Farm Fresh April 2020: Lessons from the Past

Dear Friends,

One thing this virus has shown the world, is that we are all connected. What each one of us does matters and can affect those closest to us, or those thousands of miles away.

I recently listened to a podcast by with Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield and Paul Hawken, an environmentalist and author, who spoke of global warming and now the corona virus as a gift, the gift of feedback.

Without feedback, we go on without understanding the consequences of our actions.

https://beherenownetwork.com/jack-kornfield-heart-wisdom-ep-107-change-and-regeneration-with-paul-hawken/

We are all in this together, whether we like it or not.

This is a wakeup call for humanity, to listen to the cries of Mother Earth...or perhaps in this case Mother Kali.

Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfiled

I would like to share this with y’all my recording of Turning Toward the Light. I still plan to work on it some more, but I wanted to give you a listen in these dark times.
Douglas

When our way seem dark And our sight’s not clear
When our way seems hard And stones lie in our path

Keep turning toward the Light, we are turning toward the Light
Yah Nuri Yah Allah Yah Tawab Yah Allah

Nuri is an Arabic name for boys that means “radiant”, “brilliant”, “good”, being an attribution to Nur (“light”).

Tawab means to return; to return to goodness, to be restored.

This beautiful song was written by a U.S. Sufi friend Zahir Orest.

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Lessons from the Past

I am called to reflect back on why we started The Farm in the first place. I think many of us from those days could feel that change was in the air, but how those changes would manifest was uncertain.

We knew that the path of humanity was on shaky ground, and that our best chance for survival was to get away from the cities, to have some ground to grow our own food, our own water supply, our own medical people, and a support system that relied on each other, not the government.

Not long after The Caravan first arrived in Tennessee, the community faced its first crisis, a Hepatitis outbreak, brought on by the consumption of watercress from the creek. Turned out the group was camped out downstream from our neighbor's outhouses. Several dozen people contracted the virus from our innocent naivete.

The second Hep outbreak came a few years later, which was traced down to folks giving their babies a bath in the household’s kitchen sink. Probably most parents have done this when their child was small.

So one lesson is… it is often the little things you don’t expect that have big consequences.

As the community began to get involved in relief work around the world, we were on the front lines with a population who dealt with Shigella, Giardia, Tuberculosis, and more.

It wasn’t long before we started picking up some of these bugs as well.

When Deborah and I went to Guatemala, she was our lab technician to monitor Farm volunteers for parasites and other afflictions.

Consequently, some of these diseases were brought back to the community and became widespread. The Farm Clinic Lab had to work double shifts to process all of the stool samples of sick people to identify which bug people had.

Of course those were different times. We lived in communal households of 20, 30, even 40 people. There were no flush toilets and often limited access to running water.

Still there was more to it.

Just when the Farm Clinic and its Lab would start to get a handle on things and put the community back on track to wellness, there would be another outbreak. During her time working in The Farm Lab, Deborah coined the expression, “Giardia doesn’t fall from the sky. It comes through the Gate.”

Ultimately we came to figure out that it was necessary to quarantine our people when they came back from a stint in the third world. We also started asking visitors if they had been traveling in places like Mexico, Guatemala, etc. and if so we sent them to the lab and ran some tests before letting them stay in a household. Once we started doing that, we stopped having outbreaks of Giardia.

When things changed in 1983, we no longer had our own lab. We can’t test people ourselves for the corona virus. And so like everyone we have had to cancel all events. Our gate is closed 24/7, with volunteers up there during the day to monitor and screen traffic coming in and out, and to turn those away who do not have an essential need to enter, something we started mid-March.

We hope and pray that those lessons from our past have offered us some measure of community distancing.

Which is all to say, we should not live in fear, but we should not be overly trusting and unwise, or ignore the basics of science. We are grateful to have 2 doctors, physician's assistants and nurse practitioners, and more than a dozen nurses to serve as community health advisors. It will be a summer with a lot of time in the garden, beneath the blue skies, with a few thousand acres to wander in peace.

Starting this community is feeling like it was a pretty good idea. When we all get past this, what will be your plan?

Namaste y’all!
Douglas

A young man from South Africa that I met at the Dances of Universal Peace in Turkey sent me this graph.
I like how it moves past our fear, to learning and introspection to growth and positive action!

Social distance art by some young folks on The Farm

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I recently watched this documentary movie on Amazon Prime, and you can also watch it for free on YouTube, in 4 parts. I found it to be amazingly aligned with my personal spiritual path/philosophy, explaining how all the world's religions and spiritual practices say the same stuff about vibrations, how everything is connected, and on and on.

It is a couple hours long, divided into 4 parts:
Akasha - The Spiral - The Serpent and the Lotus - Beyond Thinking

Spoiler Alert: About 10 minutes into Part 1 they have a soundtrack I found annoying. I lasts maybe 5 minutes,

It is written and directed by Daniel J. Schmidt, who founded the not for profit Awaken the World Initiative in 2012 and Tanya Mahar joined the team in 2016. Together they create films, run the Samadhi Meditation Center in Canada, and engage in other projects that support the ATW Initiative. They believe that through the sharing of our own inner journeys, it is possible to inspire and support others on their path.

https://awakentheworld.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXuTt7c3Jkg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIMoxXO0XvM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNEruEsb5T4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmL4CeTENtw&t=26s

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Peace,

Douglas

Douglas@thefarmcommunity.com