Farm to Tablet: On Insignificance

Sometimes I wonder what it is, exactly, that we're doing out here. At the outset it seemed significant, and from a distance it probably still does. We raise much (though far from all) of our own food. We give our livestock the happiest and healthiest lives that we can. We organize our planting so as to replenish, rather than strip or poison, the soil. And we live each day of our lives with a palpable connection to that which sustains us.

Okay, when I put it that way, this life does sound significant. But often, as I move within it, I feel like I come up empty-handed. Truly, what do you have to show for all of this, my inner critic asks, sliding his glasses down his imperious nose, besides a freezer full of meat?

Last week I stumbled into a conversation with a microbiologist at the University of Michigan. She told me about her research into the plastics polluting our water and the role microbes can play in their degradation. She lamented the unnecessary globalization of the textile industry, and how textiles are responsible for a staggering percentage of water pollutants. She then went on to talk about a personal pursuit of hers: a small fiber farm. In her off hours, this microbiologist is raising Shetland sheep, which she is learning to shear so that she might use their wool. She has also been experimenting with flax, which she has grown and harvested and spun by hand into yarn.

I marveled at this, and I said so. Her research extended to such academic – even global – ends, yet her personal pursuit toward localized fiber remained small enough to hold in her hands. I even went so far as to ask if the small scale of her farm ever discouraged her, in light of her research. Her response struck me so hard that it's rung in my ears ever since. The insignificance (her word) of her fiber farm had actually become a comfort.

For those of you who read last month's newsletter, it will come as no surprise that this perked up my ears. The woman was not accepting insignificance as sadly inevitable, or as an unfortunate pothole along the road to glory. She was not begrudging its company or practicing tolerance of its presence. No, she was welcoming it. She was inviting it in. She was moving toward it with desire.

Please, I replied hungrily. Tell me why. I need to know why.

Because, she said, if I aim for significance, then that significance becomes more about me than about the work. And besides, if my part in this work is insignificant, then it stands to reason that others are contributing much more, which means that this movement will persist without me and will continue on after I have gone.

Since speaking with this woman, I have thought about her words daily, sometimes hourly. For one thing, they contain the far-seeing piece of wisdom we'd often rather not see—that our lives are ultimately and inescapably very short and very small. But what strikes me most is her choice to persist in the very actions which she herself labels as insignificant. As pollutants continue to pour into our oceans, this woman plants flax, and harvests it, breaks its outer stalk and pulls free its hair-like floss. As the climate continues to seize and shift, she learns to breed her small number of sheep and shear them and spin their wool.

Within these gestures – within the defiance required to continue a small good while a parallel, mammoth bad chugs on and on – I find, forgive me, such significance. It is a small significance, yes, and as compact, perhaps, as a grain of rice, but nevertheless it is there. Because this woman is not intending to make some gargantuan impact. She is not hoping single-handedly to overpower the offending industries. And yet, she persists. She continues to act in accordance with what she knows to be right and true. And in this way, she testifies to a world beyond the world in which we live, and she brings that world into our imaginings.

This, I suspect, may be the only true significance left to us—right action that accepts its smallness and persists rightly, regardless. And besides, if everything we do is ultimately so insignificant, then who's to say our smallest actions don't matter just as much as any others?

I will keep considering these thoughts this afternoon, as I wheel my cart down to last year's compost pile and start shoveling it up. I'll spread it over the beds one by one and begin to broadfork it in. And I'll check, for the third time today, the ewes' slowly swelling udders, try to estimate how long until their lambs arrive, these new lives as astonishing and as ordinary as all the others.