As I write these entries, I imagine many different people potentially reading them someday. After all, nothing on the internet can really be reclaimed, can it? So I imagine sometimes how these posts would sound to people like, for example, my mother. Perhaps an in-law. My priest. Someone from my church. Someone from my childhood church. Or, perhaps, one of my close friends.
Of course, when I think of many of those categories, there are many things I imagine they wouldn't already know about me. An in-law may know certain things about me but be totally in the dark about others. Someone from my church might only know that I am an Orthodox Christian and nothing more. Someone I attended church with in childhood would likely not even know that, though they would probably be able to tell you who my grandparents were. Of all of these possibilities, the people for whom the fewest of my scribbles here might be surprising are my close friends, particularly those I have known since my teenage years.
I'll be quick to admit that I don't have very many close friends anymore. There are many reasons for this: growing apart from former companions as we choose to form a family and they do not. Becoming Christians, which some friends would not take seriously. Moves across the country. Little spare time to spend together, especially when both parties are in college at once. Add to that the difficulty of making intimate friends as adults -- with all of the forces that either actively pull us apart or passively encourage us to keep polite distance -- and there are only a precious few left who seem to know much about us at all. This is ok... we do not have to be intimately close to other people necessarily to love them!
But for the few who have hung on, I thank God and love very much. Between them they very well may know more about me than I know about myself! That is a beautiful gift. But as I began to think of writing this entry, I realized how strange it is that -- while this topic is SO dear to my heart and shapes so many of my thoughts -- even many of my dearest friends probably don't know this about me.
It's not a deep, dark secret, I promise. Nothing scandalous. But it's deeply counter cultural, and maybe this is why I tend to glide over it without mention, as I don't want to alienate anyone, or make them think I am judging them. You see, it's common knowledge among the people who know me (love me or hate me!) that I am "a bit of a hippie." This is said with a smile and a nod and is quite a charming and acceptable quirk overall in our society. (Some people do say it with more of a grunt and grumble, I admit!) Being "green" is "in" these days, "hip," whatever. I recycle, I like to go barefoot, I know how to can jelly, and my husband and I are known to drag our babies out to tent camp for a week at a time. People know this, and whether they themselves think these things are fun or important or foolish or strange, they at least have a nice and inoffensive file in which to place us:
Hippies. Green. Hipsters? Young.
But, in this blog I'm going to go where I rarely go in general conversation, and say that those things may point to certain surface features of our life choices, but they really miss the point.
We have a hundred reasons for all of these seemingly strange choices we make, but the deepest, most abiding reason beneath it all is that we... well, for lack of a more precise term, I guess we have found ourselves here as 20-something agrarians. What does that mean? There's the rub, and one of the reasons why we tend to shy away from revealing this part of ourselves. Speaking broadly, those who identify as agrarians tend to feel that living on the land is the only way to be truly free in society. They feel that the work and cooperation characteristic of rural society are ideal for mankind, and that through interaction with and dependence on the soil which God created, we may become closer to God.
It all starts to sound a bit judgy, doesn't it?
But at least for us, that's not the point. Our place is not to judge. As Orthodox Christians, we have the lives of many urban saints to show us beyond doubt that God can make us holy in any place and society, whether in the deserts of Egypt or the intrigue-ridden city of Constantinople. We cannot claim that this is the One Right Way to Live. If God wants to hand that mandate down from heaven, that would be His privilege, but we will not. If the circumstances of our lives required that we live in a studio apartment in the vilest city on earth, we could make good and do good in that place. These things are not in question.
But there is a certain truth, we feel, that God reveals Himself in unique ways through life lived near the land. God Himself has tied our bodies to the fruitful earth, no matter where we make our home: we cannot escape the need to eat or the need to breathe, and both needs are met by the soil and sun on the physical side. Many great saints teach the importance of working with our hands, which is almost entirely lost in the average urban (or suburban, or in many examples even geographically rural) lifestyle. Within agrarian life there is much more space, more space in time and within our minds for the stillness in which we can hear God speaking. It is harder to fall into patterns of consuming, choosing, taking, that dominate so much of modern life, in which everything -- and I do mean everything, right down to the lives of children and the dignity of living human beings -- is for sale. Sometimes I wonder if agrarian life is to modern urban society what the monasteries are to the wider Church: not a choice everyone can make, or that everyone should make, and not a place that guarantees any degree of sainthood in itself, but even so, a pattern to which those "outside" can look for a certain guidance, and a place to which they can retire to refresh and reframe their own lives.
So there you have it. I'm not hip. I'm extreme (I guess... at least in this age). I really believe there is something valuable in a life of "rural ideals" that extends deeper and beyond mere personal preference. I truly do. I do not wish anyone to feel I think THEY need to stake out a homeplace in the country, though I would be glad to share in their joy if they do. We do not wish anyone to think that we feel they are somehow lesser for choosing (or in many cases having to choose) a more urban life, any more than I should want to be thought of as "lesser" for choosing to live in marriage than in a monastery. As for ourselves, our time living in the joyful silence of the woods may itself soon be at an end, and I pray that God will lead us where we need to be -- understanding that it may even be a city, and that we would be okay. But all of this would never stop me from believing that there by the quiet pond are the songs of the frogs and the calls of the geese and the Voice of God.
Wow! We'll said.
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