When we were at Koinonia I wrote a blog post about the Tree of Life Conference held about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We were lucky to have to chance to meet and talk with some visitors from Palestine including Daoud, whose family owns Tent of Nations. Recently, the Israeli army came and tore down all of the olive trees on their farm. They continue to fight for peace and for their land. It was good news to see that the BBC wrote an article about their struggle, click the link above to view the article.
Category Archives: Koinonia Farm
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Beautiful, wonderful Koinonia Farm
Auld Lang Syne
I know, I know, it’s been quite a while since we’ve posted on here, my apologies. The last month at Koinonia was insanely busy. We shipped over 1,000 orders our last week there are over 2,000 in November and December (which is super exciting and awesome!) Here is a picture of a sea dragon made of out boxes in the shipping room that our lovely shipping team assembled (they may have been slightly delirious):
So when I wasn’t working I was trying to find some down time and spending precious time with friends. I worked in the bakery a lot, which I really came to love! I learned how to make pecan pies and pecan brittle, unfortunately the last batch of pecan brittle that Lauren and I made we burned pretty terribly so we couldn’t sell it. But it all feels like a whirlwind and now I find myself back in Raleigh and preparing for the next leg of our adventure.
My last week-and-a-half at Koinonia I had the song Auld Lang Syne in my head almost every day. I had never really thought much about this song before, I didn’t even really know what it was about, but I found myself strangely addicted to it. Here are some of the lyrics:
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
The phrase ‘auld lang syne’ essentially means old times or long, long ago. I brought this up at our final intern breakfast and speculated on the fact that it had been stuck in my head for so long (side note: I don’t believe in coincidences, so I tend to speculate about a lot of things) and my friend Hannah said that she knew why it was in my head: “It’s because we all feel like old friends.” And I think she was right. This pretty much sums up my experience at Koinonia in a short phrase. New friends quickly became old friends that I will cherish and love for the rest of my life, I’m sure. We lived so intentionally and were together so much that we grew into each other, we opened up to each other much more quickly than we would have in different circumstances, we were able to search for ourselves with the support of those around us.
Being back in Raleigh, the first thing people ask me about is how my experience was at Koinonia. I still haven’t been able to put it into words–that’s why it’s taken me so long to even begin to write this post–but my first response is always to talk about the people I met. I have never met a group of people who were more genuine, caring, passionate, and engaged, and it changed me. For the first time I saw people living out their beliefs wholly and honestly, and being comfortable in their searching, and it swept me in and allowed me to begin to do the same. I felt more at peace there than I had in a long time, I felt more open than I had in a long time, I felt more myself than I had in a long time, and I can attribute that to the people and the atmosphere they provide. I was truly heartbroken to leave. BUT I am so thankful that this was our first stop, it set a precedent of mindfulness, contemplation, and compassion that I hope to carry on throughout our whole trip. We worked hard, but the focus was on our spiritual and emotional journey and we learned to use work as well as conversation in that pursuit. I can imagine that beginning our journey with this mindset will be invaluable for the rest of our trip. So, here are some pictures of the family I found at Koinonia:
So, our next stop is Green Hill Farm in Kentucky beginning January 19! Stay tuned for more adventures and thoughts to come.
–Lindsay
Marley and Me
For three months straight,
Marley barked at me every single time I passed by his fence on a run.
He would stand on top of his doghouse,
Protecting his dominion with teeth bared and ears alert –
His eyes glared at me
As if he would love nothing more than to rip my throat out with his vicious jaws
And swallow my whole beating heart down into his stomach.
I told my story of the ferocious killer dog to a friend,
And turns out the dog belonged to his family.
I could not imagine this beast of a dog actually belonging to anyone.
I met Marley shortly thereafter.
He barreled towards me,
A compact brick of muscle
With tongue lolling lazily from his once believed-to-be-vicious jaws.
He nearly knocked me over with the force of his excitement
And wagged his whole body so hard, he fell down and rolled all over my feet.
This is not the dog I had seen on the other side of that fence.
I sat with Marley for about an hour;
He licked my face and laid his head in my lap.
All he wanted was to be shown love,
And I realized that perhaps that’s all he’d wanted all along –
That his constant barking, while seemingly brutal to me,
Was his way of saying, “Hey! Stop running and come play!”
It was his only form of communication,
And because I did not understand, I was terrified.
I am so glad I got to meet Marley on the other side of his fence –
On his turf, at his home, where he lives.
That fence to me had been a barrier –
In my mind was in place for a good reason:
To keep me safe from something I feared.
Had I taken the time to stop even once,
I probably would have discovered what I was able to find out
Only by going about things from the inside.
Once I gave Marley some time and love,
He responded beautifully.
We had simply had a miscommunication.
Whatever we had feared and misunderstood in one another
Was mended by spending a moment in each other’s company.
We became instant and forever friends.
Now, Marley is a dog,
But I think there’s something to be said here
About the way human beings interact with one another.
We are so inclined to put up fences
And to fear what is behind the fences we see other people building.
What would happen if instead of building fences,
We built friendships?
What if instead of running away,
We climbed over or simply walked around?
A fence has to end somewhere.
There has to be an entrance,
A gate,
A hole dug underneath,
A ladder,
A weak point,
An opening,
Even if it’s invisible to our eyes.
The “other side” is not nearly as scary when we visit it AND welcome it to come,
Our arms stretched open to possibility.
There is no creature on earth that cannot, on some level, feel the power of love.
Everyone and everything wants to be accepted and given a chance to be good.
There are enough barriers already.
We need to tear them down and build something new – together.
–Lauren
Vanessa
A few weeks ago–actually it was the Saturday after the Tree of Life Conference which I wrote about in my last post–I went to the Prisoner Family Lunch along with my fellow intern Tracy and community member Elizabeth. The Prisoner Family Lunch is hosted by a different church each month and we serve and eat with people who are coming down from Atlanta to visit family members or friends in jail down here. From what I had heard from interns who had gone previously, the people who were traveling weren’t very talkative, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I definitely was not expecting anything like the conversation I ended up having. I met an amazing woman who was so fascinating and full of wisdom and we all ended up talking the whole time she was there. I was so moved by her stories and insights that I wrote a poem about her. I have a feeling I am going to be processing our conversation and learning from her wisdom for a very long time. So, here’s my poem (I changed her first name for privacy reasons):
Three weeks later and Vanessa’s smile
is what stuck with me.
After sharing one hour and some food with her,
learning her struggles,
hearing her stories,
I want to save her laughter in a glass jar.
Laughter burning in such rubble should be preserved.
It seems her life has been one blow after another,
she traces the connections through the ash
and finds the trees it has grown
as she ties back her hair with a vibrantly colored bandana.
“I understand the sacrifice needed for love,” she says,
and “all religions have the same core of loving each other
and loving God,
why can’t people see that?”
She speaks of the violence she has witnessed,
the injustices experienced,
with a frankness that only honesty could muster
and barely a fraction of the bitterness
I would allow her.
She lives right and wrong better
than most people sitting in church pews
and doles out judgment far less often.
This is such wisdom paid for at quite a price,
but I want to open my bones to her
and pay her back,
come to her with eager ears
and a box to save her words in and show her how valuable they are.
And she thanks me for the food.
She walks out of the door without a goodbye,
going to visit her boyfriend in jail
and I feel as though I’ve been punched in the stomach,
still trying to catch my breath,
head whirling
without any words to form, for once.
I felt her absence instantly,
but as I looked around the room I was able
to find pieces of her presence to put in my pocket.
It has taken me three weeks to begin write about her,
some of the pieces I’m still holding close,
not ready to expose to the light of the sun,
afraid of dropping some of her beauty like dust
once I take them out.
She has felt the burden of race,
a beautiful mix of Korean and black,
felt home in neither
and home everywhere else.
She has lived all over the world,
saw the Berlin wall come down,
I can’t help but believe she had a hand in it
she’s so good at breaking down walls,
seeing the people on both sides.
What’s a wall of concrete and metal to her?
Graffiti and human ignorance all in one
and once it got started it fell so easily.
She chips away at walls with her words,
soft and burrowing,
finds the innermost bones that look just like hers
and pulls them to the surface
until, in her presence,
you are skeleton,
you are exposed,
you are as you are,
soft and human and gasping for air.
Vanessa can smile through all this wreckage,
she’s done it her whole life,
with her fingers in the rubble
and her eyes above.
Her laughter still trickles through my dreams at night,
I’ll probably be haunted by her for the rest of my life,
an alluring phantasm
burning down barriers
and calling me to do the same.
–Lindsay
Tree of Life Conference
A few weeks ago we attended/hosted a conference called the Tree of Life Conference which is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tree of Life is an interfaith group that fights for a more just and peaceful world, this conference has been traveling around the East Coast and we were honored to house our Palestinian visitors for a night and hear their stories. Before this conference I knew very little about the conflict, so here is a little background from the Tree of Life pamphlet:
1922: Ottoman Empire falls, British Mandate of the area of Palestine begins
1947: Britain withdraws from Palestine, leaving the situation for the UN to decide. UN partitions the territory into two independent states–Israel and Palestine
1948: Israel declares statehood, without declaring borders. First Arab-Israeli War
1967: Israel captures Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights.
1987: First Intifada, “Uprising”
2000: Second Intifada
2008: Gaza War
1967-2011: Israel builds “settlements” within the Palestinian territory, destroying Palestinian villages and farmland. These settlements and numerous checkpoints divide the territory even further. The UN condemns these settlements, declares them illegal.
2011: UN moves to halt settlement construction and expansion. Over 120 countries co-sponsor this resolution; 14 of the 15 voting countries on the Security Council support it. However, the US vetoes it.
Realistically all of this means that the Palestinians are not at home in their own country. Israel controls more than 83% of the water within Palestine so Palestinians have very strict restriction over their own water and they are forced to pay double what Israelis pay. Palestinians collect rainwater and have to decide between watering their gardens or having drinking water. Israel began building a wall in 2002 that will be 500 miles long when it is completed and cuts into Palestinian territory illegally. Palestinians who work in Jerusalem have to go through the wall daily to go to work and can face any kind of mistreatment from the guards at the wall. Families are separated, access to healthcare is restricted, farmers are separated from their olive groves, etc. One of the Palestinians visiting told us of her grandfather’s death in Jerusalem and the Israeli soldiers would not let her through the wall to go to his funeral for no reason. Another visitor had his ID taken so he is no longer legally a Palestinian and has to leave his own country every three months and get a new visa. The stories go on and on. Moreover, the United States pays $15 million a day to Israel to support the occupation.
We got to take the afternoon before the conference and have an open conversation with the visitors from Palestine. It was incredible to hear the struggles and their courage, “existence is resistance” they said, resistance is a lifestyle. Daoud, a farmer in Palestine, told me that the reason he travels and speaks about the conflict is in hopes that his children will see peace. He told me that he knows that he will go home to the same issues, maybe worse, but he is going to keep fighting for peace. He owns a farm called Tent of Nations just outside of Bethlehem and aims to build bridges between people and between people and the land. His farm is surrounded by Israeli settlers and has been attacked several times, his olive trees cut down in the middle of the night, and a road block has been placed at the entrance to his farm. However, through all this he fights for peace and says “We refuse to be victims, we refuse to hate, we live with our faith, we believe in justice, we refuse to be enemies”. This kind of life is amazing and unfathomable to me, I cannot imagine living in such turmoil and oppression.
What struck me the most was the way that I’ve heard this conflict spoken about in church settings. It is considered “patriotic” as well as “Christian” to support Israel, yet there is never any information actually discussed about what is happening. No one realizes that we are supporting horrendous human-rights violations and calling it ‘God’s will’. I realize that some people may be upset when reading this post, but I wonder if God would support Israel taking land that is not theirs and committing crimes against the inhabitants in the name of Zion. No matter your history, no one has a right to oppress others and steal their homeland. We need to be more aware of what we are supporting. I feel so blessed that i was able to be at Koinonia when this conference came and to learn about this issue and talk to people who are actually fighting it. I felt so encouraged and humbled merely being in their presence and hope that I can help them spread the word about what really is happening in Palestine.
Interested in learning more?
http://www.tentofnations.org
http://www.endtheoccupation.org
http://www.tolef.org
http://www.bdsmovement.net
http://www.arij.org
http://www.codepink.org
fotonna.org
Finally, enjoy this poignant piece of artwork by Banksy
–Lindsay
Queenie
I wrote this poem about a woman that occasionally comes to help cook at Koinonia.
Queenie is beautiful,
A carefully poured mixture –
Part womanhood, part God’s sacred magic,
Fully human,
Brought to a boil and never stopped simmering,
Spits fire from her full, burning lips.
Birds alight on her open shoulders
Trilling aloud the song of strength
Silently sleeping under a blanket of time and skin.
Confidence spreads through her hands
As she pours, mixes, rolls, and pats,
Kneading love and history into food meant for sharing.
Queenie is a cook,
Steeped richly in experience.
Used to run this kitchen
Before age and injury changed her status
To occasional visitor.
If you were to ask me how she cooks,
I’d call it generous.
“Baby, that need more butter! Ain’t got enough.”
Collects recipes and holds them gently
Like stories in danger of being lost.
Gives out instructions like a piece of her own heart,
“4 cups flour, 4 cups oats, 2 cups sugar. Plenty of butter.
Girl, let me watch you pour that cinnamon –
I’ll tell you when it’s good.
Mix it up now with your hands. Alright then.”
She knows ingredients better than I know myself;
My hollow cheeks are not ready
For that kind of knowledge to fill them.
Queenie and I are both trying to feed people –
She nourishes hungry mouths
In a way I can only hope to do with words,
Serves up wisdom and hot meals to empty stomachs
And leaves them happy.
I still do not know how to accept this kind of love;
I do not think I’ll ever learn to.
Screams tossing and turning inside of my restless body
Beg my mouth to steer clear
Of anything that feels too heavy –
My fears and habits already weigh me down
Far more than is wanted;
I do not need anything extra.
With food, I want what’s clean and safe,
Untainted by added calories,
Consistency and control in the midst of chaos,
Security and command over something.
I am aware that this sounds unhealthy.
If you ever happen to meet a 23-year-old woman
Whose body image wasn’t drowned
In the adolescent flood of stick figures
Walking across TV screens
And down supermarket checkout lines,
Send her my way.
I will look her over fearfully,
One hand in love and one in curious envy,
Seeing if I can recover my self-confidence
Somewhere along her poised spine and beautifully bending kneecaps.
No, home-cooked food is not my love language,
Nor is it how I feel loved,
But I am thankful that the world has Queenie.
She gives me hope
That we can show people how much we care
Simply through being and doing what we are.
Queenie is beautiful,
A carefully poured mixture –
Part womanhood, part God’s sacred magic,
Fully human,
Brought to a boil and never stopped simmering,
Spits fire from her full, burning lips.
Asked me the other day
If I was going to forget her when I left here.
I’ll be damned if that woman ever leaves my mind.
She knows how to feed people –
I mean really feed them.
Food is only a small part of what we have to partake in to grow,
And Queenie knows that.
Food is common ground – relationships come from it.
I too have been fed by Queenie;
Listening to her talk, hoping to know her,
Tucking away her stories – the recipe for her soul –
To read over again when I leave here and need reminders.
She speaks and works in languages I cannot understand completely,
So I listen, quiet and close.
Words have never made me feel so full.
–Lauren
Learning from the Mockingbird
As just a little context for this poem, ever since I got here I’ve been noticing mockingbirds everywhere. It seemed like every time I was outside or even near a window, one or two would come a land on a branch just in the perfect spot to catch my eye. I decided that this was something I shouldn’t ignore so I looked up what mockingbirds mean and found this: overcoming fear, finding your own voice, “they teach us to develop self-confidence, to speak our truth and stand up for what is ours by right.” All of these things have been emphasized in my life over the past year and especially this summer. I don’t believe in coincidences, I think if you pay attention to what is around you then whatever you need to learn will show itself to you. So, I wrote this poem after mulling all this over for a few weeks:
Learning From the Mockingbird
My grandfather learned how to fly here,
training for a war he had nothing to do with,
encasing himself in machinery
to view the patchwork land as a moving target.
He landed his last plane on his 21st birthday and never looked back.
I, too, am learning,
but I doubt I’ll ever go 10,000 feet up.
I’m learning how to dance in the winds of this world
not glide above them.
My teacher is a mockingbird,
not even aware of my eager eyes
hungry for her wisdom.
Hungry for her knowledge of herself,
for her fearless pursuit of new calls to learn,
for her playful attitude.
She will help me to find these traits in myself
and my tiny hops
will become graceful flights.
For now I must settle for being grounded,
feeling the earth hold me as it’s own
and dancing joyfully with the mockingbird
from below.
I am learning to love my limits,
how they tie me to the earth I have come to adore
and teach me how to move with fluidity
along the ground.
I’m learning to grow in and grow down
from a creature who is constantly soaring.
But maybe this is in my veins,
the exhilaration of my grandfather’s first flight
seeped into his blood
and was passed down to me.
My grandfather learned how to fly here,
how to defy the laws of gravity
how to kick the red soil away without regret
and soar through the air free of all chains.
I am learning how to kick away soil
but I still keep some for myself.
–Lindsay
We’re in the Nuthouse Now
Pecan harvest has officially begun–actually, it started about two weeks ago, but we’ve been so busy harvesting that I haven’t gotten to write a blog post since it started. So, for those of you who don’t know, harvesting pecans is incredibly involved and kind of hilarious. I had never seen anyone harvest pecans before two weeks ago, and it blew my mind the first time I saw it. You take a big machine called a shaker and literally grab the trunk of the tree and shake it until all the nuts fall off. Then we take a sweeper and sweep all the nuts to the middle of the row and then the harvester sucks them all up. Then after that we have to go through and pick up the pecans that the harvester left behind. If you want to see a video of a tree getting shaken here it is: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151925971335053&set=vb.80716350052&type=2&theater T
I worked in Plant 1 all last week, which is the first place the pecans go after they leave the orchard. We pull them out of the wagons, pick the big sticks out, and then they go through the de-sticker, onto a conveyor belt where we pick out the bad pecans with cracks or holes or that still have the hull on, finally they go through the sizer. As monotonous as this job can be, I’ve actually enjoyed it quite a bit. We have to wear earplugs because the machinery is so loud, and so I just sang songs and jammed out while I picked nuts out. It goes pretty quick, but after a few hours of standing at a conveyor belt it makes the world feel like everything is moving and you can’t stand still.
This week I’ll be working in sorting a lot, which is where the pecans go after they’ve been cracked. We’re picking through the pecan haves to separate the halves, pieces, and ambers (darker in color). This is really where everyone goes a little nutty, it’s incredibly tedious, but luckily I’ll be in good company. Fortunately there isn’t much machinery in the sorting room so we can talk and listen to music to pass the time.
One of the aspects of Koinonia that I have really come to appreciate is the attitude toward work. Everyone has to work, but it is used as a time to get to know each other, to fellowship, to have fun. We work to be together and to support ourselves. Work is no longer thought of as a means to an end, a way to get money so that it can be spent, but instead a way to be productive and to further form the bonds of community. Sure, things get tense every once in a while, people get annoyed, things go wrong, but that’s just life. There was one day last week where every piece of machinery in Plant 1 broke at one point and it got incredibly frustrating, but the fact that we were together figuring out what to do allowed us to not get completely overwhelmed by frustration. I want to emphasize the fact that I am not trying to idealize or romanticize life here, I am not naive to struggles and hardships. However, it seems like those issues, which would have gotten to me a lot in the past, seem less heavy in a community. Here I can seek out what I need, be it solitude or companionship, singing or laughter, bonfires or reading out loud. We have already, in this short amount of time, come together and begun to carry each others burdens and to walk on this sometimes difficult journey together. Harvest season has been busy and full of high tensions and mishaps, but it has given me a chance to work with a lot of people who I hadn’t gotten to yet, we are often in large groups as we work. We even had a community dance party a few days ago with homemade disco balls and goofy costumes. We’re a crazy group, but I’ve fallen quickly in love with it.
–Lindsay
Breathe
Since I’ve been at Koinonia, I have been (very slowly and not too diligently) reading through Peace is Every Step by the Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh. While I have found the book to be both refreshing and inspiring, I have not been able to come to terms with the idea of mindfulness and of living in the present moment, focusing on your breath, etc. For me, this notion of living in the present has been associated with ignoring past issues instead of dealing with them and not taking responsibility for what will happen in your future. I have been wrestling with the concept because I know that is not the insight and wisdom that is to be gleaned from this practice. So tonight, I was outside swinging on the playground in front of our apartment. For some reason, I decided to try and focus on taking deep breaths – mainly to get some fresh air into my lungs. I started by simply inhaling while swinging forward and exhaling while swinging backward. Without exaggeration, I felt an instant sense of calm fall over me. As I cleared my mind, I began to marvel at the trees, to cherish the cool air, and to stare with awe at the beautiful sunset. I realized suddenly that this is all it means – to live in the present. It is a practice of taking a break from the thoughts that fill your mind constantly and just being. There is holiness in the ability to truly delight in the beauty surrounding you and the beauty of your own existence. I spend an incredible amount of time stuck deep in my own thoughts to the point where it is often maddening; I am sure I’m not the only person who harbors this sentiment. It is good to take time away from the overwhelming activity of my mind and simply breathe. Thinking further along these lines, I believe that this is why children live such carefree lives. It is not that they do not worry or get upset about things that happen, just that they are engaged in the present moment of their lives. If they are playing on a swing, then all they are doing is playing on a swing. They also find ease in imagining they are completely something else, which is a sort of art that becomes lost in adulthood. I imagine it is good for our minds to, on occasion, take a break from the reality of who we are and take solace elsewhere. Like everything, this too should be worked in balance – we can lose ourselves in both reality and imagination, but a combination of the two might prove to be refreshing and even healing. Maybe this idea of living in the present is also why we find things like holidays and vacations/trips to be so “magical” – we find so much joy in these moments that we want to live completely immersed in them, giving our attention to them as fully as possible. But what if we treated every moment like that? What if every mundane and fantastic piece of our lives was viewed as equally deserving of our mind and attention simply because it was a part of our experience as human beings? This is all just my recent stream of consciousness, so I haven’t worked out my thoughts on the matter completely, but I think there’s something to it nonetheless.
-Lauren
The Grand Farmventure 