You may have seen the recent story out of Ireland that a 200-year-old faerie tree was being cut down to make way for migrant housing. It was all over X, but I could find almost nothing online (outside of a local Irish newspaper) about it through mainstream sources. I suppose that is to be suspected. We live in a culture characterized by a media that places utility and expediency over the sacred. As one poster phrased it, “When the fairy tree is felled, there will be famine again in Ireland.” Truly, it made me heartsick. Not to wax maudlin, but the destruction of this tree occurred on July 2nd, what would have been my maternal grandfather, Michael Patrick Conlon’s one-hundred and fourteenth birthday. He was the first one to ever tell me about the faeries. Modernity sucks.
The idea of famine here mentioned is an important one. We are regularly threatened with scarcity and famine—usually by those tacitly encouraging the latter by spreading panic about “overpopulation” (I’m looking at you, John Kerry, Jane Goodall, and, alas, fellow biodynamic farmer King Charles). These are the same ilk of sociopaths who have been trying (and succeeding to some degree) to shut down farmers in the cause of “Build Back Better.” They promulgate the Gospel of Scarcity, not only of food, but of other resources—oil, energy, jobs—while waging a forever war against fertility of every kind, but mostly human fertility. In fact, they treat fertility as if it were a disease. This is madness. This is madness because nature is superabundant.
I know this from experience.
I also have nine kids.
Here on my tiny biodynamic farm of ten acres, we have about an acre under garden cultivation. That small space creates A LOT of food. We practice what used to be called “The French Intensive Method” and many people would be stunned to see what can be accomplished in so small a space. It is far, far more than we could ever eat, so we have small CSA that serves between 20 and 40 families in a given year, providing them with fresh vegetables from June to October. We also have about 2 ½ acres of pasture. At the moment we have four lambs (we’ve raised milk cows and dairy goats in the past), but this meager pasturage could accommodate many more, at least ten times as many. We have a little less than an acre surrounding the house, where we have a small, beginning orchard and vineyard, augmented with gooseberries, flowers, and herbs. And this doesn’t even take into account our poultry or beehives, let alone the patch of blackberries near our woods or the various wild raspberries, blueberries, and huckleberries so prolific I have to pull them out upon occasion. And then there are the mushrooms—ceps, corals, chicken-of-the-woods (really tastes like chicken), morels, oysters, turkey-tails, etc.—that proliferate all over the place. And I won’t even mention the wild game—the deer, turkey, rabbits, and so forth so numerous as to sometime become nuisances—nor the predators—the owls, hawks, snakes, raccoons, opossum, skunks, and coyotes with which we share this space. And I don’t have the time to tell about the songbirds—including the wren who keeps trying to build her nest on a shelf in our pump-house or the hummingbirds who have a nest in the concord grapes growing on the remnants of the old windmill well-pump. I also can’t get into too much detail about the pond at the bottom of the hill that is home to legions of frogs, turtles, water snakes, and pan fish. The point is that there is so much life here that you start to realize that the narrative of scarcity with which we’ve been barraged over decades and decades is completely counter to reality. The words of Christ are held up by reality: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Anyone that tells you differently is a liar and a thief.
I know what you might be thinking: If things are so abundant, why do people starve? That, my friends, is precisely the question. My answer is simple: society is structured by systems of control that benefit from the narrative of scarcity and from pushing people to the margins of life. This is exactly what happened in Ireland, then under British rule, in the days of the Potato Famine (known to the Irish as “The Great Hunger”). Potatoes were not the only crop grown on Irish land, but they were the staple of the poor—and 80% of the population were poor and Catholic—so their Protestant landlords (and the British government) let them starve. Good Christians all. As Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote, it an “indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation.” It is one of the oldest totalitarian tricks in the book, from Enclosure to the War on Farmers now being waged all across the West. Yes, the Archons have no problem in starving to death a population of millions. History proves it. Over and over.
I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot lately, particularly because our garden is having a more-prolific-than-usual year. Part of that is no doubt due to the fact that we have been farming biodynamically at this location for eight years and that the real payoff in applying biodynamic methods can be seen after the seventh year. It is also probably attributable to the experiments in electro-culture I started last year and expanded this year. (You can read about electro-culture here.) Electro-culture, by the way, has some affinity to cloudbusting, which can be used to return fertility to farmland (and eradicate chemtrails). I started experimenting with cloudbusting out of desperation about seven years ago (I’ve mentioned it before), and last year I raised an electro-culture pole near my pattypan squash—which exploded with fertility. So this year I put up a few more. Zero insects, incredible fertility. Superabundance.
This notion of superabundance appears over and over in the stories of St. Brigid, the great Irish saint (and patron of our house church). Story after story of Brigid associates her with abundance and fertility, no less than tale of her mysterious transportation back in time to serve as midwife at the birth of Christ. I also love the story about when she was asked to prove her virginity by placing her hand on an altar, the wood of the holy table returned to its greenness. As Seán Ó Duinn, OSB, writes in his wonderful The Rites of Brigid: Goddess and Saint, “Many features of the life of Brigid are more easily explainable if she is seen within a milieu alive with activity involving agriculture, economics, sports, local kingship, archaic religion, a newly-introduced religion, ecclesiastical organisation, herbal medicine, international trading, artistic work. Into this complex and pulsing area, the saint sought to introduce the unifying spirit of Christianity.”
My God, it would be nice to find such another spirit of Christianity in these dark times.
And I simply cannot move on without sharing this delightful poem attributed to Brigid:
I should like a great lake of ale For the King of Kings; I should like the family of heaven To be drinking it through time eternal. I should like cheerfulness To be in their drinking; I should like Jesus Too, to be there (among them) I should like the three Marys of illustrious renown; I should like the people Of heaven there from all parts.
And so should I.
The point here, of course, is that fertility is as much a spiritual property as it is a biological one. Perhaps even more.
Farming is, in the main, no longer understood as an activity in which, in addition to the world of the living, one interacts with the world of the spirit. In the West, this is no doubt a legacy of the Protestant Reformation, the history of, as my patron saint H.J. Masssingham explains it, is characterized by an ethos in which “the hatred of nature coincided with the thoroughly worldly preoccupation with economic power.” These were the same “Christians” who tore down the Maypoles, banned games and drinking on Sundays, and outlawed Christmas. What a bunch of party-poopers! In short, they were the inspirers of the Archons who even today wish to reduce human flourishing to a bleak landscape of utilitarianism and obedience. And that isn’t human flourishing at all.
Human flourishing does not appear in a secular milieu. It appears only when the view of nature, Creation, stands in symbiosis with a view of the spiritual worlds (and beings) who surround us awaiting acknowledgment. In that, it is a very pagan sensibility—but one that is simultaneously Christian in a very real sense (but one that would be lost on the architects of Reformation). Again from Massingham:
“The conservation of the land by rendering it back to what its fruitfulness yields in the endless circulation of organic and vegetable residues is as much an axiom of any community of peasants and yeomen (the aristocracy of the peasantry) as it is the law of nature’s own fertility. The peasant’s relation to the land is symbiotic by nature and so the reverse of predatory. Lastly, peasant society is invariably religious, whether Pagan or Christian, and so tenaciously religious that a new religion is hard put to replace the pagan substratum.”
Nevertheless, there are still those of us in our day (as Massingham was in his) who understand the cosmos in a more realistic manner—a manner in which the farmer interacts with world of the spirit and its denizens every but as much as with the soil, the plants, and the animals under his charge. And, what’s more, I think almost everyone has an intuition—even if buried deep inside—that this is not only the way things should be, but, truthfully, the way things are. As Massingham wrote, “The way to the restoration of the West is not, therefore, a yet more elaborate mechanism to kill it. It is an alternative to it and the dual one of the Christian and organic life is the only one there is.” Clearly, we have seen how the Archons and architects of the West have been devising mechanism upon mechanism for destroying the West they inhabit, parasites that they are. Their worldview is not only outdated, it’s pathological. And it can only result in death. But we choose life, and choose it more abundantly.
In closing, I want to share a recent disclosure on my farm. I love hawthorn trees, but we only had one here, overgrown with Virginia creeper and over-canopied by black walnuts. It was a very sorry specimen, but I’ve been trying to nurse it back to health. But earlier this Spring my wife had our two youngest boys, aged 13 and 15, clear some brush so she could plant strawberries. As they were clearing, they opened up a pair of young hawthorns. I told the boys to leaven them alone. I turned the larger of the two into our own faerie tree, where I hang ribbons to accompany my prayers, and added some holy images, a rosary, and a medal of the Virgin. It’s an ongoing project, much as life is. Because sometimes you need to affirm holiness of the land, and not just talk about it.
As I mentioned before, I will be speaking (and probably playing the guitar/singing) at the Estuary Northwest Conference: Encountering Face to Face. The only bad part is that, if you attend, you have to see my face. But I play a really mean guitar.
Since I mentioned cloudbusting, I just couldn’t resist…
Where did you start with biodynamic farming? I'm very inspired by your writing on it and the little I know of Alan Chadwick -- interestingly enough, one of his last garden projects was right around New Market in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, not 20 minutes from where I live!
Beautiful article. Feeling this on a smaller scale with my little herb garden which produces endless mint and spring onions.