If you would like to support our work, you can mail checks made out to Brush Brook Community Farm to PO Box 202, Huntington, VT, 05462, bring gifts to the Gift Stand, or donate through the website. We are 100% financially supported by these personal financial gifts.