Visit a Farm

Visit a Farm

The more urban your situation, the more this is necessary. A shout-out here to the Oakland-based organization Planting Justice, whose mission is to empower people impacted by mass incarceration and other social inequities with the skills and resources to cultivate food sovereignty, economic justice, and community healing. There is an unacknowledged link between mass incarceration, slavery, and the removal of people from direct connection with the soil. Food sovereignty creates personal empowerment, restores dignity, and reminds us our real value. Getting your hands in the dirt is one of the most grounding and re-connecting things that we can do. Everywhere around us on a farm there are lessons about life. You can’t visit a farm without learning something. Even if you are not paying attention you are going to learn something, because you are going to trip over that hoe, and that will teach you to pay attention. From the obvious–there’s a delay between planting a seed and harvesting fruit, during which you must consistently tend to the growing plant. To the mystical–have you ever watched a honeybee dance its location? To sit in a field, to be with plants and animals, is to be in the timeless contact with the cycles of life, as they are, were, and will be. Visit a farm, and you will just feel better.

For a brief period of time my organization worked with tech folks in the Bay Area. I was coaching and consulting to young tech workers, and invariably when they began to trust me, each of them shared the same fantasy with me. They all told me that they were working in tech just long enough to make enough money to buy a piece of land (a farm), and start an intentional community. After the third person told me this I realized that this fantasy was not a fantasy at all, but a deeply embodied awareness of the nutrients they were most deeply lacking: deep connection with the earth, and other humans.