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Secular Sabbath

Highlights from a weekend at Two Bunch Palms with Secular Sabbath:

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It’s been one month since we left the farm, sinc

It’s been one month since we left the farm, since I’ve had my toes in soil and hands stained purple by tomato vines, and so part of me is missing. But I’m back on the east coast, back to visit my parents and the place I grew up, and so part of me is returned to me with every burnt gold bit of autumn that crisps under my feet, with the scent of crunched acorn caps and the whir of omnipresent leaf blowers I forgot could be a soundtrack, with every red wing I watch whip between bushes and know to call “cardinal” by name. My skin was so used to snuggling with breeze all day, and it grumbles like a stomach for sun; and yet, the intentional walks and runs, which are purposeless except for relief, have never felt more sacred, more necessary. Maybe because my muscles are more rested, I’m running faster, farther, stronger. And after three weeks out here with my family, Lauren just left to fly back west a few weeks ahead of me, and so we’re apart for the first time since March, and a part of me (in the shape of her laugh) is missing. But I also have solitude for the first time since March, and so a part of me is returned to me. (I just have to pray that part of me does more than eat salty nuts and scroll Instagram when Lauren isn’t here to witness.) What I mean is, it’s all both/and. The wind reveals the trunk as it steals the foliage. When the amber leaves land, you see that they have light, pearly underbellies. You swoosh your feet through all that’s fallen, and it’s like confetti.

Give up, give up, give up, says life. Kicks, shove

Give up, give up, give up, says life. Kicks, shoves, slams, bruises, wilts. And as we fall, we think, I hate it here. Each time it hits hits hits hits again again it hits it hits, we think, I hate it here, I hate it here in this world I can’t leave, in this grief too big for the whole sky to swallow. But here is where we are, at a boundless rock bottom where we try to remember: despair is love turned inside-out. Grief happens where love happens, so the heart’s here somewhere, too. We look around from where we’re crumpled on the floor that keeps sinking deeper, and we reach for something — a speck of dust that the sun turns to glitter, the soft edge of the bath mat, a hand. For the things that don’t ask for answers, that don’t even make sense, like the cinnamon scent of wild matsutakes or how hugging a stranger can be home. We rest here, right here in the crumbling mess, held by what we can hold.

I noticed new wrinkles in the mirror this week. I

I noticed new wrinkles in the mirror this week. I have creases where dimples could be and crows’ feet at the corners of my eyes. It makes sense — I’ve been growing faster than I can keep up, I’ve been crinkled up by life a lot, I’ve been exhausted. Maybe the wrinkles were there before, and I just didn’t see them, or I see them differently in context now after not looking in many mirrors for months. I have the iPhone snapshots to remember my reflection, though. Here: leaning into a dahlia, a few days after the fever faded and the mystery illness receded. Here, returning home from the exact same run I took on an almost daily basis (except during the sickness and the fires), and joyously at home in myself. And then, drenched from cooling off in the creek that healed me in ways there aren’t words for. That I always take for granted. Here, chopping wood with imperfect technique but perfect delight. In the car outside the Safeway half an hour from the farm, where I parked every week for Zoom therapy, because that was the closest place with reliable cell service. Here. Munching cukes like apples. Letting the sun paint me, but the rain mold me, too, like the mud; these are metaphors. I barely recognize myself; I am me, I am me. @myrtleglenfarm always makes me more me.

Our home here is a studio that’s attached to the

Our home here is a studio that’s attached to the goat barn. At night, you can hear the old gates squeal and grumble as the goats scratch their jaws on the metal, or sometimes they chat at each other, butting horns. We strip kale for dinner and toss the stems to them, a few meters away. When Lauren and I arrived in June, we milked three of the mamas every morning, stuffing our bedheads into beanies and stumbling out our back door with the metal pail clanging as they nagged and nagged and nagged, hungry for the sweet feed we traded them in exchange for their milk. Some kicked, just to test us. Mid-season, I got accidentally head-butted by the biggest wether with the horns that curl backward; the silly bruise was a strawberry on my temple for weeks. When one goat was sick and quarantined to her own lonely stall for a couple of weeks — a painfully timely scene — we’d hear her bleating at 3am, or when we’d just sat down to lunch, or while we showered under the outdoor faucet just around the corner, wanting something: attention. help lifting her head to drink water. more alfalfa pellets. answers. I’m grateful for these oddballs. They remind me that humans aren’t the only earthly ones causing chaos with neediness and foolishness and fear. That we’re all a rowdy mess.

I’m taking a nostalgic scroll through 4.5 months

I’m taking a nostalgic scroll through 4.5 months’ worth of harvest photos. Remember that one week we nearly drowned in the plush piles of figs? The conjoined zucchini? The bliss of the first tomatoes in my white hands? In my white hands. My white hands, this soil, these fruits. I’m thinking about @farmerrishi’s post from a few days ago, in which he elegantly explained (you should read it) all the monstrous issues with the whitewashing of the environmental movement, through the lens of one hot new film about regenerative farming. (The film suggests we can solve climate change by shifting farming practices to sequester more carbon in the soil, which is generally a good idea, but it does not ask, who owns all the farms that make all the bad decisions? And what do we do about the colonial culture and racist, sexist, extractive economic and political systems that support these bad decisions?) I’m thinking about how you‘d only have to line up a few handfuls of these lanky kale leaves down the road before you hit the depressing graveyard left behind by one of many nearby logging operations — a lush plot stripped naked, left to the crickets, with a quiet crowd of frightened tree survivors standing back at a distance. About how all the Trump signs (all Trump signs, only Trump signs) that you sweep past on the way into town leave a bad taste in your mouth. Haven’t they seen the rainbow chard and the delight of its queer exuberance, or tasted the organic strawberries so soft and sweet that they nearly melt within hours of picking, if you can even let them linger in the bowl that long? I’ve been thinking about how quickly and consistently I can numb my mind to the fact that these towns are named after the Indigenous communities they violently displaced — how I can forget, with a perfect cucumber in my hand, that this land was never meant to be tended by me. May gratitude for each harvest always remind me. May it be fuel for working to dismantle the very systems that privilege me with access to every last perfect vegetable. #womenwhofarm

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