With ‘Cult’ as an overarching term for human relationship with the divine, and ‘Culture’ as a shorthand for our collective social world and relationships between humans, we now turn to ‘Cultivation.’ Cultivation is a shorthand for our relationship with the natural world. It refers to the cultivation of love and intimacy with the rest of creation, the art of growing one’s own food, fuel, and other basic needs from the earth, and the practice of supporting the flourishing of all living beings in one’s local area.
Cultivation is an essential part of a whole human life. It is the descending, earthy, embodied movement that complements and balances the ascending, heavenward, expansive movement of a vibrant spiritual life. Many classical modes of spirituality, Christian and otherwise, have described the goal of the spiritual life as an ascent to heaven, union with God, enlightenment, or some similar movement from the physical into the realm of spirit, eternity, and bliss.[1]In my twenties, I had a single-hearted goal to seek God in this way of transcendence. In that season of life, I would pray for hours each day, fast, keep a vegan diet, and spend days and even weeks in solitary retreat. One day, while living at a hermitage during a year-long retreat, I woke up to a feeling of immense sorrow. My heart broke open with a deep sadness that I didn’t know or have a real understanding of any of the plants, trees, animals, or insects around me. I felt, with acute pain, that I was a stranger on this earth. I knew that day that if I was going to live a full human life, I would need to be of earth as well as of spirit. Looking back, that was the day I began my conscious journey of cultivation.
The most basic and essential aspect of cultivation is an interest and curiosity in the wider community of life. To be in conscious relationship with the natural world requires time, love, and attention, just like the cultivation of any human friendship. Some are drawn into this love relationship with a particular part of the landscape and develop a highly attuned awareness to this aspect of the natural world. Birders who can differentiate hundreds of birdsongs by ear. Wild mushroom harvesters who can identify a hundred species as easily as most of us can tell an apple and a tomato apart. River guides who know every rock in a stretch of river—at dozens of different water levels. The reward of cultivating this kind of intimacy with nature is a profound sense of belonging, of being a part of the marvelous unfolding mystery of life. It leads to a sense of participatory relationship with other living beings and a gradual de-objectification of the natural world.[2]The profound kinship with other living beings that is common among both indigenous cultures and Christian saints like St. Francis of Assisi can be recovered by any person, with a combination of humility, openness, love and committed study and exploration.
A second aspect of ‘cultivation’ is the art of providing one's basic needs from the land. Being cut off from this aspect of cultivation is one of the great poverties of modern life. I believe it’s one of the reasons so many of us feel a sense of alienation from ourselves. Every human alive today has a deep ancestral lineage of hunter-gatherers and the vast majority of us have deep family roots in farming, as well. As recently as 1900, 40% of all Americans worked in agriculture. Today, the percentage is around 2%. While the modern food system has become incredibly efficient at having a few people (with the aid of very expensive machines and chemical inputs) produce an abundance of calories, it has led to a dislocation of the great majority of people from the land.[3]We no longer caretake land or depend upon it directly for our nourishment and well-being. Even if we enthusiastically recreate on land, we do not directly experience our dependence on the land as our ancestors once did. We do still need the land to eat and be clothed and sheltered, but the direct feedback loop has been cut off by supermarkets and other intermediaries. Without this conscious dependence, we do not truly know the land and in its place we depend on money and the industrial economy (and the products of industrial agriculture) to survive. Undoubtedly this impoverishes us, but it also impoverishes the land. It is impossible for a farmer to tend to land with the same level of care and nuance when managing a thousand acres with machinery and chemicals instead of ten with draft animals and manure.[4]
Any step towards participating in the production of our basic needs reconnects us to the cycles of life and the reality of our needs as embodied creatures. Gardening, even in a few pots on a windowsill, is an accessible way to reconnect to the cycle of life and rediscover our capacity to nurture and support life. Hunting, fishing, wild food harvesting, cutting and heating with wood (even just at a backyard firepit in the summer) are all simple ways to participate consciously in the great cycles of living and dying that are occurring everywhere in creation. Any engagement with growing, harvesting or making food, fuel, shelter and clothing can reconnect us to life, empower us, and bear the seeds of cultural renewal.
Finally, ‘cultivation’ also refers to supporting the flourishing of all life. When human beings are consciously committed to the well-being of land, we can live in such a way that not only minimizes harm but enhances the vitality of both human and non-human life. This conscious land-care can be expressed physically, as seen in systems of permaculture and restorative agriculture that build topsoil faster than land left fallow. It can also be expressed spiritually, in blessing land and walking land with reverence while remaining attentive to the needs and longings of all its species. We can manage land in a way that species diversity increases more with human presence than without, so that land with human care is even more abundant and fertile than pristine wilderness.[5]This is the heart of mature cultivation – to live in such a way that our presence on the land is a blessing to all life. According to Genesis 2, this was the very reason human beings were put on the earth in the first place, to cultivate the flourishing of the rest of the Garden of Eden. When our hearts are re-aligned with divine love, and our culture is developed in harmony with both heaven and earth, we can again return to this vocation as joyful servants of all life.
[1] Or, stated in the negative, as the cessation of all suffering, freedom from the cycles of rebirth, or being saved from hell or damnation.
[2] For most of us this will be a process of unlearning as our industrial society primarily treats the non-human creation as resources to be used/exploited for human use.
[3] While huge numbers of white farmers lost access to land in the 20th century consolidation of American agriculture, the effects on Black farmers was even more severe. In 1900, 11.6% of the US population was black, yet Black farmers owned 15 million acres (14% of the total US farmland under cultivation). https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/losing-ground/ Today, Black farmers own less than 4 million acres, and make up less than 1% of US farm families. In our era, agriculture and rural agrarian life is stereotypically seen as a white cultural activity – despite the rich and profound legacy of Black farming in the 19th and early 20th centuries (as well as the incalculable quantities of enslaved black labor –and agricultural knowledge- that was the basis of southern plantation agriculture before the US civil war).
[4]There’s no shame in being cut off from land – for most of us living in industrial society, powerful economic forces in the capitalist system forced our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents off of land and into the urban (and later, suburban) worlds of commerce. For most, this move was made out of harsh necessity rather than free choice. Most of us have inherited this disconnect with even less of a conscious choice – we are children of the dispossessed.
[5]According to Charles Mann (author of 1491) and others, much of the ‘wilderness’ of North American and the Amazon rainforest that European explorers encountered was the result of centuries of active cultivation by indigenous populations.
This post is part of the ongoing series:
- Cult, Culture, Cultivation and Conversation -
Imagining a vital human community
Peter Maurin, who started the Catholic Worker movement along with Dorothy Day, spoke of renewing society through the practice of ‘cult, culture and cultivation.’ Writing and speaking in the early 20th century, Maurin saw Western society in precipitous decline and envisioned a wholistic, spirit-centered restoration of vital human community. In our Metanoia reflections, we are adopting Maurin’s template, while adding a fourth ‘c’ of ‘conversation’.
- Cult -
Reflections on spiritual practice and growth, both communal (ritual, liturgy) and personal (spiritual discipline)
- Culture -
Exploration of human culture, renewed by spiritual insight and just relationships between people and with the land
- Cultivation -
The work of building fertility and abundance in land and discovering ways to live in healthy interdependence with the natural world
- Conversation -
Spiritual dialogue with pressing social and cultural issues and dialogue with other thinkers and perspectives beyond our vision at Metanoia.