Diggin' the dirt!!!

FRB is basic in so many ways.  We each depend on the dirt and the rain for our daily existence and yet we can easily forget it...

Several growing projects in Iowa recently gathered to fellowship and collected dirt from each community represented.  The dirt was combined together and then was taken back to each field as a reminder of our work together and our dependence on the basics. 

Please enjoy reading this wonderful excerpt from a correspondence Pastor Joan Fumetti sent earlier today.  Joan is FRB's field development manager in Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois.  Thank you Joan, Iowa GPs and Howard!!!

"We each went home with a bucket of this soil to return to our fields with its blessing and its reminder of our unity in the work we share. Arlyn Schipper, a farmer from the Conrad, Iowa A-maizing Grace Growing Project and FRB Board Member, also took a pail to our Annual Meeting in Ohio. One of the things we did there was honor Vernon and Carol Sloan, the first farmers to be involved in FRB. They received a number of lovely gifts commemorating their dedication over the years, but none so simple and to the point as this bucket of soil from Iowa growing projects.

Howard Royer, FRB board member from the Church of the Brethren, was moved by the gift and shares a quote from Wendell Berry about the exemplary nature of

topsoil:  It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition of aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future. [The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, Shoemaker & Hoard 2002]

Howard reflects: "Berry's recurring plea is that humankind recover a sense of the majesty of creation and be worshipful in its presence. Toward this end, isn't it intriguing that a bucket of dirt becomes something of an ultimate symbol?"

Comments

[Joy Kauffman]

Joan- Thanks for keeping us up-to-date and inspired!!
Marv- thanks for this blog, for all the great work of the conference, and for what you do every day. It is amazing to get to be part of God's work in this way. Thank you again!
Joy