Curiosity (#1)
An excerpt from Daily Bread, a story of Spiritual Bankruptcy through the eyes of the food system
If you are just joining, note that this is an excerpt of a book-in-progress, titled Daily Bread, about the spiritual bankruptcy in America as seen through the lens of the food system. All passages are available for free in sequential order, though it is perfectly acceptable to read one without the other, should you wish.
***This one is a quick read. Take it as a chapter intro—I wanted to get something out there for you as I’m scribbling away.***
My vocation is to face in myself what others cannot face within themselves. A type of inescapable curiosity that metamorphizes light from darkness. When I drive alone along these country roads, the darkness shadows the calm and hovers over all the land like a fog. I don’t believe it is evil, but rather a force difficult to decipher. It engages in unimaginable calculation. The hawks and turkey vultures possess it, forever circling this land. The vastness of the fields possesses it, between the rows of endless corn. It’s there, gathering at the edge where the fields meet forest. It’s there on the shores of Still Pond: the dusty beiges and greys and greens of the landscape, the juniper, the honeysuckle, the uprooted trees washed ashore. It’s there where the land meets the sea, in the rocks holding steady the crashing tides. It’s in the white sun-bleached driftwood piling high onto the beach. It’s in the gesture of the seaweed, waiving below the surface, rooted to the silty floor. It’s in the dawn wrapped around me and in the smell of salt air and pine as I unlock the paint-chipping shed door. It’s in the brisk morning air cut by the spark of the lighter and the flame of the oil lamp. It’s in the canopy of the weeping cherry tree beyond my window, where my children laugh and play and cry. It is a great and wonderful force that permeates everything. Because that force is me. I am that place where the rows of corn meet the forest, where the hawks and vultures circle, and where the land crumbles into the sea. My curiosity is the tide battering the perception of what is fixed and what is fluid. It attempts humble translation of this almighty darkness. I bow to the ground and kiss it. I find the light.
It was this light that led me to feed off the land. The manmade city weighed me down with its imported cement and steel, rigid functionality, manufactured populism, and lack of identity. Its citizens weighed me down. I knocked on their beliefs and a hollowness resounded. They must also suffer a similar crisis of constitution. They must also find a hollowness within me. The land called. And I saw nothing more healing than consuming its bounty and providing it to others.
I picked it up where I’d left it, finding it to be as pleasant as it had ever been. Neat rows of dozens of summer crops, high tunnels filled with tomatoes and flowers and herbs. Karma Farm hides from the fields of corn and soy, tucked behind them in the hills of the northern Piedmont. This region borrows its name from the Italian Piemonte, meaning foothill. In this case, foothills of the ancient Appalachia. I’ve only recently discovered this and am ashamed it took me so long. I had never noticed the rolling hills blanketed in native trees. Chestnut, black walnut, pine, oak, beech, dogwood, birch, and ash. My awareness extended only to the well-traveled interstates and gridlocked shopping centers. My view was as flat as a desert. I had no notion of peaks and valleys, nor was my existence determined by them. It was good that oxygen was abundant and free. Should I had needed to find it, I would have been unable.