Newsletter 1.8.25
Digging for the Commons
Hello friends and neighbors,
I’m filled to the brim with gratitude having received gifts from so many of you in the wake of our 501(c)(3) announcement. Thank you. After the solstice, the holiday festivities, and the following blur, it feels like many of us are slowly crawling out of the longest night into the coming light. This season marks a time of rest and renewal for many. And also, any annual celebration brings mixed emotions for those grieving loss and change. I am grateful we have time and space to take stock of all of our feelings as this new year begins. I reflect on our work of hope, commoning, and land below, but first, a few announcements.
Soul to Soil Art Exhibit - Opening Reception:
I (Tony) will give a talk on natural burial and Jeremiah Commons at the opening reception of the Soul to Soil art exhibit.
When: This Saturday, 1/11, at 6 pm (my talk will be at 7 pm)
Where: Art 634, 634 N Mechanic St, Jackson, MI 49202
Following the talk, there will be a Q&A panel with funeral home owner, Mike Mitchell, End-of-life Doula Merilynne Rush, Evergreen End of Life Care Foundation, and myself.
For the duration of the exhibit (running Jan. 11th to Feb 9th), artisans and deathcare professionals will weave the visual arts alongside public events touching on grief and death. Michigan Deathcare Collective, Art 634, and Third Coast Herbal Collective have organized this gallery. If you are in the South-Central MI area, I’d love to see you there this Saturday!
A lovely family in the Jackson, MI area just went live with their website and local enterprise, Heartwood Caskets, where they make beautiful handmade casket bookcases made of locally sourced hardwood and pine.
These are caskets that can serve as bookcases in your home until needed. Quite practical! Here is a picture of one of their walnut casket bookcases from their website.
Black Walnut Casket Bookcase by Heartwood Caskets
Digging for the Commons
In the book of Acts in the Christian New Testament, we’re told that, after the Spirit descends on the apostles on the morning of Pentecost, the fellowship of believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. There were wonders and signs, “and all who believed were together and had all things in common.” (Acts 2:44, ESV). I’ve often wondered if the early Christian church lived like this—had all things in common—because they had to, because they were in dire straits and had to make do the best they could, or did they live like this because it was the ideal? The ideal partly makes sense to me if only for the fact that, like any ideal, its existence was fleeting. In a mere 5 chapters, one of their leaders is stoned to death and the rest of the believers are persecuted and scattered. I wonder what might have happened if they had been left to continue sharing all things in common?
This passage has a lot to say about life together, but for the moment, I’m primarily curious about the way this ancient text, and the ways many in our culture have wrestled with it, gesture to a way of commoning. A way of sharing what we have in common that instills hope in our relationships with the land and with each other.
We have commons now, or forms of them, that I’m sure you’ve participated in recently. Libraries are our family’s favorite. Especially little free library stands. Our oldest starts skipping whenever she sees one. (I’ve been trying to find a simple blueprint to build one at our nearby park. Please send if you know of any!) Wikipedia is an awesome form of a digital commons. While only about 80% accurate, it’s quite an amazing testament to the human capacity to share knowledge for free. CSAs (Community Shared Agriculture) are another—shared risk up front for a shared reward later on. Community land trusts keep housing affordable for local community residents. Tool libraries are popular in close-knit or organized neighborhoods.
I like thinking of these small and large collaborative efforts as ways to disrupt our more competitive nature. When we participate in systems where the benefit is not solely individual we must inevitably consider the well-being of another. It’s not just about you—you are bound up in the whole. You care for the book you borrow from the library because someday, someone else will tend to it, just as you hope those before you tended to the book in your hand. If you spill coffee on its pages, you’ve spilled coffee on everyone’s pages. When we engage in these efforts, we can catch glimpses of the hope that dissipates amid relationships predicated on competition and speculation.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book The Serviceberry underscores the hope inherent in acts of commoning. In a world driven by market forces urging us to hustle, compete, and commodify, cultivating an attitude towards the natural world as a gift, as a commons present for the mutual flourishing of all creatures, helps build (and re-build) relationships of love with each other and with the world. When we can approach the fertile soil not as real estate upon which we can capitalize, but as land that must be nurtured so that we might be nurtured in return, we begin to find hope and joy in the reciprocal relationship. Ask anyone who has cared for a garden about the joy they get from knowing their veggies are the fruits of their tending to the soil from which they came. And if they shared those veggies with friends, family, or strangers, ask them about that joy as well.
In Love’s Braided Dance, Norman Wirzba writes:
A hopeful economy respects the life-giving relationships that join people to each other, to fellow creatures, and to their shared habitats. It honors our lives by nurturing the homes that nurture us. A hopeful community, then, is a rooted economy. The thing about roots, however, is that they do not simply extract nutrients from the soil… Successful plant life, along with the health and vitality of all the insect and animal life that depends upon it, grows up and down; it hinges on the flow of nutrients going in both directions. (140)
In contrast to the extractive mindset of squeezing as much profit out of the land as we can, approaching the land as a commons acknowledges that it must first be nurtured so that the surrounding community’s relationships can truly be life-giving. Like plant life, our relationship with the land is not one-way. It is deeply communal.
About 400 years ago during a time of enclosure in England, a group of farmers called the Diggers, led by Gerard Winstanley, took to the wastelands of St. George’s Hill in England and started turning (they called this manuring) the earth with spades and plowshares. (80’s rock artist Billy Bragg has a great song about this.) They took to the hill to grow food, manure the land, and feed the soil that in turn fed them so that, ultimately, the earth might again be what Winstanley often called a “common treasury for all.” The Digger’s act of communally digging in a place—turning over and manuring the land together—created a space to strengthen the bonds between each other and the land.
Today, in conservation burial grounds across the country, graves are being dug about 3-4 feet deep, the soil is being disturbed in beneficial ways just as uprooted trees in forests promote seed growth, land is being preserved, communities are nourishing the land, and death more vividly becomes entwined in the life-giving processes of the land. And for many of these cemeteries, the surrounding community, and those who have laid loved ones to rest there, have shared access to the grounds to rest, pray, delight in, grieve loss, gather together, bird-watch, and more. These are places towards which there is a deeply communal orientation.
What I am chiefly wondering about in this reflection is if creating a space, if only just a portion of the land, where we can communally orient ourselves might plant seeds where hope can flourish. Can taking a spade to the earth and digging in common land open paths of healing where there were previously none? I hope to be engaged in this dirty and hope-filled work for years to come. In the meantime, I plan to continue sharing the joys and hopes I experience in community and with the land as we continue connecting with more friends and neighbors looking for sustainable, thoughtful, and meaningful end-of-life options. If you’re in town, I hope to see you soon.
Peace,
Tony
Want to read more about the commons?
“Reinventing the Commons” Schumacher Center for New Economics
David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
Saskia Cornes, Milton’s Manuring: Paradise Lost, Husbandry, and the Possibilities of Waste
If you’d like to give a gift, you can do so at our website.
(Here is a list of the current conservation burial grounds and green burial sites in America)
I appreciate these thoughts and hopeful expressions of where we could be through a greater focus on commoning and as Kimmerer suggests, a gifting economy. I think we'll only be able to make real cultural progress toward this when we get ourselves out of the way, and put others first. Talk about being radically counter-cultural! I think it also reflects the basic premise of Jesus' teachings, themselves pretty radical and counter-cultural.