When something happens far away, it is tempting to think of the distance that lies between us and the event as insulating or paralyzing. But the tragedies of the last few years have challenged these assumptions. In the early months of 2020, Covid-19 felt distant. Then it claimed the lives of precious people we knew. Violence in Afghanistan may have seemed far away, but as refugees have sought help and support, people around the world are seeking to support them. Similar work is happening now in response to war in Ukraine: a dear neighbor recently gathered coats for a clothing drive for refugees, and filled the pockets with tiny crocheted stuffed animals she and her daughters had made, hoping to bless a child whose world had been turned upside down.
I wrote about this a bit in June 2020 for Breaking Ground (now part of a book of essays they’ve released), considering how Wendell Berry offered important wisdom in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. In “Health Is Membership,” a speech he gave nearly 30 years ago, Berry argued that the division of “our bodies and our world into parts” spoke against the tenets of health: the root of the word “health,” Berry wrote, stems from the same root as the word “whole.”
Health, then, is literally “to be whole.” But this wholeness cannot be attributed to isolated individuals, whole in themselves but divorced from the health of the ecosystems they inhabit. Neither is health-as-wholeness universalizing—enforcing a sort of sameness that ignores the differences and particularities that exist between people, places, and communities. Health-as-wholeness must have larger and deeper implications: it is “not just the sense of completeness in ourselves,” Berry argues, “but also . . . the sense of belonging to others and to our place.”
If we understand health as wholeness, one’s own individual health cannot be seen separately from larger memberships within communities, societies, and the world itself. Chris Arnade wrote recently on Substack that not everyone is prone to individualistic thinking, as many Americans are—and that there is a lot we could learn from communities that think and act collectively. Health-as-wholeness requires us to re-member our worlds, thus resisting a culture that “isolates us and parcels us out.” In his book Being Alive, Tim Ingold speaks of this as belonging to a “meshwork.” Thinking of life as a network rightly emphasizes the connections existing between things, Ingold writes, but it maintains a distinction between things and their relations. Ingold argues, in contrast, that “Things are their relations”1:
“What we have been accustomed to calling ‘the environment’ might, then, be better envisaged as a domain of entanglement. It is within such a tangle of interlaced trails, continually raveling here and unravelling there, that beings grow or ‘issue forth’ along the lines of their relationships.”2
Ingold’s viewpoint here seems to fit with Berry’s consideration of the world as a giant circulatory system in “The Body and the Earth”: “Body, soul (or mind or spirit), community, and world are all susceptible to each other’s influence, and they are all conductors of each other’s influence,” Berry writes. “This is a network, a spherical network, by which each part is connected to every other part.”
The United Nations World Food Program buys 50 percent of its wheat from Ukraine, which then goes toward feeding 125 million food-insecure people worldwide. “If the conflict does not end, the world risks famine, destabilization of countries and mass migrations,” the New York Times reported this week. As war and pandemic impact supply chains worldwide, many are talking of turning these chains into “supply webs,” seeking to build complexity and diversity into systems that have become fragile over time. We’ve seen similar efforts in the U.S., as farmer co-ops, regional slaughterhouses, and local butcher shops have sought to meet local food needs and repair systems impacted by the pandemic. As Berry writes, disease in a circulatory system “tends first to impair circulation and then to stop it altogether.” Building more dense webs of interconnected commerce should build local resilience, and support food-insecure communities. But these webs are yet another way in which we are reminded not of our isolation, but of our interconnection. The Ukrainian farmers who’ve helped feed food-insecure people in other countries will now need support. The “tangle of interlaced trails” that create health will demand different forms of support and provision in months to come.
Last year, Matthew Loftus suggested that the Christian faith contains both centrifugal and centripetal forces: pushing us inward, to focus us on immediate, local needs, and urging our eyes outward, to see and serve in larger, far-reaching ways (I can’t find the exact tweet, but you should follow Matthew for wise thoughts and excellent articles). Locality ties us to the places where we live, and the immediate people we can serve. When we get out of bed every day, we confront a tangible world of needs in which we play an active part. That does not change. But I think, too, it can be easy to think of child care, maintenance, local service, or community-building as distractions (or even as means of escape) from wider engagement. In fact, the opposite is true. If we are living in a circulatory system, or a meshwork, then the question is never whether our efforts will matter—but how. Our work is always both/and, not either/or. This is neither meant to denigrate the local, nor to put undue pressure on people to transform systems and institutions on their own. Rather, it’s meant to remind us that our immediate means of service are often more meaningful than we often think. Berry’s local focus does not ignore the global, but ties the local to it, inextricably, as the space in which global needs and crises are most often felt and addressed. To repair a broken meshwork, we never look only to our own needs. But we can start at home. As Brian Hamilton wrote recently for Comment, economic ethics and Christian politics “begin with an honest recognition of who we are in relation to one another.”
The assurance, perhaps, of thinking of the world as a web of interconnectedness is that it prompts us to take action where we are, however we can, and not just to “doomscroll,” as they say. One of the many things I appreciate about Leah Libresco Sargeant’s “Other Feminisms” Substack is that she does a wonderful job connecting people to tangible means of service amid pressing crises. To that end, she has shared Kelsey Piper’s article on ways to support Ukrainians a few times in the last month or two.
Being attuned to the needs of others—connected to strands of immediate, felt needs, and aware of our own responsibilities to act—is a form of re-membering. It is one, Norman Wirzba suggests in his excellent forthcoming book Agrarian Spirit, that is apprenticed to “God’s way of being,” to ways of “presence, patience, and compassion that equip us to take care of each other.” We are being pressed, I think, to see the strands of a web we all too often ignore. Several of the articles and essays below—in their considerations of mowing and bees, deadwood, nature writing, and getting to know one’s neighbors, for instance—encourage us to think more about meshwork living. These are the little, immediate strands of our webs. Stories on global crises and pressing issues like climate change help us to remember and keep in mind the far-off strands of this web. Thinking of life in the ways Berry and Ingold define will, I hope, urge us to fight for health in both large ways and small.
articles
“Gene editing could usher in a new era for meat production,” Kenny Torrella writes.
Tish Harrison Warren has an excellent Q&A with Charlie Camosy, discussing his book Losing Our Dignity, in the New York Times. You can watch my conversation with Charlie from last month on Youtube.
“No Mow May” seeks to preserve local habitats for endangered bees: “No Mow May lawns had five times the number of bees and three times the bee species than did mown parks.” Benji Jones has an excellent Q&A with Oliver Millman, meanwhile, about our insect crisis.
We need to be “aggressively friendly” in the days to come, David Brooks writes. Over at Vox, Allie Volpe writes of the importance of finding and forming community ties, and NPR writes that pie-eating contests brought communities together last year.
Is Iowa “ripe for rewilding”?
Daniel Cox urges readers to learn more about their neighbors: “we have become deeply incurious about each other, no longer interested in getting to know even the people who live next door. We live in a nation of strangers.”
Lisa Held writes of the regenerative farming practices spreading across the the Mid-Atlantic, and considers the possibilities this move toward rotational grazing offers.
A New Zealand couple discovered a giant tuber in their garden, thought it was the world’s largest potato, and named it Doug.
essays
John-Paul Heil suggests that “the way we treat the earth reflects the way we treat human beings and vice versa” in this thoughtful essay for Comment: “If we treat the earth as malleable to our will without an inherent dignity or nature that is a good in and of itself, then we will probably treat other people in our lives the same way. Likewise, if we see others as extensions of our own will and desires, if we instrumentalize them as if they were a tool or a piece of technology, we will also do the same to creation.”
Our addiction to stuff has a massive impact, Melissa Norberg writes: “If your household were to reduce purchases by 10 per cent for an entire year, it’s estimated you could prevent the equivalent of 14,000 domestic garbage bags filled with CO2 emissions from being released (approximately 1,400 kg). You could further reduce landfill waste by passing on your unused, but useable, items to other people.”
The widespread death of ash trees in the United Kingdom (likely 60 to 90 percent of local trees) is a tragedy—but in its provision of deadwood, it could also help to nourish life that would otherwise be lost, including fungi, insects, birds, and small mammals.
Matthew Miller considers the perils and joys of nature writing: “nature writers ought to send us back to our own places, not just make us pine for some experience of ‘the wild’ that gives us implicit psychic comfort as we pollute or destroy closer to home.”
Mary Townsend has a wonderful essay in Plough about Dolly Parton and Aristotle: “if we, stuck in the language of twenty-first-century America, don’t happen to have a familiar word for the goal our actions ought to aim for, we are likely to have trouble figuring out what to do with ourselves and our lives, as we obviously do. And so, when someone proposes that Aristotle’s philosophy has something to tell us that later thinkers in other languages lack, we find his suggestion that in order to be happy we ought to act more ‘virtuously’ rather hollow. Fortunately for us, this is where Dolly Parton comes in.”
books
This Beautiful Truth, by Sarah Clarkson
Sarah is a stunning writer, and her considerations of OCD, theodicy, and beauty in this memoir are incredibly powerful. As someone who’s struggled with mental health issues in my own life, I find Sarah’s perspective and wisdom incredibly life-giving. A lovely and vital book.Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land, by Norman Wirzba
Norman’s book hasn’t come out yet, but I strongly encourage you all to pre-order it. It’s a book about embodiment and creation care, about rejecting dualisms in order to properly see and steward the world. Norman makes the principles of agrarian thinking accessible to people in both urban and rural environments, urging use to embrace environmental stewardship wherever we live. A favorite quote: “Agrarians are distinguished by their commitment to work for the well-being of their places and communities, and they do this by developing the practical skills that cultivate the material and social goods—things like fertile soil, clean water, abundant green spaces, nutritious food, genuine health care, safe neighborhoods, beautiful homes, child and family support, youth empowerment, inclusion and honoring of the elderly, and worthwhile work—that promote a thriving world.”The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman
This has been a really fun spring break read for me. If you like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries, you’ll like this one.
food + drink
Nicole recommends this amazing-looking white chicken chili. Adding it to our dinner menu this week.
Matthew says this is the best risotto ever.
I’ve tried a lot of great flapjacks here in the UK—they’re often a granola bar/cookie fusion, though some are definitely more decadent than others. Tim on Twitter shared this recipe for homemade flapjacks, and recommended halving the sweet ingredient.
We made Deb Perlman’s classic shortbread, and it is **incredible.** 10/10.
I got to visit Portugal this past week, and enjoyed pastéis de nata on more than one occasion—hoping to make some for the kiddos to try in the coming days!
Recipes to try: cream of asparagus soup, pistachio poppy seed orange bread, fresh turmeric tea, and honey garlic meatballs.
sharing some beautiful thoughts from others on loving place:
“As a child, I often went to the boardwalk in Asbury Park, with my grandmother, Nanny. I can still remember how much I loved her and the smell of the ocean air and the stands we stopped at to buy apples on the stick or ice cream. She put me on the rides and took me to the movies. I miss her so much but can still find her there.”
– Ann
“I love the rolling hills, the green fields and the ancient woodlands through which I walked so regularly and discovered a new facet of beauty on every occasion. I love the few cattle that perch on top the hill and the view of the town from the benches at the top. I love the pink burst of colour of spindles in the bare branches in winter on the trees and the burning yellow bushes of forsythia in the spring. I love the lush leaves of green is the woods and the muddiness and the fallen leaves in the autumn.”
– Visitation
“I live in British Columbia where there are giant forests, beautiful snow-capped mountains, and an immense ocean to the west. Inserting myself into any of these places I feel my insignificance, and have not yet lost the novelty of feeling spoiled that I get to see and explore these landscapes frequently.”
– Sarah
“What I love most about the place where I live is that I’ve been here all of my 46 almost 47 years of life and it is my home. People always think it’s strange that I’ve never lived anywhere else and they have no problem letting me know how odd it is in this day and age (and that perhaps makes me somehow less than). I even met my husband in my place and went to college here and now my husband and I have raised our daughters here. It’s by no means perfect but it’s been ‘perfect’ for me, for us.”
– Traci
“I love the fact that though I ended up here more or less at random, for my children, this old house on a hill, with its broken-down barn, and seasonal creek, will always be home in the minds of my children.”
– Mike
“My joy in living in Colorado is that I can look and see the majesty of God's creation everyday with the glorious mountain peaks. The endless blue sky and sun that is so close and warm, just brings joy to any day.”
– Danielle
Tim Ingold, Being Alive, Routledge (2011), page 70.
Ibid, page 71.
Thank you, Grace. Lots here resonated -- including health as wholeness, and the idea of ‘supply webs’; something I’ve been thinking about here as a District Councillor in rural Devon (UK), a place that depends heavily on food and farming. I discovered your newsletter after having read ‘Uprooted’, which resonated deeply. I recently started my own Substack to share encounters from Devon and Africa, and thoughts about listening, place, politics, nature and more. Your work has been one of the encouragements behind that, so thank you! Elizabeth
Combining Wendell Berry, Chris Arnade, Leah Libresco, Matthew Loftus, and Comment Mag in one post.....? Amazing. Beautiful and challenging thoughts as always.