Ode to Working Outside
Outside, I feel myself met by the elements—introduced and reintroduced to the world. Outside there is wind, sunshine, rain. There’s dirt or mud, shade trees and sharp thorns, cute ladybugs and gross cutworms.
Outside, it is constant encounter. Nowhere on the farm am I not relating, in some way, to other lives and beings and presences. To touch even a single blade of grass is to come into contact with another life; to intentionally tend to the lives of the plants we grow is that much greater a responsibility, that much more intimate a relationship.
Direct presence, that’s what working outside offers.
Outside, it’s all unmediated. There are no screens—not even a window screen—between my eyes and that which my eyes are drinking in, or between my hands and the work of my hands. Be it the tomatoes I am harvesting, the weeds I am pulling, the bed we have just planted into, or even sitting in the shade enjoying our pau hana, in these moments it is not difficult to re-member myself as one of a countless number of lives equally dependent upon this breathing, heaving earth.
Outside, I feel my body as one among many; my self as one among many selves. When there are no walls around me, no floor beneath nor ceiling above, I perceive the world as alive and full of agency. And different: decidedly *not* me. I’ve come to recognize the giant eucalyptus trees across the gulch as watchful, communicative guardians—when the trade winds come howling, they are the first to let us know, their giant bodies swaying and creaking and whispering a heads up. I recognize the various birds—sparrow, myna, etc—as not mere background noise and color but also as opportunistic little bastards eating the worms turned up by our bed prep and pecking to death the tender first shoots of our beans and turnips and pac choi if we foolishly leave them uncovered. (They have my begrudging respect.) I recognize too the agency and indeed intelligence of our row crops as they seek water with their roots and sunshine with their leaves, their immune systems fighting through powdery mildew or chomping pests, their whole beings jostling, competing, working for life’s abundance.
And it’s not only the forms we readily identify as “alive” that constitute this wakeful world. Hawaii’s original pioneers, the voyaging ancestral Polynesians, recognized the life-giving and death-dealing power of the earth’s interior, incarnated as Tūtū Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes. Our earth scientists today, our geologists and biologists and ecologists, all recognize the epochal weathering of solid rock (say, volcanic for example) into living soil, and that soil into the foundation for plant life, and that plant life as the basis for a thriving ecosystem. The blue rock hiding under the few inches of topsoil at the front of block three; the tiny explosions of powdery mildew as we rip out the dead and dying cucumber plants from tunnel four; the interplay of light and shadow as the sun pours itself down through the afternoon clouds: as David Abram writes, “each particular presence partakes of a common mystery: the unfathomable upsurge of existence itself.”
I suppose that the house I’m sitting in and the laptop on which I’m composing these words are also presences, also partaking of existence itself. I am happy they are part of my life, along with my comfy mattress and record player and bottles of gin and Campari and sweet vermouth (Negroni anyone?) and a thousand other delightful conveniences of contemporary life. But I am grateful that I work outside. It has become just too easy to ignore the wider world… that un-engineered, more-than-human, radically other community of life with all its attendant beauty and danger. Too easy, as well, to ignore the foundational truth that that world is our world. We belong to it.
We belong outside. At least a little bit, at least some of the time.
And I must say: working is different than simply being outside, like hiking or sunbathing or playing with your dog. And working on a farm is a particular type of working outside, different than working construction or as a fisherman or a park ranger. A farm exists in the gray area between civilization and wilderness—farmers embody a creative tension held between the two, doing the work of translating or interpreting or negotiating the needs of society and soil, of the market and the land. A farmer is cultivating life that still holds within itself an ancient wildness (corn, that most modern crop, was simply a wild grass ten thousand years ago) and through that cultivation sustains the civilized world of produce aisles, restaurant kitchens, and CSAs.
Outside—working outside—I feel at home and at peace, even when I’m tired of weeding the stupid purslane and my body hurts from hurling old bags of spent substrate onto the compost pile and there’s not enough time left in the workday to finish what we need to. I feel okay because I understand that in all jobs there are annoying tasks; and to have a body (to be a body) is to know pain and suffering; and to exist in time is to feel, at least on occasion, like there is never enough time. Those are part of the package deal of being human—like it or not it’s the price of admission. I’ll take my licks outdoors rather than indoors any day.
Of course our farm is not exclusively outdoors. We have structures (and I don’t boycott them). Being in the built areas of the farm is fine, don’t get me wrong. I love tending to our tomato plants so of necessity I spend many summer hours in the high tunnels amongst their tall, trellised forms. I don’t mind working in the mushroom greenhouse or the washing/packing station. I am in fact grateful for them, for the barn and nursery too; we need them, truly! But man… I was born to work outside. Send me out into the fields. Let me be out there, my sweat commingling with the dirt, giving and receiving within this community of life we call Lapa’au Farm.
I’ve noticed too that I am increasingly grateful for natural silence. By this I don’t mean a pure silence like the sort of skull-vacuum that a good pair of earplugs create, and I definitely don’t mean the narcotic white noise of a sound machine. I mean the absence (or at least near absence) of civilizational sound. These are the moments when I’m out in the middle of a field block weeding or harvesting or whatever, and the only sounds my ears pick up are arising spontaneously from the place in which I’m situated. A breeze rustling through the trees and tall grasses, various birds communicating to their own kind, perhaps a buzzing of bees or other winged insects, and of course my own small noises—the crunch of my boots on dirt, the small *thwick* of my knife through a head of lettuce, maybe a couple pops from my knees as I stand up (and depending on how long I’ve been down, a long low groan emanating from the very core of my being). I’ve come to a sincere appreciation for these moments because of how uncommon they are. Like most folks, I’ve got music playing pretty consistently—while driving, cooking, cleaning, pretty much you name it. And of course there is always music playing in stores and restaurants (do you remember the last time you sat down to eat somewhere and there was no music, and how uncomfortable the quietness made everything seem?). In addition to music we have just the general noises of human society: cars, construction, home projects, the vague and ambient sounds of the built environment around us.
Pay attention sometime, if you can, to how much or how little silence you encounter in your days, and if that silence is outdoors or within the structures we have built. Is it unnerving? Comforting? Dissonant? Restful?
To be outside is, at least in some small way, to be outside of society—outside its strict bounds and inward-gazing. This fact alone reopens and reawakens us to the earth, ‘the commonwealth of all breath’ in Abram’s phrasing. And it does so predominantly, I believe, through our bodies, not our minds. Though perhaps it’s better to say that it invites a porousness between body and mind that we humans have become so adept at closing up. It recalls to us our ancestral, primal sense that we are not bifurcated between body and mind/soul/spirit—that we are one, whole.
Working outside, my intelligence courses through the whole of my body; it does not feel confined simply to my brain. There is a full-bodied dexterity, a kind of attunement between my human self and the more-than-human world that would be unremarkable in a past age but is a rarity today. I am starting to learn this kind of attunement. I am, at the tender age of thirty-eight, a beginner. I did spend much of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood outside, but mostly at play…
And play is different than work. Here on the farm I am learning to work. Outside.
