Practicing Community

On building a love ethic

In early 2019, when Marcie Cohen Ferris asked me to contribute an essay to the book Edible North Carolina: A Journey Across a State of Flavor, we had yet to move onto the farm we now call home. The essay would tell the evolving story of the food life co-created by my husband and me, and how community plays a central role in our work and the vision held for our forever farm. The assignment came three years into the political turmoil and daily unrest created by a certain reality TV show star turned tyrant who had effectively pitted an entire country against itself; before we moved to the majority conservative, majority Christian, majority white township in Upper Cleveland County where my husband grew up.  

In the essay, I contemplated our move.

I wondered, How can we find common ground with our rural neighbors? How do we live our values in community? How can we make lasting contributions to the local food economy? What does a life in food look like now, and what must be given up to embrace it fully? 

By November 2019, when we moved onto the property that would become Old North Farm, the daily media assaults had reached a crescendo. My nervous system was a merry-go-round of fight or flight. I found it hard to look away from the firehose of bile spewing across my screens and the subsequent pileup of injustices. I was appalled at people who I thought decent, but took to Facebook in their righteousness and did the opposite of what their Savior would do. I retaliated in kind, posting angrily on social media. I was rageful most days. 

The divides in our country, which are not new, felt more stark—redrawn in thick, inky impassable lines. I knew families that couldn’t speak to one another, relationships severed because of irreconcilable [insert phobia here] differences, and people living in vastly different realities. I watched as vile rhetoric unearthed and emboldened the worst of humanity out of its greasy slumber. 

I felt sickened by every flag furiously flapping, vehemently claiming a wholly different perspective than mine. On the three-mile stretch of road bearing my new home address, I counted nine such declarations.

 “These are my neighbors,” I thought, eyebrows and skepticism raised. 

We settled into the farm with the intention of building community, though we still didn’t know what that meant. We knew we wanted a welcoming, inclusive space open to all people. Our most persistent thoughts centered around the notion of care and how we could infuse it into the foundations of our vision. Our ideas about agriculture deviated from the methods touting monocrops and industrial operations as “the only way to make a living in agriculture—” legacies held by farming families all around us, including my own husband’s. When we talked about the farm, we talked of “building a vision of a different world.” 

Mia Birdsong, in the book, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community poses the idea that “creating community is creating culture.” In the places we practice community, Birdsong says we also practice world-making or “creating some version of the future world we want to live in now, in the present,” and that doing so is a “declaration of love and commitment.” 

Love and commitment. Not hate or otherness. Not separateness or arbitrary conditions imposed by religion, race, class, or other human-made barriers. Love. 

A tall order. 

Creating community as a declaration of love and commitment sounds good in theory. It sounds especially good when you live in communities of mostly like-minded folks. Liberal enclaves come to mind: Asheville, certain neighborhoods in Charlotte, and crunchy, rural places that are city-adjacent, but none too far from creature comforts. But how do we practice a love ethic in places of extreme difference, or perceived difference? 

When I think of the places that have welcomed me into community, I think of the places that made me feel as if I belonged, where I was a “part of”, not apart from. I think of the places, or people, that wrapped me in care, and made me feel safe and valued. I think of communities of color and queer people who have shown me, in study and in real life, radically imaginative ways of being together. 

How can we find common ground with our rural neighbors?  

In a 2012 conversation between writer/activist bell hooks and George Brosi, the owner of Appalachian Mountain Books, entitled The Beloved Community: A Conversation with bell hooks, hooks says

“Most people think that community means that we all think alike, or we’ll all be taking the same action, when genuine community is inclusive and says, ‘We’re actually different but part of what we are working towards is how to be together in our difference.’” 

hooks shares her experience as a Black woman living in the small town of Berea, Kentucky, the same place where abolitionist John G. Fee built a radical interracial community, affording education to all, including women, when he founded Berea College in a pre-Civil War society. 

 “If we think about living in a small community, one thing is that we are very aware of our differences. It is very obvious that, in order to live in harmony, we have to come to terms with those differences,” says hooks. 

The examples of transformation that hooks shares give credence to the “inescapable network of mutuality” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Being in community means a willingness to engage with and struggle with. “There is no such thing as automatic community,” she says. 

This is very different from definitions of community that live on corporate websites, where the word serves as a vehicle for virtue-washing, where the motives are murky, aggrandizing, and disingenuous. The word community has metastasized into such myriad meanings that the essence of it, a love ethic and practice, is distorted.

I use the word community when we talk about the farm. In our internal conversations and written vision, we explicitly state a desire to “create a robust agricultural community” and make a place on the farm to “host our beloved neighbors.” 

I drew language from the central tenet of Martin Luther King Jr.’s message about The Beloved Community in which “all people can share in the wealth of the Earth” because it is an ideal worth striving toward. The same principle influenced people like bell hooks, who says King’s teachings demonstrated “a profound awareness that people involved in oppressive institutions will not change from the logics and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way.”  The “logics and practices of domination” being the ocean of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that is America; a society that prizes one-upmanship, greed, and competition over collective care. 

How do we live our values in community? 

Prior to settling on the farm, immediately next door to my in-laws and directly across the street from the house where my husband grew up, the idea of community centered on our relationships with friends and other like-minded people. Our strength is our wide network of relationships, the community of food and farmer friends we are privileged to know. When others share about the work we do here, they speak of community. 

Lately I’ve been sitting with what hooks teaches––that we cannot build community or foster change without engagement, or without knowing people. 

hooks says, “Community is about what we bring to it, and community is based in knowing. I cannot really be with you in genuine community if I am not willing to know you. And to know you, I may have to know things that scare me or turn me off.” 

Having lived through the last election cycle and then moving to a place of stark ideological difference, I learned one cannot browbeat anyone into radical transformation. The revolution will not be force-fed. My anger separated me from the work I needed to do. True community, the kind that hooks talks about, cannot be built from a place of anger, judgment, or blame. There is no opening there, only walls. 

Transformation comes from lived experience and connection, specifically engaging with another’s humanity and struggles. This presupposes, of course, that people first acknowledge the humanity of another. I think of people like our liberal redneck buddy Curtis Wilkinson, a hulking six-foot-three unicorn in a straw hat and overalls, who credits the expansion of his own consciousness to traveling the world: seeing people, places, and traditions vastly different from his own and finding value in them. But not everyone leaves the county, or has the privilege to travel far and wide, a consideration we take to heart. What if we brought a small piece of the world to Cleveland County? 

As food people, we use nourishment as a means of gathering people together, but we also use it as a platform for inviting people to new experiences. We host events with food friends who look nothing like the folks on Crowder Ridge Road. We allow people to share their stories, cultures, and traditions. Our hope is that when folks engage with people from different backgrounds, learn something new, or taste something they’ve never tasted before, they connect to the humanity of that person. Perhaps a story they hear evokes a universal feeling or memory, an undiscovered commonality. An opening. 

Three years into living in this rural place, I find that my neighbors are kind, pleasant, and generous people. They ascribe to helping one another out. They share farm tools and equipment. They bring buckets of fresh crowder peas to our door when the harvest is plenty. They’ve come to our events. Our neighbor Calvin stops to marvel at our tidy fields. He asks Jamie about his growing practices. When we see each other, we wave. 

Not once have I bumped into the ideology of my neighbors, though I know it to be different than mine. I think about what this says about human interaction versus digital engagement.  My editor for Pleasant Living, Jess Dean Rogers, a college English professor, says that social media has stunted the ability for young people to communicate. She’s seen it firsthand. The sharp, unforgiving landscape of social media has created a culture that promotes fear and division. One misstep and you’ll be canceled. Better not engage at all. So much of it has dulled the desire for human connection, the place where reconciliation is possible. 

What does a life in food look like now, and what must be given up to embrace it fully?” 

When I ask my husband for his definition of community he says it is, “Being responsible for more than yourself through generosity and service. It is not transactional. Community is care.” 

We do this daily with the people who work with us. We check-in. We discuss. We ask questions and we listen. We make decisions together. 

So much of what we’re doing now is figuring it out. What is our ethic? What exactly are the values we’re trying to embody? How does this look in practice? It’s a mix of philosophical imaginings and practical application. Even before we moved, I knew the actual work would prove more durable.

Back in 2019, I wrote: 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the superficiality that dominates mainstream food culture and how my feelings about food, land, and community have drastically changed since I first got here…My partnership with Jamie and my experiences up until now have turned lofty theory into practical application. It’s a practicality that can’t be intellectualized over Twitter or conveyed rightly on the pages of a glossy food magazine. At least not in its fullness. 

What is more clear now is the need to give up the false binary. Absolutist thinking is a product of supremacy, self-righteousness and exclusion. People like hooks and Dr. King held the idea that reconciliation was possible which, to me, is a deep hope born of great love. Paired with a love ethic and accountability, reconciliation is a way of practicing the future we want. To get there, one must be open to learning, to fucking up and making amends, to struggling with another, to listening, and returning to a place that recognizes and engages with another’s humanity. 

Still, there are gray areas to ponder.  What does our concept of radical inclusion say about the person that wants to carry a firearm onto our property? Our values say we prioritize the safety and comfort of all people on our farm, which means we consider the collective first. If we promote a culture of safety, what is the need for a gun in the first place? 

What happens when a racist or homophobic comment is made? We address it immediately and seek accountability. In current practice, we send out a written statement before every event outlining our ethic—- we firmly and kindly state that Old North Farm is a place of welcoming inclusion, that all people have a right to be here and deserve our care and respect. It communicates clearly who we are. 

I  was skeptical about moving to Crowder Ridge Road. I had ideas about how people would behave. I felt combative, suspicious of my neighbors. When I considered my own values, I concluded that what I put into the world comes back to me. If I expect love and care and mutual respect, then I would have to give it. If I want radical openness, then I would have to practice it. 

Rilke said, “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” 

There is still so much work to do, so many questions unanswered.. We look to nature, to the wisdom of our teachers, and the truth of our experience to light the way. Community is not practiced in isolation.  It is an invitation, over and over again.