Protesters across the United States are regularly showing up to demonstrate opposition to the president and congressional leaders who refuse to challenge his executive overreach. I’ve stood alongside them and make regular calls to our representatives. (If you’ve never done this, please try it! It can be really cathartic. The 5 Calls app makes it super easy.) But my biggest form of resistance to the current attempts to move our country backwards was resigning from my job last month. I’m still processing this decision; digesting a rich stew of conflicting emotions including regret, grief, fear, renewal, solace, and excitement.
Before I started working in state government a year ago, my off-farm work was fully remote, mostly asynchronous, contract work. It was the ideal match for the busy life I enjoyed beyond my profession. The position with the state was hybrid – 3 days in, 2 days at home. I enjoyed the professional discourse and teamwork. I enjoyed working in support of arts education for learners of all ages across the state. I enjoyed spending time downtown and the views from the 33rd floor. I enjoyed the regular paychecks.
But I did NOT enjoy the morning rush out of the house on office days. I won’t miss 7-9 hours a day in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, mostly spent staring at screens. And I certainly won’t miss the commute and parking lot fees, which at the time I left had escalated dramatically as garage owners took advantage of higher demand following the Governor’s return to office order, the move that prompted my resignation.
In the end, I didn’t leave because I couldn’t have remade myself into someone who worked in an office five days a week. I left because I didn’t want to do that. Over the past 12 years I’ve built my life around our urban farmstead. Being away from here three days a week and keeping things going last season was barely sustainable. I was afraid five days away would have meant the end of this lifestyle – one that keeps me physically active, mentally balanced, and social engaged – and I wasn’t willing to give that up. It’s my recipe for resilience. It’s my path to a thriving life paved with healthy food and fellowship.
While I didn’t make this decision lightly, and while it will require some financial sacrifice for me and my family, I recognize that I was privileged to make this choice. I’m married to someone who doesn’t mind putting in long work weeks and supplying our family with health insurance and money to make mortgage payments.
I know my small act of protest didn’t make any waves. In the end I probably only hurt myself in acting out this way. But I’m proud to have taken a stand for things I value in life beyond money. I’m happy to set an example for my kids that a good life isn’t just built on professional advancement. And feel grateful to have passion projects to lean into as I live into my next chapter.
Like nearly half of Americans who voted in the election earlier this month, I’m disappointed with the results. I’m disturbed that so many people were willing to vote for a sore loser who values TV ratings over hard work and experience. I’m sorry Kamala Harris couldn’t convince more people to follow her down a path paved in freedom, mutual aid, and joy. I’m frustrated by all the people who didn’t vote one way or another. Much of what I hear on the news makes me angry, confused, and disheartened. Thank g!d for the farm.
Research shows that having your hands in the soil and spending time with other people can help ward off depression and loneliness. Farming gets your body moving which is the first step towards better mental health. Bonus that you are getting exercise outdoors in the fresh air absorbing Vitamin D. When you grow your own food you eat better. When you eat better you feel better. And the kind of urban cooperative farming we engage in provides opportunities for social connection.
The climate is changing and the earth is literally on fire in many places, but when we come together to work with the land, we do our part to help keep her alive. Our efforts on the quarter acre we’re stewarding may not have a huge impact on its own, but imagine the impact of 1 hundred, 1 thousand, or 1 million people engaging in small scale collective farming and rewilding native habitats. Doug Tallamy is mapping the latter through Homegrown National Park. It’s beyond time we had something like that for urban farming.
If you’re angry about the election, I strongly advise you to follow the advice of Lukas Nelson & Family: “Turn off the news and build a garden.” I promise it will help you “feel a bit less hardened…a bit more free.”
There are tons of resources on this and other blogs that can help you. And I, like most every other grower I know, am happy to answer any questions sent my way. Talk to people, find your allies, check some books out from the library, start a garden journal, and start getting ready for next season. I can’t tell you it will stop He Who Shall Not Be Named* from doing dumb shit, messing stuff up, and enabling others to do the same or worse. Potentially a lot of stuff. But I’m sure it will make you, and any friends you bring along, feel better, and stronger, and ready to fight the bastards when the time is right.
This all aligns really nicely with something my friend Cheryl has been teaching in our Jewish community the past few weeks. Our tradition offers three suggestions for hard times: 1) Don’t mourn alone. 2) Express gratitude. 3) Practice tikkun olam (find, uplift, and bring light into the world through acts of loving kindness and repair).
Reflecting on how our farm has provided and will continue to provide space for all these things makes me feel some hope in the darkness. And I hope by reading this you might feel inspired to find or make space like this in your community. If you’re around Columbus, plan to join us sometime in the spring. Over winter, consider taking a class at the Columbus Garden School. Check books out from the library (see some of my early recommendations here.) It’s always the right time to start building a garden.
*I thought it would be interesting to look back and see what I’d written before about working through the 2016 election by farming. I search for his name and only found it in one post. I’m proud I kept him out of this space. He’s one of the few people whom I would never invite over for a salad.
[A bloom of Passiflora or Passion Flower. Also known as “clock plant” because its arrangement of pistil and stamen look like the center point and hands on the face of a clock.]
This week marked four months since I started my new off-farm job. 40 hours a week, somewhere between 8am and 5pm Mondays-Fridays, I’ve been fully engaged in settling into my work as an Arts Learning Coordinator at the Ohio Arts Council. This has required me to take a big step back from farmwork overall and to develop a whole new relationship totime on the farm. In keeping with that theme, I’ll break my rule against apologizing for how long it’s been since I last posted to note I started writing this just before my three month anniversary. Feels good to finally get it finished.
Back in May, I revisited the concept of farming as a creative practice. Continuing with that thread, I’ve been thinking about the concept of farming as a 4D, or time-based, artform. Again, this isn’t a totally new idea for me. My friend and colleague from the University of Florida, printmaker Patrick Grigsby has been prompting me for many years with invitations to think with him around our overlapping “slow” art practices. With this post, I’ll start to unpack that a bit and record some more recent thoughts on my changing perception of time in relation to three concepts – clock time, perceptual time, and deep time.
I. Clock Time There were semesters, even years, during my time as an adjunct professor when I worked the equivalent of a 40 hour week. But I mostly did that job in stints and at odd hours as needed and as it suited me – 4am-7am, noon-4pm, 8pm-midnight – based on my internal clock which sometimes decided 3am would be a fine time to start the day and between other joys and responsibilities including tending the farm. So working a (mostly) desk job in long stretches, M-F, week after week is a significant change. Overall I would say I’m adapting to working “bank hours” and abiding by clock time, better than I expected but it has changed things in my life overall, particularly as a part-time farmer.
Trying to keep things going, especially in the record-breaking hot dry summer we’re having, has meant occasionally getting out in the morning before I put on my clean work clothes, or working super extra carefully because I already have them on, and again after I take them off at night. But I’m not putting in anywhere near the hours I used to and it shows. (Note to self: You MUST get a new irrigation system next season and use it!)
I have really enjoyed the few brief times I’ve been on the farm before heading downtown for work. It sounds different – it’s quiet but for the birds singing, and you I actually hear them because there are no mowers, motorcycles, or sirens blaring. The air is fresh and relatively cool and the dose of natural light before a day in the office under fluorescents is better than any vitamin you can get at a store. Heading out after work gives me a moment to catch my breath, to step out from behind the screen and re-engage with the physical world through a deeply somatic experience. All of which leads me to the next shift I’m experiencing, a change in my psychological perception of time on the farm.
II. Perceptual Time I’ve written many times before about experiencing a state of flow while farming – losing track of time as I bounce around the space from task to task. That is a precious experience I haven’t been able to enjoy as much as I would like these past few months because it requires BIG chunks of clock time. (Note to self: Add setting aside more weekend days for that to the wish list.) For now, I’m thinking about how the ways I perceive time impact my perception of myself and my life. How are we shaped and defined by the ways we fill time? How are we shaped by what we do with our few precious hours of free time? I want farming to remain part of my identity so I need to make time for it.
In the meantime, I find I’m moving my body in different ways, more slowly, when I do get out. I’m not feeling as hurried, even though I’m well aware I have less time. I’ve adopted a “what gets done will get done” attitude that’s really new for me. It’s probably in part just a natural part of the aging process. I’ll be 50 (fifty!) this spring which is not the age I feel most of the time. But I definitely don’t have quite as much energy as I used to. This has impacted the farm’s productivity, but I guess that’s not the point of the space at this moment. – I’m not getting as much done but I’m experiencing and enjoying it in new ways.
[Bowl of berries. This summer I learned another way of telling time on the farm – “fruit time” – from Aimee Nezhukumatathil in her book Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees]
III. Deep Time Which links directly to my last point. My loss of clock time for the farm has caused me to let nature lead the way more so than in the past. And nature works s-l-o-w-l-y. As deep ecologist Joanna Macy wrote in the poem, “From the Council for All Beings,”
I, lichen, work slowly, very slowly. Time is my friend. This is what I give you: patience for the long haul and perseverance.
In some ways it has been interesting, even exciting, to move slowly, if not as slowly as lichen.
As my Instagram followers know, I love to celebrate volunteers (#volunteerplants) that pop out of the ground, and often thrive, of their own free will. The less time I am out pulling weeds, the better chance there is for these kinds of surprises. But my lack of attention to watering and pruning has also cost me in lost productivity and led to the establishment of some less welcome guest plants and pests. This is a good reminder that agri-culture isn’t natural, it depends on us.
The weather is also a reminder to think about the land over time. It was here before us and it will be here long after we’re gone. I worry constantly about the change in climate we are experiencing in my area code. The city of Columbus has been impacted by changing temperatures and a heat island effect caused by our lack of tree coverage. I watch the storms break up just before they reach us as if impacted by an invisible force field. The city’s Urban Forestry Master Plan is designed to address this, but trees need time to grow. Future efforts to push the city and our little farm into perma-culture practices will prove beneficial for the plants and us.
In this time of deep transition, as I travel in these new modes of time, I’ll try to be patient. It doesn’t come naturally for me. It takes intentionality – an essential ingredient in both good farming and good art.
As some readers know, I spent this winter on the job market. As an art educator, I was often asked to talk about my personal artwork. While some of the best art educators I know do maintain active studio practices, I also know many for whom teaching is their primary artform*. So the expectation behind the question drives me a little crazy. By this logic all science teachers should have labs in their basements and all English teachers should be writing novels.
It’s also a tough question for me because for the past 11 years the farm has been my studio. That’s not an idea that makes sense to most folks so it requires some explanation. It aligns closely with my interest in contemporary art practices that utilize non-traditional materials outside gallery spaces and forefront social engagement, which are also foreign concepts to most people. I’ve written about farming this way before but after an intense and highly rewarding early spring waking the farm up for the season and securing a job at the Ohio Arts Council, I feel compelled to revisit the idea.
Years ago, Rachel Tayse (Harmonious Homestead, Hounds in the Kitchen) – one of my early inspirations in backyard farming – honored me with inclusion in an article she wrote for Edible Columbus about farming as creative practice. Rereading that article now, renewed my commitment to the concept.
While I’m totally freaked out about how warm this past winter was, it was such a pleasure to get outside and have my hands in the soil in February. Since pausing our annual Pollinator Lover’s Plant Sale, I’ve reallocated the energy and resources I used to spend preparing for that event on rejuvenating our property and donating plants to my daughter’s school as part of a honeysuckle clearing and re-wilding effort. I can’t really describe the joy I find in dividing perennials to spread beauty and bounty around. But I want to try to articulate and share how this work relates back to my understanding of the farm as a site for creative practice, as creative placemaking, using some of Hetland, etal’s (2007) Studio Habits of Mind.
It all starts with making observations. Heightened awareness and acuity is a powerful form of mindfulness essential to all forms of visual art making. (NOTE: I’m a visual artist so I focus here on sight, but I’m sure the same is true for musicians with sound, dancers with movement, and actors with behavior.) Not a day goes by that I’m not out walking around the yard looking at what’s popping up out of the soil, how the landscape changes from season-to-season. It brings joy to my life to connect in this way. To see the natural world unfolding. It may sound obvious but the more I look, the more I see.
My best days are those when I head out back and get lost. If you’re familiar with our place you know that’s not because we sit on acres of land. But within the small plot we’re stewarding, there is so much going on, and so much to do. Once I reach a state of flow, I move between plants and spaces like a painter across a canvas – digging here, weeding there, seeding here, harvesting there. Like the abstract expressionists who inspired some of my first successful (read: interesting) independent artwork, I use an all-over approach to farming. In this way my craft develops in response to what I find in the field, in collaboration with the rain, sun, soil, time, and temperature.
Moving through the tasks that ,while important to successful production, don’t feed me creatively, provide opportunities for me to practice engaging and persisting. While people generally refer to K-12 art class as “fun,” honing an artistic craft requires repetition and trial and error that is not entirely enjoyable.
Everything I’ve written thus far pertains to my relationship with the work. But this season I’m trying to get people back to the farm after my sabbatical because I know that it’s your presence that completes the work. Having people over is the final component of farming as creative practice. It’s like a tree falling in the forest – a farm that no one visits is important, it serves its primary function of producing food but to serve the transformational function of getting people to think differently about where food comes from and how edible plants can function in a landscape, they need to stand within and see it with their own eyes. Like Walter Benjamin wrote about works of art in the age of mechanical production, an urban permaculture farm in the age of industrialized agriculture has an aura about it that can only be experienced in person.
So keep your eyes and ears open for announcements about our next open house! Coming this June.
Over the Fence Urban Farm 