Cooking a Life—Part 6 from the Farm

The clay of Dad’s humility. AND Today is my 1 year anniversary!!!

[This is another “posted as drafted” entry written before Dad died—I think I’ll send a Dad-focused blog on the first Friday of every month. That way, I’ll be consistent in insuring Dad’s Eldering continues. This one includes a time marker, Ash Wednesday, and was the post that was intended to be sent (scheduled for February 24) when Dad unexpectedly took his final turn and began to actively die. (Here’s the link to the one sent instead.) Today’s post has not been revised or edited in any way.]

And yep, on June 2, 2022, I sent my very first Substack blog entry, in fact three of them (to do some updating and provide background info) to what was then a total of 1 subscriber: me! It was day one remember). This one you are about to read is blog post # 90!

And as always, thanks for being here.

~kbl

Let’s hang with John O’Donohue some more, okay?

“Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness….”

As I write these Dad posts, at first I was worried I might run out of ideas and thus have to pare back the posts to once a month or even less often. But I’m an unabashed and proud and addicted reader (of books, btw, that I can hold in my hand, smell their pages, touch their leaves and covers, and mark up with marginalia. If you own a Kindle, good on you. I tried that. Nope. I discovered the act of reading, for me, is more sensual, more tactile. I no longer have shelf-space for my books—the stacks and piles keep growing. And I’m SO happy for that!). Though both literate, Mom and Dad were not readers; I’ve stopped trying to figure out where I got this compulsion for reading (I still have the first book I ever bought for myself when I was in eighth grade!).

I like to think I’m a serious reader too which means my main genres are non-fiction, poetry, and the very best of literary fiction. And lately, books that tap into resonance and reverance, Soul, mysticism, environmental concern, dying, grief, and death, have captivated my attention and populated my already overflowing “TBR” shelf.

Fortunately, great authors and great writing sow seeds. Usually. But always when the writing and poetic language lands on receptive “clay.” (You’ll see in a minute what I just did there!). As great writing always has something to do with every life, there will always be something to write about when it comes to my Dad; as long as I stay a reader of books and my Dad.

Which has led me often to John O’Donohue and a new way of appreciating Dad and the alchemy off the farm. You see, perhaps THE most important ingredient in the growing of a life is found there, always just below our feet (and sometimes in the weirdest of other places).

“The normal understanding of humility involves a passive self-deprecation in which any sense of self-worth or value is diminished. Humility has a more profound meaning. ‘Humility’ is a derivative of the Latin word ‘humus,’ meaning ‘of the earth.’ In this sense humility is the art of being open and receptive to the inner wisdom of your clay. This is the secret of all natural growth: ‘Unless the seed dies it remains but a single seed.’ […] Clay is not interested in any form of hierarchy; it is immune to the temptation and competition of the vertical line. Under the convenient guise of not being noticed and being lower ground, it operates a vast sacramentality of growth which nourishes and sustains all of life.”

~ John O’Donohue (“Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong.” Harper: Perrenial, 1999. p 190)

Humus:

(noun)

1. the organic component of soil, formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant material by soil microorganisms.

Humus is dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and animal matter decays. When plants drop leaves, twigs, and other material to the ground, it piles up. This material is called leaf litter. When animals die, their remains add to the litter. Over time, all this litter decomposes.

(Merriam-Webster, 2023)

The word humility is from the Latin humilis meaning "lowly, humble;" literally "on the ground," From humus: "earth.” Humility is “of the earth.” I don’t think it is a coincidence that Dad, a lifelong farmer who spent so much of his entire life working in the soil, and who depended so much on the fecundity of that soil for our livelihood, had, as one of the defining characteristics of his character, humility. You might recall when he was asked what he missed most about farming, Dad said: “Everything. I loved it all.” And he did it all without a need for acclaim or praise. His life he kept “close to the earth,” in the soil and clay of his fields. The most humble of ways to be.

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There are so many terms for dirt: earth, sand, silt, soil, humus, topsoil, clay, ash, compost, ground, hardpack, clods, land, field, grime, sediment, subsoil, loess, peat, detritus, duff, rock, gravel, pebbles, soot, muck, mud, turf, sod, loam, dust…. O’Donohue is fond of the word clay, Irishman that he was and lover of the bare and stark landscape that is, especially, the coastal west of Ireland—and I’m coming to love it too. The word “clay” that is.

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean by yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you, 
An invisible cloak
To mind your life. 

~ “Beannacht” by John O’Donohue

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In Moxee, we had dirt.

It wasn’t so much the primary focus of farmers back when my Dad was actively farming to take seriously their role in cultivating soil. If it was, I cannot remember my Dad ever talking about it. [“C’mon boys, time to get up and get ready to go grow us some good soil! Let’s go irrigate our dirt” was said like, um, never!] Instead, my Dad was a hop farmer. He also grew apples and sage. We had friends, family, and neighbors who were wheat farmers, and corn farmers, and apple farmers, and grape farmers, and also hop farmers. The Yakima valley, nestled as it is in the relative rain shadow east of the Cascades, with abundant mountain runoff from rivers that fed it, ample volcanic soils, and an ample abundance of arid and bright and long sunlit days, is a renowned region for fertile agriculture. Back then when I lived there, I didn’t know any dirt farmers. It is only recently that a resurgence and rethinking is occurring that has changed a bit about what a farmer’s primary mission actually is, or should be. And I do often wonder how this would have affected Dad and HIS farming. Maybe he’d have used a little less RoundUP and dinitro. Maybe.

In reality, the crops harvested off the land are the happy consequence of the farmer’s love and care for the soil. Farmers really don’t “grow crops;” they cultivate soil. It’s ALL about the soil. If you garden, your primary focus should always be on the quality of the soil, the clay you cultivate as the medium allowing you to grow whatever your heart desires. If you grow hops, same story: your primary focus should always be on the organic quality and moisture content of the soil in your fields. Good soil equals a good crop. Great soil equals a great farmer! Nowadays, I like to think of Dad as a great cultivator of clay (hop farmer being secondary). This feels more noble—I think because it is more noble. And it “grounds” my Dad further into what I think is his core and true nature: that being a very humble man of integrity with a superhuman capacity for hard and humble work. A man of the earth. A man of soil; a man made out of the clay landscape of a farm. A man who got his hands, and more often than not, other parts of his body, dirty each and every working day of his long life.

Such men, it seems, are becoming a rare breed. I am proud to be the son of one.

Dad, in the middle of his dirt. I’m guessing circa somewhere in the late 1980’s. Those green things happen to be hops. And notice…no weeds. Duh.

[An aside: one of my fun memories of Dad, that he taught us out of sheer practicality, is how he (then we) tended to always end his work days off the farm. It is quite surprising the crevices and nooks on the body and in the body that dirt can find—especially the dirt found in the middle of a hop field in July in 90+ degree heat in Moxee, Washington. Unless you’ve been there, you just don’t know. Trust me, you just don’t know. So, before we stepped foot in the house, or maybe before mom let us step foot in the house, at the end of a 10 hour day in the fields, Dad taught us to “air hose” ourselves off. Dad had an industrial air compressor (Trevor has it now!), the only kind that can, with ease, fill the heavy tires of large tractors, that also served as a slick and fun way to “get the dust off.” You can do a good enough job of this by yourself, creating a thick cloud of dust all around you as you did so. On a farm, all you really do is redistribute dirt. But it helped as well to have a brother or cousin or Dad who would also grab the air hose nozzle and get your backside too. And because we were on the farm, it was okay to start undressing while you air hosed off. All the easier to get the dust and dirt out of boots, and socks, and jeans, and long-sleeved shirts, and hats, and out of pockets, and…underwear. Trust me, you just don’t know! And if you really don’t know, you’re not gonna learn it all from me! A farm at the end of the day, well, at any time really, is not the place for discretion. Demure discretion don’t get you clean, y’all. I won’t share, once you are hosed off, and before you step into a shower, what you find in your nose and ear canals and tear ducts. And any other orifice that dirt WILL find. ‘Cuz, dirt will find it! And yes, we know well what Moxee hop field dirt tastes like. If you don’t know any of this, maybe be glad you don’t. But, I feel more than a little sad for you then.]

Oh the good ol’ days. And they WERE good.

Eldering 101: Humility even past the end.

Farming is a humble and noble way to BE in the world. NOT the way of Big Farm Industrial Agriculture, mind you; the kind that favors a sole focus on monocultural profit and greed at a greater expense in other ways. I’m talking the kind of farming my Dad did—on a smaller scale and just for the sheer joy of it. He didn’t want to do anything else—and he cultivated an amount of clay that kept us afloat and met all our needs without being “too small” or “too large.” Dad made the familial “ends meet” even when some of those years’ harvests were pretty lean. Bank loans were often a part of the deal. Which is also a way of inviting humility into a life.

Among those “in the Valley” who knew him, Dad is known for his kindness and his humility. A Dad doesn’t teach those to his sons explicitly, at least THIS Dad didn’t—he lives them every day trusting his sons will learn from his example. We learned.

I’m proud of my Dad and proud he was a farmer. As I reflect upon a life growing up on an active farm, I am amazed at the things we did and were allowed to do, the things we learned, the things we were able to get away with (without mom or Dad ever knowing about them, we think), and most amazed at the kind of man the farm made of my Dad. I cannot imagine Dad as anything else. His life was not suited for a 9 to 5, tied-to-a-desk and tie, follow-the-bosses-orders kind of career. For Dad, farming wasn’t a job, it wasn’t a career, it wasn’t a profession, it wasn’t even what he did. It’s what claimed him. It was a calling and vocation, and he humbly answered. Farming was who he was—which places the humble act and art of farming on a whole different plane: the plane of the Soul.

Upon Dad’s death, he will follow in mom’s surprising “footsteps” and be cremated. Dad surprised us, certainly me, when he disclosed upon mom’s death her wish to be cremated. I was a little proud of mom in that moment of disclosure from Dad—I feel the choice of cremation is a move toward more humility, understanding, and awareness of just what our bodies are while we are alive—simply the material vessel that houses something deeper that is actually the true essence of who we are and that cares not for the body it leaves behind.

John O’Donohue says we are clay—we are made of clay, we come from clay, we return to clay. We should return to clay.

[Practicing Catholics the world over celebrated this week the first day of Lent: Ash Wednesday. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I let the former alter boy in me have a bit of a moment there.]

Although Dad’s cremains will be placed in an urn, and then placed in a vault with mom’s urn under the family plot in Holy Rosary Cemetery, we will still, in a way, be returning Dad to the soil. Fitting that. Had he been Eldered differently, I do wonder if he would have entertained an even greater intimacy with the soil by allowing his ashes to be sown in a different way; or allowed his body to undergo a more sustainable way of degradation—ie, back to the ways of the “way back” ancestors (and the “still ways” of many indigenous cultures) through the decomposition back into soil. The farmer that he was, I think he would have understood, and I do think he would have been intrigued by that possibility. All his life, he lived in the clay, the field soil of his farm, and he wished always he could have done it more and longer. Ironically, he could have. But he wasn’t Eldered that way—instead, he’ll do it mom’s way, not surprisingly.

I think a more enlightened Dad, this person who cared for and depended upon the health of the soil in all his hop fields, if Eldered differently (heck, Eldered at all!), might have gone “full humility” for his body’s final disposition. How fitting would it have been for Dad’s remains to have nurtured new life that would have sprung from the earth just like he nurtured the emergence of every hop plant in his acreage. We cannot and would not change Dad’s wishes here. But the Eldering lesson and possibility is there for the rest of us to consider as we consider how to best be stewards of those we Elder in our future, and of the earth.

Humility — humus — “of the earth.”

We all cannot do much better than to aspire to a life, and even death, of humility.

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T plus 236 days and counting. May the clay always dance to balance you. Even when you need a walker.

I wish you could have seen my Dad farm. For then, you would have seen someone who knew how to follow his bliss. Even with a quarter pound of dust up his…um… sinuses. Yeah, that’s it…sinuses!