Freedom from Limits of All Kinds

Photo: Trevor and Angus one year ago. These boys now weigh more than a half-ton each.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I recently found a copy of the undergraduate thesis in Anthropology that I wrote two decades ago.  I hadn’t looked at it since.  I opened with the following questions:

What is it that seems to be driving humanity towards the ecological brink?  How can we go about changing course?

For those who have signed up to receive this Newsletter recently, the various topics explored here—gift economics, traditional agriculture, animism, and the work of making human culture—all circle around these two questions of ecological grief, with one small addendum.  The second question about changing course betrays the desire for solutions that I carried back then.  I would phrase things slightly differently now:

Was it inevitable that it would turn out this way?  Could it have gone another way?  Might we still?

So perhaps this Newsletter serves as an invitation to gather ‘round a digital campfire and cultivate a quality of companionship that could allow us to look directly into the blinding light of a world ablaze.  These writings court the possibility that humans are capable of much more than the Western imagination allows, including a recovering capacity to turn from the easy seduction of grievance and cynicism to the hard, honest work of grief.

Days of thick, wind-blown wildfire smoke bring ecological grief into full sensory saturation.  The smoke enters my sinuses and begets a bone-deep sadness in me that will simply not let up.  On the day the smoke cleared, the Fourth of July fireworks began.  That’s when the following piece emerged.  I offer it to you as a gift.  If you find it useful, I ask you to consider passing it along.

These labors ride out into the world on a magic—and mostly invisible—carpet of goodwill.  Would you be willing to help with the housekeeping chores by sharing this essay with a friend, co-worker, or someone younger than you who will have no choice but to learn to inhabit a world on fire?

One year ago I wrote an Independence Day piece titled What will we Afford?  I have written a new introduction to the piece below. Click here for last year’s story in its original form.

This week’s invitations:

The next Gratitude Feast will be Sunday 8/6 at 4pm.  The meal is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.

Please join us Sundays at 3pm for our weekly Farm Frolic, where we tend to gardens, kitchen, and pantry.  A simple meal will be shared at 6pm with roast lamb and salad from the Farm.  Your additions of a side dish or a dessert are welcomed, but not required.

Interested in learning alongside us here at the Farm?  Read more about the Peasantry School offerings HERE.

Freedom from Limits of all Kinds

From The Huron Relation of 1635:

Their hospitality to any and all strangers is noteworthy.  In their feasts, they give the best of what they have prepared to the stranger….I do not know whether anything equal to this can be found elsewhere.

I hear what sounds like cannon fire in the distance as I lay in bed reading the first-hand account of Jean de Brebeuf, a Jesuit missionary living with the Huron peoples of present-day Ontario.

When they come back from fishing, hunting, and trading, they share a great deal of their goods with one another.  If they have caught something special, or even if they have bought it, or it has been given to them, they stage a feast for the whole village.

Today the original peoples make money by selling fireworks to settlers.  Here in town there’s been a fireworks tent set up for two weeks in the parking lot outside the hardware store.

On this Fourth of July evening, to the sound of fireworks and the smell of wood smoke, I fall into a fitful American dream.

Four hundred years ago, when Brebeuf made these observations about hospitality and generosity among the Huron, America had not yet been conceived.  You might say that freedom was just rising from the horizon as a new North Star.  This is vast and complicated territory.  This essay will not attempt to map these histories, but rather notice that the following definition of freedom seems to sum up the American project fairly well: unrestrained choice, without constraint by necessity.  Freedom from limits and discomforts, both social and ecological.  Freedom from the frustration of personal desire imposed by obligation to another.

In his letters, Brebeuf encourages other missionaries to join him there on his post along the Western frontier of civilization.  But, as he straddles a line between worlds, his writing betrays a surprising degree of ambivalence.

When you reach the Hurons you will indeed find hearts full of charity for you….we shall have all the desire in the world to do you good, but our situation is such that we can do very little.  We shall receive you in a hut so decrepit that I scarcely know of any in France wretched enough with which to compare it.

Brebeuf goes on to describe the full range of biting insects and the hardship of sleeping with only an animal pelt for a mattress.  And then, several pages later, he writes:

In spite of a winter six months long, spent in the shelter of a bark cabin open to the weather, we have yet to experience its bad effects.  No one complains of his head or his stomach.  We do not know what diarrhea, colds or catarrh are.  This leads me to say that the delicate people of France do not know how to protect themselves from the cold.  Their well-carpeted rooms, their well-fitting doors, and their windows shut tight with so much care, all these things serve only to make the effects of cold more keenly felt.  The cold is an enemy from whom one wins almost more by holding out one’s hand to him than by waging a fierce war against him. 

Brebeuf re-animates Cold as a stranger to whom he is learning to extend hospitality.  Hospitality derives from the Latin hostis, which means both “stranger” and “enemy.”  It makes me wonder: at what point does a stranger becomes an enemy, and at what cost?  Brebeuf seems suggest that waging war on discomfort and infirmity has the unintended consequence of creating ever-more keenly felt discomforts and infirmities.

A story of freedom seems hard on hospitality, hard on our capacity to extend generosity toward the stranger at the door.  In our time, the list of strangers asking to be entertained has grown too long to name, and so they get lumped into inanimate categories with titles such as Climate Change, Ecological Collapse, Refugee Crises, Poverty, Infectious Illness, and more.

In Brebeuf’s words, the stranger at the door is “an enemy from which one wins almost more by holding out one’s hand to him than by waging a fierce war against him.”  This was his prophetic dispatch from the Western edge of civilization some four hundred years ago.  The story of American freedom spans the intervening generations.