Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Unless you don't eat, you have most likely noticed the organic and local food movements.  At Spirited we featured organic and eco-friendly wines a few weeks ago.  The visiting winery this weekend will bring along one of their organics.  The Cannon Beach Farmers Market is a major hit.  In fact, nearly every town now has it's own version of a farmers market. 

I attended one of our Market Dinners last night where we discussed various issues farmers and fishermen face:  the bee situation, dwindling fish populations, fewer fishing days, increasing fuel costs for transport and equipment, climate changes...All of these dominoes that set off a chain of effects, rippling out to things we haven't even thought about. 

My grandfather was a farmer with 100 acres of pasture and farmland on top of a mountain.  I've been thinking about him lately, selling his vegetables to Bardwill's Grocery at the bottom of the hill.  As he walked through the rows, he would pull off a couple of green beans and pop them in his mouth.  When we said goodbye after a visit, he would hand my parents brown paper bags (re-used from the grocery store) full of potatoes, tomatoes, spring onions, lettuce, peaches, corn, beans, cherries and pears--whatever was in season.  Thirty-plus years ago I didn't fully appreciate his work.  I knew that he worked hard, and I knew that the tomatoes and potatoes tasted better than "store bought."  A little rabbit appeared at one point and used to follow him around the barn and garden like a puppy.  In college, the farm was my favorite place to shoot photos, and one Christmas I gave him an album of black and white shots of the barn, the baler, the water pump, the view of the Ohio River and West Virginia, his beloved flowers.  Now that he is gone, I have the album.

How did we get to the "big box" mentality of buying stuff to have stuff?  I am as guilty a consumer as anyone, but living on the Coast has taken me away from Targets and Wal-Marts and made me not only appreciate, but prefer better quality things in smaller doses;  taken me back to things that are raised/created and sold with care and kindness rather than produced by money-minded corporations with overseas factories and in-house legal teams.   

Yesterday, a friend and I went to a rural area on the other side of the Coast Range.  We picked blueberries, drove some backroads and visited her small hometown.  I'd taken some vegetable shots at the Market, but the old wood buildings and the little field mouse breakfasting on a blueberry and the grazing sheep and goat and horses took me back to Ohio and the questions about a focused, simpler life on your own path versus trying to make a difference in one's part of the world.

It is probably no coincidence that I am reading Thomas Merton, someone who seemed to struggle with being at peace in solitude, viewing and writing about his pastoral Kentucky surroundings, and wanting to serve and contribute to making the world a better place.  I am about halfway through The Intimate Merton, so I don't yet know how he addressed some of his concerns.  However, one of my favorite quotes so far is a starting point for resolving my own dilemmas:  "Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise...Perhaps the Book of Life, in the end, is the book one has lived.  If one has lived nothing, one is not in the Book of Life." 

Food for thought.