Who is this farmer?

No bad fortune, no good fortune, no loss, no gain;

Never seek such things in eternal serenity.

For years the dusty mirror has gone uncleaned,

Now let us polish it completely, once and for all.

...

Always working alone, always walking alone,

The enlightened one walks the free way of Nirvana

With melody that is old and clear in spirit

And naturally elegant in style,

But with body that is tough and bony,

Passing unnoticed in the world.

--Zhengdaoge

It was difficult
to walk away from the George Jones Farm, a place to which I can honestly say I completely gave myself.
to take a chance and step off the hundred-foot pole and onto that farm, and then step off that same pole again off that farm.

It's been even more difficult
to let go of good fortune, and bad fortune.
to let go of losing the security of an unreasonable proposition.
to let go of some fancy of gaining liberation from others.

This year I decided to move on from the George Jones Farm, with a lot of sadness for a dream not fully realized, but with some renewed sense that that dream lies not in one field or another, in one network of relations or another.  What and where is this farming practice?  What and where does this work take place?

This year I will be concentrating on developing the acre of land our house lives on to grow vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, berries, and more, while working with students and others, sharing what I know and how I think about this work of growing with the world.  It will be an experiment in techniques and in approach.

Growing and eating and dying and growing and eating...
Who does this? 
Preparing fields or small garden beds, sowing five hundred feet of peas or twenty around the fence encircling an apple tree. 

These fingers knitting the soil gently over this seed or that seedling are themselves knitted together by sunlight and the searching mouths of worms in darkness and ever-hungry bees buried deep in flowers and other fingers before them.  Who is the farmer here?

In these last days of winter there is the bursting seed coat and the pale tenacity of roots pushing down and cotyledons pushing up.  There is growth and there is caring for that growth and there is eating. 

There is a farmer "passing unnoticed in the world" hoeing her rows and watering his children.  In spring her hands curl in green tendrils "naturally elegant in style."  In autumn winds, he sways and creaks with a "body that is tough and bony."

It was difficult to leave (or be left by?) my old job, but really the same farmer is still farming, all the time "always working alone."  My fingers knit into his and knit the soil in turn.

...There Is Nothing At All

“When the Dharma Body awakens completely,

There is nothing at all.

The source of our self-nature

Is the Buddha of innocent truth.

Mental and physical reactions come and go

Like clouds in the empty sky;

Greed, hatred, and ignorance appear and disappear

Like bubbles on the surface of the sea.”

(from Zhengdaoge/Shodoka)

“When the Dharma Body awakens completely/ There is nothing at all…”

Mycorrhizae, root hairs, ants, voles.

Birds, acorns, barberry fruits, and seeds in a matrix of excrement.

Winds used to carry North American pine pollen hundreds of miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, dumbfounding European sailors in clouds of gold.

Canopy leaves catch dust in the hot breeze, rains catch dust in vertical rivers, bark catches dust floods in channels, moss catches innumerable unkown Nile silts in luxuriant green deltas at the foot of the oak in the backyard.

Who is in control?

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

Looking out, there are birds and roots, dust and leaves and moss.

Looking around, what is there? Kaleidoscope center, still point among the shifting colors. Amazement.

The sailors lift their eyes from their tasks to see the backs of their hands, the rigging, and the sails, the sky and the clouds covered in gold. Their mouths hang open and their eyes widen, lost.

The Leisurely One

Pardon the hiatus but I was in Uruguay with my partner Kazim visiting family in January. 

   Two times a year my sangha, The Village Zendo, engages in Ango practice.  Hearkening back to the original rainy season retreats of the early Buddhist sangha, ango (meaning "peaceful dwelling") is a period of intensified daily practice.  We are currently in an Ango period, and the study text for this period is a long poem by the Chinese Zen master, Yongjia Xuanjue, called the Zhengdaoge (Shodoka in Japanese).  I have decided to read it stanza by stanza with an ear towards what it says about my farming practice, and will occasionally make posts on thoughts that arise

"There is the leisurely one,
Walking the Tao, beyond philosophy,

Not avoiding fantasy, not seeking truth.

The real nature of ignorance is the Buddha-nature itself;

The empty delusory body is the very body of the Dharma."

“There is the leisurely one…” What might it mean to farm leisurely? Hardly “gentleman farming,” rather a kind of poor man’s farming.
 
Chuangzi: So removed from civilization were they that they forgot how to speak.
Mumon: His speech is rough, his writing illegible.
 
To farm leisurely might mean farming
 
as if your life depended on it,
as if farming was your life,
as if life was nothing but farming.



As if:

In June Kazim and I pick deep red-purple serviceberries from the trees in Tappan Square in the pallid violet of twilight.

In the evening I pad out the back door and through the high grass to pick orange day-lily blossoms one day short of bursting open into a great steel bowl. Then I string them with needle and thread and hang them to dry for winter soups and stir-fries.

Hurrying ahead of the wave of frost, we work though the evening until even headlights aren’t enough, picking tomatoes and peppers, hanging the immature cayennes upside down so that they continue to ripen to red.

Cattails in spring, lamb’s quarters in summer, mushrooms in autumn.

Hang acorns in an onion bag in a toilet tank and with each flush slowly leach the tannins. Every week hang mint to dry for winter tea.

Save seeds at every opportunity. Seeds in pants pockets, shirt pockets, stuffed in backpack pouches. What were these again?

Read and dream and forget. Hatch plans.

Spend evenings chopping, washing, mixing, pickling.

On Failing and Letting Go

This first year as a farmer has been challenging. From a late start to the job to breakdowns of every piece of equipment in the Spring, this year has been characterized by frustration at setbacks, desperation at the mounting tasks necessary for success, and elation when even one seedling miraculously burst out of the earth. The art of farming is really timing – peas in on St. Patrick’s Day, tomatoes in on Mother’s Day. And so when the tractors on the farm were all broken, in early April we hurled ourselves at the heavy clay of our fields, weeding nearly two acres by hand and hoe (and shovel for mammoth tap roots of curly dock), then trying to draw furrows in the unbroken clay to sow peas and finally plugging them in one by one stooped over in the pouring rain with aching fingers.

This scene played out crop after crop this Spring: leeks, onions, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, potatoes. All gotten into the stubborn ground with aching hands, tears, and sweat, albeit increasingly late, as each required mammoth efforts to prepare the ground for them. What satisfaction to see the peas unfurl their first fat cheerful leaves and the leek transplants thicken and grow tall, and what frustration and sadness to watch that hard work swamped by weeds as late Spring heavy rains made the fields lush with life (just not the intended life of our plans) while we were trying to catch up with planting.

What to do? Make dandelion root tea and pick dandelion greens. Make use of wild greens like lamb’s quarters, amaranth, purslane, chickweed. And yet…

As the season has progressed and our efforts have brought fruit but not always bounty, it’s been hard not to feel a failure at this enterprise. What to do with this feeling, and the stunted onions and vanished shallots, the late planted tomatoes stalled and stubbornly green in August, and the struggling cucumbers?

In the middle of summer I went to the Hudson Valley in New York to join my sangha, the Village Zendo, for a 10-day sesshin, or intensive meditation retreat. The night before my flight, after working at the farm from 7:30am to 7:30pm trying to get everything done, I returned home to pack. I folded my sitting robes and packed them with my rakusu, and pulled my oryoki bowls off the high shelf of the hutch in our dining room.

“Oryoki” means “just enough” and is the formal way one eats meals in a Zen temple. Like sitting meditation and walking meditation it is a practice and a tool for Zen students, a wake-up call. An intricately knotted cloth package holds nested black bowls, chopsticks, a spoon, a small rubber spatula (more on this in a moment), a napkin, and a drying cloth.

Three times a day after hours of concentrated silent sitting and walking, these packages are brought down by practitioners from their perches on shelves lining the zendo, or meditation hall, and carried with respect t the same seats used fro meditation. There is seamlessness from zazen to kinhin to oryoki.

Eating is an incredibly intricate and meticulous practice wrapped in ceremony. Before opening the cloth package we chant that we are actually opening the Buddha’s own bowls. Energies of wisdom and commitment and compassion are invoked as food is served. Humility and recognition of the generosity that brought food to these bowls are expressed once the bowls are filled. A small offering is set out by each participant from their bowls to feed all beings in the universe. As utensils are arranged and the first bowl, the Buddha Bowl, is held high in offering, all of the universe participates in the meal.

Food is eaten mindfully and efficiently, and when it’s done out comes the spatula. This little tool bewildered me when I first practiced oryoki. Chopsticks and spoon are licked and sucked clean, and then bowl by bowl the spatula is used to scrape up and eat every last morsel, grain or gob of food. In a meal guided by form and decorum, this sucking and scraping and licking is a radical dining move: nothing is wasted.

Hot tea is then poured into the first bowl and each participant goes to work with their spatula to clean the bowl, diligently removing any residue, then pouring into the next bowl and then the next, also cleaning the utensils along the way. The now brothy tea is then drunk: nothing is wasted. Except at this point a last swallow of this meticulous act of dishwashing is reserved and then thrown out.

For years, from my first bewildered experience of this eating ritual through growing familiarity and ease with it, what has always been most meaningful is the focus on the preciousness of food and the meticulous way in which none of it is wasted. But there at the end of the meal is the pouring out of the last of the brothy tea. At this pouring out, we chant, “The water with which I wash these bowls tastes like ambrosia. I offer it to the various spirits to satisfy them.” What is this? After doing everything possible not to waste, the temple collectively throws the last of the meal out.

Arriving at the retreat feeling like an utter failure after watching all of our herculean efforts in the fields seemingly go to waste opened for me a small window. After doing everything possible, what is left? Let go. Tip your bowl, and let the last of the tea spill out. Is this failure or is it a gift? “I offer it to the various spirits.”

In Zen there is the famous image of the enso, the dramatic sweep of ink arcing in a breath across a blank page into a circle – perfection in the moment. And yet it really isn’t. Always left open, the circle is never complete. The bowl’s rim can’t hold, our efforts never complete themselves. The perfect circle is one that spills its contents out to the world/that opens its heart to let the world pour in.

Every day in the fields is total commitment to caring for earth, coworkers, and community through environmentally sound practice, teaching and supporting, and food that graces so many people’s tables. And yet… In dollars and cents, this year has been miserable and hard. And yet… After everything the bowl tips and the remains of the meal spill out, an “offering to the various spirits to satisfy them.” Who knows what effects have spilled out from this year of hard farming? Into the earth, into the people I work with, into my small town and beyond.

Since returning to the farm from this retreat I have been focusing not only on being meticulous, on saving every piece of produce possible, but also on the gift of “failure,” on letting go of my efforts and their failures, trusting that every act is a gift whether it is saving or losing. That in fact there is no losing. Where is the bowl’s rim? When the circle is always open, is there a rim at all?

Saving All Sentient Beings

“The best way,” Brian said, “is to just squash them between your thumb and your index finger.” I grimaced, he grinned. “Or you can throw them into your bucket of soapy water. I’ll burn them on the bonfire later.” This was twelve years ago when I first apprenticed at a farm, Flickerville Mountain Farm and Groundhog Ranch (a joke about their perennial crop of one pest in particular), started by former Washington Post reporters Cass Peterson and Ward Sinclair, and in 1998 run by Cass and Brian Cramer in the wake of Ward’s passing. Brian and I were standing in the middle of several rows of potatoes holding fluorescent yellow and blue kiddies’ sand pails filled with soapy water, incongruous tools for our grim task: killing Colorado potato beetle larvae. One by one the larvae filled my pail and those of the other apprentices, quarts and quarts of wriggling life, anaesthetized and drowned in the soapy water. Although one of the high school students we worked with, a local kid in this most rural part of Pennsylvania, left the field that day expressionless and unfazed with his hands covered in orange goo.

Twelve years later, as the Farm Manager of the George Jones Farm in Oberlin, OH, I walk through our fields and smile at the treasure trove of Stellaria (aka the chickweed that most people try in vain to eradicate from their gardens) I’ve just spotted. Late May and warm, but the recent rains have meant a resurgence of fresh growth on this cool season wild green. It’s bright green leaves and tiny white flowers (it’s in the carnation family) are mild and fresh.

Next to this unexpected find is the large patch of crowded Lamb’s Quarters growing in a dense colony of varying shades of blue, silver, and gray. Ooh, and there’s a patch with dusty rose coloring similar to the special variety (Chenopodium giganteum) I just got seed for from a recent visit to Stonecrop Gardens, where I had lived and worked while training as a horticulturist in the Hudson Valley. Caroline and Michael kindly allowed me to dig up a few plants of a very special Lamb’s Quarter whose new leaves are a fiery magenta and then mellow out to a peaceful silvery aqua. In Spring, Stonecrop’s English-style flower garden erupts with bulbs followed by spring perennials and these stunning little magenta and aqua plants pepper the blank spaces of the beds. Soon enough they’ll be pulled to make room for summer plantings, leaving only one or two to self-seed next year’ crop, but in the meantime this little “weed” shares its beauty. My own interest in it is that Lamb’s Quarters, a relative of spinach in the goosefoot family, is also an excellent and nutritious edible wild green. Packed with vitamins, the leaves can be steamed or sautéed like spinach, or the tender tops can be eaten raw in salads. For the past two weeks or so, we’ve been harvesting these tender tops at the farm and adding them to our salad mix. Now, with this little magenta and aqua gift from Stonecrop Gardens, the salad mixes at George Jones Farm will shine.

I think I’ve missed my chance at picking the deliciously sour wild sorrel leaves of Spring but maybe they’ll be back in the Fall when the weather cools. However there’s always purslane to hunt for in the heat of summer. Each season brings forth a new wild addition to our palettes. Stellaria, Lamb’s Quarters, Sorrel, Dandelion, Dock, Purslane: weeds gardeners spend so much time trying to remove from their lives, which all the while might satisfy our hunger and nourish us.

Most of the rye and vetch cover cropping we sowed last Fall has already been mowed down just before flowering. It is mass death on the one hand (I send a thought to the literally tens of thousands of lives I’ve just killed just at their fullest potential), but their “corpses” will add valuable biomass and nitrogen to the soil as the churned tops and the invisible but massive root systems below decompose and build topsoil on this land that had been mined mercilessly with corn and soy of its riches for decades. This is a patient work of life through death, a participation in the process (which I will join in too. So will you.) that started with lichens growing directly on primeval rock eons ago and in dying provided life to mosses which in turn in dying gave life to small plants which in turn in dying gave rise to forests, all growing from an ever-increasing placenta of soil (see Wes Jackson’s preface in New Roots for Agriculture for a compelling discussion of how all agriculture as we know it degrades this “placenta” of topsoil).

But here is a patch that got missed, and in the late evening twilight, as I am (im)patiently waiting for the chickens in our chicken tractor to finally decide it’s time to roost so I can close the coops, I wander up to this beautiful and subtle island of blues, violets, and silvers in a sea of freshly turned earth. The rye is just coming into flower, its long stately bearded heads swaying in the breeze. These will make an excellent accompaniment to the creamy yellow and aqua blue of the spikes of overwintered collard flowers I will pick for bouquets to sell at market. Yes there are lupines and valerian flowers and later we will have zinnias and marigolds. But there will also be rye (and other grasses), dock seed heads, chive and sage blossoms, collard flowers and seed pods, cress seed stalks, and many many other unbidden gifts from the fields.

I’ve just taken a small break from the farm and gotten away to New York for a few days before returning for the summer. I went back primarily to spend time at my home temple, the Village Zendo, with my teacher Roshi Enkyo O’Hara, and my sangha. My time there began with a wonderful workshop led by Roshi on the Four Bodhisattva Vows that are chanted each evening in Zen temples around the world. At the Village Zendo they are translated as:

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.

The Dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.

The

Four impossible tasks that Zen students commit themselves to each day.

The workshop looked at various English translations of these vows and at the original Chinese characters, to try and tease out for ourselves just what these vows mean. For me, as a farmer who daily engages in cultivating life that in turn enlivens the people in my small community while also simultaneously engaging in daily killing (whether its Colorado potato beetles, countless rye and vetch plants, or beheading broccoli or ripping carrots from the earth), the first vow has always been a lesson in partiality and accommodation, a lesson in acceptance of failure. There is no way to “save” all beings. The fact of my own life and all the actions that support its continued existence mean the death of other beings. I have come to think of this vow as one that forces me into an understanding and acceptance of my interconnectedness, that as I am intimately connected to all beings, so by “saving” my own life and taking care of others I save all beings. But still there is still this dark side of beetles drowning in buckets and rye falling beneath the scythe.

The Chinese original of this vow and the workshop’s discussion of it, however, revealed other dimensions of it for me. The original of “sentient beings” is more literally “all birth” or “all that which has been born;” “numberless” is “without boundary;” and “save” is “to take over to the other shore.” So, one might say: “All that is born (i.e., subject to birth and death, or that I perceive as being born and dying), I vow to transform.” What is this transformation? Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of the Zen tradition, expressed this vow as “The beings in my own mind are infinite, I vow to liberate them.” Who are these beings “in my own mind?” Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto Zen tradition in Japan, writing about the Buddhist precept, “Do not kill,” said “Promoting life is not killing.” The other day at the Farmers’ Market a woman came to buy a head of romaine lettuce for a housebound friend of hers. “I need one that absolutely doesn’t have any slugs on it. My friend can’t handle slugs,” she said. We looked for a nice head and poked about among the leaves, inspecting for slugs. No slugs but the leaves did have holes here and there, and yes in the evenings when I close the greenhouses where these lettuces have grown I have seen the odd slug slowly strolling along the edge of a leaf. Watching slugs do their own walking meditation is immediately calming. I tell the woman at the market that she should tell her friend not to be too unforgiving of slugs. After all, they have to eat too, and in opting for the head of lettuce with a hole here or a hole there, she has in fact shared a meal with another being. We all get hungry.

Of course we have also lain down slug bait and when I’ve seen slugs I usually pick them off and throw them far away. So who are these “beings in my own mind” and how do I not kill by “promoting life?” What arose from me at this workshop was that in absolute reality nothing is born and nothing dies, there is just a great circulation of energy, but in my mind I give birth to countless beings. Here is valuable food, here is a pest. Here is the plant that I will coddle, here is the weed I will uproot. Here is the person I get along with, here is the person who is difficult. In reality none of them exist, but I spend my whole life constructing them out of thin air, worrying about the survival of some on the one hand and killing others over and over again on the other hand.

I think that fulfilling this first of the Bodhisattva Vows is at its core accomplished through loving observation. To look about oneself carefully and with an open mind and heart means seeing bouquets in collard blossoms and rye, food in chickweed and cattails and lamb’s quarters, partners and teachers in the people who drive us crazy. “Saving” is “transforming.” Slugs and potato beetles still need to be removed, but hopefully they’ve enjoyed the meals they’ve managed to have, just as the chickens will surely enjoy the slugs and the beetles, and I will surely enjoy the eggs they offer up each morning.

Buddha Way

is unattainable, I vow to attain it.