The rapidly increasing darkness has turned our daily life from an abundance of sunshine and warmth to long nights of stars and cold, wet weather. Following the unseasonably hot and dry spell, late October has returned to a semblance of normality. Cold nights and frosts have brought out the beauty of fall, with dying leaves on maples, sugar maples and other trees turning bright yellow, fiery orange-red and maroon.

In the garden, long neglected due to other duties, I have harvested Hutterite, John Allen Cut Short and Trail of Tears pole beans, all heirlooms provided by a local grower and seed saver. Arugula and Kale are still doing well in the garden, despite my lack of attention, and a volunteer fennel plant is still providing seeds for our homemade bread.

The food club’s season ended with an abundance of the harvest, so much so that I took a picture of one of our hauls of produce, waiting to be distributed in shares to the members. I attended a late auction after the food club’s season was completed, buying Mums, Turnips, Candy (sweet) Onions, Daikon Radishes and other seasonal crops at rock-bottom prices. Toward the end of the auction, while I waited for the sale of pumpkins to provide to a friend and his family, a bag of eight five-pound butternut squashes was bought for quarter a squash—two dollars for forty pounds of food. The buyer turned down the second bag of squash and the auctioneer appealed to the crowd for someone to buy it for the same price. I threw up my hand and said I would take it.

“You can have mine as well,” said the woman who bought the first bag out of charity to the growers.

“I don’t want it either,” I replied, “But I won’t turn it down.”

After the auction, while my stepdaughter was visiting, I dragged the forty pound bag of huge squashes from our unheated basement to show her the bounty.

“It was two dollars,” I said. “I couldn’t turn this down for that price.”

“So it can rot in your basement,” my frugal stepdaughter wryly replied.

While whether I am able to use all the squash over the winter remains to be seen, purchases that we make at the local produce auction and farmer’s market mutually strengthens our town’s community of consumers and the outlying communities of growers. This mutual dependency and lasting relationship is central to the sustainability of our human and natural communities.

We have taken grapes, harvested on Labor Day from the orchard of a grower at the farmer’s market, from our friends’ freezer and begun the process of making wine. I’ve squeezed the grapes to speed them turning to juice and added sugar, pectin enzyme, yeast nutrient and wine yeast. The grape juice and ingredients are fermenting quickly, soon to be racked off the sediment into clean glass carboys to allow the wine to finish fermenting and begin to age before bottling in January. In doing so, we continue an annual tradition that unites the grower, our friends and our families in the work of life.

The weekend before Halloween, we hosted a family-friendly costume party as part of the celebration of the season. We opened our Rye Stout ale, aged for over six months, and made Pumpkin Ice Cream using some of the butternut squash. Following our large party this summer, our Halloween party was small, made up mainly of friends that my wife has known for over thirty years, with a few people, like me, who she has only known for twenty or more years. Our face-to-face community, decades old, is a gift in the modern age of distant family and friends connected, if at all, largely by text messages, emails and social media.

Just as local natural communities of trees, flowers, squirrels and birds depend on harmonious relationships with other natural communities, our community of family, friends and neighbors depends on harmonious relationships with other communities, such as the Anabaptist growers at the food auction. Unlike some places in our world, where civil wars rage and religion, class and ethnicity are literally matters of life and death, in the abundance of our community we can set aside our differences long enough to have harmony. In other communities, and other ethnic groups, people are not so fortunate. The harmony offered to me as a white male in the US is far greater than the harmony and peace offered to many to people of color, women and immigrants.

This harmony, often taken for granted, is essential for the well-being of future generations. In the present time, the abundance found in supermarkets and the wealth of our homes can blind us to the essential need for harmony between communities. Just as my family has increasingly become dependent on the food grown by Anabaptists living without electricity or phones and traveling to and fro in buggies and wagons drawn by horses, the well-being of our children depends of the essential harmony with communities around us.

The Essential sums this up as:

The community must live in lasting harmony with other communities.

At its core, this axiom points to the futility of the patriarchal vision of the superman or the man in conflict with society. Those who seek to survive without a community or by oppressing those around them suffer the downfall of the nemesis of hubris. Again and again, the story of the rise of the arrogant, oppressive man and his seemingly unforeseen fall is the story of the covenant of bad works, repeating itself in history through generations living in patriarchy. Likewise, when communities claim superiority and oppress others, it sets into motion their own demise.

Just as my town’s community cannot survive without the food grown in other communities, the harmony of communities is essential to the well-being of our children and grandchildren. In this contentious and hard time, strengthening the relationships between our community and communities of people of different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds is the means by which the meek can inherit the Earth—not through violence and power-over-others, but through harmony from commonality with people who share a love of the well-being of all the children of the Earth.