The Farm School on a hill In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. - Motto of The Grange
The Grange, Quick History
1867 America was a country in the midst of a tumultuous and painful recovery from the Civil War. Reconstruction - intensified by a newly elected congress of Radical Republicans - was in full swing; the first railroads were being constructed, their tracks laid mostly by Irish, Scandinavian, and Chinese immigrants working in deplorable conditions; and yellow fever was periodically killing thousands in the Southern gulf states. Fundamental schisms in American society, exposed by the long war between the states, were not fast to close (and, really, a lot of these schisms still openly ooze today on a nearly daily basis. See: Anything Related To Election 2016). While the crime of slavery, and the scourge of deep racism receive most of the attention when it comes to discussions of the crashing tectonic plates of America’s complicated history and present (and often rightfully so), the cultural, social and political splits between rural agrarians and urbanites was also of profound importance, especially in those difficult post-war years.
Enter Oliver Hudson Kelley. In 1866, Kelly was sent by President Andrew Johnson to collect data on Southern farming, and ended up setting out to organize disparate rural families into social and political communities. He did not confine this work to the South either, but went across the country, getting people in agrarian areas to come together, build social centers (Grange Halls) and transform into a powerful populist political lobby. A Freemason and eccentric connoisseur of Roman, Greek, and Biblical mythologies, Kelley linked these communities under the banner of a new fraternal organization called The Grange, or The Order of Patrons of Husbandry. He traced its roots to the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient group with a spiritual focus on agriculture (they worshiped Demeter, goddess of the grain and harvest) and particularly on the cycles of seasons. As is standard for secret fraternal organizations, The Grange held closed door ceremonies with complicated rituals and oath taking. And while many of these ceremonies still exist (The Grange is active in 36 states today, and its national headquarters in Washington DC remains a powerful lobbying center), much (not all) of the secrecy involved has been purged.
As I made my way to The Grange Farm School in Mendocino Country California, with winter setting in, on my final stop on this leg of the tour through America’s spiritual fringe, the ideas of seasons and cycles, of seeds and the rituals of renewal, of agriculture and the human triumph of working the land - all of these being the spiritual building blocks of The Grange - were very much in my mind.
More on that in a second.
Into California
It’s not difficult to see why there are so many Intentional and spiritual Communities in California. The physical beauty of the landscape of the long state on the Pacific Ocean is, in the humble opinion of this writer, unmatched in this country. To those who desire to live in some daily meaningful acknowledgment of something greater than themselves, there is no more helpful aide than a natural setting - one not built by human hands - that sets off some internal spark of awe, of wonder. Indeed, if there is any fundamental notion that links Intentional Communities - aside from the desire for Community - it is an appreciation for, and humility before, the land, the ecology: that which functions in this world beyond the control of human hands. This includes, it seems necessary to say (if only to remind myself), the human heart and body (and mind too, although it’s true that sometimes the mind would have us think otherwise). All of which was as true in the mountain village of Earthaven, the preserved prairie lands of The Farm, and the desert cragginess of Arcosanti as it is in California...but in California there are all of these settings in one place.
So in December I drove up along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway (what's a post about driving in California without mention of at least one highway?), beside the ocean with bursts of sunlight slitting through the heavy clouds beside me, up through San Francisco, and northward, into the paradise of Mendocino County.
It is the termination of the West in this country, California, where that great quest into the unknown reaches the impassable depths of the Pacific Ocean. It is where the land ends. In some ways, this makes it both the winter and spring of the American continent, an end and a beginning all at once. An idea brought home on The Grange.
Rituals of The Grange, The Seasons, and The Spiritual Art of Farming
In the ritual life of The Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, there are seven levels, or degrees. The first four are associated with the seasons of the year (levels five, six, and seven, are still secret from outsiders like me). To become a member of The Grange, you must be ushered through the first four levels of ritual by an established Grange Master, which is to say, it takes a full year of participation to become a Grange member. Each of these four levels is associated with a human virtue related to the season. For spring, there is faith that the seeds being planted will yield sustenance; for summer, there is hope for the coming harvest to be plentiful; for autumn, charity, in sharing the bounty of the land with those who can’t provide for themselves; and for winter, fidelity, to retain belief in the land and in its workings, before spring and faith return.
This, it strikes me, is of some majorly profound meaning. By organizing their rituals in this way, the virtues of the seasons tie the agricultural life of the land being farmed to the spiritual life of the people doing the farming. The ritual practices of The Grange conflate the life of the land with the life of the individuals who work that land. The art of farming - that earliest historical expression of humanity’s awareness of our unique skills in land development - becomes a means of learning the art of being (the pillar of doing faith, the reason for having religion), and vice versa. The spiritual success of The Grange is in formalizing through ritual the relationship between farming and the very existence of being human.
Cycles, and Imitation
While the ideas of cycles and renewal are certainly enticing, they bring to my mind a nagging question. The Kotzker Rebbe says that one should not imitate oneself or anyone else, that true presence in God, or The Oneness, happens when imitation of any kind is rejected. So what to say of the turning over of a year? The repetition of a cycle? Isn’t the cycle of seasons just the natural world (which is all the world) just imitating itself? After all, following every fall will be a winter; following every winter, a spring.
Aha, but perhaps this is the greater insight of the Kotzker: while the cycle of seasons happens, we have the ability to transcend it - whether by some kind of lofty elevation, or by dropping into the quiet sea of infinite consciousness, does it really matter? - by appreciating at once the truth and the bullshit that exist at once in the present.
The cycle is not just a repetition, not just an imitation, but a means of being humbled by the life-impacting importance of divisions within The Oneness. Of using those divisions as doorways into different virtues of The Oneness. The cycle of the seasons contains us, even while we reach for the spiritual heights that, in mindful, heart-felt, stripped-down moments, transcend it. With each turn over of the year, each descent into a new winter, each emergence into the bounties of spring, there is a whole new world to be seen, to be appreciated for its unlimited depths, to be grateful for in its beauties. But to get spring, we must live in this physical world through the winter. This renewal of the physical world reminds us that any transcendence of physical life can only happen within the mindful awareness of that physicality. This is the lesson of The Grange: Faith, hope, charity, and fidelity - those foundational assets of human being - do not float detached in the ether, but are intrinsically rooted down in this world, on this earth, on these lands.
Transitions, and Back to the Grange Farm School
As this was my last stop for awhile (and there will be one more blog post with some conclusions and reflections on the whole trip), it feels appropriate that my topic is, at root, the spirituality of transitions. It also feels appropriate that my visit to The Grange was in fact to The Grange Farm School of Mendocino County, California. A school, after all, is a place of rebirth. Education - especially education of this sort, which explicitly ties the farming of land to the spiritual lives of the farmers - is renewal. And this school especially embodies this notion. The rituals of The Grange are used there to encourage a constantly growing knowledge base of local, smart, ecologically responsible farming. The directors, teachers, and students of The Grange Farm School are enacting the very phenomenon that this blog set out to explore: the intertwining and mutual bolstering of tradition and innovation. All this in service to humanity’s physical and spiritual needs, through a recognition that one is not possible without the other.
Final Thought on Seeds
When a plant no longer produces its fruit or flowers, we say it “bolts,” which means that it has started to enter the terminal phases of its life. This also when a plant goes to seed, which is to say the death throes of a plant constitute the same action as its perpetuation, its being reborn.
Most of us probably remember this fact from science class in elementary school, but it seems worth repeating, worth remembering at this moment in the cold of winter. Death and life occurring in a single act….what a strange wild existence we inhabit.
One more post to come.
The Grange, Quick History
1867 America was a country in the midst of a tumultuous and painful recovery from the Civil War. Reconstruction - intensified by a newly elected congress of Radical Republicans - was in full swing; the first railroads were being constructed, their tracks laid mostly by Irish, Scandinavian, and Chinese immigrants working in deplorable conditions; and yellow fever was periodically killing thousands in the Southern gulf states. Fundamental schisms in American society, exposed by the long war between the states, were not fast to close (and, really, a lot of these schisms still openly ooze today on a nearly daily basis. See: Anything Related To Election 2016). While the crime of slavery, and the scourge of deep racism receive most of the attention when it comes to discussions of the crashing tectonic plates of America’s complicated history and present (and often rightfully so), the cultural, social and political splits between rural agrarians and urbanites was also of profound importance, especially in those difficult post-war years.
Enter Oliver Hudson Kelley. In 1866, Kelly was sent by President Andrew Johnson to collect data on Southern farming, and ended up setting out to organize disparate rural families into social and political communities. He did not confine this work to the South either, but went across the country, getting people in agrarian areas to come together, build social centers (Grange Halls) and transform into a powerful populist political lobby. A Freemason and eccentric connoisseur of Roman, Greek, and Biblical mythologies, Kelley linked these communities under the banner of a new fraternal organization called The Grange, or The Order of Patrons of Husbandry. He traced its roots to the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient group with a spiritual focus on agriculture (they worshiped Demeter, goddess of the grain and harvest) and particularly on the cycles of seasons. As is standard for secret fraternal organizations, The Grange held closed door ceremonies with complicated rituals and oath taking. And while many of these ceremonies still exist (The Grange is active in 36 states today, and its national headquarters in Washington DC remains a powerful lobbying center), much (not all) of the secrecy involved has been purged.
As I made my way to The Grange Farm School in Mendocino Country California, with winter setting in, on my final stop on this leg of the tour through America’s spiritual fringe, the ideas of seasons and cycles, of seeds and the rituals of renewal, of agriculture and the human triumph of working the land - all of these being the spiritual building blocks of The Grange - were very much in my mind.
More on that in a second.
Into California
It’s not difficult to see why there are so many Intentional and spiritual Communities in California. The physical beauty of the landscape of the long state on the Pacific Ocean is, in the humble opinion of this writer, unmatched in this country. To those who desire to live in some daily meaningful acknowledgment of something greater than themselves, there is no more helpful aide than a natural setting - one not built by human hands - that sets off some internal spark of awe, of wonder. Indeed, if there is any fundamental notion that links Intentional Communities - aside from the desire for Community - it is an appreciation for, and humility before, the land, the ecology: that which functions in this world beyond the control of human hands. This includes, it seems necessary to say (if only to remind myself), the human heart and body (and mind too, although it’s true that sometimes the mind would have us think otherwise). All of which was as true in the mountain village of Earthaven, the preserved prairie lands of The Farm, and the desert cragginess of Arcosanti as it is in California...but in California there are all of these settings in one place.
So in December I drove up along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway (what's a post about driving in California without mention of at least one highway?), beside the ocean with bursts of sunlight slitting through the heavy clouds beside me, up through San Francisco, and northward, into the paradise of Mendocino County.
It is the termination of the West in this country, California, where that great quest into the unknown reaches the impassable depths of the Pacific Ocean. It is where the land ends. In some ways, this makes it both the winter and spring of the American continent, an end and a beginning all at once. An idea brought home on The Grange.
Rituals of The Grange, The Seasons, and The Spiritual Art of Farming
In the ritual life of The Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, there are seven levels, or degrees. The first four are associated with the seasons of the year (levels five, six, and seven, are still secret from outsiders like me). To become a member of The Grange, you must be ushered through the first four levels of ritual by an established Grange Master, which is to say, it takes a full year of participation to become a Grange member. Each of these four levels is associated with a human virtue related to the season. For spring, there is faith that the seeds being planted will yield sustenance; for summer, there is hope for the coming harvest to be plentiful; for autumn, charity, in sharing the bounty of the land with those who can’t provide for themselves; and for winter, fidelity, to retain belief in the land and in its workings, before spring and faith return.
This, it strikes me, is of some majorly profound meaning. By organizing their rituals in this way, the virtues of the seasons tie the agricultural life of the land being farmed to the spiritual life of the people doing the farming. The ritual practices of The Grange conflate the life of the land with the life of the individuals who work that land. The art of farming - that earliest historical expression of humanity’s awareness of our unique skills in land development - becomes a means of learning the art of being (the pillar of doing faith, the reason for having religion), and vice versa. The spiritual success of The Grange is in formalizing through ritual the relationship between farming and the very existence of being human.
Cycles, and Imitation
While the ideas of cycles and renewal are certainly enticing, they bring to my mind a nagging question. The Kotzker Rebbe says that one should not imitate oneself or anyone else, that true presence in God, or The Oneness, happens when imitation of any kind is rejected. So what to say of the turning over of a year? The repetition of a cycle? Isn’t the cycle of seasons just the natural world (which is all the world) just imitating itself? After all, following every fall will be a winter; following every winter, a spring.
Aha, but perhaps this is the greater insight of the Kotzker: while the cycle of seasons happens, we have the ability to transcend it - whether by some kind of lofty elevation, or by dropping into the quiet sea of infinite consciousness, does it really matter? - by appreciating at once the truth and the bullshit that exist at once in the present.
The cycle is not just a repetition, not just an imitation, but a means of being humbled by the life-impacting importance of divisions within The Oneness. Of using those divisions as doorways into different virtues of The Oneness. The cycle of the seasons contains us, even while we reach for the spiritual heights that, in mindful, heart-felt, stripped-down moments, transcend it. With each turn over of the year, each descent into a new winter, each emergence into the bounties of spring, there is a whole new world to be seen, to be appreciated for its unlimited depths, to be grateful for in its beauties. But to get spring, we must live in this physical world through the winter. This renewal of the physical world reminds us that any transcendence of physical life can only happen within the mindful awareness of that physicality. This is the lesson of The Grange: Faith, hope, charity, and fidelity - those foundational assets of human being - do not float detached in the ether, but are intrinsically rooted down in this world, on this earth, on these lands.
Transitions, and Back to the Grange Farm School
As this was my last stop for awhile (and there will be one more blog post with some conclusions and reflections on the whole trip), it feels appropriate that my topic is, at root, the spirituality of transitions. It also feels appropriate that my visit to The Grange was in fact to The Grange Farm School of Mendocino County, California. A school, after all, is a place of rebirth. Education - especially education of this sort, which explicitly ties the farming of land to the spiritual lives of the farmers - is renewal. And this school especially embodies this notion. The rituals of The Grange are used there to encourage a constantly growing knowledge base of local, smart, ecologically responsible farming. The directors, teachers, and students of The Grange Farm School are enacting the very phenomenon that this blog set out to explore: the intertwining and mutual bolstering of tradition and innovation. All this in service to humanity’s physical and spiritual needs, through a recognition that one is not possible without the other.
Final Thought on Seeds
When a plant no longer produces its fruit or flowers, we say it “bolts,” which means that it has started to enter the terminal phases of its life. This also when a plant goes to seed, which is to say the death throes of a plant constitute the same action as its perpetuation, its being reborn.
Most of us probably remember this fact from science class in elementary school, but it seems worth repeating, worth remembering at this moment in the cold of winter. Death and life occurring in a single act….what a strange wild existence we inhabit.
One more post to come.
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