The Gift as Whisper of the Wild

By Unsu Lee

These days, I'm finding much inspiration and insight from the farmer Adam Wilson and his Peasantry School Newsletter. Wilson runs the Sand River Community Farm, which has the tagline: "This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason." Wilson practices what he calls radical neighbouring. He grows food in order to give it away to his neighbours. I don't know how he does all that farming and still manages to write these incredibly articulate newsletters every week or so. In a recent newsletter, under the heading "The Gift as the Whisper of the Wild", Wilson writes:

Asking for money is the least-comfortable part of my self-appointed job description as a gift-practitioner and spokesperson. Likely because money is the aspect of modern human life that has been furthest abstracted from the treasury of the wild. Dollars carry a higher degree of mine-or-yours-ness than, say, food or clothing. They cast a more-impenetrable spell. I wouldn’t hesitate to ask you for a bowl of lamb and vegetable stew if we were seated together at the table. But asking for money? Sheesh. I know I’m not alone on this one, but the spell in question traffics in aloneness. It traffics in a felt sense of scarcity, in unworthiness and un-belonging.

He follows this by asking his subscribers to consider donating to his farm's Winter expenses, which amount to $9200. He then makes a promise of sorts to all his potential donors, expressing what he’ll do with their money in transcendental terms:

I can still recall the whole-body longing I felt when I first read Martin Shaw’s description of a human being who belongs to this world: "a portion of the landscape that temporarily resides in human form." Every dollar sent this way will be planted in to the fertile ground of that possibility for the children to come. Here’s a rephrase, now as a series of questions: Could we remember money as a portion of the landscape currently being held hostage—an abstraction of Life into property? Could we begin to plant that story of human scarcity back into the ground at our feet? Could we find the courage to trust that our acts of cultural and ecological goodwill will rise again to meet those humans born in the future?

When I read this paragraph, it struck me as the essence of what I'd love to be doing with my life. It's almost as if Wilson wrote those words for me. I'll be spending this year, and perhaps the rest of my life, in decoding his wisdom. The feeling of human scarcity is a fact. We see it everyday. We experience it in our work, in our endless quest for more resources, more time, more funds, more partnerships, more deliverables. There's no use denying it, or pretending it isn't staring us in the face. And it takes tremendous courage to persist, despite all of that, in performing precisely those acts of cultural and ecological goodwill that will plant the seeds of a different possibility for future generations of humans.

I take inspiration from Adam Wilson because he's not an armchair theorist like me. I often worry that my idealistic thoughts only make sense from the safety of privilege. But Wilson is a hands-on farmer who barely has any savings. And he's been giving away food for six years now.

I'm not expecting us all to become Adam Wilsons. But I do hope that we can see the bigger tapestry and contribute our own "whispers of the wild". If enough of us do so, future generations of humans may yet rise to greet each other as landscapes temporarily residing in human form. As spoken word poet Kim Calhoun says, "May we remember that scarcity, separation, and supremacy are myths as we recreate relationships and systems sourced in deep care for ourselves and each other."

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