Contending with gratitude at year’s end
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
After the longest night, Sun rises and stays through the day, pressing life-giving warmth into the dark broadside of a Jersey Cow. Tigger teaches the young ones to turn sideways on a Sun-kissed winter morning. As I watch, I wonder if some prayers aren’t meant to be made facing head-on.
Aching cold here, already more than came the whole of last year. Crunch of arctic snow underfoot. Crackle-bright orange and red behind the stove glass. I feed the hungry fire black walnut logs split down fine. Their furled bark catches first, lapping the stovepipe with ringlets of flame. Summer’s sunlight and heat has been stored in these bones of forest and released into the winter house by fire—to sustain this human life. It’s hard not to linger there, in the mystery of those words. Like a cow standing broadside to the Sun.
For the first time in at least forty-four years, my family and I will exchange zero presents on Christmas day—less in protest than experimentation. How shall we create the fertile conditions for conviviality to rise from the ashes of a collapsing consumer society?
The other day I rode in the car with a neighbor from whom I’d asked for a ride to a dinner in the next town. I make such requests regularly now that I don’t have a working car. This is the first time this neighbor and I get to really meet one another. The length of the journey—about twenty-minutes each way—allows for deepening. She’s been to one or two Feasts, but the work of the Farm remains a bit of a mystery to her. “I’ve been to all the Feasts and the same is still true for me,” I tell her. “Rather than a charity project, maybe you could think of it as a sort of protest,” I say. The words aren’t exactly right but they do nudge something free in her imagination.
“I think I can see it a bit more clearly now,” she says.
The next day I speak on the phone with Petra from the non-market phenomenon called Fruition Seeds, to be found here on Substack as Growing Kin with Fruition. If you haven’t met Petra, she is a bundle of radiant summer sunshine. It’s hard not to linger in the crackle-bright warmth of her glow. I consider Petra a cherished co-conspirator in the work of staging a nonviolent gift rebellion, but she lets me know on the phone that the word protest makes her bristle a bit. Thank goodness we can lovingly disagree with one another. I know the second she says it that she’s right. We must care for the language as we would the soil under our feet.
The gift hasn’t arrived at the bedside of a dying way of living to overthrow or to oust. The gift hasn’t even brought a sword along. The gift doesn’t begrudge the corrupt politician who capitalizes on our discontent or the corporate CEO who profits from our steady state of dis-ease.
I once heard the late John Lewis quote his mentor Martin Luther King as saying, “We’re just going to have to love the hell out of them.” I think he meant it literally. If a man is possessed by a demon, you can’t slay the demon without killing the man. The gift has been trained in other-than-Western healing modalities.
Describing gifts and gratitude in modern English at Christmas time could take hundreds of pages. This has been dawning upon me as I set out to try to write a book on the subject. It can be helpful sometimes to say what the gift ISN’T and then stare together into the empty space created by crossing that one off the list. Here’s one example:
Gratitude isn’t a form of emotional debt service.
In preparation for writing a chapter on markets, I have been re-reading the late David Graeber’s sweeping treatise called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. If you find yourself in the awkward position of searching for a last-minute Christmas gift, this one might fit the bill.
Upon a second reading, Graeber’s story reminds me of the tragic psychic wounds we carry as children of the West. Our religious language is filled with banking terminology. Take, for example, forgiveness and redemption. Debt and trespass are merely two sides of the same coin.
It will be a mighty challenge for me to find words that can bring the non-punitive medicine of the gift into view. “After all,” says Graeber, “to argue with the king, one has to use the king’s language, whether or not the initial premises make any sense.”
So, dear reader, I will close this Solstice/Christmas letter by saying that I am immensely grateful to have been kept alive by your life-giving attention this past year. As Tigger does upon a clear winter sunrise, I turn broadside this morning to the warmth radiating from your reading eyes and your listening ears.
Some of you have passed along these weekly dispatches from the gift front. Over 2,000 people now receive these stories in their inboxes. Others of you have decided to send dollars this way over the past year—to the tune of over a little over ten thousand. I spent $3881 of those dollars on things like books, black tea, Ibuprofen and transportation. The remaining $6K+ I have passed along as a gift to the Farm that feeds me, Sand River Community Farm. The Farm will be posting a 2025 Budget Request in the New Year, which I will send along once those estimations have been completed.
When I say that I am immensely grateful for your life-sustaining kindness and care, I am happy to report that I don’t detect even a hint of emotional debt service in that feeling. None whatsoever.
That might be a bit of what the cows have to teach us when they turn broadside to the life that comes toward them as an unearned gift. Their way of responding to gratitude doesn’t resemble an accounting project or a game of ping pong. The gift must pass out of sight, as Lewis Hyde reminds us. The gift is refreshed by its passage into mystery. For the cows this means turning sunlight and rainfall into soil food. Broadside to the rising Sun and head down—that’s how they roll.
I will do my best to follow their fine example by planting your gifts into this real ground, the same ground that might just rise up to feed us on our day of hunger.
With love,
Adam
Photo at top: Lingering in the afterglow of Annie’s season here, this photo arrives from her this morning in the inbox. How fitting.
Turning Broadside
Contending with gratitude at year’s end
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
After the longest night, Sun rises and stays through the day, pressing life-giving warmth into the dark broadside of a Jersey Cow. Tigger teaches the young ones to turn sideways on a Sun-kissed winter morning. As I watch, I wonder if some prayers aren’t meant to be made facing head-on.
Aching cold here, already more than came the whole of last year. Crunch of arctic snow underfoot. Crackle-bright orange and red behind the stove glass. I feed the hungry fire black walnut logs split down fine. Their furled bark catches first, lapping the stovepipe with ringlets of flame. Summer’s sunlight and heat has been stored in these bones of forest and released into the winter house by fire—to sustain this human life. It’s hard not to linger there, in the mystery of those words. Like a cow standing broadside to the Sun.
For the first time in at least forty-four years, my family and I will exchange zero presents on Christmas day—less in protest than experimentation. How shall we create the fertile conditions for conviviality to rise from the ashes of a collapsing consumer society?
The other day I rode in the car with a neighbor from whom I’d asked for a ride to a dinner in the next town. I make such requests regularly now that I don’t have a working car. This is the first time this neighbor and I get to really meet one another. The length of the journey—about twenty-minutes each way—allows for deepening. She’s been to one or two Feasts, but the work of the Farm remains a bit of a mystery to her. “I’ve been to all the Feasts and the same is still true for me,” I tell her. “Rather than a charity project, maybe you could think of it as a sort of protest,” I say. The words aren’t exactly right but they do nudge something free in her imagination.
“I think I can see it a bit more clearly now,” she says.
The next day I speak on the phone with Petra from the non-market phenomenon called Fruition Seeds, to be found here on Substack as Growing Kin with Fruition. If you haven’t met Petra, she is a bundle of radiant summer sunshine. It’s hard not to linger in the crackle-bright warmth of her glow. I consider Petra a cherished co-conspirator in the work of staging a nonviolent gift rebellion, but she lets me know on the phone that the word protest makes her bristle a bit. Thank goodness we can lovingly disagree with one another. I know the second she says it that she’s right. We must care for the language as we would the soil under our feet.
The gift hasn’t arrived at the bedside of a dying way of living to overthrow or to oust. The gift hasn’t even brought a sword along. The gift doesn’t begrudge the corrupt politician who capitalizes on our discontent or the corporate CEO who profits from our steady state of dis-ease.
I once heard the late John Lewis quote his mentor Martin Luther King as saying, “We’re just going to have to love the hell out of them.” I think he meant it literally. If a man is possessed by a demon, you can’t slay the demon without killing the man. The gift has been trained in other-than-Western healing modalities.
Describing gifts and gratitude in modern English at Christmas time could take hundreds of pages. This has been dawning upon me as I set out to try to write a book on the subject. It can be helpful sometimes to say what the gift ISN’T and then stare together into the empty space created by crossing that one off the list. Here’s one example:
Gratitude isn’t a form of emotional debt service.
In preparation for writing a chapter on markets, I have been re-reading the late David Graeber’s sweeping treatise called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. If you find yourself in the awkward position of searching for a last-minute Christmas gift, this one might fit the bill.
Upon a second reading, Graeber’s story reminds me of the tragic psychic wounds we carry as children of the West. Our religious language is filled with banking terminology. Take, for example, forgiveness and redemption. Debt and trespass are merely two sides of the same coin.
It will be a mighty challenge for me to find words that can bring the non-punitive medicine of the gift into view. “After all,” says Graeber, “to argue with the king, one has to use the king’s language, whether or not the initial premises make any sense.”
So, dear reader, I will close this Solstice/Christmas letter by saying that I am immensely grateful to have been kept alive by your life-giving attention this past year. As Tigger does upon a clear winter sunrise, I turn broadside this morning to the warmth radiating from your reading eyes and your listening ears.
Some of you have passed along these weekly dispatches from the gift front. Over 2,000 people now receive these stories in their inboxes. Others of you have decided to send dollars this way over the past year—to the tune of over a little over ten thousand. I spent $3881 of those dollars on things like books, black tea, Ibuprofen and transportation. The remaining $6K+ I have passed along as a gift to the Farm that feeds me, Sand River Community Farm. The Farm will be posting a 2025 Budget Request in the New Year, which I will send along once those estimations have been completed.
When I say that I am immensely grateful for your life-sustaining kindness and care, I am happy to report that I don’t detect even a hint of emotional debt service in that feeling. None whatsoever.
That might be a bit of what the cows have to teach us when they turn broadside to the life that comes toward them as an unearned gift. Their way of responding to gratitude doesn’t resemble an accounting project or a game of ping pong. The gift must pass out of sight, as Lewis Hyde reminds us. The gift is refreshed by its passage into mystery. For the cows this means turning sunlight and rainfall into soil food. Broadside to the rising Sun and head down—that’s how they roll.
I will do my best to follow their fine example by planting your gifts into this real ground, the same ground that might just rise up to feed us on our day of hunger.
With love,
Adam
Photo at top: Lingering in the afterglow of Annie’s season here, this photo arrives from her this morning in the inbox. How fitting.