Infinite Gifts

The Abundant Harvest Newsletter, Fall 2019

The first full growing season of the Abundant Harvest is nearly complete and a lot has happened since it’s beginning. Perhaps the mark of a new growing season is the first planting, which for me was several rows of potatoes in the middle of March. Then came garlic (which was almost a total failure), onions, lettuce (which again was a failure—poor germination rates due to old seeds), peas, and then the rest. Sometime close to the potato planting I was told I needed to leave living in the shed—alas. The cold had nearly beat me anyways, living there throughout the winter with essentially no heat, but I was still sad to go. The news came and I walked to my side door and sat down in my snow pants as the sun shined through the barren trees above the neighbors’ roofs and radiated my face. Change was in the seasons.

I moved in with dear friends, Ron and Judy Zook, in Lancaster city, which turned out to be a welcome change. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned after living in the shed alone for six months was that I need to live with other people: I need to bump into housemates unexpectedly in the hallways; I need to cook with others spontaneously; I need people to tell about my day and to hide from. I need community. I quickly got a new job at a restaurant in town, The Bread Pedaler, as commuting to New Holland every day or so to work quickly became inviable. I also started connecting more with different social justice groups in the city, like The Catholic Worker House, Lancaster Stands Up, The Sunrise Movement, etc. Many friends were also closer. I left my cell to enter the world at the beckon of responsibility, and I think I was better for it.

The garden continued regardless. For the first few weeks of the growing season I mostly prepared the beds and planted. I didn’t do any tilling, which was planned as part of a strategy to preserve soil integrity and microbial life. The season before I planted a cover crop on much of the property and laid straw on the rest. The cover crop died and the straw compressed and both pulled back from the beds like a blanket, revealing the nearly weedless surface below. Seeds were planted and watered, soil hoed and time passed, and a harvest soon came. Food distribution to the neighborhood started again and before long increased and increased and increased. One person told me that I should be ashamed because I didn’t keep record of how much I received. Maybe. I told them that I wasn’t selling it or making money so I wasn’t so concerned about keeping an accurate count. There was an abundance.

As the harvest gradually increased from the end of spring into the early summer the distribution days did too. Accurate records of who I visited when and what I left with them did become an issue so I decided to organize a routine route. Also knowing how much to harvest became a problem, not wanting to end up with highly perishable produce not given away by the time I needed to catch the bus back into the city. I decided to ask some people who I knew appreciated the food deliveries if I could visit them at a certain time each week and if they were not home to leave a grocery bag by their door. Essentially, the project evolved into a kind of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), where each week 20-30 shares of fresh, organic produce was delivered to folks in the neighborhood—all for free, a gift. I would load up five five-gallon buckets full of vegetables on my wheelbarrow and push it down the sidewalks, delivering to one side of the neighborhood at the beginning of the week and to the other towards the week’s end. Even until October this has remained the weekly rhythm.

Now looking back at the end of the season, I wonder how to measure success. Yes, the garden grew a lot of vegetables (without accurate records), people were fed, friends were made. These are surely some measure of success. Surely there is much that cannot be measured. How does one quantify love? So much cannot be translated into calculations or costs, and that is the point of the whole project: to encounter a world beyond the limitations that bind us and to begin living in it now. Certainly I have learned so much about the gift in this experiment with truth. Even today someone new I met said after giving them a grocery bag of produce and telling them that it was free, “I’ll pay it forward,” which is what I usually say to people to help explain what I am doing and here I didn’t even have to because of intuition! At the heart of the gift is the interconnectedness of all things: what we do for one effects the rest and everybody knows it. Further, the good that we receive is never limited to just ourselves but extends to all of creation and “paying it forward” is just the necessary manifestation of a spiritual truth that always precedes it. 

At the beginning of the Abundant Harvest almost a year and a half ago I decided that a full growing season was a necessary amount of time to have a true test of the hypotheses behind the experiment. The time has passed and the results are in. Perhaps I do not know the conclusion fully in my head but certainly they are in my heart. At this point, I do not know what the future holds next year for the Abundant Harvest. The opportunity to tend the garden for another season is very much a possibility, as I understand it, but I wonder what is the best use of my time and talents: where is God calling me? On the one hand, I could very well see myself pursuing another year with the project, but I also lament living so far away from it and having my life somewhat divided as a result. I desire that my work-life and home-life be one, intrinsically intertwined, that my life be a whole, like a plant firmly rooted in the ground. I will be spending most of the winter in a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California, called the New Camaldolese Hermitage, to learn from the monks there more about prayer and community, leaving here Nov. 12 and returning sometime in March, and my life afterwards is still to be determined. Do keep me in your prayers.

I would be remiss not to thank and identify the many people who have made the Abundant Harvest a success. Firstly, my Dad, Tim, whose generosity allowed the project to exist and continue by donating the use of the land. Many hands helped for a day or two and have made their mark on the place. Joan Engle for many months helped tend creatures there in my absence; Michelle, Andy, Luke and Kristina have done so more recently. Jean Fetty provided good company over lunch for many an afternoon under his big purple beech tree that always hosts a nice breeze. Many people have donated various things here and there, like water, cookies, and money, all of which sustained me. Father Walter passed a big donation at the beginning of the current growing season and allowed me to purchase the seeds and other start-up costs, which was momentous and humbling. So many people have blessed the project with tremendous kindness, sorry for not naming you all but you know who you are and the gift will come to you too, especially when most in need.

The thirteenth century Persian poetry master, Hafiz, said, “Does the Sun ever say to the Earth / even after all these years, / ‘You owe me!’ / A love like that / lights up the whole sky.” Regardless of the project’s future or where I’ll be, I look forward to another year of growth in a universe that never stops giving.


Sincerely,
Elliot Martin

Does the Sun ever say to the Earth 

Even after all these years 

‘You owe me!’ 

A love like that 

lights up the whole sky. 

-- Hafiz

Home Again

The Abundant Harvest Newsletter, Winter 2019

 A soft layer of snow covers the earth outside.  I see green pushing its way through the frozen powder.  Soon the grass will be covered again, but it patiently waits, knowing springtime will come eventually.  My fingers are cold.  Exposed fingertips still function, proceeding from my fold-back, mitten/glove cut-offs that were probably designed so that a hunter could pull their trigger in time.  My cat insists on sitting on my desk, watching the computer screen, pawing at the digital mouse (a habit I cannot seem to easily break).  I see my garden in front of me through the window of my shed.  I see the backs of neighbors’ houses.  I am home here. 

I have returned to my small hometown of New Holland, PA after being away for the better part of 9 years since graduating high school.  Why?  My body has led me here.  An internal compass has led me back.  At 27, marriage, family, commitment, rootedness, and permanence is on my mind.  I need to be tamed.  I have returned to New Holland to ask my ancestors, living and dead, human and non-human what I should do with my life, most of whom for the past three hundred years have lived within a ten mile radius of where I live now.  Who are my people, my community, what is distinctly ours, what am I/we bringing into the world that is of unique importance, what is ours to give, what does it mean to be in this place, who are its members?  These are some of the questions I am asking.  Feedback is not always easy to receive but I want to be listening. 

In August last year I moved into an old work shed on a property, about a third of an acre, in the middle of town.  The land was covered in sod the month before but I tilled long rows of beds into it, wanting them to be permanent with the grass as a permanent cover for the walking paths besides.  I did so in the midst of a drought so the land was stubbornly hard even with the biggest machine I could rent from the local hardware store.  I did what I could and planted seeds without knowing if they would grow because I was set to be away for the coming month, as previously made plans insisted I do so.  The wettest summer on record followed, so by the time I returned a month later the place was alive, caring for itself. 

Like the empty lot in July, when I moved into my shed in August the place was bare.  About all that was inside were some pieces of old shelving randomly scattered along the wall from their former use, wood paneling, plywood floors and an old metal workbench spanning most of one side of the rectangular structure.  The shed did have electricity and insulation, except under the floor, but no running water, all of which was fine for me.  Slowly, it has become inhabited: walls painted green, the floor brown; a desk, a bed, a sink that operates from foot-powered energy, buckets of water, old chairs, clothes, cans; things put away, herbs drying from above; pictures, blankets, candles.  The home is my womb, where my soulwork takes place.  The cold now challenges my stamina and commitment, my peace of mind.  I don’t have any heat so I am constantly wrapped in warm clothes, a habit not foreign to our species, I imagine.  Global warming has made my situation a bit more bearable.  Francis, my cat, keeps me good company, and is also my jester who reminds me that life is not so serious and who uses his innocence to pester me for pleasure as a test of my equanimity. 

What am I doing here?  Many must ask, including myself first of all.  As previously mentioned, I am finding my place in the world, which has led me home, the one that I know best and which has most formed me.  I am seeking self-knowledge for the benefit of all, especially those closest to me.  I am here for the poor, to heal my own poverty, which in many ways is not uniquely mine but is held by all of those with whom I have community.  The neighborhood I live in is very comfortably middle-class so material need doesn’t appear necessarily pressing, but many wise people have observed that in this society spiritual poverty often is inversely proportional to the material abundance at hand; in other words, the extraction and separation from which our goods were produced have made us incredibly fragmented and disconnected people.  My work here is to rediscover my people’s place in the order of things, to re-localize the spiritual goods (which are always connected to material ones) that have 
been outsourced to the benefit of economic “progress.”  I am doing this through gardening, mainly. 

When my grandma and grandpa were raising seven children down the street fifty years ago they had a massive garden on a lot near their house.  My Mom recounts memories of tediously picking peas as a morning chore.  My grandparents needed to feed their family and they had inherited the knowledge of how to do so with their own means and strength.  I suppose the super markets had not yet moved in, maybe because there was not yet a market for them, as surely my grandparents were not alone in their work.  A rich culture, certainly somewhat unique to this county, Lancaster, preserved largely by its Mennonite and Amish ancestry, continues to farm and provide nutritious and beautiful food for its own communities, but the influences of global capitalism have also deeply penetrated even this fortress of subsidiarity.  Today very few gardens the size of my grandmother’s, if any, are found in the borough.  I must think that gardening is only one of the many forms of knowledge and practice that have been or are threatened to be lost to time for these people, as my upbringing was certainly removed of it.  I am seeking here a restoration and an innovation of a way of life that enables my community and the future generations to live in a more healthy, just, and sustainable manner than what I was given, not blaming any of the people who raised me and loved me boundlessly, though certainly no one is absent of guilt, but primarily the systems to which they fell prey.  Like the sacraments give me spiritual vitality through material means, so my hope is that gardening will inoculate the relational matrix of this place with spiritual food. 

A primary theory which guides my work and strategy is known as the gift economy.  Essentially, the idea is that selfless giving inspires its own spirit to pass along to others who receive it, which in turn is necessarily passed along further.  Love, the free giving of the self, is contagious!  I have started a garden here that consumes most of the property I inhabit and the intent is to raise good, beautiful, nutritious food for the neighbors and friends of this place.  Through the free, selfless giving of the produce away as a gift I hope to inspire others to give other gifts in return and to those around them.  The economy of gifts transcends monetary transactions where only a specific currency has value or that only specific work determined by those in power is considered worthy of its reception.  In the gift economy everyone has something to give and the uniqueness of the gift is actually most of value, even if it’s totally ignored by the market.

So the fall was a great test of all my ideas and inspirations, a sample.  Some crops came in while I was away over the summer and were harvested, others were planted shortly after arriving and came in later still.  Once a week I was consistently challenged to take my produce and ideas to the streets.  My strategy for food distribution, as my project is still little known by the neighbors, except perhaps for obscurity, was to go door to door with five gallon buckets full of things to give away and ask the residents if they were interested in anything.  This led to good conversations and introductions.  I met most of the folks around me, which is really sweet, and probably unique even for residents who have lived in the neighborhood for a long time.  “It is a commuter neighborhood,” one person commented.  Learning names has been an important first step.  Eventually the food production decreased as colder temperatures and lesser sunlight set in.  Now everyone is inside. 

           
By far, my presence and efforts have been warmly received, so I have encountered.  And some people have intuitively responded to the gift ideas from which I operate.  One neighbor memorably yelled as I drove away in my truck, only seeing her just before passing after she found a bag of produce I left on her porch, “I’ll make you cookies!” Others have brought eggs from their chickens, others have donated a case of sparkling water, others has been kind, and yet others have gifted me with weariness of this random person with no shoes showing up on their porch unexpectedly.  Perhaps I am learning to see everything as a gift, even if in disguise, which also means that everyone is already participating in the project—good reason for much optimism! 

            
Still, my life here is so precarious.  My landlord (my dad), who has been extremely generous and integral to the project, could at any time decide that I cannot use the property any more.  The neighbors could find discrepancies with my being here and see that I leave.  The long-term realities of the project are somewhat ambiguous because of development possibilities. Or maybe my goals are just all too much to do for one person (which they are).  I need others to join the work (which they are, even if cannot see it).  The loneliness of my life and work here is the most difficult challenge at the moment.  I am tired of being different all the time, but this is my vocation—so be it.  The loneliness might drive me elsewhere, but it is good that I am here for now.  I feel committed to the project through the upcoming growing season as a fuller test of its ideas and inspiration, then, who knows? 

            
This winter I am carving out lots of time to read and write.  I am working on a memoir of a trip I made in 2015 after graduating from college, hitchhiking across the country, etc.  I am working on maintenance and infrastructure projects around the property, like building gates for my fences, a chicken coup, gravel and mulch pathways, a water catchment system, landscaping, and interior things, like painting, creating curtains from burlap, and decorating.  There seems to be endless things to do when one “owns” a property, which I have found to be surprisingly dignifying, and an equally surprising energy and inspiration to do all the work has come with it.  I am travelling a bit as I have time, too.  I am also working part time as a dish washer at a local restaurant to finance my life and work, and somehow there is always enough.  So many dreams of what could be live with me in the shed and accompany my meandering of the garden’s pathways, but I am forced by limitations of all kinds to only do so much, which is teaching me patience and appreciation for what already is. 

* dotted lines represent future plans

I am calling this project I started The Abundant Harvest, whose name is inspired by the verse in the gospels where Jesus says to his disciples, “The harvest is plenty but the workers are few.”  Included in the expression is a recognition that God has always already provided the means to salvation.  God has been faithful to their creation and most of the work we are required to do is simply recognizing the abundance already at hand.  So the project is an attempt to raise up workers for the fields to assist with the harvest, using gardening as a medium to facilitate connection, inspire generosity, and thereby realize the feast before us.  Also, linking the project to the Catholic Worker Movement is an essential association because it provides a home for its larger ideas and inspirations. 

Though life in New Holland and the work there has often felt lonely, I know I am not alone.  I know that there are infinite strands of connection going forth in all directions binding me to loved ones, known and unknown, all over the planet and further.  Truly, an abundance of vibrant local relationship, too, sustain me; and yet still, I long for more.  I suspect something of what Dorothy Day meant of “the long loneliness” is captured in my sentiment, that there will always be a longing for more love in this life.  What I am saying is that there are many ways to get involved with The Abundant Harvest if you are so moved.  I speak as the founder and primary mover, in a way, of the project, but my intent is that it will be a community effort, and I have to continually remind myself that even now I am not alone.  Prayer, money, time, friendship, care, tools, seeds, trees: there are really countless things that would benefit the project.  Feel free to respond if you think of something that you have and might like to give or ask.  My life and work here is dependent on you, and hopefully it is bigger than my own.  Feedback is appreciated. 

Know that I am with you too.

                                                                                                            Sincerely,

                                                                                                            Elliot Martin