End-of-summer greetings,
If you’re in the Southern Michigan area and haven’t bought your ticket for our Benefit Concert on Friday, you can still get it here! Doors open at 5:30 pm, and Little Spoon River will start their folksy blues at 6 pm. After they’ve shown us their oaky roots and soulful tunes, Elisabeth Pixley-Fink and her crew will take the stage and dig in with her folk-indie blend of melancholy and meaningful music. The night will close out with Billy King’s homestead heart songs—rootsy folk with a touch of pop and country swing.
Not only will your ticket open the door for a wonderful night of music, but all of the proceeds from the evening will go towards supporting our vision to create a conservation cemetery and land commons in Southern Michigan. A space for all people to have access to natural burial and connecting with the land. On Friday, there will be food trucks, beer/wine/NA drinks, a silent auction, and all around good vibes. If you have an item you’d like to bring for the silent auction, please feel free—I would be much obliged.
Free exchange of gifts
I had the pleasure of an impromptu, hour-long drive with my father Sunday afternoon. On the topic of political and personal preferences—of which we have a number of disagreements but about which we can still enjoy a lively conversation—he made a tongue-in-cheek jab at our family’s gardening practices. Referencing a meme he’d seen about the person that waited four months for their $340 salad, he proceeded to say “this stuff doesn’t just fall out of the sky for free.”
I thought for a moment and then jabbed back with an “It actually does!” Since we've received our seeds that have lasted us the last three gardening seasons from a library in Durham, and we amend our soil by spreading our compost and some gifted horse manure from a nearby stable, our costs are low. Once sunlight and rain—the free stuff that falls out of the sky—are soaked up, food starts growing.
Since we were out of town for two of the summer months, and we had lovely friends staying at our place to keep an eye on things, we let the winter wheat we planted last fall go to seed. On our return in August, we were gifted with some very fine looking wheat berries, ready for Shari’s wheat mill. Even the tomato seeds, left mostly untended, embraced the free gifts from the sky and have been bursting with fruit for the last few weeks. All for free. We were even surprised with a giant sunflower and candy roaster squash—seeds we never planted.
I get what my dad is saying though, and I’m grateful for him saying it. It’s not free to garden. It costs something. And depending on personal preferences or practices, gardening can be pricey. And that’s to say nothing of the barrier of access to a patch of earth in which one is free to scatter seeds. The whole venture requires resources, time, life, land, energy, and value being put into the ground (often with help of
water from the city piped to our backyard) so that it can be transformed into other life.
But despite this exchange of effort, time, and care, plants are always eager to enter into relationships freely. Even plants that have never been cared for by human hands generously offer us what they can. One of the beauties of plants that Robin Wall Kimmerer has helped me realize lately is that green things are not discerning. They are very generous with their gifts. They don’t care what you do for your job, how you provide for your family, if you helped the plant grow, what you wear, look like, sound like, or even who you voted for. They freely offer you their shade, their fruit, their medicine. I imagine it would be a good practice to engage with those around us just as indiscriminately.
Conservation burial offers a similar avenue of engaging with the land and the living world around us—one that instills and nurtures care, love, and affection for the land and for our friends and family. Jeff Masten, co-founder of Bluestem Conservation Cemetery says this about conservation burial grounds:
Our bodies are gifts to the land, the land is a gift to us. Conservation burial is a means for us to act in a tangible way, contributing to climate resiliency while creating whole families and communities of spiritually and financially invested land stewards.
If you’re in the area, I hope to see you on Friday.
Peace,
Tony