Relational Reverence

Or, what am I actually doing with my life?

The Soil Amendment Sale volunteer team in 2022. Photo by Mary Carman, Ten Rivers Food Web.

Next week, many of us will sit down with family and friends for Thanksgiving dinner.  And then prayers will be spoken: “Thank you Lord for these thy gifts we are about to receive…”  And then steaming plates of turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberries and pie will spontaneously appear upon previously empty tables, and we will tuck in, happily partaking of our Lord’s gifts…

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I don’t really mean to pick on the more religious among us.  The prayers are, after all, an expression of gratitude and an acknowledgement of humility, and atheists and agnostics are more likely to give thanks to the cooks or to say nothing at all.  Instead I intend to bring light to a sort of subtle and unintentional spiritual bypassing that pervades our relationship with food and with our economy in general.  Because the truth is that even if we believe in a world where God created the Earth and all creatures, we have to acknowledge that He had little if anything to do with the arrival of Thanksgiving dinner, and so perhaps He is not the only one deserving of our thanks.

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Consider these two stories, both of which are true.

1.       We choose our recipes and make a shopping list.  Then we go to the store to buy ingredients, where we’re frustrated by inflation and jostling crowds, and we set to work preparing a feast and welcoming friends and family, hoping that nothing burns and the turkey is ready in time.

2.       Light energy arrives continuously from a nearby star.  Some of it energizes and evaporates water in tropical oceans, driving the water cycles that allow life to exist on land.  Some of it reaches leaves in cranberry bogs and apple orchards and fields of potatoes and corn, where it drives the miraculous process of photosynthesis, allowing these plants to carry out thousands of chemical reactions, following a genetic blueprint influenced by hundreds of generations of human farmers selecting crops for food and feed.  Farmers tend and harvest all of these crops, using machinery designed and manufactured by inventors and engineers across the globe and powered by ancient sunlight stored deep within the Earth in the form of fossil fuels.  People collect and incubate turkey eggs – my father was briefly thus employed – and within those eggs cells expand and divide, a dance of twenty thousand genes exquisitely timed and expressed to create bone and feather and beak and wing and foot and liver and gizzard from formless yolk and white and bags of feed pellets.  More humans, especially deserving of our gratitude, work long hours in cold facilities converting living birds to the familiar plucked and hollowed-out versions we place in our ovens, and yet more humans pilot the vast fleets of trucks and trains that move apples and potatoes and frozen cranberries and turkeys through cavernous warehouses and ultimately to grocery stores, where yet more humans place them on shelves in the wee hours while we’re sleeping and yet more humans clean the floors and staff the checkstands, where we offer at most a curt nod of acknowledgement in our hurry to finish shopping and get home.  And then we return to the familiar Story #1, though this is only a tiny fraction of the full web of interdependence and interconnection and co-creation upon which our Thanksgiving dinner depends.  I’ve left out the miners of the metals for the machinery, and the builders of the tires for the trucks, and the folks who maintain the roads, and the dispatchers and the planners and the folks who care for children while their parents are at work, and a hundred other roles that are no less essential.  And it seems to me that all of these people and living beings and energy flows are at least as worthy of our gratitude, as we sit down to eat, as the God or Source or force that set it all in motion.

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We have allowed our world to be commodified:  categorized into products and services and job descriptions with no distinguishing features beyond quantity, quality, and price. 

Three hundred years ago, we would inevitably have known the farmer who raised our poultry and potatoes, or perhaps more likely we would have raised them ourselves.  And yet it seems we did not truly value this relationality, and there was not much resistance to commodification.  Our ancestors appreciated the arrival of markets and supermarkets and mail-order catalogs that offered convenience and choice and low prices, theoretically freeing up time and energy and money for creative pursuits.  Farmers and makers appreciated the ability to gain access to distant buyers, to deliver their whole crops to warehouses and elevators rather than selling and bartering them bit by bit.

Perhaps we allowed commodification to advance this far because most of us had already chosen to inhabit a story, a paradigm, a worldview that did not value reciprocity and relationship: the masculine-dominant worldview I have been exploring recently.  We valued achievement, financial security, finding a partner, providing for family, setting our children up for success, exercising our will, making our own way in the world, living according to the imposed authority of our chosen religions.  And so we were happy to put in our 40 weekly hours at some mundane just-a-job and take our pick of commodified stuff at the local big box.

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I would question how many people are truly happy, in their hearts and souls, within this story, and yet it is a funny thing, the way that we all find meaning and value in life.  I have always found meaning in the great web of interconnection: the changing weather and seasons, sensory immersion, growing my own food and sharing it with others, and I have never found any one thing – a sport or a vocation or a hobby – that truly and uniquely captivates me.  At the same time, I know many people whose lives revolve around some such activity - hockey, or horseback riding, or a political cause, or a research question they have devoted their career to as a scientist.  And I do not wish to insert my own story, to assume others’ lives are lacking in meaning simply because I would not personally find their choices meaningful. 

I write this not to claim some universal truth or to identify a right course of action, but rather because I find that my own personal story, my internal paradigm, is vastly out of sync with an economy that wishes to commodify my skills and abilities and reward me with dollars to purchase essential commodities.  And I imagine that I am not the only one to feel this way, that others too are seeking an alternative to an economic system of extraction and sacrifice. 

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Decommodifying our minds

The first step to escaping from a commodity economy is to recognize that there is no such thing as a commodity, no such thing as a product or service that does not have an origin story.  There is no such thing as “lumber” that just shows up on a rack at Home Depot.  Every stud, every layer of veneer in plywood, every chip in a sheet of particleboard is the product of sunlight and photosynthesis, grown in a particular place and holding within it the story of climate there, the unique mineral signature of the soil.  Every atom of iron in a steel bar was once dissolved in an ancient ocean, precipitated to the seafloor when cyanobacteria evolved the ability to produce oxygen, and uplifted into mountains before being mined and refined in a particular location, perhaps carried by brave mariners across stormy seas along the way.  Every kernel of corn pressed into feed pellets or processed into syrup or crushed into cornflakes grew on a cob on a particular stalk, in a particular field, planted and tended by a particular human being farmer.  Every Thanksgiving turkey hatched from a particular egg in a particular incubator and grew in a particular barn through summer heat and autumn storms.

Commodification renders those stories largely untraceable, but it cannot erase them.  The stories are still there, and if we start digging we will often find that we don’t like what we discover.  The same paradigm that invented the concept of commodities values extraction over relationship and reciprocity, and so we can usually trace that lumber back to clearcut forests, steel back to open-pit mines, corn back to chemical-intensive monocultures, turkey back to massive impoundments of millions of birds raised in their own waste, processed by poorly compensated humans working long and monotonous hours in harsh conditions.

Stories and standards

If those origin stories become sufficiently problematic, we might seek to change them.  Producers might choose to share the story of their own practices, letting buyers know that they value healthy soil or healthy ecosystems or living wages, and once there is sufficient demand for a particular change buyers and producers will usually work together to create standards and certifications.

We are very familiar with these: Certified Organic produce, Fair Trade coffee, FSC-Certified lumber, GMO-Free foods.

This is a step, but it is not reciprocity and cannot substitute for it.

These standards effectively create “special commodities” that fetch a higher price, but they also of necessity create incentives for producers to cheat and require a “police force” of bureaucratic and fee-charging inspectors tasked with ensuring that producers are abiding by the rules of a particular certification.

Human interaction

If we take one more step toward reciprocity, we arrive in the realm of farmers’ markets and restaurants and doctors’ offices: places where we recognize and acknowledge that we are interacting with a particular human in the course of acquiring what we need.  By and large, however, those conversations are scripted and transactional in nature, and we are very much there to shop or to eat and true relationality is incidental or even unwelcome, a breach of “professional distance”.

Why is it so easy to interact with people but regard them as categories or machines?  Why is this considered normal?

Relational reverence

What if we were to value relationship as much or more than exchange?  What would this look like?

Might we look someone in the eye, acknowledge the same spark of divinity within them as is within ourselves, imagine the series of experiences and joys and loves and losses that brought them to this moment, say something from our heart or our sensory experience, share a smile or a tear or a wistful glance as we share this unique moment in time?  Oh, and also thank you for the lettuce and carrots, and here are some dollars in exchange.

Might we then look forward to connecting again, in commerce or in community, and sharing another moment together?  Might we begin to build a web of interconnections, so that if their greenhouse is destroyed by ice we are willing to offer our time or our money to help rebuild?

What if we were to extend that same reverence and reciprocity to our entire web of interdependence, to farm workers and truck drivers, to the animals and plants that we eat, to the land we inhabit, to the forests and ore-bearing mountains and power-generating rivers?  How then might we choose differently?  What lost joy and meaning and belonging might we rediscover?

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An unconventional invention

I might say that I live my life in pursuit of relational reverence.  Or, in other words, I don’t wish to be respected or successful.  I wish to be seen and known and loved and appreciated, and I wish to see and know and love and appreciate others in return.  Ten years ago I built the first prototype of the seed cleaning machine that would become the Winnow Wizard, now an ubiquitous part of the toolkit of small-scale seed growers across the US and Canada.  As it became clear that this wasn’t just a novelty but an innovation that would benefit others, I published open-source plans and set up a small shop building them.  Many times I was asked if I was going to patent it, license it to a manufacturer, see if I could make it profitable.  I was asked why I wasn’t charging more money for them, what the market would bear, so to speak.  The truth is that, while of course I needed to be paid for my time, I had no desire to have control, to have “intellectual property”, to act as a gatekeeper extracting dollars from those who might benefit.

What I value most about the Winnow Wizard is not the dollars or respect I have earned but the human connections I have made.  All of the morning coffee breaks at Wild Garden Seed where I built them for five years. Victor’s original artwork on each one. My first delivery and demonstration in southern Oregon.  Touring Floret Flower Farm and meeting the team.  A night spent at Uprising Seeds.  Riding the ferries to farms on the San Juan Islands and sharing briefly in their lives, drinking morning coffee with milk squeezed right out of a goat.  Sleeping in the dome in Boise.  Sharing a long afternoon with Zach of North Circle Seeds, who would later connect with my Master Gardener uncle in rural Minnesota.  Unpacking a machine with Dusty in Minneapolis, sipping homebrewed mead and musing on the future and the end of capitalism.  Visiting the young family a few miles from my family reunion, whose carpenter brother-in-law built a machine for them and may now be joining the Winnow Wizard manufacturing team. Packing up components to send in suitcases to Australia, and fielding their unusual inquiries as to how to remove snails and snail droppings from seeds.  Meeting the whole team at the Organic Seed Alliance and camping out on the grounds of the cidery next door.  Puzzling out a whole slew of novel seed cleaning challenges with Nick of Rhythm Seeds and connecting over shared ideas and visions.  Cleaning seeds for my dear friends at Empowered Flowers and then delivering a machine with a custom yin-yang artwork to their farm.  Taking a Winnow Wizard on the road in my own community cleaning beans and grains and sharing meals with farmers. 

Do I ever wish that I would have patented it, licensed it to a manufacturer, hired a marketing team, earned more money?  Nope. Never. Not at all.

On seeds and relational reverence

For the past ten years I have worked in the world of organic seed production: planting seeds, tending seed plants, selecting the plants to save seed from, harvesting, threshing, cleaning seeds, and even a little bit of packing and pulling orders to ship.  On the farm, there is reverence and reciprocity, tending the soil and maintaining a diverse ecosystem and building crew camaraderie.  And once they arrive in a buyer’s mailbox and are planted in gardens and on farms, they reveal their magic, the wondrous potentialities that are packaged within, waiting for water and soil and light.  In between, though, the chain of relationship is often broken.

My main task for the past two years has been final cleaning of seeds, largely using my own machines.  Although it can be dusty and occasionally tedious, it feels like a sort of sacred wizardry or midwifery, separating out the fluff and chaff and light or hollow seeds to yield glistening bags of black celosia jewels, sorrel triangles, parsnip disks, milkweed wings, scabiosa “birdies”, corn and beans in all colors.  Until the seed leaves my hands, it is free, in flux, in a co-creative dance of sorts with nature and our own decisions.  Insects might eat it, or birds, or we might choose to harvest ahead of rain, or not, and reap the consequences.  We can fertilize, irrigate, isolate, trellis, bring in bees for pollination, protect from early frosts.  I can use my own judgment to winnow away half of the seed if I find it to be hollow or damaged, and whether I aim for higher quality or higher volume is a choice I can make in concert with others.

Once I turn it over to the inventory manager, though, that same seed becomes a product.  Tested and approved for sale.  A line item on a spreadsheet.  A listing on a website.  Future dollars in the bank.  And when people place orders from around the country and the world, and we fill packets by the thousands and ship out 100+ orders daily, glancing briefly at names on shipping labels, there is no relational reverence, no reciprocity.  There is only its pale transactional reflection: customer service and product reviews, a sort of uneasy dance of expectations and kudos, based on the virtual handshake that is the exchange of cash for goods.

A mail-order business model seems to be incompatible with relational reverence, with sharing hearts as well as seeds, and this is in large part why my friends at Fruition Seeds recently chose to abandon that model in spite of financial success, electing instead to take their seeds on the road, sharing stories and smiles and human connection as well as packets of packaged potentialities.  I admire their courage, and I am in some ways making a similar choice as I seek greater relational reverence in my next endeavors.

From markets to hubs and clubs

There is an unfortunate correlation between cost and relational reverence that holds across most aspects of the economy.  It’s as if most people crave this reciprocity but – within the paradigm of extraction and capitalism – only the wealthy can afford it.  The highest-end restaurants use ingredients with stories, sourcing directly from farmers and perhaps even inviting the farmers to give presentations to diners.  At wineries and art galleries, creators share stories of their life and work with eager buyers who know they are not just purchasing a product but participating in a relationship.  For the right price, we can get salmon airmailed from fisherfolk in Alaska or bison from ranches in Montana, delivered to our doorstep with photos of the storm-battered crew or the next generation of cowpokes.  On the other hand, when we shop online or in fast-food restaurants or in supermarkets or big-box stores, seeking the lowest price or perhaps the only price we can afford, the human element is entirely absent.  What we get is a commodity: the global standard Big Mac or bags of sugar or cans of soup, created and shipped and stocked and delivered by human beings who are almost always underpaid and overworked, and with whom we have no meaningful connection or relationship, if we even acknowledge their existence.

Six years ago now I was invited to take over coordination of a local buying club for organic soil amendments and growing supplies.  Started way back in 1987 by local farmers and gardeners concerned about high retail prices and limited availability of organic inputs, it has grown to encompass three semi-truck loads pre-ordered and then delivered, organized, and distributed over three days in late winter.  I appreciated the logistical challenge, the opportunity to offer a needed service, but I wasn’t prepared for just how much joy it would bring me, for the way it would situate me within a web of human connections.  The wholesale team we purchase from became my friends, and we started sourcing from local farmers as well.  Many of the buyers were already in my circles – farms where I had worked or that sell produce at market – and over time I would meet and connect with many more.  And then there is the joyful team of volunteers that make it all happen: OSU horticulture and soil science students who also source amendments for their own farm, board members and colleagues and gardeners, elders who have been helping out for 20 years or more.  In bypassing the usual for-profit supply chain, we can offer substantially lower prices while nurturing relational reverence – a sense of community and reciprocity that would never have come into being if everyone just went to the store or ordered online.

Relational reverence does not need to be the exclusive domain of the wealthy, but it does require a shift in the way we relate to the “stuff” of life.  We need to let go of the idea of being “consumers” and instead see ourselves as participants, giving and receiving in each moment.  We need to decommodify our minds, to understand that products don’t just magically appear on shelves but that they are the wondrous co-creations of evolution and sunlight and geology and water and so many human hands and hearts and minds – even if they are standardized and mass-produced and obscured by the blandness of branding.  We need to let go of our obsession with near-infinite choice and the convenience of anytime shopping, and focus instead on ensuring that each exchange of goods and dollars is also a human connection, a budding relationship, a sharing of gratitude.

What might this look like?  Imagine that hundreds of people decide to buy produce from a particular farm and pool their orders.  The farmer now has one delivery to make instead of hundreds of small transactions at a market, and so they have time to visit, to share stories and build human connection upon delivery.  And the stories get shared as folks gather to divide up the orders, come together to pick up goods and foods from a variety of local farms.  This is easiest when the producers and buyers are local, but with modern global communication it can easily extend across distances and borders.  What if, instead of buying Fair Trade commodity coffee in plastic pouches, a whole community decided to buy beans from a particular farmer in Costa Rica?  These beans would still travel in bulk totes in containers on ships – no special airmail delivery needed – but they would bypass the multiple middlemen who extract dollars and anonymize and commodify and instead arrive directly at a local distribution point, where all who bought them would learn the story of the farmer.  And when these folks travel to Costa Rica on vacation they might well visit the farm.  And if the farm is hit by a hurricane or an earthquake they might well chip in to rebuild, just as they would for a local farm.  Such is the nature of reciprocity.

The modern market economy offers convenience and choice at the complete expense of relationship, and it extracts most of the value to brokers and dealers and distributors at the expense of producers and buyers alike.  The alternative of direct sales at markets and events and farmstands is necessarily expensive and resource-intensive, requiring displays and setup and lots of small transactions and folks standing around in the rain or on slow days when no one is buying, and the folks hired to work the markets are often not the ones who baked the bread or grew the carrots.  It is possible to have both relationship and efficiency, reciprocity and affordability, but it requires a shift away from individuality and toward community, away from profit and toward collaboration.  Inspired by the Soil Amendment Sale being an annual highlight for the past six years, I’m now part of a team working on starting a food hub, which is fundamentally a web of exchange overlaid upon a web of human relationships and which will offer the same sort of collective bulk purchasing with locally grown foods.  I don’t know yet exactly what it will look like, but I know that it will be shaped by relational reverence – a fundamental acknowledgement of and respect for one another and the gifts of our labor - and I am looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

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This Thanksgiving, whether or not we give thanks to the Lord, I encourage us to also allow ourselves to follow our potatoes and turkey and cranberries far back beyond the store shelves, to the trucks and warehouses and barns and farms, to the eggs and rivers and sunlight, and offer gratitude to the many hands that have touched and shaped them along the way, to the exquisitely complex plant and animal tissues that nourish us, to the living Earth and her processes that make it all possible.

And perhaps we might even choose to source those foods locally, direct from farmers or through a buying club or a food hub, where they never become commodities and we can actually trace their paths and stories, where all of the humans and beings and flows and cycles involved are acknowledged and appreciated.