Cultivating reverence

I'm afraid I may be jumping the bounds of agriculture and straying into social commentary more than usual this week, but the topic of this post has been on my mind lately. I'd like to share a few thoughts on our society's relationship both to food and to death and dying, and why those relationships are at the heart of many of our environmental, social, and psychological problems. The complexities and specialization of the modern world, I believe, have distanced us from the processes that bring food to the table and that bring our lives to a close. While modernity has brought us inarguable benefits, our decreased intimacy with and therefor understanding of the most basic processes of life and death has serious ramifications.

These thoughts were rekindled last week during a conversation with a dinner guest at the farm who is studying to be a palliative care nurse. I shared with him that my father passed away two years ago and spent the last two weeks of his life under hospice care--first at his own home and finally at Monterey Hospice House. While hospice care didn't make the loss of my father any less painful, I believe it helped my family integrate his passing with the broader scope of his life. That sense of integration has brought me some understanding, comfort, and sense of peace. So often, the aging and dying process is hidden behind the doors of nursing homes and hospitals. I think we all suffer on account of this--those isolated by their age or illness and those of us who have become unfamiliar with death and dying. Consequently, we understand very little about death. We fear it and avoid facing it all the more. The fascination with death and violence in our popular media reflects a deep alienation from the dying process.

Our relationship to food has become similarly detached and opaque. Because we only participate in the final stage of the process--consumption--food has been reduced to a commodity. Most of the process which brings food to our supermarkets is now hidden from view. Yet for millennia, agriculture was a primary way in which mankind studied, understood, and appreciated the workings and rhythms of the natural world. This intimacy with natural and semi-natural ecosystems fosters a reverence for life which manifests logically in an attitude of respect, conservation, and stewardship. Now that less than 2% of of Americans are directly engaged in agriculture, and those who do farm are increasingly pressured to do so in a way that is more industrial than ecological, it is not surprising that we face an ecological crisis. Alienation from the natural world is a much bigger threat to the environment than an army of Humvees because the latter stems from the former.

The 20th century thinker Krishnamurti wrote, "Our problems--social, political, religious--are so complex that we can solve them only by being simple, not by becoming extraordinarily erudite or clever." Gardening is in some ways a simple act. But it is helping me cultivate a deeper understanding of and reverence for life, death, and the processes of the natural world. And because actions are ultimately extensions of our attitudes, I find such cultivation to be a most practical step in addressing in my own way the complex problems of our time.