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As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.
Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective — as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.
'Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic' — words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness — Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.
Show moreAs a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.
Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective — as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.
'Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic' — words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness — Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.
Show morePROLOGUE: A GOLDEN FLEDGED GROWTH
Chapter 1: INEXHAUSTABLE WAYS OF SEEING
Chapter 2: TONGUES IN TREES, BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS
Chapter 3: A CARE FOR WORDS
Chapter 4: IN THE SEASON OF GRAIN RAIN
Chapter 5: OLDER THAN THOUGHT
Chapter 6: CULTURA
Chapter 7: A STRONG SONG
Chapter 8: JUANA’S ORANGE, ELENA’S RED
Chapter 9: THE REMEMBERED EARTH
Chapter 10: GRAINS OF A GREAT WEB
Chapter 11: THE MOUNTING SAP
CHAPTER 12 FILTERES OF THE EARTH
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit. He is also the author of a memoir, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, and a book of non-fiction, Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades. A pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for thirty years he cultivated more than sixty crops for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of the original CSAs in the country. He is past president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York and was honoured as Farmer of the Year in 2013. He was a founding board member for both the Center for Whole Communities, in Vermont, and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, in Shelter Island, New York. He taught as a poet-in-the-schools for over two decades and as an instructor for Antioch International and Friends World College in Southampton. Chaskey lives and works on the east end of Long Island, New York.
Praise for Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of
Life “How to classify this collection of interconnected
essays by community-agriculture pioneer and poet Scott Chaskey?
Science and nature? Memoir? Poetry? Rhapsodic exhortation? Soil and
Spirit is all of those things. [. . .] Chaskey's ruminations and
celebrations are reminiscent of, and often pay tribute to, poets
and planters who have come before him [. . .] Like them, he
emphasizes connections and kinship, noting, for instance, that
recent studies of how plant life, especially trees, are linked by a
vast network of mycelium model the benefits that humans could reap
from closer connections with nature and with one another.”—Pamela
Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune"Scott Chaskey’s elegant and
spirited essay collection Soil and Spirit concerns the
interconnectedness of elements and life forms. Studded with
literary quotes, poetry, personal anecdotes, and scenes from a
well-traveled life, these essays consider how flora and fauna,
earth and sky, and rock and water are linked through different
ecosystems and cultural traditions [. . .] Soil and Spirit is a
sensuous and serious collection of nature writing, replete with
passages about the layered wonders of the natural world. It is also
unwavering in stressing the imperative of working to undo the
environmental damage that imperils all human beings."—Foreword
Reviews“Scott Chaskey embraces a deep respect for the land, the
plants and animals that depend on healthy soil, and the knowledge
of indigenous peoples. In his travels across borders, he finds
common ground by celebrating the farmers and peasants who work the
soil around the world. Chaskey’s personal understanding of laboring
the land is reflected in the book. In this collection of essays, he
recognizes the challenges that we face and counters them with an
abundance of knowledge. Many seek to repair the harm our species
has caused. His message is filled with love and hope, backed by a
lifetime of knowledge, and interspersed with a bit of poetry. Its
rich layers rival the first forkful of silt loam in Spring or a
relieving lungful of air in a forest. In just over 200 pages, this
is one of the most inspirational books that I have ever read.”—Todd
Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, WI “I love to watch
things grow, whether it be more own plantings, the gardens of
others, or the growing of things planted by Nature herself. For
those who feel like I do about green things (and other species as
well), there is a sadness these days that is creeping into our
deepest recesses—the turning of our climate, the destruction of the
land by all manner of abuses, and the mistreatment of our fellows
and other species. Scott Chaskey, leader in the Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) movement, brings us a message about growing
things, ongoing changes, survival and, most of all, community and
its power to unite us all in doing our best for our shared future.
He has spent much of his life working with growers of all kinds,
including indigenous peoples still utilizing the ‘old ways’ to
sustain their families. As a poet, he understands what it means to
feel with Nature. As a farmer, he knows what it means to partner
with the land in a sustainable way. These essays are beautiful,
thoughtful, and insightful. There really is hope, if we will simply
pay attention and take that important step, doing our part to
better the future. I urge everyone who cares to read this powerful,
encouraging book.”—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Book Shop, Spokane, WA“As
one of America’s greatest agrarian poets and essayists, Scott
Chaskey deserves recognition as a national treasure. He both
expands our horizons and deepens our contemplative capacities with
the astonishing connections he makes between soil, soul, and
sustenance in these challenging and eloquent essays. Soil and
Spirit will be read and reread for many years to come.”—Gary
Nabhan, author of Jesus for Farmers and Fishers: Justice for All
Those Marginalized by Our Food System“Soil and Spirit is truly
a feast. Scott Chaskey celebrates the emergence of beauty,
nourishment, and community from the earth. The vivid range of
narratives and voices here—from his adventures as a farmer in
Maine, Cornwall, and Long Island to the deep love of poetry the
author bears in his heart even when (or especially when) laboring
in the fields—makes this an exhilarating book. Readers of Suzanne
Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, Robin Wall
Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and James
Rebanks’s Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey will be
struck by the many levels on which Chaskey enters into dialogue
with those fine achievements.”—John Elder, author of The Frog
Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods
“So much is happening under my nose, but I missed some of the
essence until Scott came along. Following his teaching, instead of
a villa with pool and tennis court, I, too, started a farm. Scott
is a teacher, a mentor, a guide. He made me understand Nature
through the irreplaceable wisdom of agriculture that humans have
practiced for thousands of years, shaping our civilization. This
book is on one level a guide to farming, and a spiritual guide to
the deep emotions Nature raises in us all.”—Isabella Rossellini,
author and award-winning actress“Soil and Spirit stands as a
beautiful meditation on the endless richness of the Earth’s rocks,
fungi, herbs, vegetables, fruits, and trees, and our place among
them as expressed in word and deed. In this hopeful and heartfelt
book, seedsman, poet, and world traveler Scott Chaskey brings a
lifetime of experience to his wide-ranging exploration of our human
relationship with the natural world and the many possibilities our
engagement with it offers.”— Jane Brox, author of Silence
Praise for This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm“Packed
with knowledge that often runs counter to conventional wisdom, as
well as insights into the subtler and more difficult arts, like
protecting land from the pressure to develop, or fostering an
awareness that soil holds the key to plant health. An elegy to the
land and to the creatures who inhabit it, this book is also a
gardener’s bible.”—New York Times“The decades spent reading and
listening widely, the time spent with plow and pen, make this book
much more than simply an account of a year and a spring on one
organic farm. Here Old World wisdom gleaned from one peninsula
infuses experience on a New World shore. Here, too, the voices of
American pioneers from Walt Whitman to Aldo Leopold weave through
the argument like a trail through dewy grass. Chaskey’s book is so
well-rooted that one can almost shake the fine Amagansett silt from
its binding.”—Christian Science Monitor“The delight of [Chaskey’s]
writing is his balancing of the poetry of farm life with touches of
humor. He also effectively summarizes the ‘critical juncture’ at
which the organic farming movement finds itself as a result of
recent federal legislation governing organic foods. His book will
be a joy to read for lovers of organic farming.”—Publishers
Weekly“An almanac and handbook for the community organic gardener,
offering hard-earned practical lessons in counterpoint with fine
touches of insight, poetry, and the earthy lyricism of weather and
the seasons.”—Peter Mathiessen, author of Shadow Country“CSA
farmer, poet, and keeper of the land Chaskey, who here leads you
wonderingly through a year on his South Fork farm, is just whom you
would choose to grow your food: a soul who presses his cheek to the
clover to see the first emerging garlic shoots, who celebrates the
sight of monarch wings among the white blossoms of his buckwheat,
and who, most importantly perhaps, does not allow his love/hate
relationship with the temperamental tomato keep him from growing
forty-four varieties anyway—seduced by such memory-infused names as
Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. This Common Ground is for
eaters, growers, poets, and other wildlife.”—Joan Gussow, author of
This Organic Life“I celebrate the coming of seasons and the
universal language of harvests with Chaskey. He brings new life to
the common ground we share.”—David Mas Masumoto, author of Epitaph
for a Peach and Letters to the Valley“Chaskey understands that
stewardship is born of both necessity and imagination; that
cultivation and wilderness, family and community, are intertwined.
This Common Ground—beautifully written, and steeped in the practice
of poetry and farming—is a rich and generous accounting of what it
means to work the land.”—Jane Brox, author of Clearing Land“One
glory of Chaskey’s important book, framed as a good humored,
discursive amble through a year on the farm, is how he opens our
eyes. . . . The greatest joy of this book is its levelheaded,
wholehearted optimism. . . . All of this takes us deeply into the
mysteries and responsibilities of place. . . . Readers everywhere
will be led by this book to see the world around them with fresh
eyes.”—East Hampton StarPraise for Seedtime: On the History,
Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds“An ode to the seed from a
farmer who is as gifted in the field as he is on paper.”—Anna
Lappé, author of Diet For a Hot Planet“Land is for Chaskey soil and
metaphor, a living thing, a livelihood—an idea. His land—the land
beneath us all—is a lens on the largest questions. How ought we act
in the world; who do we wish to be? Rarely have we been gifted a
working farmer who so firmly clenches in his root system the roles
of poet, historian, scholar, and philosopher. The yield here is
extraordinary.”—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words“Reading these
wise and pungent essays, I could imagine sitting by the wood stove
with the author as he shared the lessons of a life amid the turning
seasons. [...] He’s ripened through the wind and rain. Like all
those mysterious Irish tunes moving to a dancing rhythm. Dialogue
and discovery are also central to Chaskey’s essays in this
collection. Perceptions and memories are alike in being seeds and
Seedtime is a degree of awareness, perpetually available when we
can return to what David Steindl-Rast calls the posture of
gratefulness.”—John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home
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