It's About Time

I’m thinking a LOT about time these days. I never seem to have enough of it. My days are gloriously full of activity that I have worked hard, my team has worked hard, to create. And even as I fall asleep, my mind is spinning with lists of all that I didn’t get to or all that I was just inspired to start. 

Time is surely our most limited resource.

Have you noticed how the concept of time is reflected in our language? Spending time, wasting time, lost time, investing time, using time, buying time, time is money, etc.

That last one gets close to the heart of it, in a round about way. “Time is money,” is often spoken about the financial cost of inefficient work — but when you think about it more deeply, the way we use time is our most powerful currency. None of us know how many hours/days/years we have in these bodies. How we use our time is how we use our lives.

All of this is coming up for me as our society slowly climbs to the edge of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, so many of us felt frozen, isolated, unable to do the things we wanted to do. This year, we’re in that re-entry phase of doing more, then doing too much, then having to go back to doing less, only to be able to do more. We all hope that soon, either there will be enough of us vaccinated, or enough of us consistently wearing masks and socially distancing, that the yo-yo of activity levels can steady a bit, at least allowing us to more freely gather with our friends.

“Making up for lost time,” is a phrase I’m hearing a lot. This morning, it’s the phrase that was running through my mind as I awoke. 

While I’m guilty of occasionally using that phrase myself, this morning, I laughed at it. 

Our “COVID time” was not lost. It was spent holding ourselves together. It was spent learning how to hold each other up from a distance. It was spent holding on to hope for better days. Maybe we spent a bit too much of our time eating all that food we bought and prepared while we were in a stay-home-stay-safe mode, or maybe we spent too much of our time sitting on the couch instead of walking or doing all of the exercises we told ourselves we were going to do when we had to stay in our homes (yes, that was a personal admission). But we spent that time. It won’t be ours again. We gave it away, and we gave it away with a goal of getting to the next moment.

Perhaps we call it “lost time” because we didn’t fully realize how we were spending it. I wonder if that’s not the case more often than not? We are frustrated, even angry with COVID and our collective response to it for “taking our time,” but throughout it all, we had choices about what to do with our moments.

The beauty of it all, is that our hours/days/years are still rolling out in unknown quantity before us — and we still have choices about how to spend them.

“It’s about time.” It’s all about how we spend our valuable time. Maybe COVID has taught us, is teaching us, that it’s about time we take the use of our time more seriously.

I’m making breakfast for the man I love, then going to spend time with my tiny garden in this stunningly beautiful day. 

How are you spending the currency of this day?

Springing Forward

I don’t mind the time change. I know, that puts me in a quiet minority. The seemingly artificial adjustment to our clocks shakes life up though, in ways that make me pay attention to things I might otherwise not notice. The lengthening of shadows, the increase in the volume of morning birds, the pace at which the grass is growing, the subtle fragrance of fruit trees in bloom.

What will we notice this week that we didn’t last week?

The Season is Changing

…and I find myself daydreaming a lot. That’s mostly the reason this post is coming to you so late in the day. I sat down at my computer at 6am this morning, but distractions kept me jumping from task to task until the rain caught my eye. From there on out, I kept looking at the changing weather, thinking about how the rain, or the sun, or the wind, or the cold, or the day length might impact what we do at the OFS this week.

And then all “real thinking” just kind of stopped. I just kept looking out the window.

I didn’t finish the newsletter as I’d planned. I didn’t outline the OFS calendar. I didn’t outline the conversation with farmers that I’m hosting with Carol and Steph Tuesday evening. 

I just sat looking out the window, as if I could see the season shifting from winter to spring.

And you know what? I’m the most relaxed I’ve been in months.

When is the last time you let yourself get lost in what showed up outside your window?

It's all about relationship.

“Between a good farmer and good soil, there must be a good relationship. This is an understatement: Soil and the people who work it are the foundation of a thriving society. Wealth has its source in nature, and that wealth must be protected as well as spent.”  Mark Bittman


Yesterday, Saturday, I woke up at 6am and started my weekend to do list…a list of all the things I never seem to get to during the week, also the things that must be done in order to set the stage for the week to come. 

This morning, Sunday, I woke up at 5:30am to see how many things were left on the list (all but three that I managed to get done yesterday) and to add tasks I had forgotten earlier.

As I worked at crossing things off, it seemed I kept remembering more things to add. It felt good to get it all on paper, where clarity can take over and kick anxiety out of the way — but I could also feel a sense of overwhelm starting to take root. 

I set the list down and took care of our grocery shopping, fixed dinner for John, washed the dishes, watched a little TV, and started reading the new Mark Bittman book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal.

That’s when I came across the quote you see at the top of the post.

Those of you who know me well, know that I LOVE my job, I LOVE the Farm, and I LOVE learning and talking about community-scale farming. So you’ll not be surprised that when I read this quote, it resonated with my personal perspective on life :)

If you had pulled me aside and told me I needed to tend to my “work/life balance,” or to practice mindfulness, or to refresh my boundaries, I would have blown you off. Sorry.

But the concept of the relationship between farmer and soil reminded me that I have a relationship with my own resources, and that if I hope to keep doing this work I love, I will need to restore and protect those resources that make me who I am…I need to take a day off now and then, I need to keep my house clean and organized, I need to offer care and attention to my beloved, and I need to occasionally read a book for new ideas.

If my “farming” is the work I do with the Organic Farm School, then my “soil” is the home I share with the man I love, and the interests that keep my creativity strong, all of which benefit when I slow down to spend time with them.

How would you describe YOUR relationship between the work you are called to and the resources that make it possible?


Space Is Important

A friend of mine asked last week, “why do people blog?” That led to a wonderfully rambling conversation, but the specific answer I offered about my blog was that I was hoping to model a practice of reflection. OK, more truthfully, I hope to model a practice of reflection that leads friends to fill the notebooks I sell or give as gifts. But I do sincerely want the practice to be of service to those to pick it up.

But to reflect requires space in your schedule - space is the time you DON’T schedule. 

I plan my schedule each week…and I’m notorious for doubling or tripling the number of commitments I make between the time I design that initial plan and the end of the week. The reason I can do that it is I initially plan a very open schedule. I know that “control is an illusion” and that interesting opportunities are going to emerge throughout my days. If I start each week with a fully booked plan, I’ll either miss those serendipitous moments or will frustrate people by missing previously planned conversations.

Space is important because being able to “give” time is important — and you can’t give what you don’t have.

How many times have you felt frustrated when someone wanted to talk with you even as you knew you were running late for a task? And yet of those times, how often have you left such conversations feeling good about giving that person your attention for 5 minutes? …or realizing you were inspired in a new and exciting way? …or recognizing that you learned something helpful? …or, perhaps most important of all, relaxing into what it means to be human?

This coming week, my intention is to continue in pursuit of space. At the end of each day, our time will have been put to use. I want to remember that time is not wasted when I have an empty block on my calendar, it is filled with potential: reflections that can be made, help that can be offered, a ear than can be lent.

By the way, the reason my friend and I could blather on about why people blog is that we both had space for that conversation :)

What's Frozen...And What's Not?

Happy Valentine’s Day! And Happy Snowy Sunday!

After a day of tiny snowflakes that slowly added up to about 4” by last night, this morning has brought bigger flakes and another inch or two of accumulation. Things look whiter and colder from this side of the picture window - but the hummingbird feeder is not frozen like it was yesterday.

Given that it’s Valentine’s Day, with thoughts turning to love, I started thinking (uh-oh) about how hard it’s been to feel and show love to those who fall on the other side of the political divide over the past year (or four). Maybe you have escaped this experience, but I’ve found my heart hardening against public figures, acquaintances, high school friends, and even some family members because of all the hate that’s been tossed around.

And as I sit here looking at a non-frozen hummingbird feeder surrounded by 4-6” of snow, I wonder if now that we’ve closed the most recent impeachment chapter, I can begin to thaw parts of me that have been hardened. 

Do not misunderstand, I am not calling for “unity without accountability.” I’m simply noting that I am the one hurt by the hardening of my heart — and I believe there must be a way for me to melt it a bit so that I can look for what we have in common as a way to talk about where we are different, so that we can collectively get to the future we need to meet. There are huge challenges ahead of us. Finding healthy and sustainable ways through them is going to take more than half of us. 

I laugh at myself as I’m typing…because I’m also listening to the morning political shows. Hearing a prominent politician blaming the democrats for allowing the country to get to this point is testing my “thawing experiment.” For a moment there, I could feel my heart getting colder again.

Sigh. The pursuit of a warm and loving heart is worth it, but dang, this is going to take a while.


A Month In...

We are now a week into February! How are you feeling about that?

I had hoped I’d be more organized by now…hoped that I’d have a few more communication systems in place…hoped that I’d be a few pounds lighter and a bit stronger.

But I’m proud of myself for continuing to hold on to the intentions I set for myself: perpetuating the positive things that kept me going during the craziness of 2020, and holding an awareness that in every moment I have choice.

Note, I did not say that I am happy with all of the choices I made. There is a reason I have not lost the weight I say I want to lose :)  But at least for January, I was much more aware that I held the power to choose what to eat and how much — and I have a new routine for booking time at the gym so it gets built into my weekly calendar. There is a reason I still find myself in back to back meetings with no break for walking once around the track — but at least for January, I owned the fact that I was the one who scheduled the meetings and that I can choose to schedule differently this month.

How are you doing with the intentions you set for yourself? Have you kept them front and center? Are you ready to re-confirm them? Or have you considered new ones? It’s only February… there’s a lot of year ahead.


Focus

So, what were your observations of sharing as a capacity building activity? Did you notice anyone practicing such a thing? I did, and I’d love to tell you about what I saw…but not this morning :) Facing a grant application deadline, I’m in a hyper focused mood, which brings me to today’s blog post on focus.

What are you focusing on these days? And what is that focus bringing to your experience of these times?

Are you focusing on what you can control? Or on what you can’t? Are you focusing on what you have to get done each day? What you are getting done over the long haul? Or on what you weren’t able to get done yesterday?

Is your focus helping you? Or tying you in knots?

We sometimes forget that we can change what we focus on. We can break big pictures into smaller ones to make things feel a bit simpler. AND we can also zoom out to include more of the big picture in our focus so we can breathe into how things are coming together. More often than not, we get to choose how to use our focus.

So again, what are you focusing on these days?

Collaboration as Sharing

This past week was another wild one. It included a holiday, Inauguration Day (a peaceful one!), and many dynamic planning conversations. 

One of those conversations has kind of taken hold in my head, twisting and turning as I work to find a way forward. Without giving away too much, the exchange was related to an opportunity for collaboration that we have at the Organic Farm School this year. Someone offered to move one of our outreach efforts forward in a very meaningful and generous way, not only taking a significant amount of work off my plate, but also creating something much more robust than my current skill set would allow.

As I shared this with my team, a few questions and concerns were raised, which is part of healthy discussion around anything new. But what fascinated me was a significant push back against anyone doing anything for us that would lead to a significant benefit for that person in the future. 

Allowing the discussion to spread out a bit, it became clear that the issue was two-fold: one, that the person I perceive as being very generous toward us, the one offering to do something with and for us, was in effect the one being given a very generous opportunity that is not part of our organizational focus; and two, that in the end they would actually take something of value from us that we could not control.

We will continue to work through this. My sense is that a new kind of collaboration is needed in these rapidly changing times, and that more than ever it has to be grounded in trust and generosity. That such collaboration naturally leads to benefits for each participant and that there is beauty and mystery in watching how that happens and moves out into the world. 

And yet, the divisiveness of the past few years has habituated many of us to be skeptical of the motivation of others…to be convinced that if someone gains something, then someone has to lose something.

We are taught as little ones to share freely, certainly a key element of collaboration yet an attribute many of us lose practice with over time. I’ll be looking for how this kind of giving shows up in adults this next week. But I’m now wondering if we also learn somewhere along the line that sharing creates benefit for both the giver and the receiver? That genuine sharing is a capacity builder for everyone involved, creating new opportunities that move beyond our control even as they can expand our reach. I’ll be looking even harder for examples of that. 

I’d love to hear about your observations…


Resetting

I’ll be honest. When it came time to start on this week’s blog, chaos and confusion resulted. There is just so much rattling around me/us right now. Trying to write a clear and meaningful paragraph or two feels like heavy lifting, and this morning, I’m not forcing myself to do it.

Instead, I’m finding my bearings and resetting. And I have two suggestions for all of us concerning “shoulds.”

One. Think of something that you are feeling you “should” do today that you can set aside for the moment without causing harm to yourself or others.

Two. Find a quiet time today and read THIS, all the way through. Read it out loud if you can. On Wednesday, we are asking Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to pledge to “uphold and protect” it…perhaps a non-negotiable “should” in our lives is an annual commitment to at least read it.

Reach Out and Hang On

It’s only 10 days into the new year, and yet it feels like months have passed since Christmas. 

Some of that may come simply from the long to-do lists that come with new beginnings — but I have a strong sense that this year it comes more from all that is going on in our individual and collective lives and the COVID-driven separations that keep us from holding each other up.

In this first full week of January, we’ve seen frustrations over the slow distribution of COVID vaccines; the horrific assault on our nation’s capitol and the legislators and their staffs working inside of it; a continued surge of homelessness; rains that just don’t seem to stop; and the end of the Seahawk season.

Not a single one of these things has surprised us. The distribution of the vaccines has always been understood as a monumentally complex task, and the wise among us know it’s going to take time and patience. What happened at the Capitol has been long in coming, a blind anger stoked by ego, misinformation, disinformation, lies, manipulation, racism and hatred - all of which have been methodically weakening the very separation of powers, checks & balances, and principles of citizen engagement that were created to keep such assaults from happening. Homelessness continues to grow, as the battle between individual rights and collective health rages on. We live in the maritime Pacific Northwest, so winter rain is part of the deal. And, well, we love the Seahawks, but who among us really thought they were at the top of their game at any point this season?

Woven into all of these shared challenges are the more personal ones: aging parents/partners/selves; cancer diagnoses and mental health crises; employment insecurity; parenting of babies and adolescents; regular old relationship issues; and more.

But the thing tipping so many of us into a painful sense of hopelessness and self doubt is the isolation we’re feeling because of the COVID crisis. In a more typical year, as the dramas of life unfold, we turn to each other. We gather. We hug. We laugh, we cry, we don’t let our “others” struggle alone. These days, we mask up, stay at home, don’t allow visitors, and postpone our celebrations.

My hope this week is that we can all begin a practice of creativity when it comes to finding new ways to offer support to our family, friends, and neighbors. So many of our more habitual ways of taking care of each other are off the table for a while…but we are a species that needs connection, and I’m confident that just as a virus can be novel, so too can our expressions of community and love.

This week, I’ll be reflecting on what I can do, with what I have, where I am — not only in spite of all that we see happening so early in this new year, but because of it. I want to find myself and all those I love (and even those I don’t) in a much better set of circumstances by December. My intent is going to be to reach out and hang on, hoping that our collective tendrils can keep our individual spirits tethered to the future that is waiting for us. Join me?

Choice + Do

Last week, I shared that I was going to spend some time thinking about what I want to hold on to from 2020 - as compared to what I want to do differently. Did you join me in this reflection? I’d love to hear where your thoughts led you….

Mine took me on quite a ride! A ride filled with laughter at myself (good-natured, not mocking laughter…well…mostly).

I had challenged myself to look for a New Year’s intention of what to hold on to, so of course the first thing I did was think of something I wanted to avoid in 2021. HA!  Isn’t that so often the way our New Year’s intentions go? We say there is something we want to do differently, and almost immediately we go back to old patterns.

So I laughed, and then looked more deeply at what had just happened. I had identified something that exhausted me in 2021…having to make so many more decisions, every day, about almost every step of every task on my plate. Who could visit the Farm and who couldn’t? Which activities could we do in person and which ones could we only do on Zoom, or only outside at a distance with 5 or fewer people? Which tasks made sense to perpetuate if we couldn’t do them in person and which ones was it better to drop for the time being? Who could drive the van and who couldn’t? How should we clean the van between deliveries? Would we deliver to an outlet that wasn’t insisting on masks? So many decisions.

Alright, that did get old…but what was tangled up in that? Was there some part of the constant need for “decisions” that I might want to hang on to?

I let my mind play with the question for the week, and yesterday my curiosity was scratching around the word “default.” After all, wasn’t I really bothered that my “default” actions weren’t enough in 2021…that I had been repeatedly challenged to consider anew all of my habitual responses to come up with new decisions?

Turning to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this is what I found:

default (v.)

late 14c., defalten, defauten, "be lacking, be missing," also "become weak," from default (n.). Restricted meaning "to fail in fulfilling or satisfying an obligation," especially a legal or pecuniary one, is from late 15c. Related: Defaulted; defaulting.

So, had I become weak in the process of actively making decisions prior to COVID-19? Or at least lazy? Was that why I found all of the decision-making so exhausting? Again, I laughed at myself — yes indeed, I had allowed myself to go into a form of auto-pilot around so many things. Not necessarily a bad thing when pursued in moderation, after all, there is an efficiency in doing some things the same way over and over again. But it struck me that consistently turning to “default” actions or approaches, can weaken our creativity, can blind us to alternatives and lock us into patterns that generate lackluster outcomes at best and catastrophic ones at worst (say, like a pandemic).

As much as I want to let go of the persistent need to make decisions, I think I’m going to reframe it as the opportunity to make choices. My new intention for this new year is focused on  recognizing the choices I have available to me, deciding how to act on them, and then doing something in response. After all, new choices will follow, right? And I can always make a different decision. My “word of the year” has turned into two: CHOICE + DO.

What intentions are you carrying into this moment of re-set that we call a New Year?

—Judy Feldman


Contemplating a New Year

As we step into the last days of 2020, I’ve been considering how to set my intentions for the new year. I mean, this one has been challenging on almost every level. We started with fires burning what seemed like all of Australia. One of the NBA’s greatest players died in a helicopter crash. There was the impeachment spectacle. As police shootings of unarmed Black men continued to demean our culture and the Black Lives Matter movement took shape and took to the streets, imploring us to radically confront institutional racism. There were earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, explosions at fertilizer storage facilities. There was the election that took weeks to call. Oh, and there was/is COVID-19. Friends and family perishing because of the virus, the economy doing a bizarre crash/recovery dance depending on how much money you had to start with; “Stay Safe/Stay Home” orders; restrictions on travel and gathering; conflicts over masks; difficult decisions about how to spend the holidays; and more.

It has been a rough year. If for some reason we’ve become a little numb to all that happened, we can refer back to this site .

My first inclination, when I started thinking about 2021, was to list all of the things I want to be different. And certainly, my greatest hope is for the COVID-19 virus to stop killing so many people. But I don’t really have control over that…so I held a question of not what to put on my intention list, but first, how to actually think about it. 

While letting it roll around in my head yesterday, I noticed several birds riding on the stiff winds blowing around the island. Maybe the birds were struggling. Maybe they were having to expend more energy than normal to do their daily chores. Or, maybe they were being held up by the wind, given a chance to let go and yet remain floating above the fray…maybe they were able to shift their perspective on what was happening below. Maybe, just maybe, they were even having a bit of fun?

I will never know, but thinking about it offered me a different way to think about how to set my intentions for what we hope will be a healthier year for all beings.

With the wild diversity of challenges we faced in 2020, how were we held up? At times, it felt like we were struggling against a never-ending wind…but to use bird terms, didn’t we keep flying even when it felt like our wings didn’t work? What were the things that kept us “airborne”…and can we think of some of them that we want to keep in our lives even after the pandemic eases?

Between now and the stroke of midnight that separates us from 2020 and pulls us into 2021, that’s what I’m going to be thinking about. I have to believe that in spite of all that was painful in this year, there are things we don’t want to leave behind, and that our intentions don’t have to focus solely on change…they can include thoughts on how to keep some of the good that helped us stay upright during the bad.

If any of this resonates with you, maybe we can share some of our lists next week?

Something to think about...

Each year during the holidays, I give away notebooks to my friends. Often, what I hear is “this so pretty, I can’t write in it! I’d mess it up!” Ack! The purpose of a notebook is to write things in it, put thoughts to paper, brainstorm about your life. At least that’s how I look at it when I make and gift them. So this year, I added something to the gift. I added the offer of a weekly prompt. Thinking others might like to play along, I’ve decided to start posting those prompts here on the blog. I hope you give them a try. Even if you don’t have a notebook, or you do but still don’t manage to get anything written in them, maybe the prompts will be of service to your practice of “paying attention.”

So far:

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Eating Our Fear

I am a grower of farmers. For the sake of small scale farmers everywhere, I ask you to eat regular heaping platefuls of colorful lettuce leaves. Frilly pale green friseé, purple and lime green butter heads, bitter dark green chicory, countless shades of green and purple loose leaf lettuce, and more.

For beginning farmers especially, they provide a significant amount of income. No one goes into farming to get rich, but all farmers need to generate a profit or they don’t remain farmers for long. Lettuce crops grow quickly, they tend to sell quickly too. At the community level, they are in steady demand. In fact, there are farmers who not only paint their fields in the startling diversity of lettuce heads, but specialize in custom salad mixes. They combine spicy leaves with sweet, green with purple and spotted, add in a few herb sprigs or spinach or kale. They change up these offerings throughout the season, along the way developing the sophistication of their eaters’ taste buds and in the best examples talking with them about the process.

This lettuce stuff is also good for you. With very few calories, it subtly goes about adding micronutrients to your blood and bones. But you should probably know that I kind of don’t like it.

It’s amazing to watch grow in the field, beginning as tiny, almost weightless seeds, valiantly pushing two bright leaves up through the soil and then in time-lapse fashion adding round and round of thin yet textured photosynthetic wings around a center. They are perhaps the most elegant example of sunlight made edible, and especially in the spring, after a long winter of starchy cooked vegetables, a soul satisfying change of pace to your menu. Especially the varieties with a bit of crunch. 

But I’ve yet to find one that has much flavor. They are more a blank canvas upon which salad dressings serve as the taste equivalent of color. If you’re lucky, they have enough flesh to make your fork useful. Otherwise, you end up trying to slip your utensil under them and awkwardly balance the leaves up to your mouth, or proclaim foodie privilege and pick them up with your fingers.

Shy of a salad, they become the green layer on a sandwich to keep the cheese from sticking to the roof of your mouth. Or the wrapper to hold the meat when a diet says you can’t have bread.

However I encounter them, lettuce leaves are just not my favorite food. That said, I do not find them dangerous. The USDA, the FDA, and insurance companies across the country now do. They are especially worried about your consumption of romaine.

For those of you who were anticipating the theatrical production of a caesar salad at your recent holiday table, you are now feeling pinched. You were hoping to see the eggs beaten, the olive oil dripped, the salt added, the anchovy paste blended in, the lemon squeezed, and the concoction poured over the torn leaves of this majestic upright green — tossed and decorated by savory croutons and shredded parmesan cheese. You looked forward to the bite, the zing, the texture and chew. And it was taken away from many of you.

Hear me when I say it was made available…but in that offering there was hidden the unintended consequence associated with how we have come to grow food and THAT is what we should all be talking about right now.

We have asked farmers to do what we didn’t want to do. We asked them to invest in crops that weather, markets, palates, and/or economies might not ultimately support. We asked them to work in the cold, the wet, the windy, the hot, the dry, the bright and the dark.

We also asked them to grow a lot, but then only bring us the perfect. We asked them to grow it quickly, and in every season and every region so we’d always have the freshest of whatever we decided we wanted on the morning we got up.

But in asking them to do all of this for us, we didn’t want to have to actually pay very much, so we asked them to find cheap water, cheap seed, cheap fertilizer, cheap labor, cheap land. 

We didn’t want to have to go to them, so we asked them to bring goods to us. They were too busy doing all that we asked, so a second layer of commerce was introduced. Distributors. 

The distributors gathered the food we asked to have grown, mingled it all together, hired advertisers to think up logos and commercials. They packaged up boxes and crates and cargo containers. They scheduled routes and drivers, boats, and trains. Weeks, sometimes months later, food arrived at our grocers from farms barely remembered. After sitting in warehouses, parking lots, freeways and on loading docks, our food was unpacked, handled again, and set out for more hands to touch, examine, and select.

When lettuce made someone sick, the warning alarm was quickly sounded. This is logical. We should know when something we are about to make a part of our bodies is tainted in any way. We should be able to work from good information about how to keep ourselves and our loved ones healthy and strong. The thing is…it’s a bit late to assume we can really have such knowledge and information.

Robbed of our romaine, maybe it’s time we begin asking for different things.

Did you know that lettuce is a cool weather plant? Once the sun’s stroll across the sky slows, building up heat over the course of long days and raising temperatures above 75 degrees fahrenheit, lettuce changes. Like many of us who don’t like to be hot, it grows bitter and tough. However it is that plants know their time is coming to an end, so the lettuce knows and it begins the race to procreate. It bolts. It changes from a tender set of concentric leaves to stems that reach up toward that hot sun as if on a dare. The stems pop with small yellow flowers, adding yet more color to the field, and more dining options for non-human eaters. Ultimately, these flies, bees, and other pollinating insects barter with the plant, exchanging DNA delivery services for meals so that seeds can be born as the lettuce plants die.

But most farmers don’t see this miracle of life because their livelihood comes from the sweetness of lettuce youth rather than the bitterness of lettuce death. Unless they are seed farmers, which by the way is an entirely different kind of farming, their focus is on timing their crops to fit within the confines of the cooler weather days. 

Lettuce is 95% water. Lettuce requires a lot of water in the field. To produce the salad you had for lunch probably took over 20 gallons of water to grow. To grow, not to grow and wash and keep cool in the produce aisle — 20 gallons of water to grow not the full head but the 1-2 cups of lettuce leaves you put on your plate. Fortunately, water is more abundant in the cooler weather days of spring and fall. You could almost believe that nature is a wise and functional farmer. Hmm.

So how is it that 90% of the lettuce eaten from November to March in the US comes from Yuma, Arizona?

Just in case you need a little context, Yuma, Arizona is in the extreme southwestern corner of the state, near the Mexican border. 

Temperatures in Yuma rarely dip below 40 degrees. For 8 months out of the year, their high temp runs from 80-108 and for six of those months, the total of the high and low temp adds up to more than 150 (Romaine tends to suffer beyond that 150 mark). This means they need heat tolerant varieties and still, it matures quickly. (E. coli can live in the tissues of plants for up to 65 days.) Annual precipitation in Yuma is 3 inches per year. In terms of water per acre, this pencils out to about 80,000 gallons.  An acre of lettuce can need more than 900,000 gallons per planting . 

Without getting that from the sky, their irrigation water must come from wells or the reservoirs made available via huge dams on the Colorado River, which is interesting from the perspective of sovereign rights/water rights. To whom does that river belong? The National Reclamation Act of 1902 (reclamation?) set into motion a host of projects that fundamentally made agriculture possible over more than 300,000 acres in Yuma County, Arizona and Imperial County, California.

So again, how is it that so much of our lettuce in this country is grown in Yuma, Arizona, 100,000 acres of it?

Because we eaters, in very real albeit indirect ways asked that it be grown there. Because land is flat and inexpensive, labor is cheap and anxious for the work, water is subsidized, and the weather is not ideal but it’s consistent and stolen water makes up for the heat. These things keep the price of our beloved romaine down under $2 per head. The farm owner gets about .87 of that. The laborer? We won’t go there just yet.

Arizona is a fine state, and the farmers there are fine farmers doing what we have asked them to do. The E. coli that has grown into the tissues of the lettuce leaves did not do so from anyone’s intention. It did so because of our disconnect with the fullness of life and the diversity of organisms on this planet, our disrespect for the pathways of water and waste, the enormity of the food web in which we are both diner and dinner.

Scientists have yet to identify the specific point of origin for the E. coli that has caused harm to the humans who ingested it. They assume it started in Yuma because so much of our lettuce starts in Yuma. Experienced researchers, pathologists, physicians, regulators, attorneys and judges will be tasked to find “who’s responsible,” but chances are that in ultimate fact we all are. And the sooner we settle our hearts and minds with that stunning judgment, the sooner we can set about moving back closer to the farmers doing what we ask them to do - not to micro manage and question their practices, but to be in relationship with them.

I don’t know who the earliest farmers were, but I carry a sense that they were the ones in a community who had the deepest affinity for caring both for the plants their fellows needed to sustain their bodies and for the Earth that offered up such gifts. Not quite shamans but perhaps very close, I imagine they were the ones who on some unknowable level felt the exchange of energy between rock and belly and because of this, they were called to the role of farmer steward.

This in contrast with our contemporary culture, where we say food is “produced,” as if by our own ingenuity, and where invisible farmers are assumed to be laborers at our calling not theirs.

Among activists, there is a term heard more frequently with each passing food scare…re-localization. It’s a concept of pulling back our work order with mono-cropping, multi-national, corporate food systems, and instead investing in local or at least regional networks of farmers with faces. Not only is this concept loaded with a tangled mess of challenges across issues of economics, health and safety, hunger, human resources, cultural diets, and more — it won’t solve all of our problems. There are some careless farmers out there. There are some misguided, uninformed, damaging practices in use. There are hazards and really tangled screw ups to be addressed. But relocalization might bring daylight to them along a timeline we have a chance to interrupt before traumatic injury becomes national threat. 

What’s more, it might bring the eater in closer proximity to the eaten. It could remind us that our lives depend on the calling of wise and compassionate, hard working farmers. And it has a chance to remind farmers that they are asked to feed us well from the gifts of the Earth, which are not to be taken for granted.

Idealistic? Hell yes. Impossible? As a complete shift, probably. Insane? Not as insane as continuing down a path that seems to be making us afraid to eat.

The day of the latest Romaine Recall, most of my friends still sat down to salad with their dinner. Their romaine leaves dressed with rowdy and robust concoctions of who knows what delectable ingredients from their cupboards. They didn’t have a death wish, they were farmers. Or they knew their farmers. And they weren’t in Yuma, in the middle of 50,000 acres of romaine. They knew the soil from which the lettuce was grown, they knew who shared contact with that soil, where the water for the field came from, and how the heads were handled as they were cut from their roots, washed, and offered. If they didn’t know directly, they had trust in those who did. Funny how trust generates confidence.

Across all of the crazy social media platforms, posts and reposts about the announcement from the USDA and FDA pushed aside previous debates about the history of Thanksgiving, arguments about whether or not there is a war on Christmas, memes referencing the Mueller investigation, and countless pictures of kittens and puppies. Facebook friends noted that while a few people have been made quite ill from this pathogen, which is an awful thing, the health of those few people has generated a broad scale ban of a vegetable - while guns kill tens of thousands of people and yet to speak of a ban of those things is to beg for rioting by gun owners. No, let’s not go there. But let’s think about why there is such an exaggerated response to one threat and not to another.

Perhaps it’s because even though we have outsourced our responsibility for fueling our bodies, we know in the most visceral of ways that we must be fueled. We will die without food. Yes, some of us will die because of food, but that is why we want to trust those who do the work involved in feeding us. Most of us don’t know what E. coli looks like. We don’t know that it’s full name is Escherichia coli O157:H7, or that it is part of a huge family of bacteria with most being harmless or actually important members of our human intestinal communities. We don’t even know how to pronounce it which is why we shorten it to E. coli. But we know this particular E. coli is bad and we don’t want it in our food, and the fact that it’s there is making us lose trust. 

What we would be wise to remember is that trust only persists between mutually engaged and invested parties. When we chose to price our food rather than value it, we may have generated a paradigm shift we haven’t fully articulated. We shifted “farmer”  from a role to which one is called to a job for which one is hired.

We eaters made that choice somewhere along the line. We can blame a host of others…advertisers, peer pressure, the economy, “the man,” but we each and all put food to mouth on our own. Depending on your view of the course of human history, you might see the path as short or long, but either way it has been one of incremental shifts away from connection with the larger source of our food. It looks like our reconnecting path might need to be shorter and faster. Again, it is our choice.

I am not a farmer, but I have chosen to cultivate farmers because when I look around at the world and how quickly big changes are happening, my stomach still growls. E. coli, Salmonella, Mad Cow Disease, botulism…these are real and formidable neighbors we live among, and my stomach still growls.

I want to trust that there are people called to quiet that rumbling in me, called not as laborers, but as stewards of the source of what keeps our bodies alive. I want to trust that there are strong backs with healthy souls out there who at some point in their lives sat down on the Earth and just knew…. that every thing that has lived or is living or will ever live on this planet is fueled by a very real and yet complex flow of energy from the sun in the middle of our solar system.

That’s a big calling. And one not likely to be heard by many when it comes flanked by the question, not spiritually asked,  “why on earth would anyone ever want to be a farmer?” 

We are a nation that has a twisted relationship with eating. We pay way too much for things that do us harm and not nearly enough for things that make us strong. We think of farmers as dirty and ignorant and yet we put what they grow on our tongues. We incentivize production of “commodity crops” that more often than not go to animal feed and fuel rather than to food for communities. Or when they do go to communities, the calories arrive in highly processed and preserved fashion, in brightly colored boxes, purchased with clipped coupons, and sporting a list of ingredients in 4 point font that few can make any sense of and probably should not be in the boxes or in our bodies.

As we use precious water, land, habitat, and human resources to grow all of this material we put into our mouths, we have astronomical rates of cancer, chronic disease, obesity, hunger and malnutrition all co-existing in a network of solid waste facilities overflowing with rotting food.

Are we really asking young people to become farmers and solve all of these problems?

No. Or we shouldn’t. Instead, we should be helping to inspire them, recommitting ourselves to make better choices with them.

The farmers in your community that are growing lettuce? Buy it from them. I buy it from them and remember, I don’t even like it. But I buy it because I trust them to feed me and they trust me to support their efforts. And I know that I really am healthier if some of it ends up in my bones. If you are fortunate enough to have a farmer near you, get to know them. Ask them questions. Observe what they offer. Tell them they are your heroes, your lifeline. Expand your meals to include things you’ve never tried, like kohlrabi, turnips, parsnips, six different kinds of kale. Create a relationship. Grow some trust together.

That young child you notice sitting in the sun, playing in the dirt? Sit with them. Ask them what they feel, what they smell, what they see. Encourage them to look at bugs, water the plants, taste the sweetness of a pulled honeysuckle stamen. Give them nasturtium seeds and delight in their laughter when you show them how to eat the flowers and swallow the peppery bite of their bright yellowness. Plant carrots and show them the crazy satisfaction of pulling the dayglo cylinders from the hug of the Earth. Sing The Farmer In the Dell, maybe update it for the 21st century, but sing it all the same. Sing Old MacDonald Had a Farm and talk about how grass is powered by the sun, and how the cows are powered by the grass, and how the cows give us milk and cheese that because of the grass and because of the sun puts calcium into our bones as we grow. 

As they get older, conversations can shift to balance, vegetarianism, veganism, and more, but first, instill in them the magic and mystery of how a star creates bodies. Later, it will draw them into the additional mysteries of how different seeds grow into such different plants, each pulling up from the soil a different conglomeration of vitamins, minerals, sugars and proteins.

Growing all of our vegetables, and all our eggs, and meats, nuts and fruits takes hard physical labor coupled with innate curiosity, knowledge, planning, bookkeeping, patience and stubbornness. For a long time now, we eaters have paid those who do the work for the product we take rather than for the planetary and terrestrial processes they tend.

Let’s change that. Buy some lettuce*.


*from a farmer you trust

Thinking About Doing...and Doing

I've been doing a lot of thinking about doing. For years. Thinking about writing. Thinking about opening an on-line shop. Thinking about doing more with my photographs. So much thinking.

Unfortunately, the thinking included cloudy thoughts of apprehension and laziness. So thinking about doing was pretty much all I did.

Funny thing. It doesn't take much to move from thinking about doing to actually doing what you think about. Maybe the key is a willingness to take tiny little scary steps toward big shiny audacious dreams...knowing either you or the dreams can shift things along the way.

So, today I'm doing. Sharing my story, thinking it might be useful for you. Or not. At least it might be entertaining.