Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "local-food"

As sunlight has ever-so-slowly diminished following it's peak during Summer Solstice, the normal heat and humidity of early summer has returned, bringing on white and bright pink Lillies, red Bee Balm, purple Coneflower, white Queen’s Anne Lace, red Trumpet Vine, deep purple Morning Glories, pale blue wild chicory and purple Butterfly Bush. The warmth has caused mid-season crops to burst forth, providing summertime favorites like corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions. In addition, harvests of garlic, turnip greens, lemon balm, zucchini, yellow squash and a myriad of other foods has filled our homes and dinner plates with wonderful food. In place of the cooler and more tolerable temperatures earlier, the joy of the season is now in the luscious, fresh and healthy food provided by local growers.

With the change in my schedule, I have had more time to accompany my wife on her work as a babysitter and helper with my stepdaughter's young family. I have pitched in with some yard work and preparing some meals, a couple of weeks ago including local sweet corn and tomatoes. The choices seemed popular with my stepdaughter, so I brought more the next week. After telling her this she said, "I was hoping you would bring corn and tomatoes." I was glad that this simple gift of the abundant season pleased her and her family.

Despite the plentiful harvest, the effects of the pandemic have challenged produce buyers in our food club. Normally, the club will pay wholesale prices for wonderfully healthy and tasty food sold in large lots by the local growers at the auction. This year, however, global and local supply lines have been shifting rapidly. While some restaurants and suppliers have closed or lessened orders, there has been an influx of large food clubs and emergency food aid grants, bringing many more big-budget buyers to the auction.

Our community’s local food donation hub was approached by a ten-county community organization given emergency aid money to food security to many dislocated workers. As a result, the hub is now bringing two large buying accounts to the auction. Meanwhile, a nearby medical provider began a large food club, buying food for nearly 150 households and providing bidders a buying budget triple our club’s substantial clout. As a result, for the first time in the auction’s history, prices for premium products like sweet corn, tomatoes and other items have doubled or tripled from previous levels and are at or above the prices at our local Farmer’s Market. The auction itself has reached out to additional growers, some of whom have seen their markets close, seeking to meet the upsurge in demand. As I left the auction after buying for our club, I sincerely thanked the auction manager for his more than decade-long work to develop this crucial local food source. He kindly thanked our club, since our participation over the past decade has helped ramp up the auction’s capacity to serve our region during this crisis.

Ironically, while the growers at the auction are for the first time since its inception receiving fair market prices for their wonderful, life-sustaining produce, the rise in prices creates huge challenges for our club, which markets itself as an affordable source of local produce. Our buyers are discussing strategies and options as we seek to supply our 60 or so households with the same amount of high quality, local produce that we have consistently provided for nearly ten years. Despite the challenge and worry, it is a deep fulfillment to be a decade-long contributor to a vital service in the midst of a world-wide medical and economic crisis.

Meanwhile, in my spare time, I have reflected on my career change, which includes returning to college to gain credentials to work full time in the field of mental health and recovery. It is area I have devoted many hours to over the past two and a half decades, volunteering, researching, writing books and providing training and presentations, but it is one that I have not been able to work in full time. For the past two decades, well-meaning and good-hearted people suggested that I pursue a career like this, where there is so much need, and I have long felt guilty that I have led a more financially rewarding path while failing to do good works in my career. I imagine that more than one person has felt the change was long overdue.

In the spiritual abstraction of good works, I can see the argument that I should have made these changes sooner. After all, advocating good works is about more than urging others to be kind--it is about living a devotional daily life. However, in the context of my life, I felt that my responsibility was first and foremost to provide a stable foundation for my chosen family.

For years, my wife's family including caring for my very dear and kind mother-in-law, who in her later years provided joy and love to all her knew her. It also includes my wife's chosen family, who have kindly accepted me as a somewhat goofy, odd-acting person from a foreign family culture far different then their own. Where they have practical skills, my original family has educational theory; where they have humor, my family has sober reserve; where they have diverse musical and artistic talent, my family is centered on words, numbers and news.

Yet, they could see, for all our differences, I struggled to help my wife and her family from the earliest times of our relationship. This was the application of an early lesson from my experience of patriarchal arrogance, which had been deeply, but unconsciously, ingrained in my youthful ambitions.

As a young man, I placed my career plans ahead of any relationship, including with a young woman who I thought I loved. This, of course, is not uncommon in patriarchy, where the fathers have announced that it is the will of the god of the universe that women serve men, especially as obedient wives.

Though I thought of myself as a liberal, pro-feminist young man, I was narrowly centered on my personal ambition, causing me to act with little regard for those I claimed to love. This was simply an extension of the patriarchal culture in which men usually see ourselves as in a personal struggle with the larger human world, seeking to take the world by storm and assuming happy relationships and harmonious families as our birthright.

Forced to face my arrogant shadow during my psychosis, I realized that I had little actual understanding of the Feminine or women I knew. Seeing the importance that I, as a man, embraced the Feminine, caused me to spend many years earnestly learning from the women around me and studying the philosophy and spirituality of modern women theologians. Eventually, my journey led me to my wife and her family. It is a gift that few men truly receive and fewer appreciate.

Applying my abstract ideals to our lives, I decided that I would try to be a helpmate to my wife in strengthening her family. This made intuitive sense--I knew that as our family thrived, my wife, and thereby me, would be happier; as the family suffered, so would my wife and I. In time, I expressed this journey as the first two tenets of The Essential:

The children must be cared for.
The community must help the parents in their work.

Since my wife was the primary caretaker of her family, I was to be her helpmate, though I was not their biological father. This was of no matter; their fates are intricately interwoven with ours. The essential failure of patriarchy is that the wife is to serve her husband and their children are to be under his domain, draining time, energy and strength from the family center and into centers created by patriarchy, such as the pursuit of war, money, partying, religion, abstract education, sports, and other things. These male-dominated centers often have no real value to the children of the world and, in some cases, are anathema to the needs of a happy home.

As an arrogant and privileged young man in patriarchy, I sailed expectantly into one of these centers, constantly complimenting myself on my supposed virtues and assuming my personal ambitions would automatically make the world a better place. These lofty goals were more important than my brief and emotionally distant but often sexual relationships with the young woman I dated. I did not need to really think about the relationships around me, or consider those whose lives I touched, because I thought I was acting on “higher ideals”.

This essential failure of the patriarchal culture blinds many into a way of life with little concern for future generations. A partier need not worry for the hearts he breaks or the children he fails to care for while fulfilling his lusts; a money-chaser need not worry about his carbon footprint to be become rich; a violent man need not consider the "collateral damage" he does to win his "glorious victory"; a puritan need not consider the harm done by abusive husbands and fathers to fulfill his view of holiness; a thinker need not consider the harm his discoveries do in the hands of violent men and money-chasers to be a respected scholar. In these male-created pathways, rather than serving the family and future generations, individual men and compliant women have created an unsustainable larger human world as a direct consequence of the pursuit of their goals.

On the other hand, a childless gay man may seek to reduce bullying of youths; a childless feminist may work tirelessly to help women and children escape abusive families; a childless straight man like me may seek to help his wife's children. Our lives are made better for the effort and our family, friends and community around us are strengthened. The promise of acting in accordance with The Essential principles is the good works will return to us in some way. Moreover, it makes daily life joyful because it brings us into the true center of Earthly life.

The privilege my past career has allowed me to provide a financial foundation for my family, focusing my good works on that center. It has brought a depth to my relationships because it was paired with sincerity and vulnerability. The greatest risk is that I would become a corrupt money-chaser, forsaking good works and the well-being of my family for the pursuit of money. For all his anger and arrogance, my younger self would maintain that is exactly what has happened to the older man who has led a largely materialistic life.

In looking back at the unhappiness and stress I felt in my old career, which common among of the money-chasers I worked with, I can see that my change into a career of good works for much less money is essential. A true money-chaser, prizing acquisition above all else, would have worked many years in declining health and bitter unhappiness. He would have found that not only he can't "take it with him", but that he also never really attained true happiness. The Feminine's reward I’ve received over the years is that by following The Essential principles to care for my family and community I’ve experienced the deep happiness of taking part in the Earthly river of life. Had I walked this same path primarily for acquisition and satisfaction of my own ego, I would have never experienced the bliss I have been given. It is this true happiness that must, as is commonly said, be given to be received.