Thursday, October 1, 2009

Mindful and Relational Spirituality at the Farm

These are my words for the community: earth-respecting and holistic. By this,I mean something akin to what Barbara Kingsolver speaks to in her novel, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She writes:

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of “food” and “dirt” in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one’s supply chain to learn where things are coming from.

We like to compare ourselves to Kingsolver’s family, we five interns and the farmer’s family with the support of a small board of local Venturians have set out to eat, sleep, pray and love in the fertile soil of Ventura County, California. But, I say, there is something more!

Respecting and living with my complete self in the land also means understanding the “animate, interconnected, dynamic universe,” as Starhawk states in Earth Path. Yes! I believe we have a relationship with the earth as we do with each other as we do within ourselves.

It is good to live in the present and with one another.

In other news, Denise and I finished a Farm House sign!

1 comment: