The Return of Farmer Jim

chronicles of exiting hibernation

The drapey linen shirt hung off of me as I bent over the flower bed, smelling the dank musk of wet, decaying leaves. Depending on your school of thought, I’m a lazy idiot or a genius for letting the leaves sit in the bed through the winter. I wish I had the forethought to clean out the beds like someone told me to do once. But, I just didn’t, okay? At the end of last fall, I finished raking my yard and magically turned into the sleepytime bear. Heeding my glob given right to hibernate, I tucked myself and all my flower beds in for the season. I opened up the door to my cellar, brought all my black candles and herbs, and gave the world a final hiss before closing the hatch. With the sun climbing in the sky again, I returned to my human form and have returned to clean out my beds with my “Farmer Jim” linen tunic (trademark pending).

I don’t think I am an idiot, but I am like real lazy. I am a proud member of the IWW, local chapter 666. That’s my local I Won’t Work chapter. Like Bob Black, who in his 1985 Pamphlet “The Abolition of Work” noted that work was the “source of nearly all the misery in the world,” I am really not interested in “working” my beds to optimum efficiency or whatever. That’s all a bit hamster-in-the-endless-cycling wheel for me. No, I am much more interested in engaging in play, specifically the “ludic conviviality” Bob Black juxtaposes with work, with my plant buddies. This means that my flower buddies and I are engaged in a never ending game of growth and decay, which we play out every year. We all win because we get to express ourselves freely outside a domain of capitalist production. We all win, because we get to take off our skin or cellulose suits for a while and just be carbon-based lifeforms.

This jives with my own approach to natural dyeing, which has inspired my gardening. I was taught by Rebekah Paulson to just enjoy the dye process for what it is—an unwieldy, free jazz-esq collaboration of which I just play a bit role among my ensemble mates: local water source, plant matter, and the seasons. Juxtapose this with your contemporary production natural dyer who attempts to play the hits every time they dye by using formulas to rigidly recreate a color that should never be enclosed in the commons of capitalism. Yes, I said it. I don’t think that its useful to commodify natural dyeing by pandering to the passive consumer who by sheer rote and repetition demands the ability to buy a knowable, understandable commodity. I get that people just want to be able to eat and shelter themselves with something that they don’t find too odious, but can we please stop trying to turn our ancestral crafts into hampton inns, people? I beg you.

Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” is about as far afield to the hampton inn as you can get and the spirit that I want to bring to my play. Although it was Coleman’s composition, Don Cherry, Scott LaFaro, Billy Higgins, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell all contributed unique musical solos that comprise the sum total of the work. That’s the organizing philosophy that I want to bring to natural dyeing. The practice should be thought of as having a rough skeletal composition/ ordering structured by the dyer but should be brought to life by the sequential soloing of the water, plants, metallic salts, sun, and wind. Each element brings their own unique tenor and timbre to the process depending on the day, which we should CELEBRATE, not try to rigidly stamp out. Yes, we should improvise with our collaborators in the dye process, not try to control them.

“Ooooo, an earthworm!” I thought to myself after coming upon my first terrestrial invertebrate of the season. It had emerged while I was digging out some plants that I don’t want in my yard. I hate the word weed, because it’s just a political, colonial designation given to things that our dominant christian capitalist culture can’t monetize. For instances, how is a medicinal plant like dandelion, which was brought to the Americas from Europe, considered a weed and Bermuda or Kentucky bluegrass is propped up with a toxic combination of overwatering and toxic chemicals. Its mad, I tell you! I hate to break it to all you glob-faring, earthworm-loving folx: earth worms are also “invasive” invertebrates that came with European colonization. 

We really can’t escape colonialism for a second can we? No, we can’t. Even when we are just in the presence of the most crystalline vibrations in our official “Farmer Jim” linen tunics, we can’t escape the clutches of the churning behemoth of colonialism. One cannot ascend beyond the “material conditions”¹ that made their ascension possible: that form of spiritual trickery is always made on the backs of others. Earthworms, as European invader, crowded out all its other native competitors vying eat all the dead, decaying stuff and turn it into soil. Now, it is estimated that there are approximately 7 million earth worms for every one human. Just like white america’s comfort is built on genocide, mass incarceration, and land theft, so too, we have our colonization to thank for our garden soil now. Heavy, right?

Honestly, that may be a bit of hyperbole, but it raises an important point. Who is to say that the pillbug or other native invertebrates wouldn’t have done just as good a job? Ultimately, it’s impossible to know, because it’s all part of a stolen future that the indigenous people, plants, and invertebrates of the Americas never got to live into. I am just kinda tired of white folx² projecting themselves into ecosystems as something other than what they are: an imperfect, destructive human trying to make the most of consciousness and an opposable thumb. I keep wondering to myself: is the push to interweave ourselves, as white folx, back into the ecosystems we are actively destroying a bit of bypassing? For example, I wonder if some of our contemporary white writers and readers want to imagine themselves as a mushroom or a frog, because they cannot take the crushing immediacy of doing the death work to recognize how complicit they are in the grand pummeling of everything and everyone that isn’t a white homo sapien man in the 21st century. Ultimately, I would appreciate if, and again I am repeating myself here, white identifying folks would start by fully examining their own privilege, become a traitor to it, and then weave themselves into relationship with all the life around them. I get the need to bypass all the death and decay to get to the plant nuzzling, but it isn’t going to do you any good to put the cart before the horses.

Before I get to the absolute wonder and awe I feel among my plants and earth worm kin, I had to ground my discussion in critical race theory and acknowledge colonialism. This is a reminder for myself mostly before I get too carried away into other realms, because I also had to learn how to not bypass the death and decay. In my previous practice of Buddhism, I was your typical white practitioner, emphasizing sitting meditation above all. I wanted enlightenment, but bypassed all the hard stuff. Even though I said I wanted the mud, I really just wanted the lotus flower. I wanted to meditate my way into the 432 hz healing sound youtube video with the waterfall without ever really dealing with my mom’s death, my OCD, and doom that accompanies our current planetary triumvirate of planet collapse, right wing fanaticism, and christian nationalism.

Ultimately, I realized that my own Buddhist practice was just a form of culutral appropriation and bypassing where I could project myself into a place of perpetual calm, which doesn’t exist and real buddhism points out is impossible. This is about the place where I found druidry and really began to merge my own sociological understanding of power and inequality with the spirituality of my own ancestors. Yes, I rooted my spirituality in my own decolonization of my whiteness rather than trying to use someone else’s spirituality to bypass it. So, yes, apologies for the brief aside to go on one of my typical rants, but it is important to really belabor that point before projecting myself into the dirt as a luxurious little earthworm baby.

OK, with that said, I just want to get to the wonder of it all. I approach many things as fellow virgo sun adrienne marie brown does. In her book Emergent Strategy, she notes that she wrote that book for people like her,

“who get spun into wonder about the natural world and want to know things, who feel and know more than we can say or explain, and want to know how knowing those things can transform the ways we approach changing the world.”

That’s curiosity-inducing wonder is how I feel when I am caught in the thick of it in a wet, rich garden bed among my plant kin. Those soils where I plant my friends are not just the cradle of growth for them, but they are also the spiritual generative force behind all my visions of the future, a future where I am more self-sufficient because of my own skills and the skills of the communities I am woven in. Consequently, one can root my own anarcho-socialist-drenched hedge druidry firmly in my own little bit of soil that I inhabit. Yes, I am less interested in burning fossil fuels to get to wild spaces or living in wild spaces than I am in noticing the thriving wild in the urban domains I live in.

Screen still from Season 2 of Japanese Television show “Alice in Borderland”

Yes, I would love to see us move beyond the concept of green roofs to entire green cities that more closely resemble this scene from season 2 of Alice in Borderland than the manicured/sterile cityscapes we see today. Let the pavement crack from lack of maintenance and use. Put the funds saved from road maintenance into a seed bank and block-level community gardens. Like Lead2Life, let us melt down all the guns in ritualistic revelry and craft a set of garden tools for each person. Take down the structures and foundations of all jails, prisons, and police HQs one concrete block at a time with a spirit of gladness. Prolong that work of abolition across many decades so as to turn those monuments into working history museums Use the money saved to feed and shelter all people, nobody gets excluded. Place all the seed patents into the incinerator and nationalize each agribusiness to ensure that seed and land can be held in common. Scream with unbridled enthusiasm into each spring and summer new moon that our plant kin meet a wet, warm spring. Let our voices ring in unison, “With harm to none, may we emerge from the darkness to grow and thrive in spring and summer only to be harvested by sacred death’s merciful scythe as the darkness deepens as fall descends into winter. May we devote ourselves to this sacred spiral each and every year that we exist in this dimension of existence.”

Most importantly, let me be like my earthworm kin, one of our planet’s pre-eminent death workers. I just want to be like my little buddies, using my heart to wiggle through the blockages wrought by our cultures inability to deal with death and decay. Let me burrow through the blockages to create little passages for our tears to finally flow through for all the safety and loved ones we have lost. Let me gobble up all that is deathly and decay and transmute it into the fertile soil that I need to be reborn each day. Over an accumulated lifetime of transmuting death, may I make a fertile ground of growth for my daughter, my friends, and fellow death workers to grow a different death positive culture. May I approach all the personal and societal deaths with the reverence of witnessing the Fae, knowing that I too will have the responsibility of wielding sacred death’s scythe to put to rest relationships, attitudes, behaviors, and cultural trends that are not serving me and harmful to my communities. May all this be, with harm to none.

As always, dear reader, thank you for being here. Until next week.

James

1. Dis’ be a trusty Sharon Arnold chorus. :Insert pirate voice:

2. This is an important clarification because our indigenous and black and brown brothers and sisters certainly have a very different relationship with their environments.