Reaping and Readying
Some fragmented thoughts on harvesting, getting ready for future seasons, two new and very different books, and hope
Friday, August 18
Grand Rapids, Mich.
We’re in the midst of harvest here in West Michigan. Every walk home from the community garden has been a juggling act—Fozzie’s leash and the inevitable poop bag in one hand, a sack of potatoes, another of tomatoes, and perhaps a handful of flowers in the other.
This is a season of feasting. Every single lunch and dinner has brought some reminder of the garden’s bounty: So many tomato, mozzarella, and basil salads. Chard, sautéed with our own garlic. Charred shishito peppers with a sprinkling of sea salt. A stir-fry of tofu and vegetables that included the first bell pepper I’ve ever successfully grown.
Not everything has worked. I still haven’t successfully grown broccoli. I planted poppies in the community garden; I’ve got a few sprigs of what my plant-identifying app tells me are poppy leaves, but not a single bloom to prove it.The zucchini in the backyard keeps flowering beautifully, but then only a reminder that a promise isn’t the same as a guarantee.
Our potato crop has been stellar so far, and I’ve only harvested maybe half of them. After a long battle with potato beetles last year, this potato-growing season has been problem-free. I planted five kinds this year. Four of them, I ordered—Purple Viking, Desiree, Adirondack Blue, Yellow Finn. The fifth were some organic Yukon Gold that languished in the crisper drawer until they sprouted; I cut them up and popped them into the ground to see what might happen. They grew!
Two or three mystery potato plants emerged on their own, from potatoes that either I or one of my predecessors in the community garden failed to harvest last year. I have no idea what types those are. An ordinary miracle: Left to languish in the soil, those potatoes bided their time until they were ready to grow again. Then they surprised us with their grace.
All these potatoes teach me about patience. Unlike other crops—the greens, say, or the tomatoes—we can’t see what’s growing. It’s not until we’ve dug around that we know what has matured and what hasn’t. One plant gave me only a couple of small tubers; another produced six or seven large ones.
I’ve cooked a couple of meals already with this season’s potatoes. Delicious. For the rest, we will wait. Multiple newspaper-lined trays of the tubers are curing in the cool of our basement. They need time to thicken their skins, and then they’ll be able to endure for months, ready to be transformed into mashed potatoes for the Thanksgiving table or hearty stews that warm in the cold of winter.
Especially now, I’m reminded as well that the seasons are not as discrete as we sometimes like to think. These days of harvest are also a season of preparation: Those potatoes in the basement. The spring bok choy that bolted and went to seed had to be taken out of the backyard bed; those seeds have now been extracted, some saved and some put back into the soil for a fall crop. I’m starting to think about canning some tomato sauce, so that we can taste a little summer later on.
This is the reality of our existence, at once reaping and readying. All at once, we try to give thanks for the growth that has happened, to delight in the present moment, and to prepare for what’s to come.
What is your garden teaching you? What’s flourishing? What isn’t? I’d love to know.
What I’m Reading: “Am I misremembering it?”
This line comes on the first page of Shane McCrae’s gorgeously unconventional new memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, and then again on the third.
“Am I misremembering it?”
The word “memoir” comes from the French mémoire, and it does not take a word detective to figure out what it means: simply, “memory.” The human memory, though, isn’t so simple. It is not a tidy, chronological archive of everything we’ve seen, done, said, and heard. We all misremember. Sometimes that happens accidentally. Other times we choose, whether for the sake of comfort or survival, to do so. Still others, it’s foisted on us intentionally, like a story revised by an outside editor until you can’t recall what the original draft said. “The memory exists in shards in my mind, shards orbiting a darkness, the shards make a sphere, like a bubble, but a sphere of disconnected fragments, through the cracks between which the darkness is visible, and seeps out, and whatever actually happened,” McCrae writes, “I can’t see.”
I met Shane McCrae in 2016, when I moderated a conversation between him and the theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. The title of that session: “The Language of Forgiveness.” During that chat, McCrae winsomely described forgiveness as “the root of hope,” something that liberates us to see possibility but that also makes us vulnerable to being hurt again.
To read Pulling the Chariot of the Sun now casts what McCrae said about his vision of forgiveness and hope then into sharper relief. I did not know then—couldn’t know then, because he was still working out how to tell the story—much about how McCrae had been hurt and what exactly he has had to try to forgive: When he was 3, his (white) maternal grandparents kidnapped him from his (Black) dad and spirited him off to Texas. “For most of my life, I’ve not known what to call what they did—growing up, I never thought to call it ‘kidnapping,’” he writes.
When he was 3, “my grandparents convince my mother that I would be better off living with them,” he writes. Was it better? It could hardly have been worse. His upbringing was marked by abuse and unbelonging. Only years later did he realize: “I am not the story I was told.” (Wyatt Mason recently profiled McCrae in The New York Times Magazine; you can read the story here, regardless of whether you have a Times subscription or not.)
McCrae’s story isn’t easy, not in its intimate, heart-wrenching details nor in the unusual way he chooses to tell it. He is first and foremost a poet—he has been a National Book Award finalist and teaches at Columbia University—and much of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun reads like poetry, demanding a second scan, maybe even a third. He rejects linear storytelling. His writing will frustrate the reader who wants quick hits and clear takeaways. Instead, he circles and meanders, much as the memory does. Wandering and wondering, grasping and grappling, his prose has its own strange, spellbinding beauty.
I had McCrae’s story still in mind when I opened my friend Amanda Held Opelt’s Holy Unhappiness: God, Goodness, and the Myth of the Blessed Life. While she does tell some stories from her own life, Opelt’s book isn’t primarily memoir. It’s a careful, thoughtful examination of happiness and disillusionment in the context of Christian faith. Building on her exploration of grief in her first book, A Hole in the World, she indicts what she calls “the emotional prosperity gospel.” If sorrow is inevitably a part of human existence, what then?
Opelt wrestles deeply with American society’s emphasis on the self—self-improvement, self-actualization, self-care, the meaning and the mattering of our individual selves—and the way in which that self-absorption has made its way into the lives of those who call themselves Christian. Where is the line between an appropriate sense of self and self-obsession? What are the downsides of individual freedom? Where might we find healing in community? “Agency comes with a massive amount of pressure. When things in life don’t go your way, not only do you feel unhappy; you feel shame,” she writes. “The religion of self-discovery, while it may seem dignifying and liberating on the surface, is really exhausting.”
Perhaps the most stirring part of Opelt’s book for me was her meditation on the intersection of fear, which I know well, and hope, which I aspire to. “Lately,” she writes, “it has helped me to think of fear and hope less as thoughts that live in my mind and more as actions that live in my body. Fear, I think, will always occupy space in my brain, but it doesn’t have to animate my hands, my feet, or my mouth. And hope must do more than enliven my thoughts. It must set my body in motion.”
Uncommon hope, deep hope, transcendent hope—such hope, I suppose, is what unites both of these books. Both point to beauty and grace that is at once within us but also beyond—pain and suffering, yes, but also profound resilience and as-yet-unnameable possibility. “The sick know that even the hem holds great power if it is the hem of God,” Opelt writes. “The doubter knows that to touch the scars of his pain even just once is as much proof of resurrection as a parading host of radiant angels.”
Hear them testify.
I’d love to know what you’ve been reading this summer. What is it stirring in you?
Finally, here’s a gratuitous picture of Fozzie, from a recent day where he kept watch as I dug potatoes and harvested tomatoes. He thinks he’s the very best farmhand.
You can always reach me at makebelievefarmer@gmail.com or via passenger pigeon at P.O. Box 68565, Grand Rapids, MI, 49516. As ever, I’m so grateful we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.
Yours,
Jeff
Your comment about your zucchini plant resonated with me. Our Hungarian wax pepper plants and our jalapeño peppers have produced but because of the cool weather and vast amounts of rain, they aren’t “hot.” We can plant and we can plan but what comes up and how it grows (or doesn’t) is often not ours to decide
I’ve been deeply impressed by Stolen Focus by Johann Harri about technology and manipulation in an attention economy. I found The Center for Humane Technology through this book, which lead me to the vitally important podcast Your Undivided Attention with Tristan Harris and Asa Raskin. These are such important resources for understanding how coding, big money and data are dominating daily lives and have become defacto government.