assignment

Before the house blessing this past weekend (to stick with this week's unofficial ATFP blog theme) we had a long list of to-dos: assemble publicity materials for the CSA, make our beds, strip the experimental garden of zucchinis and patty-pan squash in hopes that we could off-load some of the abundance onto our guests...

My favorite assignment in preparation for that evening was given to the five of us interns by Julie Morris. She asked us each to bring to the Eucharist service something symbolizing our intention to be present on the farm this year. Now the candles on the mantle in the community room have been joined by a journal, a bundle of New Mexican sage, an Ethiopian cross, a childrens book (The Carrot Seed), and a clay cup made by the Dalit.

(You can keep all the radishes you can pick if you correctly match the five objects to the five interns. Actually, you can have all the radishes you can pick no matter how you score. Seriously, help us out here!)

One of the reasons I liked this assignment so much was that it ended up being really easy (at least for me). For graduation my parents gave me this wooden Ethiopian cross

(not hard to guess that was mine, right?!) to take with me, a reminder of the things that have been constant as I've lived on four continents, and will remain constant in however many more places I'll call "home" long enough to have a bed and a bicycle.
Sitting there on the mantle, it is also a reminder of something I hope to learn from this year - how to be present in all the places I will live in a way that is conscious not only of their historical, social, political, cultural, and economic particularities, but also of the uniqueness of the land itself and the people who live closest to it.