The Keepin’ It Real Book Club

I am, I think, a rather typical middle-class urban dweller. I live not far from the buzzing downtown core, in the leafy, historic Annex, perched like a sparrow on top of the coursing powerline of the Bloor-Danforth subway. I cross the city each day on the TTC. I take advantage of the eclectic smorgasbord of food the city has to offer. I go to the museums and the literary events and the street festivals, take advantage (if not for granted) the wonderful variety of shops. But I think what makes me urban is not so much those things, but a mentality. A sort of frenetic activity, physically and mentally. Perhaps it’s the number of options, perhaps it’s the lights and noise of a city that never sleeps, but I think more likely it’s just my own overachieving nature mixed up with the realities of being a driven twenty-something building a career and taking on more than is advisable. And while I love my life, find it full and engaging and challenging, there is a part of me that worries that in taking on so much I’m missing out. That in engaging with everything I’m actually processing nothing. That in the hurly burly of an overscheduled life, I’m always thinking about what comes next rather than enjoying what is.

And that’s one of the reasons I do yoga. While I enjoy the health benefits, the mental benefits are even more essential. People think yoga is just physical acrobatics or oming away amongst cushions as incense winds through the room, and while it can be both those things, it is so much more. It’s learning to slow down, to appreciate the moment, to balance effort and ease. It’s not about the experience on the mat, but rather what you can carry forth from it out into the world. So I’m always fascinated by encounters with yogic mentality in the wild.

One place I found it this summer was in my backyard garden. (Yes, despite my subway-adjacent location, I have the blessing of a large backyard: my peas curl upwards serenaded by the screech of streetcars, my carrots grow toward thrumming subway vibrations.) As I planted and pruned and weeded, time slowed down. I felt no need to multitask, the frenzied terrier that is my inner monologue slowed down to sniff at blossoms and investigate buds. Laundry swaying on the laundry line above me, sunshine of my shoulders, knees black and face smudged, I entered the meditative state I so often strived for on my little sticky mat. I even skipped yoga classes, realizing that I was doing yoga already, even if I didn’t do anything that could be defined as a traditional posture, even if time passed without a single om. I was in awe of the progress of my little seeds, was known to hop about in joy at a new fruit or blossom. The garden is filled with everyday miracles, that for some reason we have collectively forgotten, too far up in our office windows to see what’s happening on the ground.

I discovered gardening books in the long, dark February before my fruitful summer, devoured them like the fall Macs that leave my hands constantly sticky. That interest hasn’t waned, and in expanded into books on food and farming. The farming books are especially fascinating, exposing a way of life so foreign to my own. Though I was obsessed with pioneer tales as a young girl (my physical resemblance to Melissa Gilbert is just the beginning of my affinity with the Ingalls clan), as a teen I gravitated to tales of cities. But even before the gardening fever, one book brought me back to the farm: Iain Reid’s One Bird’s Choice. I didn’t even pick it out for myself, the wise Trish at Anansi sent it my way in what may be remembered as a sort of cosmic intervention. It’s a warm, incredibly personal book — the reader feels like they’ve been welcomed into the Reid clan with open arms and a hot meal waiting on the table. Part of what intrigued me was that Reid’s parents weren’t commercial farmers or hereditary farmers, but people that chose rural life, who created their own sanctuary and filled it with the things that fulfilled them: sheep and ducks, chickens and dogs, and of course Lucius the peafowl. Theirs wasn’t a farm of striving commercial production. It wasn’t burdened with the task of feeding the world’s insatiable appetite, but it satisfied the needs of its residents. (This is perhaps a little avuncular on a global scale, but based on my latest reading, perhaps an essential starting point).

That book opened a window in my mind (the kind that’s a bit creaky, with a heavy wood framed pane with gauzy drapes, blowing in the breeze). I gazed out of it occasionally, kept a list of more books I wanted to read, but with my reading list generally tyrannized by essential reading, they often had to wait. Then I picked up Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm, and was sucked right out of the city, my required reading left languishing. The fact that I started reading it on a rare break from the city, a trip to my family’s trailer in Sauble Beach on a warm Thanksgiving weekend, really only emphasized the book’s message.

Brett’s Salt Spring island farm isn’t profitable, though he and his wife do sell its products. He mentions he ended up paying customers $25 each for the privilege of taking one of his free-range sheep. For almost 20 years he’s lived at Willlowpond Farm (nicknamed “Trauma Farm” in an attempt to strip it of some of its romanticism). And yet to me it’s impossibly romantic. He writes, “The small farm is a dying anachronism in our age, but it is here that some of us are taking a rebel stand, returning to the traditional knowledge that grew good food for thousands of years.”

Each of the 24 chapters (each an hour of a day of 18 years of condensed experience) is a meditation on a different part of the farm, whether if be birds, bees, breakfasts or willow trees. Brett’s musings are part personal memoir, part natural history, and part poetry, a sort of hymn channeled from the land itself. Above all, it’s about restoring a relationship with the land, one damaged by California produce and shrink-wrapped chicken cutlets. He writes, “Life is about relationships, and the closer the relationships between the land and our belly, the better the food. This is the task Sharon and I set for ourselves from the beginning, building a circular relationship with our soil, feeding on its products and feeding it more in return.”

For Trauma Farm is all about relationships. In fact, I’d call it a love story. Like any romance it’s often inconvenient or unpredictable, it requires a lot of effort. And it asks that you give back as much, or more, than you take from it. It means learning the natural rhythms of another thing, honoring them, working within them. It often means relinquishing control (or what we perceive as control). In return you get something that physically, mentally, emotionally sustains you. That makes you stronger, wiser, more sensitive.

There is a surprising web of relationships on Trauma Farm, and Brett’s twenty years there have given him some appreciation for its delicate ecosystems. The way having a horse can solve your thistle problem, or cutting back grass can decimate your frog population. Sometimes those relationships are less practical, and you get the sense of how the all the residents of the farm, from the bees to the goose to the sheep, have come together to form a new family. One of the most touching, even surreal scenes in the book comes when the season’s final lamb is being born, and Brett finds the farm’s animals have gathered round to watch the ewe give birth. The animal kingdom’s nativity. Brett writes, “Grace lives in the land and awaits the moment when it can surprise us with its tenderness.”

And this is a book about tenderness, and “beauty and laughter and terror,” but mostly the sensitivity to discover these things, the awareness and appreciation of them. It’s telling that the first chapter features Brett walking naked through the woods on his property. He explains, “I want to feel the world on my skin, especially when the world is tender.” It’s very Walt Whitman (“I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,/ I am mad for it to be in contact with me”) though Brett’s true spiritual ancestor is more likely Thoreau. Like the philosopher of Walden Pond, he finds cause to rejoice in the simplest things, but also has no shortage of strong opinions.

Those opinions often emerge as he shares his research on global issues (the environment, industrial agriculture, slaughterhouses and factory farmed meat, the plight of small farmers etc.) and are welcome and necessary information, woven as digestible tidbits into the narrative. To him, returning to what is small is a solution to many of the world’s large problems, both practically and spiritually. He quotes naturalist Bernd Heinrich, who says, “our well-being is tied not so much to the structure of our society and the politics that determine it, as to our ability to maintain contact with nature, to feel that we are part of the natural order.”

And that’s what this book, and my garden, and even yoga, have inspired in me: being sensitive, and reconnecting with the natural order. It’s like a seed, long dormant, is starting to unfurl. Like Brett, I’ve realized that I may have thus far overlooked an essential goal: “attempting to write myself back into the landscape where I live.”

Trauma Farm has stayed with me since I read it: for its wisdom, its spirit, its discovery of the lyric in the practical. My addiction to farm books has only intensified, and these experiences and information only encourage me more. I suspect it will be a book that will radically alter the course of my life — if it hasn’t already. Recently it led me to my father’s investment/hobby farm, where I finished writing this piece I started almost three months ago on my Thanksgiving escape from the city. It took that long to find the time and the mental space to start what I finished. To slow down, reconnect and dream of a money-losing farm of my own.