The Way Out Is In / Happy Farmers Change the World (Episode #69)

00:00:00

Dear friends, welcome to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In.

00:00:22

I am Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems evolution. And there’s a pause now because Brother Phap Huu is not here, he’s traveling. But the show must go on. So we have a special episode this week on land regeneration, on happy farming, on reconnecting deeply to nature.

00:00:49

The way out is in.

00:01:03

Hhello everyone, I am Jo Confino. And today we have two special guests. We have Mick McEvoy and Sister Lam Hy. And they are both deeply involved in both Upper Hamlet, which is where the monks residence is, and also Lower Hamlet, which is one of the two nunneries in Plum Village. And we are going to be talking with them today about the art of land regeneration, about farming, and about how do we reconnect with the land. And we know that this is a conversation that is very, very strong at the moment in society about this idea that we’ve been disconnected from Mother Earth and that actually, if we’re going to change the way we live and to avoid even greater climate disasters, that actually we need to reconnect with Mother Earth and treat her with the respect that she deserves. So, Mick, let’s start with you. Can you just introduce us, tell us a bit about yourself, and then we’ll go to you, sister. And then we will dive into this whole topic.

00:02:11

Sure. Thank you, Jo. So nice to be with you and Sister Lam Hy, my bestie. My name is Mick McEvoy. I come from Ireland originally and I live here in Plum Village, in Upper Hamlet. And sometimes I introduce myself as half farmer, half monk. And so I have the good fortune to weave my livelihood into these themes that you just introduced, Jo, the The Happy Farm project, both Sister Lam Hy and I have been involved in for many years now. This is a project of agro ecology, so food production but also care for the earth. And we have farms in Upper Hamlet and in Lower Hamlet. And at the center of those projects is not just food production, but it’s the care for all of the human beings that come to be with us, whether that’s for a day, a week, a season, or a year. Centered also is the… in terms of concentric circles rippling out from the heart of everything, because Plum Villages is… the reason that exists is for the creation of well-being and healing and transformation. Or as Thay uses is the care and the restoration, the rejuvenation, regeneration of the land. So it’s yeah, it’s a pleasure and a challenge to live and be part of this beautiful and dynamic and functioning and dysfunctioning community. And the farm is just a little cell in the body of the community of Plum Village and wider to that’s also we have the good fortune to be shepherding and caring for and observing and learning from 20 hectares of land, all the arable agricultural land that sits close to the farm in Upper Hamlet that is rewilding. And what makes these little projects a bit different, I suppose, is that the Dharma and the Zen is weaved through everything. So tomorrow we will begin a new retreat with 40 guests and ten volunteers, and will be out on these lands and the farm and on these rewilding lands. So it’s, yeah, at the center of everything is the Zen of rewilding, the Zen of food production, community life and and this potential healing, regeneration for ourselves and for the land.

00:04:31

Great. Thank you, Mick. Now, I think you once were thinking about being a monk and then pulled back at the last minute. Congratulations. And, sister, I think you’re full sister. So, tell us a little bit about your journey here.

00:04:46

Yeah. Hi! Very nice to be here with you. Yeah, my name is Sister Lam Hy, which also means Forest of Joy. And actually, when I came here and also lived here, I’ve never thought I would ordain. So this came a lot later. And I came here about ten years ago for a longer time, and, yeah, I just took a time out from my job and was looking for what to do, I want to do with my life. And I stayed a little bit longer. And I also heard about the Happy Farm project, on this brother site. And the longer I stayed and also I had a little bit experience in gardening, and then I thought, wow, this would be so cool to live with the practice here and to do, to start a Happy Farm in Lower Hamlet. So this is what I did then in 2016, I asked the community if they would be interested, and I co-started it with a friend together and I… Yeah, we facilitated the farm. I did it for two years here. And after this, I also went back to Germany. And we had a community supported agriculture there. But still, I was thinking, I’m kind of one project after the other, I kind of… If I really want to live with the practice, then why don’t I ordain? And so I came back and I ordained two years ago, but I’m still, I feel this is my passion, this gardening and the Dharma. And yeah, that’s what I experience, I find it so empowering if people learn to garden and to grow their own food, for myself. But also when I see this in the team, so, yeah, this gives me also a lot of hope for the world.

00:06:28

Great. Thank you both. So I want to start off by bringing the depth of Zen teachings into this because Thich Nhat Hanh always said that the Diamond Sutra, which is one of the ancient teachings, was the first written treatise on deep ecology. And also Thich Nhat Hanh himself was a deep environmentalist. He was working in the field of environment and climate change long before many of us were born. And so maybe to start with you, what is Zen philosophies, Zen knowledge got to teach us? Tell us a bit about what is the Diamond Sutra and how does it relate to deep ecology? What does it tell us that gives us a grounding for this conversation?

00:07:20

Yeah, it’s so applicable. I think it’s something that’s so old, but it’s so contemporary. And this, this age of people are using the term the polycrisis or the emergencies. So those are obvious and maybe less obvious, but in terms of climate collapse and emergency or ecological nature, biodiversity emergency. And Thay also talks about, and many other elders and wise people across the traditions, about a social emergency as a human species. We have challenges around social justice and racial justice, so this polycrisis that we’re all facing different in different ways. And the Diamond Sutra, they talk about the diamond that cuts through illusion. And these four notions that we can explore to basically uproot the notion of a separate self. And for me, I find that just when I step out, I’m lucky. I have parents as a young person, young child, that took me for walks in the countryside in Ireland where I grew up, and a mother who loved gardening. And, you know, we lived on a small island of Ireland. So there’s the sea, the coast was never far away, so I spent a lot of time formatively as a teenager and as a child in the natural world. When I step into the natural world, these teachings of the Diamond Sutra, of non-self is just… You can pivot 360 degrees, and I can see countless examples of what Thich Nhat Hanh, Thay, refers to as interbeing, this interconnectedness of all life. You know, here we’re graced, I’m sitting looking out at the immense landscape of the oak forest. And this retreat that begins tomorrow we explore these connections of interbeing, you know, from the jays, these beautiful, noisy birds that they gather like squirrels, more of the oak acorns, the seeds from the oak trees. And they bury them for their winter stores, but they don’t go back to find all of them. And then these jays are consequently the sort of, the custodians, the regenerators of the future of generations of forest. We also have wild pigs, the wild boars that are here, that open up the soil, that puts for the jays to lay these acorns and bury them in. So the first concept of the Diamond Sutra and non-self, I touch it when I step into the forest. If I go out into nature, into the happy farms is there. And there’s three other notions that we can go further into if we wanted to. Do we want to?

00:09:48

Well, let’s mention them briefly.

00:09:50

Yeah. So the first is non-self. And there’s many different practices, you know, as farmers, that’s, the beautiful practice of eating meditation, which we do in the community each day, three times a day, is to contemplate, you know, the food in our bowl. And it’s such a deep contemplation. And I’m not always able to be there with my food in a meaningful, mindful way. But if I can, I can touch those concepts of soil and seed and sun and the hand of the farmer. And I’ll uproot this, the sense of a separate self that’s, you know, I didn’t grow all this, I didn’t cook all this, I didn’t manifest all this. And this division, when does the carrots… Lam Hy shared this the other day with me, and others. When does the carrot no longer become a carrot, become part of me that gives us the energy and the vitality to continue in our human lives. So we have this notion, it’s the first. The second, maybe I put them in a different order, this idea of human and non-human. And again, as gardener, you know, in the community sometimes people have a passion for lacto-fermentation, fermenting foods, often from the farms. And I think the reality is that in our human bodies, most of our cells are non-human. So, we’re walking around in this skin, but there’s a huge community of other than human cells within this human body. And when we, you know, we’re told to care for our microbiome, which can be so good for our physical health, our gut health, our mental health these days, we’re eating this and it’s becoming part of us, it’s nourishing the microbiome. So it’s again, it’s not very far to sort of erase that notion of the human and more than human within ourselves from these, yeah, billions of bacteria and cells that are not on human DNA. And another of the third notion would be birth and death, this sort of continuity of birth and death, so for me, I remember when I was training in ecology, there was great importance put on living trees that have died in the landscape. We call it, you know, in the English language, dead wood, but actually that tree, maybe it’s not photosynthesizing anymore, it’s not pushing out leaves at this time of the year, it’s not drawing water from its roots, but it’s continuing as Thay would teach, it’s full of life. It’s dead in the sense that it’s not, yeah, the solar panels are not there, but it’s just a, it’s like a hotel for invertebrates and small beetles and birds, for fungi and lichens and moss and habitat and home for things like bats and woodpeckers. So it’s actually thriving and full of life. So for me, that’s the capacity to see that there is that notion of birth and death in the natural world. And then living and non-living beings, that’s the fourth notion. And I’ve got some dental work over the last year. And, in this region where we are in Plum Village, all the old buildings, and you go out into the region, all the old farm buildings and homes, you know, contemporary homes that people are living in, many of the buildings in Plum Village are made from these limestone, big blocks of limestone. So this idea of, you know, I can click my teeth. I don’t know if you can pick that up, which is causing me some issues this last year, but this is also the same calcium that the limestone is of these houses, the earth. And also that’s the same limestone that’s weathered down to create these fertile soils that nourish the oak forest and the happy farm. But what’s the distinction between this inert, seemingly inert piece of rock, that’s in a wall or on the forest floor, where a farmer moves from his plow to, you know, to create the field of sweetcorn or weeds or sunflowers in this region. It’s actually this external part of my skeleton. This is the same calcium that I can touch, and all my bones that I can see or maybe can touch, but I can touch my teeth. So it can be just quite easy for me and for others and we share these teachings of Thay to uproot these four notions of, yeah, those are so deep in our psychology and in our cultures and the natural world for me as the teacher. So I love to share that.

00:14:09

Beautiful. Thank you. And Sister Lam Hy, you said you already came to Plum Village with a joy and enthusiasm for gardening. And now you’ve been a nun for two years. So you’ve been both, continue to explore Happy Farm and develop that with everyone in the community. But also, you’ve been developing your practice, and I’m just wondering, what have you learned about that common ground between working on the land and actually the practice of Zen Buddhism. What is it? What is it that you are discovering on your journey?

00:14:49

Yeah. I think it’s so many different things. Because you mentioned the Diamond Sutra and I think, yeah, what we refer to as interbeing, yeah, I think it’s a daily practice of this getting away from your smaller self, smaller sense of self in a way, and getting a wider perspective for a few minutes. Yeah. Going out and being on the Happy Farm, it’s really too sometime, also, when I work there, you know, I could see you like my mind is so full with all the things I need to do. And also at the moment, it’s kind of a practice to okay, I step out and I kind of, I really be more aware they are the trees. This is how the air feels on my skin, this is how my foot feels on the ground. So I really… to bring that attention again and again to, yeah, the present moment. And then this connection can come and I can I feel with them. With the Happy Farm what I also like is I mean, we also sit a lot, I mean, we work, but, I think it’s so good for us to have this involvement with our bodies, the physical work. Yeah, I think kind of we lost this a little bit, so I’m actually, I’m a trained sports teacher originally, so I feel like to come back to our bodies and be in our bodies in nature and to grow food, it’s kind of, like, really basic for us. We really go back there and, yeah, that this is kind of, I think for a lot of us who are so much in our heads or how we work, that this is a good start because we can really, we can touch the soil, we can open our senses to all that there is. So I feel this is already helping with seeing that I’m, I’m also just maybe one of the citizens on the farm, but, the other, the earthworms and other insects, I’m just part of this, and I’m also this, I can do my best, but in the end, the soil, the rain, the sun, we co-work there together. So I mean, this is also a long learning because I also have this kind of perfectionism or efficiency, all this how things should be. And to have this, I think that’s kind of… what I learned from farming is this to have trust and patience. I think we do things on the farm that we then maybe we see the result a couple of months later or maybe three years later. Actually, I started the farm here and then in Germany, and we had a soil which was very, in both areas, very hard and a lot of clay. I thought, okay, this is how it was, yeah, it was very physical to work with the soil. And actually I always left the projects after two years. And then when I came back here and the project had continued already for a couple of years, I noticed, ah, this is how you work with soil. And then I could see, ah, this is how what I started. And now, years later, I can see the difference. And, yeah, this was also just a teaching to, okay, maybe I stick longer to things than two years to harvest this kind of soil. And, it’s in so many ways, and also with the teachings, we often speak about how we garden our mind, how we work with our minds. And we have the image of the soil and the gardener is a mind consciousness tending to the soil and as our consciousness. And, yeah, how do we what are the right seeds in us? And I think there’s so many parallels to farming and how we are in the Zen practice. So, yeah.

00:19:22

Sister, you know, a lot of people are very disconnected from the land, very disconnected from Mother Earth. And that is one of the key reasons why we’re able to extract and not care and destroy the Earth, because actually we’ve lost our feeling for her, lost our feeling for Mother Earth. And I’m just wondering, in your experience, and when you see people come and take part in the activities on Happy Farm, what is it that it generates in us? So does it, in you, does it generate joy? Does it generate peace? Does it generate quietness? Does it generate a sense of perspective? I’m just wondering with all your experience, what is it that it generates in you that changes you?

00:20:13

Yeah. I think for one, what is already good, it brings you in contact with the elements. I mean, it’s also to be outside, it’s raining and you work. So it’s maybe not always joyful at that moment, but I think it makes you really feel alive. And this is maybe when we feel disconnected, that we feel less alive. And in this aliveness, even if we feel pain or it’s heavy work, but then maybe we notice, it’s also good to notice, oh, maybe it’s too heavy, maybe I have a break. So just to be alive and more connected to your body, to your feelings, I think this brings a general joy and awareness which brings the happiness, the awareness we have.

00:20:56

And Mick, I wanted to ask you the same because you talked a lot about reconnection. What is it? You know, you’ve been doing this for many years, how has it changed you? Let’s just imagine you worked in an office and you were living in a city, and you were going to work, you know, nine hours a day, and then going home and occasionally going on holiday, as opposed to this sort of day in, day out, year in, year out, sort of really focusing on the land. What is it given you that has changed you?

00:21:29

I did work in an office for one year.

00:21:33

That long?

00:21:33

That was really important experience to realize that I wanted to work outdoors as much as possible. I used to look at other people and professionals, and I don’t have a work diary, and I don’t go to meetings. And when I work outside, I used to get a bit jealous of that. But actually that I realized, wow, there’s such freedom in this. How has it changed me? A huge part of the Happy Farm project or the rewilding, we host retreats, we don’t do it in isolation. It’s really important for me to share that. We do that in community. So there’s often this, I’ve mentioned it earlier, this idea of we, individually, as humans are a cell in the body of the community, or the sangha body. But the farm also is maybe we talked about it before, it’s an organ, maybe it’s the stomach or maybe another… maybe it’s the microbiome. And in terms of the human community, so just before today, we recorded, I was sitting with the Happy Farm family. And we use that term intentionally, because we live together, we work together, we practice together. And what we were doing this afternoon was expressing our gratitude. So we were going through the first part of the practice we called beginning anew. And it’s just beautiful. And when I think back to working in an office versus it’s not either or, black or white, but just to be able to compare the intention of living together in community is so beautiful. And it’s not easy. You know, I’ve been there, I’ve shared bedrooms, and I think that’s the main reason I chose not to walk towards monastic life with the community would have had me. There’s lots of challenges in community life. It’s not all candy floss and kittens, but there’s a real depth to do it with other people, because I felt that I always had that intuition and that nature connection in my life. Before I came to Plum Village, I was engaged in this type of work professionally for already ten years. But what was not so present was a sense of a spirituality or a consciousness or awareness or maybe even intention. And it was when I discovered the farm and I was still journeying with my curiosity about monastic life, I thought, well, wow, that’s amazing. There’s a project that’s bringing so many of the things that I’m already engaged to in life and livelihood and I’m passionate about, but there’s this deep intention, this mindfulness and well-being centered in the middle of the whole project. And it’s, I think what changes in me is this openness to be open to shepherd in some strange way, that’s the right term, a pastoral element of expanding beyond myself, and which is, maybe I’ll share about in a moment, and being there for other people to see… Like Thay talks about the one week retreat in Plum Village where he shared transformation is real, it’s possible, of course it’s a lifelong, neverending journey that we walk. And for me, it’s been a huge honor to… And it changes me to see other people’s transformations. And it’s important to caveat that it doesn’t work for everyone. There’s times where people come with difficulties and it’s not a fit. So let’s be real about it. It’s, yeah, it’s not a one size fits all model. And there’s a balance, and what I’ve learned, what’s changed about myself, another important, maybe to finish with this, I spiritually bypassed for years in a sense of service. So service is a very noble aspect of life in this community and in many traditions, Western traditions, giving to the greater, giving to the community. But I was so disconnected with my own needs, I didn’t even realize I had needs. I didn’t realize that language existed, and some of those needs were to ask for support. For example, in some of these service projects, the farm, and I would become resentful and I would complain to someone who would listen. And then I had a roommate and a dear friend who turned around and said, I think you need to deal with this head on rather than being dysfunctional and coming to me with your… he was able to listen, but to a point. And that was a moment of awakening to come back to nourish myself because there’s a danger of giving from a well, if you don’t have water in that well, trying to give to others, if you haven’t got enough to give to yourself. So it’s changed me in that regard, in the last years, especially, where I’ve been able to come more in balance with nourishing myself. I feel I’m quite resilient in a way, if we use the word capacity here to keep going in this forward momentum, at this time and this week, in this retreat beginning. But also taking time for self-care and centering self-care in the middle of it. So it’s a lot and it’s really an honor and sometimes it’s overwhelming. But we continue.

00:26:31

So I had a bit of a wake up call when I came to live here four years ago. And I remember there was a sharing circle. And I think the question was what, you know, what is the work we do and what is our aspiration. And I remember when it came to me, I was sort of rather pompous. I said, yes, I’m work in sort of global climate change, and I’m working with sort of leaders to work… And then the next person was one of the people from the Happy Farm. And he said, well, my ambition is to grow beautiful vegetables. And I really sat with that afterwards because I thought, well, I think I’m doing important work. And in one sense I was judging, you know, growing vegetables are great, but, you know, what difference does that make? And then when I sat back and reflected, of course, what came up was just what a high honor that is to grow beautiful vegetables. And that to end any sort of form of discrimination my mind about that being any more important than going off to international conferences or whatever. So let’s just build on that a bit. And Sister Lam Hy, first of all, what is the importance of growing beautiful vegetables?

00:27:50

So, I mean, growing beautiful vegetables in itself is beautiful. And, I think what I… I mean there are so many great projects outside where people like in small projects grow vegetables, or on farms, and in also community supported agricultural projects. I think what I especially like about Plum Village is a lot of us come here for maybe for the first time to learn really to grow vegetables. What does it mean, really, to see a plant from the seed to here’s a salad plant. And the other thing is also we have this ripple effect here because so many people come here and maybe they help only an afternoon on the farm, but their CO2, what is possible or how we work together with a mindfulness practice how we stop with the bell, we have a check in in the morning or what Mick just shared about, yeah, sharing circle about gratitude for each other, or for the farm. And I also remember in our first year we started and then sometimes you think, who of the community is noticing what we are doing here? You work a lot and then a sister came back, they were on a tour in Canada, and she said, yeah, you know, I shared there about the Happy Farm. And I thought, oh, I mean, I don’t know what’s happening. What do the sisters take from there and share about it, or people who come there, maybe they’re inspired and they look for a project like this at their hometown. So I feel this is… So we do something, we grow vegetables for the community, we learn for ourselves like very so basic, fundamental, how to grow food for ourselves. We do it in a way that we, yeah, we combine it with a mindfulness practice. So I think this is so special for me also. And I feel like often in our capitalistic setup, we either, yeah, we either sacrifice the soil or the land, the nature because of the conditions there. So we need to use big machines, like there’s only one farmer taking care of big acres of land. Or if you do it in an, yeah, more tender or organic way, you sacrifice yourself. And here we have the community aspect. We have different conditions. So here we can try out a new way, how we work together, how we take care of ourselves, how we take care of the land. So I think this is also, yeah, this is a start. How we can inspire others and how, yeah, I think this is very inspiring for me that why this project is going so well.

00:30:29

And, Mick, you know, a lot of people are stuck in concepts, so you can easily come to Plum Village and, you know, people talk about meditation, people talk about mindfulness, but what it feels like is Happy Farm literally grounds people in practice. So can you just give a sense of what do people experience? So when they’re coming on these retreats and they’re spending time on the farm, what is it that you’re noticing? And I recognize, as you say, not everyone will benefit equally. But in general terms, what do you see change people? What do they get to recognize that they might not have done if they were just sitting in the meditation hall?

00:31:14

Yeah, I think we’re all different. We all have different preferences. So, you know, there’s a word is often used in Plum Village in terms of our deepest aspiration or our deepest wish, we use the word volition, maybe, as Mary Oliver will say, what will you do with your one wild and precious life? I think I understand what my volition is, and it’s to help people reconnect with the fact that they are the living Earth. Thay uses the beautiful words we are the Earth that carries us. So people are living in such a way, and our societies and cultures have evolved in such a way that Thay also uses the beautiful language, the era of individualism, and he encourages us to awaken from the illusion of separateness. So we look at our cities and we each… there’s nothing wrong with this… It’s that we all have our separate apartments and our… Most people in cities, even in small towns and villages, may not know their neighbors. And they don’t spend so much time connected with the natural world in these urban contexts. And I always try my best to remember and I will now to bring in the silent partner of all of this. Plum Village has a beautiful lineage and history of all these humans going right the way back to the time of the Buddha, who sat with his community in a forest under a tree. The story of the Buddha as he sat under the tree when he had this moment of awakening, enlightenment, and be a little bit controversial, perhaps, but people talk about the Buddha. But what about the tree? What about the Bodhi Tree that he sat under? And I give credit and praise and thanks and gratitude to the silent partner in a lot of this healing of this wonderful community of human beings, with all this wisdom that has come through the generations, from all the shared cultures that are here in this land. And the silent partner is the Earth, the planet under our feet where we can practice walking meditation outdoors through the oak forests. We can sit in circles and enjoy our lunch nearly all year in the south of France. And that is in and of itself a huge catalyst for healing. Thay again uses the term go home to nature and let nature heal you. And he knew when you talked about this, maybe a polarity of formal meditation inside the whole. He was a revolutionary to bring the community of humans, the community of practice, out into the forest to practice walking meditation every day. And that is so unique and healing in and of itself. But with the food production, if I may as well, the growing, why is it important to grow beautiful vegetables? Let me mention that I think we’ve been separated from this reality. We’re probably the first generation, at least in the Global North, that have been separated in our choices and how our communities and cultures have evolved to be separate from the gifts and knowledge of how to grow some of our own food. And in that rediscovery, we took a lot and have a lot of reverence for the ancestors, our blood ancestors, our family, or spiritual ancestors and our land ancestors, those who lived on these lands. And many people lived on these lands here, in Plum Village, going way back into historical times when people hunted in these valleys, or the people that farmed these lands before. And all our neighbors around us that are farming these lands, not just on the Happy Farm. There’s a beautiful reconnection with this practice of knowing how to and growing food with intention and with mindfulness, and also to reclaim the nobility of the farmer in France. I love this that we use the term peasant for, you could swap out the word peasant for artisan, so an artisan baker, a boulanger… as somebody who works with stone, a stonemason, and someone who’s, yeah, knows the craft that they’re engaged in, in their livelihood. And to, yeah, to really acknowledge the peasant farmer, which is so noble to reclaim that nobility, that most of the food that has grown in the world is grown by peasant farmers, especially in the Global South, 80% of them are women. And there’s a nobility in that. Like Thay chose, if I have the story correct, the brown for the monastic robe in this tradition to be in solidarity with the farming people of his land in Vietnam, the color of the soil, the living soil, the earth, the brown tone. And he was a gardener. He understood. He always had a patch of land by his hut that he would garden. And he’s written countless metaphors and teachings, bringing these teachings of transformation. So why it’s important to grow vegetables in this time of polycrisis? Yeah, it’s so important. Vandana Shiva talks about the most important thing we can do at this time is to start a food garden and to be soil builders, and that’s why, in the Happy Farm, we’re definitely soil builders.

00:36:19

Thank you. And, Sister Lam Hy, Mike just talked about Thay’s use of gardening metaphors. In my discovery of his teachings, you know, that, I think, has been one of the most important ways that I’ve been able to integrate his teachings into my life. There’s this extraordinary simplicity he talks about. We’re all flowers in the garden of life. He talks about, you know, the seeds inside us, what seeds we water will grow and what seeds we don’t water, you know, will stay in the soil. Countless metaphors. Tell me a little bit about how you perceive Thay’s use of metaphors. Why those metaphors go so deep into us so easily?

00:37:05

Yeah. I also remembered just the one where he says, like, if you go into the garden and there’s maybe one, yeah, tree broken, and you just look at the tree and you don’t see maybe the rest of the garden, which is beautiful. Where you bring your attention and I think, yeah, I think these pictures are very easily for us to grasp. And in the garden, you can, it’s so alive in a way. And I also remember, when working on the farm, because we come with this kind of efficiency and what we want to do, and we maybe have an idea how the garden should look like. And then we look at these things that are maybe not going so well or growing so well. And yeah, so I think the teachings help us really to okay, maybe to step a little bit back and to look in a different way at the garden or what is really how abundant like in spring it is. And also, I mean, this maybe puts a lot of pressure on the gardeners, the weeds don’t take a lazy day, like we have. And for us, how we how we work on the farm, or when I said to step a little bit back to watch it in a different way, I think this is the main training and the metaphors help us to get away from our usual way of looking or thinking. And also there was one Dharma talk by a sister. She said, yeah, maybe it’s good to look at your garden, maybe a little bit as if it were your neighbor’s garden, and then you’re not so critical about a lot of things. And also, I just remember one metaphor where he says like, yeah, if you go into your garden and maybe you see one dead tree and you bring all your attention there, but you don’t see the rest, what is going well, I think this is also such a good example for life or for the Happy Farm in itself, when we go there and I have an idea how things should be, and I just focus on that. Or can I see the abundance of everything? And yeah, also I feel a lot of acceptance comes from it. I think that the metaphors they make the picture wider, how we look at it, and the Happy Farm is also a place, you know, we talk about also touching the earth a lot, which we have a practice here. And there, it’s just very physical. You touch the earth every day. We prostrate and we bring, we go down the earth, we open our hands, we don’t have anything to hide. We are there like we are with our talents, but also with our challenges in us. And it’s a very transformative practice. And I also remember we had in one of our group someone suggested that we do more touching the earth and then said, oh no, you gardeners, you don’t have to do it. You touch the earth anyway every day. So yeah, there are so many of the teachings that go together with our gardening practice in the end. And I also would like to mention, because we had this a little bit before, like someone once said, happy farming is a solution to all the problems in the world, which sounds a little bit, come on, happy farm, gardening. But actually, like all these big crises we fear maybe sometimes, what can I do? And then it looks so small. But I feel this, yeah, growing your own food and what you learn from it and it can really make a change. And I feel, especially if we bring it together with the practice, there’s transformation inside and outside. And yeah, I think we sometimes maybe can’t see the ripening of what comes out of it. And this is also a good example how we sometimes we need a lot of patience and trust for the ripening of the vegetables or of the growth of this project.

00:41:25

Wonderful. Thank you, sister. Mick, let’s talk practicalities here. So we’ve talked about what it gives people, but we haven’t talked about what you produce. So can you just give our listeners a sense of, you know, all the food you produce comes and feeds the retreatants and the monastics. What are you feeding us with? So what is the sort of, what does a year look like on the farm in terms of type of produce and maybe even the amounts you produce, you know, how big is the farm? Let’s just have a few facts and figures.

00:41:59

So it’s really important to share, and we share this all the time, that the farm has never had the intention to produce all the food for our community. But there is a beauty in the food production, this tradition of the alms bowls in Buddhist monastery traditions where… We did it actually recently in the winter, some of the monastics from Upper Hamlet came around the neighbors and knocked the doors, and we offered food for the monastics. So the farms are literally filling the bowls, the alms bowls of the community, lay and monastic. But yeah, at the center of everything, like I shared, it’s not about food production. It sounds a bit strange to say that as a farm, it’s a working farm. It’s nearly a byproduct. There’s the beautiful, nutrient dense local food that’s grown with such reverence for the land and reverence for the people that are growing it and eating it. But let’s get into some facts maybe. So the farms together, there’s an estimate, we used to be in this space where we measured everything that came off the farm, and we attributed it to the commercial value for wholesale, organic wholesale. And I think €100,000 would be an approximation of an annual, the annual production of the farms.

00:43:21

Yeah, that’s impressive. I mean, I know, we’re not measuring it on money, but that’s significant.

00:43:27

It’s significant. But we really let go of the idea of of weighing. And now we know, give or take…

00:43:33

So I’ll let go of it.

00:43:33

Yeah. Because it’s not the spirit. We have a a lovely little saying that it’s not about the carrots, it’s about the collective awakening, which sounds a bit silly, but it really is centering it back again to well-being, well-being for everybody who comes to, well-being for the land, well-being for us. And it’s not just about the nutrition of the food. The food is super nutrient dense. It’s going, you know, hundreds of meters from field to the kitchen. And everything we consume is hopefully eaten and enjoyed in house. There’s pretty much in the West. And yeah, we choose to grow things that are suited to this climate and to the soil. We choose things in terms of what we cultivate that are expensive to buy. So it was just asparagus season recently. I’ll give example, and it’s very expensive to buy organic. And asparagus, if you know, I don’t know, it’s a very short window of harvest. So it’s in six weeks and we’ve planted an extra two beds in the farm in Upper Hamlet. We will be self-sufficient in asparagus, to an extent we are already. And yeah, there’s also an element that’s very important that goes back to the well-being of the farmer. So we prioritize things that aren’t very laborious in a way. An example of that will be like the winter squash, the pumpkins and sweet potatoes. These give literally tons of harvest when we plant them. There is of course work and we grow nearly everything from seed. And we prepare the bed and we nourish the soil and we plant and we steward and we look after things. And at a stage, there is a real genuine process, I’m really bad at letting go, this practice of letting go. I don’t think I’ve ever really been able to let go of anything in my life, partially. But as a farmer, as a grower, as a gardener, at one point we do have to let go. And just as Sister Lam Hy shared, it’s, you know, the other elements of the soil, the sun, the rain and the pollinators. So that’s, you know, talk about we grow a whole section of winter squash and pumpkin, which is really beautiful, but if they’re not pollinated, we’re not going to get any squash. We’re not going to get any pumpkins. But those, I think over a thousand kilos, so that’s a ton. And they store very well. They’re super nutrient dense and they’re quite expensive to buy. Same as sweet potato. Once they’re established and growing well, they grow quite easily and the harvest is quite laborious and fun. But they store for months and months and months, and the nutrient density in those is is quite exceptional. But yeah, at the center of that is it’s not about the carrots, it’s about the collective awakening. And Thay actually gave us a very clear instruction when the farm began. And at this point, maybe it’s important to honor what we call the farm ancestors, those who went before us, so Stuart and Daniel, two dear friends of ours who established the farm in Upper Hamlet and who are no longer living in community with us. They set out the, you know, the beds and the structure that we inherited. And Thay gave them this very sort of a Zen teaching. So he shared, there is no way to harvest, to harvest is the way. So what he was saying in that moment is it’s not about waiting for that winter squash fields to mature. For that moment we take our secateurs and we cut that beautiful orange pumpkin and we will bring it into storage. And that moment we can revel and feel really good about ourselves as farmers in the harvest. But what about all the other times we have to water when it’s really hard, we have to weed? And the physicality and the challenges of being a grower, those moments, he shared that we can harvest insights and collective awareness and joy and happiness every moment of being together as a farming family, living within the community. So it’s not just waiting until the end game, until we bring the harvest home, but every moment with consciousness and intention and awareness and choice is a moment to harvest. And sometimes it’s really important, Lam Hy and I have been like peers, I would say… shared bestie at the start. Yeah, it’s not all beauty, it’s not all happiness, we’re not fundamentalists in happiness, because like anything that you’re engaged in with livelihood or you put your heart into, it’s challenging at times. So we harvest the joys, but we also honor and the next part of the beginning a new session is that we didn’t get to today because we ran out of time, is to talk about conflict, to express our regret if we’ve done something unskillful and upset someone or hurt someone’s feelings, and to express our hurt, and then to move to concrete action to build those relationships again. And there’s always, you know, difficulties in community life. There’s always conflicts and not always huge, you know, but small conflicts at any other human has in their interpersonal life. And what I appreciate about Lam Hy and the friendship that we shared over the years is doing that role, you know, in terms of facilitating and leading these farms. We had similar circumstances and similar challenges, and we would confide in each other in a way, to say, oh my goodness, you know, I shared with the retreats I share with the team that I’m working with, every day. After nearly ten years, I will judge other people for going too slow or not doing something the way I would like it to be done. And then I internally judge myself for judging them and on and on. And other challenges that we’re all familiar with. And Lam Hy and I, we had that friendship to sit together and support each other in community life, and say that it’s all right at times and to pat each other on the back and say keep going, because it’s super meaningful, super meaningful.