It's been a delight working and learning with all of you this quarter! This week is crunch week on the farm, when we need to finish up most of our planting, so we're going to ask you to help us with that. We'll also take some time to walk through the gardens to see how things have grown over the past two months and maybe even harvest a few things to share during our Wednesday class.
I know that
we've covered a lot of interconnected topics this quarter, so I hope this final
reflection will be an opportunity for you to pause and think back over
the course to what has had the most impact on you and what you most want
to remember. This final reflection will be 10 percent of your grade, so please spend a little time thinking about it. You can post your reflection in the comments section or email it to me by this coming Friday, June 7.
Before you start writing, read back through the comments that you've made on this blog to refresh your memory about the ideas and questions that came up for you during the course of this class. (This will also give you the opportunity to note how many blog comments you have posted. If you had difficulty with technology during the quarter and find that some of your comments did not post, you are welcome to rewrite them and email them to me for credit by June 7.) You may also want to browse back through some of your classmates' comments that you didn't have a chance to read earlier.
Then, write a reflection on your experience in this class that addresses the following questions:
What questions, themes, and/or ideas from this class have
been the most interesting for you to consider? What new ideas are you
taking away from this course? What new questions do you have?
What do you think you’ll remember most from this class one
year from now?
What is one thing you’ve learned in this class that you hope
to put into practice in your life after graduation?
Throughout this quarter, John and I have shared with you
some of the ways we are working to make a positive difference in the world
through experimenting with and teaching small-scale, localized farming.
Following our passions, talents, and curiosities has led us to this way of
giving to the world. What passions, talents, and curiosities will you be
pursuing after graduation and how might these lead you to ways you can make a
positive difference in the communities in which you’ll be living and the world
at large?
What suggestions do you have for improving future versions of this course?
What suggestions do you have for improving future versions of this course?
*Posting this in 2 parts because it went over the character count
ReplyDelete(Part 1 of 2)
I think a common theme that kept coming up from week to week was the theme of community. Whether we were discussing ways in which community dynamics are at play in our food systems or sharing stories with each other from our own communities, this class has really helped me notice and identify the entanglement of people within food networks. Before this class, food to me meant going to the store and buying neatly separated and compartmentalized packages with a bunch of strangers walking around doing the same thing. Since then, I have been able to begin to recognize myself within a larger system as a consumer and enabler within the mainstream industrial food production as well as a potential actor in my more local food networks, both in terms of production and consumption. Something that I really want to get involved with when I go back home is a CSA and farmer’s markets so that I can become more familiar with the local farmers and support their work. On top of the communities between people, I have also begun thinking about the relationships I have within the nonhuman communities in our food system, from the beings that I eat to the microorganisms that they exist in relation with.
I think the one thing (of many things) I’ll remember the most one year from now is the lesson on walking in beauty. Since we had our discussion on walking in beauty, there have been countless times in my daily life that I have reminded myself of it and either smiled at what I observe or have had to reconsider some of my ways of thinking. I called my sister and we talked for a long time about our family dynamics, especially considering the feud between my father and my mother’s mother over her support for Trump based solely on her pro-life stance. Talking with my sister, we were able to recognize the forces (some very violent) that shaped my grandmother’s worldview and come to an understanding that my dad cannot see. The ideas of walking in beauty (at least, as I have come to understand them) help me re-examine my gut reactions and approach people/ideas/events/etc. in a more empathetic and multidimensional manner. Also, this year I have begun developing a more intentional relationship with my body after a back injury. So much of walking in beauty reminds me of the experience I’ve had finding a path to healing. The idea of the center of the compass, where I am at currently, as the home/hearth resonates so much with my experience because I was not able to find healing until I actually listened to and reacted to where I was at instead of focusing on the cure or dwelling on the past or future painlessness. Walking in beauty for me has given me a way to form a relationship with the cycles of life both internally and externally.
(Part 2 of 2)
DeleteOne thing that I learned in this class that I hope to put into practice after graduation is to have an intentional relationship with my food that follows the ideas of the honorable harvest. While I will not be foraging for every meal in my life, it is important to remain constantly aware of where my food is coming from: what are the conditions in which it was grown and transported to me, are the plants/soil/air/seeds happy? What about the people who did the labor? If the answer to any of these is no, then what can/should/will I do about it? Now that I know what questions to ask my food, I need to go out there and do it. Earlier I mentioned looking into CSA and farmer’s market opportunities in my area, and that is one potential way I can go about this. The best way to have control over the production of my food, however, is to grow it myself! I am excited to begin the trial and error process of gardening on my own beyond just watering my parents’ garden.
As of right now, I do not have any concrete plans for my future, so the most I can do is speculate. However, currently I am hoping to work and explore further educational opportunities within my interests of holistic health and healing. I don’t know if this will be something like massage, chiropractic or somatic healing, dance, or something else, but I really love moving and creating. I talked about it a bit above, but our discussion on walking in beauty has impacted the way I have thought about my own healing, and I think being able to heal others physically and/or spiritually would be such a fulfilling way to walk through my own life while also fostering a healthier community. My SIP advisor Jeanne Hess told me that healing is contagious, and I want to believe that so bad. If you heal a person’s body, then maybe they will go heal others in their own way.
Thank you so much Amy and John for offering this course and to everyone for being a wonderful class and fostering this community for just a little while. I think this has been an amazing capstone, and so many of the discussions we’ve had are already reshaping the ways I relate to the world. For me, I can’t think of anything that I would change drastically. I love how you have control over half of the discussions through the Tuesday/Friday farm blog, but that you also give half of the time to us to share our knowledge and passions with each other. It felt well balanced. The only thing I wish I had more of would be just time on the farm putting farming knowledges to practice, but I know that was difficult with all our busy schedules. That being said, I greatly appreciate your flexibility with our schedules so that we could all be a part of the class!
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ReplyDeleteI think a few of the ideas that were so central to most everything we talked about in this class, and therefore ones I’ll continue to come back to many years from now, are thinking of our seeds as siblings and our land as the great mother- or rather, the “good enough” mother. I wrote about this in one of my very first blog posts, in response to our dance with food discussion. If we begin to see seeds as filling the roll of both our caretakers and children, that have both aided our ancestor’s survival through their diversity and our attempts to aid theirs by continuing to reproduce them, then there wouldn’t be so much questioning of what our interactions with these systems should look like. Honorable Harvest would not be termed so, it would simply be the natural way of doing and many unhealthy relationships with food would cease to exist. I spoke about the danger of “greatness” ideals cutting across the political spectrum in the U.S. and all over the world, and how nature instead has always fed off of taking and giving just enough so that others can grow but still be resistant to life’s never-ending complexities, just like Winnicott’s “good enough” mother concept in psychology. No other life forms on this planet are striving for greatness except for us, and it has taken a huge toll on how we coexist with our food. To walk in beauty, we must appreciate ordinary moments, not because they are average or mediocre, but because if we don’t relent control over what we deem to be beautiful, nothing will ever be good enough and we will all exist in dis-ease.
I think the times during this class when I felt most frustrated or hopeless were when we continued to revisit the same depressing topics over and over again. Somehow, no matter the blog post someone had written out, it feels like we would end up having a very familiar abstract discussion that often left me listless and confused. I began to dread going to Wednesday classes a few weeks in. But then one week, perhaps after being very sick- something switched. I was cleaning out my desk drawer at home and came across an old reading called A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay that my freshman seminar professor, Dr. Sotherland, had given us in one of our first classes together. The braided essay is an essay that uses 2-3 events or topics to create an essay surrounding an event or question. In her essay, Brenda Miller uses this structure to braid together her thoughts on the lyric essay, taking risks, and making challah- yes, the bread. Isn’t the fact that she used a food, one with spiritual connotations, so telling to these connections I was able to make to our class? When mulling over this idea of using fragmentation and a mosaic of topics, she concludes that all she really hoped was for her students to begin to bring together these unsatisfying questions in a satisfying way- shaping the material, and it’s place in their lives in a really natural, “nourishing” way. I realized that there was a reason all our topics wove together so flawlessly. This class not only taught me to be wary of language and definitions that give change to new meanings over time, it showed me that sometimes the answers to our undying questions are less important than the questions themselves. While there may have been times where this concept left me feeling uncomfortable, it's sitting in that uneasiness that comes growth and learning.
I hope to keep this nature of questioning with me wherever I go or end up in life. Something I’ve been mulling over a lot this week is what learning continues to look like after college is over. How far can higher education really take us other than a slip of paper that has a degree and how much can we get experientially in comparison. I appreciated our time on the farm for that exact reason- we were learning how important having these skills were and then actually putting them to use, no matter how minimally. I know that there is a community of futurists that is predicting the bubble of higher education to burst soon. There’s a lot of reasons for this decline- but I think one is that people are becoming more and more skeptical of the worthiness of a degree. Many people are ending up with thousands of dollars of debt and no actually marketable “basic” skills. The further we get from trade-like schools, the further the gap in knowledge of how we can participate in our dance with food. I was speaking with Quintin about his complex feelings surrounding the fact that after attending a very expensive four-year institution all he really wanted was to divert back to urban farming. However, I think this is really speaking to what this class gave us- a drive to understand. And to truly understand you must experiment, experience, and listen. I’m so looking forward to see how my classmates live out this authentic reality K has given us as well as myself in Spain next year.
DeleteFinally, I learned a lot from my classmates about what community can and should look like, and food’s place within that. In my SIP I wrote about my Italian parents’ different relationships to food and how those in return played out in their relationships with me. I witnessed their ideas surrounding proper diet emerge beautifully- the most prominent way being in their dedication to slow food. Somehow these influences accumulated into my imperishable need for more information in regards to how I and those around me associated with it. I remember being fascinated, borderline obsessed even, by the many lives food took on outside of just sustenance. Ever since I was little I’ve loved talking about food, identifying with it, and of course bonding over it with others. Something I didn’t really understand, though, was that beyond culture, food has a lot of ways in which it builds its communities. My personal ways in which I seek that out will change as I grow.
Many questions have been interesting and engaging for me in this course and although everything brought forth by peers has been so enlightening and has incredible value, what has been most impactful for me has been the conversations about commmunity, responsibiliy and accountability. Starting with the conversation about food waste and following that thread to the last conversation about Black farmers and recognizing the way that their land and farming-abilty has been stolen by our systems, I have been thoroughly reminded of my position in this global community and the duty that has been passed down generation and generation to me to make sure that I fight for what's right and for what is best for all Life on this planet. I cherish and value all conversation about the intersections that justice meets. I have never been exposed to farming and eco justice in this way and its been so purpose and life giving. I learned so many new things during the time I participated in this course but I will really treasure the last lesson about beauty and ritual. I want to make sure that I dont find weakness and stupidity in losing composure; I want to remember to feel, express, and distribute magic. Magic can take many forms and in this last week I was re-instilled with the truth that magic must be shared, its what it was made for! My new questions are all centered around the things that I can do within these systems of being and understanding to ensure that food and its development are filled with freedom, love, and liberation. I am thinking about intersections with education, reproductive freedom, legality, and intellectual property. I am thinking about how we can remove the process of creating that which energizes us and nourishes us from being a business, a process of efficiency and convenience and turn it into something that we honor universally, practicing what we preach. I guess to some extent my question is about the "clout", the fame and the education that farming and relationships with all Life have and how we can shift that to start reflecting the importance it deserves.
ReplyDeleteI think I will remember the tandem efforts of being at the farm with critical conversation. I am a hardcore believer in interactive, applicable discussion and I think that our relationship to cultivating the land and caring for it just furthered our knowledge, and if I may speak on behalf of the class, incentivized it in a way that truly cemented itself in our core beings. It is impossible to deny what relation we have to everything else,particularly the land and I appreciated the way this class made the land something that wasnt forced into our brains as mattering but rather was demonstrated to us by giving us access to it. I will take away the ability that teaching by showing and doing really does work and can be extremely impactful. I will always carry with me the power of teaching each other and growing from each others knowledges. I have never seen it done with so little restriction and such engaged and sustained participation. I am in awe of the community we formed!
I really want to learn and teach folks how to compost urbanly in those little vertical compost contraptions. I believe that starting with compost and maybe facilitating some cool programs where neighborhood members compost and give compost to urban farms we can begin to engage people on a different scale and in a different ways and encourage that relationship. Especially with folks who in this country no longer have land or access to it. I also really want to save up money and buy land and make a commune where we raise children together and we teach anti-racism, walking in beauty, patience, listening, and other important parts of living as a community by farming and growing food. I want an intimate relationship with that which will physically nourish me forever. Thank you for that!
I want to pursue a degree in International Health and Maternal Child Health through the school of Public Health at Tulane and work with community organizations and other insitutions of neighborhoods like churches to inform people of whats available to them in terms of medical and other health related services. I want to help promote culturally competent health that focuses on whats feasible, what is relevant, and what is mindful. I also want to take these opportunities to educate and learn in community about what is necessary and what is desired for hman development and balance/harmony.
DeleteI TRULY LOVED THIS COURSE. The only thing i can think of that I would suggest would be hearing more from John and Amy in terms of teaching something they find cool too! There is so many different types of knowledge in both of yall and I would love to learn more from you. Also maybe for people who cant always emotionally or physically go to the farm, maybe some other options to get in touch with planting and farming would be really awesome. Thank you for this class.
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