Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life

by Scott Chaskey Narrated by Scott Chaskey

Overview

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.

Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective-as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall's ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.

“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”-words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness-Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life 

 “How to classify this collection of interconnected essays by community-agriculture pioneer and poet Scott Chaskey? Science and nature? Memoir? Poetry? Rhapsodic exhortation? Soil and Spirit is all of those things. [. . .] Chaskey's ruminations and celebrations are reminiscent of, and often pay tribute to, poets and planters who have come before him [. . .] Like them, he emphasizes connections and kinship, noting, for instance, that recent studies of how plant life, especially trees, are linked by a vast network of mycelium model the benefits that humans could reap from closer connections with nature and with one another.”—Pamela Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune

In conversational character, [Soil and Spirit] is like some priceless friendship where a number of essential discussions are occurring all at once; these discussions build, deepen, and inform one another over time. We return to the meaningful topics, we make fresh work of understanding interrelationship. In the work at hand, each chapter stems from a particular point of departure, then progresses in an associative manner. The meandering (but not desultory) flow of the prose carries a sense of discovery, a stream-of-consciousness-like progression where themes and threads of thought synthesize as the book unfolds.”—Evan Harris, East Hampton Star 

“In Soil and Spirit, poet, farmer, and educator Scott Chaskey generously reflects on the natural world, his travels visiting growers around the country, and his insight into how we can build healthier communities while tending to the earth.”—Orion Magazine 

“In the pages of Soil and Spirit, Chaskey travels around the world and revisits familiar American landscapes, weaving together the literature, art, and agricultural traditions of each region he visits.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Soil and Spirit is full of beautiful prose and thoughtful ruminations on the relationships between people and the earth.”—Independent Book Review 

"Scott Chaskey’s elegant and spirited essay collection Soil and Spirit concerns the interconnectedness of elements and life forms. Studded with literary quotes, poetry, personal anecdotes, and scenes from a well-traveled life, these essays consider how flora and fauna, earth and sky, and rock and water are linked through different ecosystems and cultural traditions [. . .] Soil and Spirit is a sensuous and serious collection of nature writing, replete with passages about the layered wonders of the natural world. It is also unwavering in stressing the imperative of working to undo the environmental damage that imperils all human beings."—Foreword Reviews

“Scott Chaskey embraces a deep respect for the land, the plants and animals that depend on healthy soil, and the knowledge of indigenous peoples. In his travels across borders, he finds common ground by celebrating the farmers and peasants who work the soil around the world. Chaskey’s personal understanding of laboring the land is reflected in the book. In this collection of essays, he recognizes the challenges that we face and counters them with an abundance of knowledge. Many seek to repair the harm our species has caused. His message is filled with love and hope, backed by a lifetime of knowledge, and interspersed with a bit of poetry. Its rich layers rival the first forkful of silt loam in Spring or a relieving lungful of air in a forest. In just over 200 pages, this is one of the most inspirational books that I have ever read.”—Todd Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, WI

 “I love to watch things grow, whether it be more own plantings, the gardens of others, or the growing of things planted by Nature herself. For those who feel like I do about green things (and other species as well), there is a sadness these days that is creeping into our deepest recesses—the turning of our climate, the destruction of the land by all manner of abuses, and the mistreatment of our fellows and other species. Scott Chaskey, leader in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, brings us a message about growing things, ongoing changes, survival and, most of all, community and its power to unite us all in doing our best for our shared future. He has spent much of his life working with growers of all kinds, including indigenous peoples still utilizing the ‘old ways’ to sustain their families. As a poet, he understands what it means to feel with Nature. As a farmer, he knows what it means to partner with the land in a sustainable way. These essays are beautiful, thoughtful, and insightful. There really is hope, if we will simply pay attention and take that important step, doing our part to better the future. I urge everyone who cares to read this powerful, encouraging book.”—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Book Shop, Spokane, WA

“As one of America’s greatest agrarian poets and essayists, Scott Chaskey deserves recognition as a national treasure. He both expands our horizons and deepens our contemplative capacities with the astonishing connections he makes between soil, soul, and sustenance in these challenging and eloquent essays. Soil and Spirit will be read and reread for many years to come.”—Gary Nabhan, author of Jesus for Farmers and Fishers: Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System

“Soil and Spirit is truly a feast. Scott Chaskey celebrates the emergence of beauty, nourishment, and community from the earth. The vivid range of narratives and voices here—from his adventures as a farmer in Maine, Cornwall, and Long Island to the deep love of poetry the author bears in his heart even when (or especially when) laboring in the fields—makes this an exhilarating book. Readers of Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and James Rebanks’s Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey will be struck by the many levels on which Chaskey enters into dialogue with those fine achievements.”—John Elder, author of The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods

“So much is happening under my nose, but I missed some of the essence until Scott came along. Following his teaching, instead of a villa with pool and tennis court, I, too, started a farm. Scott is a teacher, a mentor, a guide. He made me understand Nature through the irreplaceable wisdom of agriculture that humans have practiced for thousands of years, shaping our civilization. This book is on one level a guide to farming, and a spiritual guide to the deep emotions Nature raises in us all.”—Isabella Rossellini, author and award-winning actress

“Soil and Spirit stands as a beautiful meditation on the endless richness of the Earth’s rocks, fungi, herbs, vegetables, fruits, and trees, and our place among them as expressed in word and deed. In this hopeful and heartfelt book, seedsman, poet, and world traveler Scott Chaskey brings a lifetime of experience to his wide-ranging exploration of our human relationship with the natural world and the many possibilities our engagement with it offers.”— Jane Brox, author of Silence

Praise for This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm

“Packed with knowledge that often runs counter to conventional wisdom, as well as insights into the subtler and more difficult arts, like protecting land from the pressure to develop, or fostering an awareness that soil holds the key to plant health. An elegy to the land and to the creatures who inhabit it, this book is also a gardener’s bible.”—New York Times

“The decades spent reading and listening widely, the time spent with plow and pen, make this book much more than simply an account of a year and a spring on one organic farm. Here Old World wisdom gleaned from one peninsula infuses experience on a New World shore. Here, too, the voices of American pioneers from Walt Whitman to Aldo Leopold weave through the argument like a trail through dewy grass. Chaskey’s book is so well-rooted that one can almost shake the fine Amagansett silt from its binding.”—Christian Science Monitor

“The delight of [Chaskey’s] writing is his balancing of the poetry of farm life with touches of humor. He also effectively summarizes the ‘critical juncture’ at which the organic farming movement finds itself as a result of recent federal legislation governing organic foods. His book will be a joy to read for lovers of organic farming.”—Publishers Weekly

“An almanac and handbook for the community organic gardener, offering hard-earned practical lessons in counterpoint with fine touches of insight, poetry, and the earthy lyricism of weather and the seasons.”—Peter Mathiessen, author of Shadow Country

“CSA farmer, poet, and keeper of the land Chaskey, who here leads you wonderingly through a year on his South Fork farm, is just whom you would choose to grow your food: a soul who presses his cheek to the clover to see the first emerging garlic shoots, who celebrates the sight of monarch wings among the white blossoms of his buckwheat, and who, most importantly perhaps, does not allow his love/hate relationship with the temperamental tomato keep him from growing forty-four varieties anyway—seduced by such memory-infused names as Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. This Common Ground is for eaters, growers, poets, and other wildlife.”—Joan Gussow, author of This Organic Life

“I celebrate the coming of seasons and the universal language of harvests with Chaskey. He brings new life to the common ground we share.”—David Mas Masumoto, author of Epitaph for a Peach and Letters to the Valley

“Chaskey understands that stewardship is born of both necessity and imagination; that cultivation and wilderness, family and community, are intertwined. This Common Ground—beautifully written, and steeped in the practice of poetry and farming—is a rich and generous accounting of what it means to work the land.”—Jane Brox, author of Clearing Land

“One glory of Chaskey’s important book, framed as a good humored, discursive amble through a year on the farm, is how he opens our eyes. . . . The greatest joy of this book is its levelheaded, wholehearted optimism. . . . All of this takes us deeply into the mysteries and responsibilities of place. . . . Readers everywhere will be led by this book to see the world around them with fresh eyes.”—East Hampton Star

Praise for Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds

“An ode to the seed from a farmer who is as gifted in the field as he is on paper.”—Anna Lappé, author of Diet For a Hot Planet

“Land is for Chaskey soil and metaphor, a living thing, a livelihood—an idea. His land—the land beneath us all—is a lens on the largest questions. How ought we act in the world; who do we wish to be? Rarely have we been gifted a working farmer who so firmly clenches in his root system the roles of poet, historian, scholar, and philosopher. The yield here is extraordinary.”—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words

“Reading these wise and pungent essays, I could imagine sitting by the wood stove with the author as he shared the lessons of a life amid the turning seasons. [...] He’s ripened through the wind and rain. Like all those mysterious Irish tunes moving to a dancing rhythm. Dialogue and discovery are also central to Chaskey’s essays in this collection. Perceptions and memories are alike in being seeds and Seedtime is a degree of awareness, perpetually available when we can return to what David Steindl-Rast calls the posture of gratefulness.”—John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192691809
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE: A GOLDEN FLEDGED GROWTH

 

In the forest of Arden Shakespeare’s Orlando hang pages of odes on trees, a poetic variation on the signals that trees exchange underground through fungal hyphae and mychorrizal social networks. His intention is romantic, and though we cannot be certain, that of the woodland plants less so, if equally ardent. We do know that we share with plants the same need and impulse to communicate, and recently we have been reawakened to our evolutionary friendship with other species, and to what Mary Evelyn Tucker calls “the ever-expanding dynamic circles of connectivity.”

 Stories are born when people come together in relationship, and stories connect us with other species that share our soils, our air, and water. The challenges that confront us daily in the 21^st century—familial, social, economic, political, environmental—can be overwhelming. And as we encounter what is reported as the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced, climate disruption (the term Ralph Nader prefers, as do I), it is timely to revisit an ancient theme, an inter-species theme—our kinship with nature.  In his wise and playful book, Mesquite, my friend, ethnobotanist and Franciscan Brother, Gary Paul Nabhan, introduces the Mexican rancher Ivan Aguirre: “Part of our role here on this planet is to generate riqueza. How would you best say it in English? Richness? Abundance? Diversity? We are put here to observe the natural world and to learn from its structure and vigor.”

Traditionally, in multiple cultures, academies of learning have been sited within a natural structure: a forest grove or arbor. In Ireland’s ancient Brehon law, a code of conduct, forest protection was of vital importance. Irish hedge schools, scoileanna scairte were often situated in fields, in hedgerows, within a grove of trees. The prolific 20^th century Indian writer and respected educator, Rabindranath Tagore, held classes under a canopy of leaves and branches. Of your two teachers, he advised, you will gain more wisdom from the trees.

My education most closely resembles an earthen fabric, woven together throughout decades of daily attention to soil structure (both loam and mycelium), and as a curious traveler exposed to diverse landscapes. I have learned through literature and in friendship with land. My teachers: poets, pines, oaks, beech, stone, silt loam, the sharp-shinned hawk, and the windhover.

Years ago I built a home on a steep hillside above the Cornish village of Mousehole, on the Southwest coast of England, where I lived with my wife and first son for a decade. In a village built almost entirely of stone, originally of granite and slate and later concrete block—with a harbor wall dating from 1392—our house made of wood was an anomaly. I didn’t have a clue of how to build with stone—though eventually, out of necessity, I would dabble in the art of stone-hedging, a common practice in a landscape of abundant granite and slate—so timber was the material of choice. After deconstructing (carefully) a homely pre-WWII bungalow made entirely of asbestos, we raised our timber framing on the original foundation, repairing and replacing block where needed, and we left the heart of the home, the hearth and chimney, intact, for a time open to the sky. Often at a loss of how to proceed, I was saved on countless days by the intuition, strength, and practical skills of my woodworking mate, Peter Perry, a member of the Men of the Trees (now known as the International Tree Foundation). * Our labor with saws, chisels, and hammer was timed to the calls of jackdaws and gulls, and the surge of the sea on granite just below. In the strong, straight flight of the shag (a cormorant) as she skimmed the surface of the bay, I perceived a way to act and to build day by day.

To stabilize our structure—a requirement of the local Council—we engineered a truly handsome truss, known as a Queen Truss, made up of robust Douglas fir beams notched and bolted together, to bind the house in defense of the ferocious winds that seasonally assault the Penwith peninsula.

I loved the symmetry of the wooden framing against the backdrop of the green, green hillside—fuschia, bay, pittosporum, lush euonymous—and the granite retaining walls, and of course the wooden frame was an accurate, austere symbol of our significant labor; I was hesitant to enclose the space. But a roof and walls are basic necessities in a very wet climate, so I agreed to complete the job; we clad the structure in larch, milled in northern Cornwall. Before we erected the interior walls, in a gesture reminiscent of early New England house builders who often placed a coin in the space between inside and outside, I tacked sheets of poems to the fir framing. Perhaps one day a few fragments I wrote will survive, lines that resonate with the wild of Penwith: “The cliff breast shifts/ under weight of water./ Near, bare sea vowels/ foam on stone.” Should the words be lost, the melody of creation lingers in the coastal air.

When the great Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, whom you will meet in this book, was badgered to explain the pattern, or beyond that, the meaning of his acclaimed long poem Briggflatts, he drew a series of mountain peaks that looked something like this: MMMMM. His graphic explanation is enigmatic, but also leads me deeper into the music of his poem, so I offer here my best effort to map the journey I have been moved to write: xxxMMMxxx>>>xxxIIIxxx. (A clue: the symbols all refer to natural forms).

Throughout thirty years of farming on the Southfork of Long Island, New York, my travels have led me to return to the rugged Cornish Penwith peninsula where I first learned to cultivate plants, to a pueblo in New Mexico, to the southern coast of Maine, to an international gathering of community farming activists in China, and in memory to the west coast of Ireland. The thread that binds the story I have to tell is linked to an aspect of the mythic tale of the golden bough. This golden fledged growth, a scion of an oak, serves as talisman and key for a journey. Should the traveler be allowed to free a branch from the tree, another golden bough will sprout in its place, and thus another traveler will chance to pluck a living symbol of our symbiotic relationship with fecund, numinous, endangered nature. This book, through stories of people, plants, and place explores that relationship.

The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, known as Nature’s pilgrim, saw in the movements of sun and moon across the sky a metaphor for a journey, “years coming or going wanderers too…each day is a journey and the journey itself home.” We ourselves are whirling, day by day, within “circles of connectivity.” What you will read in this book is the pulse of the bough when plucked, the pulse of the poems within the wall, the beat of the cormorant’s wings in flight just above the sea surface, the salt spray tossing to touch the bird’s wings…all part of the “miraculous that comes so close, wild in our breast for centuries.” *

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