Nourishing soil, nourishing community, nourishing our deep selves

Every weekend now we have a work day at the Bloomington Community Orchard. I haven't been to all of them. But each time I go, the feeling deepens. On the first day we cut and raked the grass. It was a hot day, with the sun beating on our bare backs and arms and faces. Sweat glazed our bodies. And in answer was the breeze, which cooled us under the wide open sky as delicately as life underwater. There were only three of us (for the entirety of that particular workday) to do the work that needed doing. But there was no hurry. The work got finished joyfully and my being felt nourished.

The next day I attended, all the compost materials had already arrived and the mixing had begun in long windrows. A local farmer's excess horse manure had become our treasure, just for the convenience of having a better place to dump it, apparently. Our local brewery had delivered truckloads of spent hops and grains, already steaming with the heat of transformation. They smelled like a carcass. As we mixed these grains into the windrows with pitchforks, an enormous truck pulled up unexpectedly. The trash driver from the county fair told us that it was so much easier to dump the used stable bedding from the fair right in town, and besides, he didn't have to pay the dumping fees. He said he'd be back with more! And we said GREAT! That was the day I realized we were beginning to transmute some shit in a big way.

The next workday was a little more nerve wracking, for me. Evolver Bloomington was hosting it's Day of Action spore in concert with the Community Orchard Project. I felt a little of the anxiety of a double agent, introducing my Orchard friends to my Evolver friends, and vice-versa. Also, having recently returned from the Evolver Regional Summit with all that energy and so many new ideas, I'd asked a videographer to accompany us during the workday. So not only was I introducing one set of dear friends to another, it was being recorded. After the workday, we held our spore as a picnic. Evolver Bloomington invited the Bloomington Orchardistas to share some food and stories (on tape). Most of the orchardistas were tired and/or committed to other plans, unfortunately. But the ones who did attend were happy to tell tales, and they were amazing, and we have them on tape! People from both camps who needed to meet each other, met each other. The energy was fantastic.

Today, I've just returned from another workday at the Orchard site. We have more spent grains from the brewery that need turning into the now heaping compost piles. It's funny, because I smelled the place where our local brewery holds the spent grains for the first time just last night. It was empty and clean? They were hosting a big hoopla with bands for our local land trust. The reason I was attending the hoopla, however, was that it was also a good friend's birthday party. He'd invited me on Facebook. I haven't seen him in a long time, but he's actually the one who introduced me to the Orchard project in the first place. We stayed out until 4am last night. I met a bunch more sparkly amazing people, but I'm hard-pressed to recall their names (y'know, what I mean).

There was some discussion at the Orchard site today about how we're going to distribute all the excess compost. The weather was gorgeous! A team of young bicyclists rode by, and I overheard them gagging and complaining of the smell (mostly from the new load of hot grains). I chuckled to think that this kind of wealth should seem so unpalatable! We had more workers than ever before on site today, many from a participant's poetry class, some more from participant's families. And it's a good thing, because we're getting a lot of shit to transmute. I worked alone on the hill today however, digging the outlines of the circular plan into the soil one spade stroke at a time. The topsoil is almost like sand right now from the drought condition we're in here. I always feel so patient and languid when I work at the Orchard site. At a certain moment, late in the day, I felt like a break. I walked down to the compost area, and most of the new folks had gone already. With fresh pressed cider to drink, a bowl of homegrown sweet yellow and tart red ultra-tiny round tomatoes I've never seen before, tortilla chips and homemade salsa, local goat cheese and bread, crunchy real pears with real-life black spots... (people always bring the most interesting food to share), a conversation broke out among some of the folks who keep showing up for the smelly dirty work.

There was talk of how nourishing it feels to get real in a project like this. There was talk of how frustrating it has been to argue all these years with people in positions of power with dissimilar worldviews. But the quote that spawned this blog was "You know, what we're building here is a community." (hearer [aka. me] bites knuckle, holding tears back)

So I headed up the hill to finish cutting the outermost circle into the earth. When our orchard involvement coordinator came up to see what I'd been up to, all alone up there on the hill, she was surprised to see the paper plan that our community has designed drawn on the real terrain. So I jokingly gambled to say, "When I get back to the beginning there, the circle will be cast. Then the hoop of the world can be healed." She then gave me a super snappy and unexpected high five, and that made me feel really good! It totally made my day. It was such a beautiful day, again.

October 9th is planting day, and there's still so much work to do! I'm getting up at 5am to help cut locust poles for the gateposts tomorrow! Crazy!

I'd be remiss in my duties to my dear Orchardista friends if I neglected to inform you that we are presently in the running for a Tom's of Maine grant for 20k, which will vastly improve our ability to realize this idea. You can vote online everyday here until September 10. Then we get to wait and see what happens.

The online face of this project is both on the web and on Facebook

One of the keys to our tenuous and nubile successes so far, I think, is that there's astoundingly absolute f#!ng genius in our communities, individually accustomed to externally imposed isolation, but just bursting at the seams to find a real live outlet!