The Seed is in the Ground

Good morning, friends!

Those of you who have spent some time at The Nashville Food Project know there are a lot of moving parts to our programs. Navigating the year-over-year growth of our organization and the day-to-day operations takes both planning and improvisation. 

I was recently introduced to an internal food project document maintained by our indomitable meals team - The Meals Worksheet. This is a planning spreadsheet shared between six people with columns for rescued food coming in, menus going out, hiccups during volunteer meal prep, last minute ingredient switches, and the like. Here is a snapshot of what this document looks like in action:

Likewise, our garden team keeps a massive spreadsheet of plans for the various gardens we steward across the city, with columns for seed variety, greenhouse start dates for succession planting, row feet per crop, numbers related to yield, and more. Our garden team manages to this document with an impressive level of geeked-out detail. Here's a look:

These are just a couple of the tools we use daily to help us plan, communicate, and document the many changes that affect our work flow, our programming, and the good food going out into the community. 

When you're growing, cooking, and sharing food for and with the masses, it's essential to make plans. Of course, our growing edge is not learning how to plan better, it's how to let go of the plan when a Pyrex measuring cup shatters into the tomato sauce 20 minutes before meal service or a group of volunteers pulls the strawberry plants from a garden bed instead of pulling the weeds. It seems like life’s best lessons are usually learned when things don’t go as planned.

I'm in awe of our devoted staff who keep well-managed plans and yet stay flexible to the inevitable curve ball, whether it's a bushel of fresh quince to be incorporated into a meal or a hailstorm in March. This work reminds us that we can usher our plans only so far before we must let go of the reins. Or as the poet Wendell Berry, who is so-often quoted in my columns, reminds us: 

“The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope,
while darkness does its work.”

— Wendell Berry

Grace and peace, 

I am because we are.

This week, some of our staff had the privilege of hearing Duke Divinity School professor Norman Wirzba speak at Vanderbilt University Medical Center of the relationship between sustainable agriculture and human health. Wirzba reminded us of what we already know—that life only happens in relationship, that life is what happensbetween things, and that life does not exist within a single thing. He asked us questions, like “How can we nourish the contexts in which we live, so all life can flourish?” I left his talk reminded that if I want to work for a healthy person, I must work for a healthy world. 

At The Nashville Food Project, food is the tool we use to create change in Nashville. There are lots of people working in this food “space,” many with different goals. Our goals are to work for a healthy community—to awaken ourselves and others to the suffering within us and around us—by growing, cooking, and sharing food in ways that acknowledge what’s broken and celebrate what’s held in common. What happens here is community food, where choice is extended, high-quality meals are shared. Our work is cooperative, rooted in relationships. The nourishing food we grow, cook, and share supports the critical work being carried out by our partners who work daily to ease the enormous burdens of poverty and a broken world.

Community food is not convenient or tidy, but it is joyous. Our hope is that the meals we share and the gardens we grow celebrate abundance. We ask people to get involved with a spirit of deep hospitality—the kind of kindness that welcomes the “other" and invites them to move more fully into their own human potential. 

Some of you may be familiar with the South African word ubuntu, which has been translated to mean “I am because we are.” And this is what I am daily learning. Thank you for helping me.

Grace and peace, 

The Weight of a Snowflake

Happy New Year, all. I do hope yours is Happy, but I want to say that it feels like there is a deep feeling of despair among my circle of friends this winter. We all seem to be juggling work stress, caring for sick people we love, battling the often co-occurring illnesses of addiction and depression. We are stretching our resources of time, attention, patience, and money further than it seems they want to go, and then we turn on the news and listen to story after story about the violence, injustice, greed, scarcity and environmental degradation that plague our world. And all the bad news quickly paralyzes us into a dark fit of despair, and we decide our hands are tied; we can't do anything to alleviate the suffering of this world. 

I give thanks for a professor and mentor I had in seminary who encouraged me to let the world and its enormous problems in just enough to galvanize me to work towards their solutions. I used to think that big problems required big solutions. But in my almost seven years of doing this work at The Nashville Food Project, I have learned that answers cannot be imposed, they must come from within. I have learned that small work in a small place with small groups of people can have enormous impact on the health and well-being of an entire community. I have learned that solutions cannot be hurried, that hard questions need for patience, and that relationships and making common cause with others are the keys to making lasting change – no matter how big or small. 

Maybe some of you know this small story – someone told it to me when I was a teenager at church camp (talk about a small thing having a big impact), and it has honestly never left me. I hope you will take one minute of your day to read this winter tale, and find yourself encouraged. 

Grace and peace, 

Belonging to Others

I’m thinking about what it felt like to sit at the kitchen table of my childhood home. 

When we were young, my brother Roy invented a game that became so beloved in our family. Thinking on it now, I find myself in a fit of nostalgia; it’s the kind of happy memory I love to go back to. At dinnertime, my mom, dad, brother and I would be eating dinner at the kitchen table and at some point during the meal, Roy would announce he needed to use the bathroom and leave the table. But instead of going to the bathroom, he would quietly crawl back into the kitchen on the floor, slide under the table and kiss each one of us on the knee. And our mom would say, “Oh! It’s the kissing bug!” with a joy in her voice I can still hear. “He’s come to visit us again!” 

Sitting above the table and making eyes with my parents, I loved to be part of this world with my whole family. It invoked feelings of fullness that as an adult, I now associate with what it feels like to belong to a place or to a person or to a group of people. After the kissing bug made his last round of kisses, my brother would slide out in secret and walk back into the kitchen a moment later as if he’d just washed his hands in the bathroom sink. “Roy, you always miss the Kissing Bug!” our dad would say. “He seems to come every time you’re gone!” And Roy would climb into his chair at the kitchen table and try not to smile…

To make a place for this kind of loving pretending—what a gift this was to us children! As a parent of two young children now, I am reminded constantly of how important it is to climb into their world. In his essay “Health is Membership,” Wendell Berry wrote: 

“If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves, but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common.”

A sense of belonging to others… I’d count it as one of our most basic human needs. I was recently talking with Anne, our Meals Manager, after she attended the graduation at G.A.N.G., a gang-prevention program in North Nashville at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church—one of our cherished Meal Distribution Partners. Anne told me a little of the keynote speaker’s story – a former gang member whose mother and father had both been murdered on separate occasions, and with no one to call home, he found a life of dealing in drugs by the time he was in fifth grade, and he found his sense of belonging in a gang. By the grace of God and because of the devotion of a few key people in his life, he made it through violence and into the safe arms of a loving community.

Who among us is not longing to belong? As we say often at The Nashville Food Project, poverty isolates people and disintegrates relationships. And when we talk about one of poverty's chief symptoms, hunger—we know it’s not enough to grow, cook and share healthy food—we have to do all these things in ways that create, cultivate, protect and strengthen communities, because being with the people to whom we belong is the foundation of a whole and healthy life. 

The Nashville Food Project’s meals, garden, and volunteer programs have all been designed to be places of belonging. And to the ever-widening circle of friends that is The Nashville Food Project, I am grateful to belong. We already know that the table is a wonderful place to greet others, offer hospitality, give attention, share life, show love. As we enter into this holiday season, let’s promise each other to do the best we can to make a place for someone else at our kitchen tables and in our lives, spending some time getting to know others, spending some time letting ourselves be known. 

Grace and peace,

Healing is Impossible in Loneliness

TNFP's most outstanding volunteers at this year's Volunteer Appreciation Celebration

One of the things I love about The Nashville Food Project is that it’s a place people want to be. And in the true spirit of “project,” our work is active and evolving and involves many people. I am so grateful to you, our volunteers for participating this grand experiment—holding each other accountable on your trucks teams, leading your groups in the gardens, and making creative decisions during regular volunteering in the kitchen. Through all of this, we are learning to share life.

So many times over the last six and a half years, I’ve heard from our volunteers that they get more out of this work than the "people we serve.” And this is where the waters become muddied about The Nashville Food Project – who do we serve? We are for all people. And while we are serving one another, we understand not only more about the other, but more about ourselves as well.

In a commencement address called “Thoughts of a Free Thinker,” Kurt Vonnegut offered these words about community and sharing life:

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Yes. This world is too damn big for people to be lonely. And the undercurrents of pain and heartache we all carry with us disintegrate the relationships on which our entire lives are built. We received a Facebook comment this week, acknowledging The Nashville Food Project as an organization involved in “lifting up the human spirit, one person at a time.” Our hope is that the work we engage in together lifts lives, builds community, transforms pain, and heals the body, mind and spirit of everyone who chooses to be involved.

The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry reminds us in his essay "The Body and the Earth" that “healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness….” Being with you and doing the work of The Nashville Food Project has cured many lonely days over my last six plus years of being involved. And so for you and for this work, I am ever grateful.

Grace and peace,

PS: For those in a listening mood! Our staff enjoyed this interview with john a. powell on On Being with Krista Tippett. Powell is a faculty member at University of California at Berkeley and the author of Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Powell reminds us in this interview, “The human condition is one about belonging. We simply cannot thrive unless we are in relationship… If you’re isolated, the negative health condition is worse than smoking, obesity, high blood pressure – just being isolated. So we need to be in relationship.” Hope you’ll have a listen!