Stagtine, 14. What Food Feels

Section 1, Chapter 11

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She was right. We had spent many years passively searching for help, like a blind man in an unfamiliar place. We had met many kind people along the way, who ushered us from here to there and some, even, that helped us to where they thought we should go: across the street and closer to home. But we never made it home. Our eyes were closed.

“What if we become?” my mother inquired.

“Become what?” I replied inflexibly, immediately.

“Them.” Her voice was flat and simple. The words flowed as commonly from her lips as though she had said anything else, like the weather or the day. But the four letters galloped like a small band of wild horses across her outstretched arm that pointed to the newly awakened squirrels that danced and played in the meadow. They bounced, now juggling her words, under the spring lit and waving translucence of maple leaves. They jumped from bough to bough, sometimes to a shagbark hickory and skied down its ashen moguls, darting and flipping and hotdogging this way and that with a flip of their hips.

“They seem happy—” She said.

I was silent. My eyes and my mind had left with the horses and were now playing with the squirrels. There was nothing for me to say.

“—what if we buy some chickens?”

“Chickens?” Reality snapped back on me in two directions, like a rubber band stretched too far and tore in the middle.

That night, we bought some chickens. It was a moment of change, of emerging into the unknown, the tentative light of the new day that strides patiently, slowly, in and then is there, fully, as though her gloried and glittering yellows and blues had been there for eternity. The new colors of dawn, a new hope, rushing in like mountain water over rocks. We gave up. We let go. We threw off our search for health and decided to become it—health, that is.

We immediately amended my lifestyle and dietary choices. I began consuming raw, whole, and real foods. I began to acquire local foods and found them to be fresher, tastier, and to contain higher level of nutrients than their conventional counterparts—energy as we understood it then. Food, that substance I had known all my life but had never much cared to be friends with, transformed into the very substance of my life.

“These are living yet,” one farmer at the market said to me as he handed over a bag of asparagus. “I picked them this morning. Watch out or they’ll bite ya.”

Bite me they did. I became awakened to the idea that, while real food is good, local food is better, and, while local food is better, participating in the story of your food is best. That is to say: let your foods bite ya.

My health saga, to my great surprise, emerged ultimately as a romance. As I fell in love with food and then with local food, I also fell in love with the local families producing that food; as I fell in love with our local community, I ultimately fell in love with the lives that echo and sustain that community: the cows and the sparrows, the sheep and the deer, the squirrels, and the humans. We became farmers.

Health steadily returned, like the seasons and like the dawn. Slowly, gently, but always surely. We planted a large market garden atop my mother’s old home garden and raised pastured chickens in mobile shelters in the front yard. We were slow at first, keeping in mind the pace my body would allow. The meadows that once nourished the tellbacks of my childhood now grew in me, like memory, as we worked and harvested gifts from the soil, incorporating the life of our place into the life of our soul’s clay form. We became her earthlings. The People became The Land through the act of becoming and health, like the cottonwood’s spring snow of seeds, returned. Its fluttering wisps and flurries, its pyramid leaves emerging from the land of the dead, its roots holding the riverbank and sinking into the river herself: the healing depths of sacred wells.

Early in this journey, Morgan and I realized that, while food matters and what your food eats matters (grass-fed beef as opposed to grain-fed beef, for instance), this is not the full story.¹ In fact, understanding this extended nuance is to understand the full complexity of this book. Everything else is just details.

One evening, around the dining table, Morgan looked at me and asked, “Who is this?”

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