This reflection was originally written and sent out with a weekly newsletter from the farm on which I was volunteering in August 2024. I have edited it here for understanding and audience.
Last summer, at a farm-to-table restaurant in MI while on vacation with my family, I took a bite of an appetizer. It was some sort of crunchy toast with pea puree, radishes, and probably something else fancy like ‘microgreens’ – I don’t remember, honestly. What I do remember is the embodied epiphany moment that happened immediately after. I’m not claiming that it was necessarily the most sublime bite I’ve ever put in my mouth – I always struggle with that “best meal you’ve ever eaten” question because I love good food, and in a life in which we put unique flavors into our mouths three or more times a day, 365 days a year, I don’t always hold onto taste memories in that way. However, for some reason, in the combination of where my life was in that moment, things I was processing, people I was with – the impact of that particular bite of food became something much larger, and is seared onto my memory.
“I want to learn to make food that tastes like this,” I said out loud, almost without thinking it first. In that I meant not just the cooking, but everything surrounding good farm-to-table practices. To learn what grows well in the place I am in, how to cultivate it, and then how to cook and combine flavors in ways both time-tested and newly creative. To do good by the land and then also bring people great joy by feeding them well – these longings intrigue and inspire me, and that bite at the moment became the spark of a dream just when I needed to dream again.
It was, as many dreams are, not a particularly attainable one in the grandiose shape it took in my mind in that first moment. I love cooking, but I’m not a trained chef. I don’t make things up very well and probably have almost as many flops as triumphs. I’m an aspiring but currently less-than-average gardener who has yet to successfully grow a healthy full-size tomato in four summers of trying. I live in a neighborhood with too much shade and a small, deer-infested yard. I don’t have money or time for culinary school, or perhaps more accurately, I lack the entrepreneurial spark to throw caution to the wind, quit my day job, and pursue something wild like a locally sourced ice cream truck (despite my roommates’ urging and faith!) In so many words, I’m probably very similar to many of you – constantly wrestling with the competing questions of stewardship and contentment amidst the necessities of making a living, having a home, maintaining relationships, getting exercise, and putting something into my mouth three or more times a day; preferably something as local and delicious as my wallet, skill, and margin allow.
In other seasons of life, then, that moment might have passed in a sort of wistful sadness, shelved with other dreams that feel too big. But I was just on the edge of making plans for an upcoming sabbatical and the unique open space that offered left enough room for the seed of this idea to stick around and send some roots into reality, then keep growing from there. For several years my roommates and I had been getting vegetables from a family-run, local, organic CSA farm and had a few opportunities to get to know the owners and their broader vision of connecting a community through their land. So in the midst of these sabbatical plans and dreaming, I reached out to the farm about getting involved, and conversations and plans began to take shape.
When I first joined this family, including their three young boys, one full-time employee, and other volunteers in the fields my first week (which was, of course, a 97 degree one in late June), I didn’t know what would take shape. I didn’t even really have a concrete goal, which is rare for someone whose constant temptation is to measure productivity by both figuring out and then fixing whatever internal or external situation I find myself in the midst of. I had only some vague sense that I needed to be here, to connect with my body, food, and the land in new ways, and the rare gift of time to do so long enough and with few enough distractions to simply be present and do what was in front of me to be done. And in that doing – in the embodied tangibility of sweat, mud, never-ending weeds, thistles, a sore back, and always dirt-filled fingernails, I was reminded again of the gift of the small and ordinary. The things that I would end up needing, giving, and being shaped by as the summer carried on were not the obvious or glittery ones, not success, “forward” movement, or perfect pea puree toasts. Instead, it was gifts like an embrace and even enjoyment of hard physical labor, the blessing of working in community, and a reminder that attentiveness produces wonder, and wonder can truly change our lives.
There was the wonder of pausing in the bean picking to stand as quietly as we could, marveling at the incessant hum of a myriad of bees in the corn stalks above our heads. There was the fellowship of the hot morning we spent as a group in the shade, peeling and trimming 1000 onions for several weeks of pickups to come. There is the way the morning fog hangs over the valley, the smell of the tomato rows, and the feel of driving a thumb deep between celery stalks to break them off as close to the base as possible so as not to lose any goodness. It is hard to overstate the care of minds and hearts, eyes and hands, that touch every vegetable and every foot of soil in this square inch of the world this family have taken upon themselves to cultivate toward flourishing. I learned many things from this season (though I still remain far from a great chef or a great gardener!), but more importantly, I got to work alongside and eat at the table with others who helped me remember again that our work (vocational and otherwise) is deeply meaningful not because of its world-defined success, but because of the why and how with which we pursue it.
I wish I could send this reflection again now to each of you with a basket of fresh vegetables like the original readers received. But pick an embodied, ordinary part of your life this week to stand in for rhubarb and dill. Because more so than drawing attention and glory to just this place, sweet as it is, I hope these reflections coupled with paying attention to the abundance in your own life this week help encourage and remind you that whatever the equivalent of sweaty, dirt-filled fingernails, un-glorious hard work is in your life – it is worth doing, and full of wonder.
how faint a whisper 