neighbours

“By community, I mean the commonwealth and common interests commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so. To put it another way, community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.” Wendell Berry

Neighbours:



On many days, the farm is a busy place. People come to garden, to pick vegetables, to help with the harvest, with wood, or apple juice making or butchering. Some of the time I am outside and often, I stay in the house and produce coffee and cake and soup and juice. I don’t mind a traditional role as long as it’s an occasional choice.
The conversation is always about people we know and gardens and dogs and weather. Rarely do larger events intrude. I love the sense of neighbourhood, of community, and I understand the limits that this kind of community includes. This isn't about political or cultural sharing; this is about the work.
But living at the farm also includes an uneasy geographical proximity to people with whom I have nothing in common so that geographical proximity breeds an odd contradiction. A truly ironic example of this happend on the first long weekend in May. I was inside listening to a special on CBC radio on the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland and the implications of this for the world’s oceasn. When I went outside, all I could hear was machine noise; weed whackers, lawnmowers, boats, seadoos, chain saws, and long lines of motorcyles and RV’s on the highway. The summer people (who are not neighbours) had arrived.

Once rural community was built on a gift economy. When we were kids, and people came to visit our parents, no one ever left without something, a box of apples, a bottle of wine, or some cookies. Neighbours shared work, food, news, and help. This is still true but now not all people who live nearby are actually neighbours.
Good neighbours are the people who show up when your house is on fire, or the forest is on fire, if your pigs get out, or your dog is sick or you need a ride to town. They come to dinner or just for coffee; something they only come occasionally, but you’re are always glad to see them. Good neighbours invite you over for coffee when you need it; their kids play with your kids; they plow your driveway after a big snow, give you their many different colours of iris corms, or their abundance of whatever they have, vegetables or apples or salad greens.
And of course, geographical neighbours can also be the people whose kids roar up and down the nearest road in their ATVs, who have dogs that bark all night or get off the leash and come over and kill chickens; neighbours who have parties, let off fireworks at night when you are in a sound sleep, spray Roundup in the creek that goes through your pasture where you are raising organic beef, use up all the water in the creek in mid summer when it is most dry, light fires despite a ban, they build fences that are five or ten or fifteen feet in on your land. Such neighbours can be an infernal nuisance.
Neighbours is a contradictory word; community is a warm and fuzzy word but often contains the same contradictions. A community is always close-knit in a crisis because crisis creates community. So does hunger and fear, birth and death, joy and grief. Marriage unites a community but so does gossip, and hatred and love. Rural community was always built on sharing, survival, and necessity and underneath the ephemeral chatter of the present day industrialized suburban nonsense, those bonds still, and always will, exist.

In a future that is looking increasingly difficult for humanity, the gifts of family, neighourhood, community and clanship will begin to resume the kind of importance they have traditionally always had.

March Diary: Spring Noise by Luanne Armstrong

March Diary:

March is full of spring markers; one of my most cherished is the first swallows arriving, always so excited, dive-bombing each other, playing in aerial acrobatics. These swallows have already moved on north, the next wave will stay, build nests all over the porch, raise many babies and in the early mornings, as I drink my coffee on the deck, they will sit on the log over my head and gabble swallow talk.The frogs started early as well; now they are a brilliant chorus, not music exactly, but sound that punctuates and swells and billows through the cold spring nights.
We are early with everything this year; it was a dry warm winter and will undoubtedly be a dry and fiery summer. Already the gardens at the farm are dug and ready to be planted. Several people are gardening here this summer, which takes the burden off me and makes the work so much easier. It’s one of the paradoxes of small farming; the more people who are involved, the more work gets done, the more food can be grown, the more people can be fed. There’s a limit of course, but even a few acres of intensely cultivated land can produce an astounding amount of food.
March is always a mixed up month; storms and squalls barrel across the lake, huff and puff, blow away, the sun comes out, it’s hot, oh no, it’s cold again, it’s impossible to put on the right amount of clothes, I don’t need a fire and then I do. It’s too early to plant the garden and then, maybe it isn’t. Maybe the onions can go out—or the broccoli. Or maybe wait.
There is lots of noise in the neighbourhood this month; not just frogs, unfortunately. Last week, I went for dinner to my friends nearby who have now lived here for thirty-four years. They came in 1974, built a house in the woods up on the side of the moutain, and lived there in utter peace until a few weeks ago when the land next door to their house was bought by a man who proceeded to cut down every tree, dig up the ground so it will erode in the rain, park a whole series of ancient travel trailers on it, then he bought a generator and hooked it up to a bank of enormous arc lights that buzz and spark all night. What this man thinks he is doing; what the story is that he is telling himself about his relationship to this place is incomprehensible to the rest of us. He has announced loudly in the community that he is making an RV park with 450 sites. Well, we’ll see.
Neighbours in the country have so much more impact on each other than neighbours in the city. Each noise has a meaning, has a story, and the stories clash, compete with, and contradict each other.
So March has been noisy in many ways. April is here, Easter is next week. I have two hens setting so perhaps baby chicks will appear if the eagles, weasels, skunks, or coyotes don’t get them first.
It always amuses me somewhat that baby chickens and rabbits are symbols of Easter. Apart from their traditional meaning, in previous agriculturally-dependent times, March and April would have been the hungriest times of the year. No food in the garden yet, no fruit on the trees and most of the last year’s storage exhausted, what would there have been to eat? Unlike the abundance of Christmas, Easter is about staving-off-starvation foods, eggs, and rabbits, and perhaps, if you were really lucky, a lamb. Just as the earth is resilient under its burden of noisy human needs, so our once-upon-a-time culture as people of the earth remains resilient in our traditions and our foods.
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Speaking of culture, my very favourite book this month was called “Intelligence in Nature”, by Jeremy Narby. What became really obvious to me after reading this book is that most of what people believe about the nonhuman world are ideological beliefs, based on very little knowledge or actual experience. Various fragmented parts of the science world are now re-defining what is meant by such words as intelligence, or culture, also a deeply contradictory and biased words. Do animals have culture? Do the swallows above my head in the morning, ‘talking’, what else can I call it, have culture? Do humpback whales, singing, changing their songs, changing the patterns, communicating all around the ocean have culture? Why or why not? The answer is, we don’t know. The answer is, the human meanings of such words are by definition, exclusionary and therefore only applicable to humans. We have no language for what animals do or what we see them do. We have no way to interpret or describe what they do or feel. When I say the swallows sound happy or excited, I am describing my human interpretation of what they sound like.
My friend Kuya tells me that the Buddha said the greatest human illusion is that our bodies end at our skins. I have never felt that way because my body is part of the farm, an extension of it, and every sound that happens has a meaning, not a human meaning, but a meaning that is part of the whole gestalt of existence here. Even the human neighbours tearing up their small part of the world and cutting down all the trees are part of this existence. A frustrating and occasionally, to me at least, maddening part, for sure. From my view on the deck, I get to watch not only the swallows, the eagle on the pine tree every morning, the slow emergence of buds and seeds, but the strange and often incomprehensible panoply of human ‘culture’, whatever that means, whatever it is.